In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
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.
San Francisco Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera, coming off an an All-Star Game MVP award, had unusually high testosterone levels to go along with his .346 batting average and 11 home runs. These are not the days of Steve Howe (1), when baseball could try to ban players only to have the unnaturally powerful Player's Union block any efforts at a drug policy, Cabrera was suspended for 50 games.
Science 'consensus' is a dirty word to the environmental community - some of the time. When it comes to global warming, the science consensus is accurate but when it comes to food, biologists are in the control of Big Business and government lobbyists and the science consensus is out to kill us.
Urban legend says that alcohol is a social icebreaker - and we want to believe, given our preference for commercials where impossibly attractive young people converge on some beach and all have a fantastic time, which is in contrast to actual beer gatherings where a lot of fights and arrests occur.(1)Want to look like this? Drink alcohol. Credit: Shutterstock
Whenever 'the poor' and 'minorities' are invoked in the same headline, it's good to set your skepticism filter extra low or you will likely never get through the first paragraph of an article (umm, including this one) because the issue is rarely science or even policy, it is instead advocacy.(1)
Funny how you can go from darling of the intelligentsia to pariah in a short amount of time. As I have mentioned before, when he was at Scienceblogs.com and then Wired.com, a few of us used to joke that whatever we wrote was going to end up in a Jonah Lehrer column next week. Now its August of 2012 and even the rumor that Lehrer (who resigned from The New Yorker last month) was back at another Conde Nast publication, Wired, got a hasty disclaimer from them.That's a legendary, Jayson Blair kind of plummet.
This paper seeks to address hypermasculinity and the settled heteronormative value system embodied in public-policy actors, primarily the White-centered hegemonic masculinity that has created negative performative aspects of cultural identity constructions in this multicultural and globalized era.
I will tell you a secret. The loudest partisan progressives, some even in the science community, can find a way to hate anything if a Republican is involved. So George Bush doubled NIH funding? He still hated biology, we were told. No Child Left Behind improved scores for minorities every year it was in effect and girls achieved math parity with boys for the first time in history. Who gets credit for that achievement? Well, the bill was bipartisan, both Ted Kennedy And John Boehner signed off on it, but Bush was president so it sucked, according to partisans.
The US Food and Drug Administration says requiring special labels for foods that contain ingredients from genetically modified crops would be "inherently misleading" to consumers - that is exactly what proponents of GM food labeling are hoping for. People inherently side with the precautionary principle and there is no requirement that ballot initiatives be written clearly or well; the assumption is the public will figure it out.The American Medical Association agrees with the USDA and wrote two months ago, "There is no scientific justification for special labeling of bioengineered foods."And yet we are going to get it, and the cost, because spin doctors are calling it 'awareness'.
