HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
More high school students are taking math and science classes - a good thing, we all want more science literacy - but the U.S. Education Department, in its quest to stop people from wondering how it still exists after 33 years of education not being a federal prerogative, cautions that scores have stagnated.To people not trying to rationalize their jobs, and not in the scare journalism business, that simply means we had nearly 50% fewer people in 1970 but we have a lot more now and the same percentage are good at math and science. Math and science remain hard.That's why smarter people do it.
We tend to associate with people we like and that like us because they are like us - so it's no surprise I hang out with wickedly smart, outrageously attractive people. Long-term relationships, even non-sexual ones with women as ridiculously awesome as me, are part of what separates us from food...I mean, other animals. Well, sort of. Maybe birds do that too.
Sometimes you set out to test for antibiotics but get a bonus; in this case, diphenhydramine, arsenic, and fluoxetine.Yikes.
I'll tell you a secret a chef told me. That secret is...butter.There is a reason restaurants that seek to charge the same for 'healthy' fare end up being big flops; people feel cheated eating bean sprouts they can make at their house. No one cares about how much butter is in a dish when they go to a restaurant because it is a night out, a special occasion. Calories are basically unimportant and taste remains supreme. We want to eat something prepared by someone who only cares what we think about its flavor.Obviously the human body was not designed to eat at a restaurant every evening. If you do that, and you don't exercise, you are going to get fat.
A cap and trade system for carbon dioxide has been a terrific flop; even proponents are leery that it is just another layer of bureaucracy and the only economic benefits have been of the economic voodoo kind, similar to a federal stimulus package that went primarily to state and municipal union employees were called 'jobs saved' in a brilliant bit of marketing.Why would anyone want to export that fiasco to another environmental issue? It's academic. Sometimes academic is obviously a good thing; basic research, for example. And sometimes 'academic' connotes 'out of touch with reality', like people in the humanities who try and argue that communism really works, it's just that no one has really tried it.
Garra rufa - "doctor fish' - are now trendy in some fish pedicure places. The pedicuree dips their feet (see? I don't specify a gender or make any judgments, I am not Manny Pacquiao) into water containing the fish and the little critters exfoliate you by basically eating the dead skin from your toes.
Females like the bad boys when they are young, we all know that colloquially - and even more so when they are ovulating, say a group of social and evolutionary psychologists.
A short while ago we carried a strange claim from a group of ethicists at Oxford. Not only should abortion be okay, actual children should be aborted even after they are born.They're ethicists so they can be dismissed rather quickly. Tomorrow they are just as likely to be arguing there should be no abortion at all if you can't abort newborns. Yet there is growing concern that the government doing more things for more people in the best interests of overall society is leading to a resurgence in the social authoritarian rationalizations that gripped the country (and really, the world) the last time progressives held any power.
Andrea Kuszewski is not a fan of a critique of some concepts in Chris Mooney's latest book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality.
It's been said that science fiction can sometimes turn into science fact.In that same vein, it may be that stories from The Onion (More U.S. Children Being Diagnosed With Youthful Tendency Disorder) may one day become part of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
We carry some press releases on Science 2.0 and of course that is what Science Codex in our sidebar is. It's been an intentional effort since the communications arm of Science 2.0 began in 2006. The first, and most important reason, for that is because we think the audience is smart and don't need journalists putting context to most stories. Our audience just wants to know first so if something looks interesting, it will hit this page on the minute the embargo lifts. Everything else is written by scientists or at least (mostly) knowledgeable people(1).
The National Academies Press will roll out some new national science standards for K-12 educators and for the first time, those standards will include guidelines on teaching climate change.Good luck with that. As No Child Left Behind showed, positive results and the welfare of kids will not matter in a political fight - any attempts to create an education standard and accountability are going to flop unless education unions buy into it and any attempts to create a science standard for climate education will flop unless teachers do. And a lot of them don't.
