Science 2.0

What would the world look like with 7 billion people and no way to scientifically have created better ways of producing food?  A lot of poor vegetarians, that's what.  And only rich people eating meat.Organic food corporations love to claim that their process is 'sustainable'. Vegetarians love to claim that meat is both unethical and bad for the planet.  It makes them happy partners ... as long as science is ignored.

Sometimes you put things in the platform of a political party because it's a lot of drama to exclude them even if you don't really believe.  So we get hilarity like last week, with Republican candidate Mitt Romney disavowing some of his own platform (he doesn't believe it all personally, he said) and then this week the Democrats had the same problem; The official platform of the Democratic National Convention decided Jerusalem was no longer the capitol of Israel and they removed any mention of God.

If you've been in science media for any length of time, there are two arguments you will hear invoked to support almost any questionable position; that Einstein did his best work while he was a patent clerk and that Galileo was oppressed by the Catholic Church.One of those is wrong; Galileo was not actually oppressed by a Church, he was really oppressed by fellow scientists(1) , the Pope was actually quite supportive of Galileo but fellow scientists were looking for ways to torpedo him. Yet colloquially, Galileo is held up as this sort of 'religion against science' example in a way that shows many people believe it was some sort of unscientific Dark Age prior to his arrival.  Not true at all. 

Since the early 1970s, all aspects of academia have skewed left.  With that political shift, the confidence that scientists are neutral arbiters for the public good has also declined on both sides.More Republicans than Democrats think the fix is in regarding a green 'agenda' and global warming whereas more Democrats than Republicans think scientists are shills for Big Ag, Big Pharm, etc. regarding food and vaccines.  Basically, science can't win but there was a time when being an academic, and certainly a scientist, was impressive and not a presumption about a political world view. Getting into the political muck - and plenty of advocates for science recommend doing more of it, not less - has been a bad thing for credibility.

Obesity is not just happening in New York City 7-Elevens(1), it is also happening in aging bones.Bone marrow stem cells, which are adult stem cells, are in their fifth decade of uncontroversial new discovery. But they can still surprise us.  Our bones may be getting fatter as we age, and it could lead to osteoporosis, the condition where bone mineral density is 2.5 standard deviations below the mean (62%). The NIH estimates that up to 50% of women and 25% of men over the age of 50 will break a bone due to osteoporosis. 

I'm not much of a drinker, never have been. I have always assumed it was because I did competitive athletics until I was about 25, which means I was outside the age where you 'learn' to like the taste of alcohol, so I never picked it up.Older now, I can drink a beer socially and I sometimes drink a glass of red wine because the consensus says it is good for you in moderation, but I am still not really a drinker.

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died last Saturday in Ohio at age 82 and his funeral service is tomorrow.  Like most everything else about him, the service is private.Yet the cosmos has decided to ignore the wishes of his family and so Armstrong is getting a special event for the occasion: a blue moon. Either that, or his family is being clever.

Politicians make a lot of promises when they are trying to get elected. So many they probably can't keep track of them of them. That's understandable. Believing candidates is one of the 'sweet little lies' we tell ourselves.(1)

Are you white and a little resentful that black people get their own cool disease, sickle cell anemia?  There is good news for you. Celiac disease is all the latest rage and you can be any color at all and claim it.How do you know if you are gluten intolerant?  Elaborate assays?  DNA? At least a blood sample?  Nope, you just have to give up wheat and say you feel better and you are allowed to claim you have it. And proponents have even scarier numbers - they claim 97 percent of the people who have Celiac disease don't know they have it, so their ranks are really much bigger.

39% of Americans feel 'green guilt' for wasting food, a much higher number than letting the sink run while they brush their teeth or not buying those stupid low-flow toilets.The 2012 Eco Pulse results are in.  So look for the latest marketing campaigns from environmental activism corporations soon.Why does anyone do surveys on what people feel guilty about rather than what people care about?  They do it to sell it to environmental groups and no environmental group raises money on a 'things are great' platform, they raise money by telling you how much you are a parasite for Gaia. The Eco Pulse survey tells marketers at Greenpeace, Sierra Club, etc. what your weak points are.  

The British may think they 'colonized' Kenya to teach them about civilization and the modern world, but it would be the other way around today.  While over 80 percent of Europeans admit they are against any GMO regardless of whether or not they can be 'proved' safe - an impossibility anyway - and some Americans on the kooky anti-science left insist they are allergic to any product that has anything to do with GM sugar beets, Kenyans are downright enlightened about food science.

King Richard III, the last of the Plantagenets, ruled England from 1483 until he was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, the next-to-last major battle in what would later be called The Wars of the Roses. If you're watching "Game of Thrones" on HBO, the Wars of the Roses were Lancasters instead of Lannisters and Yorks rather than Starks - the show has more dragons and less sex than the real thing. Richard III was a York and if you think that show has a lot of characters and craziness, try to follow the actual Wars of the Roses.