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.
Like vaccines and autism or genetically modified potatoes and immune systems or DDT causing cancer, some myths stick around so long they become truth despite any evidence - and cell phone radiation may be on that same track.Yale School of Medicine researchers are not immune to jumping on the pop culture bandwagon. It's easy if you just want to find something vague like Attention Deficit Disorder. In an experiment, they exposed pregnant mice to radiation from a cell phone placed on an active phone call for the duration of the trial. The control group of mice was kept under the same conditions but with the phone deactivated.
The old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, a picture is worth millions. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide that could be saved if we stopped throwing food into landfills, that is.Food waste is a pet peeve of mine. Yes, we do it at my house, probably way too much, but there is only so much nagging one can do. I don't have the yard space to do composting - yes, I know, smelly hippies will insist I do it anyway but it isn't always practical. However, there is a 100% chance is it better to put it in the garbage disposal than in the garbage, so I do that whenever practical (so, not bones).Check out the graphic below. Some of it we can all easily do, some of it is not so easy.
Let's be honest, if you are a Republican, you don't care about the environment because you received your own oil well when you registered to vote. And you like vampire babies. So you do not care about the emissions of your yacht.But if you are a rich Democrat, things are a little dicier. Buying pretend carbon offsets for a 29,000 square foot house can only get you so far. If you want to own a superyacht too, that's a lot of liberal guilt to agonize over. What to do?
If you do not have your 11-year-old child in a car seat while driving and in a bicycle helmet while playing, you are putting them at severe risk. We have to protect them. Or not. While we expose kids to all kinds of harmful cultural stuff at earlier and earlier ages (sex, violence, political debates) we don't trust their physical competence or their judgment.Heck, the people behind the government health care plan think 25 should be the earliest age for adulthood.
If you're an anti-science hippie obsessed with the notion that 'natural' is always superior to whatever 'inorganic' means to people who know nothing about science or medicine or food or generally what carbon-based life means, I have good news for you; you may soon be able to determine if that caffeine in your Organic, Free-Range Red Bull is really natural.What? Organic, Free-Range Red Bull doesn't exist? Well, it should. Farmer's Market shoppers will dutifully line up for that, I can just feel it.
One of our popular topics last year was earthquakes. That makes sense, with the earthquake in Japan. It's not like there was some greater instance of earthquakes but if you are a Doomsday fearmonger, any event is a good event; that means anti-science activists determined to send us back to the 13th century looked for ways to make earthquakes result from fracking.If you dispute that, you get meaningless gibberish responses like 'you can't prove the earthquakes did not come from fracking', which is true, in the same way you can't prove I am not the disembodied brain of Adolf Hitler writing this piece from my Antarctic Fortress where I am plotting the Fourth Reich - but it's sort of silly to live your life believing it.
In 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik, it began a new era in the Cold War. The Race to Space. Senator Lyndon Johnson worried the commies could rain nuclear bombs down on us from the high ground, making him the perfect guy to run NASA and because it was a military concern it got funded. Only later it became a human exploration issue and much later became a science one.
Americans like to fix things. We like to improve and we are convinced the future will be better, a subset of people who want to retreat into the world of the past aside(1), but nothing has changed little despite a century of being criticized like university lectures.
If you are anything like me, and you had a chance to sit around with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, you wouldn't ask fanboy questions like 'will we ever understand the soul?' or 'how much should I make fun of evolutionary psychology surveys about sex?' you would instead lean in conspiratorially and ask, 'what's the best way to get out of a speeding ticket?'
It's always good to have a back-up plan and I may have found mine if Science 2.0 doesn't get bought by some rich media conglomerate in Germany; people gullible enough to believe their organic food is structurally or nutritionally superior and are willing to overpay for it are also likely to overpay for pet food.
Being in science media for any length of time, you will discover what Martin Robbins, a self-proclaimed liberal, called The Big White Elephant In The Room - partisan framing of science issues through a cultural and political world view. He referred to it as liberal bias, and he is a liberal, but not a self-loathing kind. He doesn't recognize it is not liberal bias that is the problem, it is progressives. Liberals can write articles talking about The Big White Elephant In The Room and worry that the lack of diversity in science media and science academia is harmful to those endeavors.
In the midst of CNN's non-stop coverage of a deceased singer whose biggest career hit was a cover of a Dolly Parton song, there may be a ray of rational sunlight shining down on a person worthy of our time; an accomplished military veteran, test pilot, Mercury astronaut and Senator named John Glenn. 50 years ago the 40-year-old Marine lieutenant sat atop a building-sized rocket stuffed with solid propellant and left the confines of Earth - backwards.
