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.
In early July, Karolinska University Hospital issued a press release about a successful trachea transplant using synthetic tissue. It got mainstream media coverage and it was interesting, I thought, but evolutionary and not revolutionary. We had covered a Lancet paper on much the same thing in 2008. But in the course of a correspondence with a media rep she noted something important; not only was this not a traditional transplant, this was not even one where an organ was decellularized and recellularized with the patient's stem cells, it was created for the patient and in just two days.That meant no immunosuppressive drugs, at $20,000 per year, and no morbidities due to their side effects.
People may complain about tax breaks for successful energy companies but the one thing worse is spending real money on lousy ones. Yet it has happened because advocacy is taking precedence over science.The recent Solyndra LLC collapse is not the first time this has happened, nor can it be blamed solely on the Obama administration simply due to his zeal for alternative energy - the Department of Energy began the loan guarantee program in 2006 when there was a Republican Congress and a Republican senate and in 2005 the wasteful ethanol subsidies and mandates were put into law.
Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease (STD) that causes urethritis and pelvic inflammatory disease. Before AIDS, this was what you got for having promiscuous, unprotected sex with many anonymous partners in a consequence-free environment (a period known as "The 1970s" yet often assumed to be the '60s) and when you contracted it you took some antibiotics and then it was back to Studio 54.
2012 is coming and, with it, kooky end-of-the-world fables. If the Asgardian calendar and its earthquakes doesn't get us, maybe the Mayans will. Some people even like to combine Doomsday prophecies - the LHC might bring the end of the world by opening a black hole and out pop Mayans armed with strangelet-powered weapons.
Far be it from me to consider anything designated by Oprah Winfrey as, perhaps, maybe, not always evidence-based, but I had always hoped some skepticism was in order yet consistently instead found Oprah viewers were not only ready to believe, they were willing to migrate to other shows and believe there also.
A giant crococile versus a giant snake in a Colombian coal mine? It sounds even more awesome than "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus", except the real life version does not have Debbie Gibson.An ancient crocodile relative, a dyrosaurid now named Acherontisuchus guajiraensis, likely gave the world's largest snake a tussle or two. In Palaeontology, University of Florida researchers describe the new 20-foot extinct species which was discovered in the same Colombian coal mine as Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the world's largest snake.
The highest paid player in baseball has the last name "Rodriguez" and 3 of the top 10 highest paid players in major league baseball are black - but major league umpires are racist, argues Johan Sulaeman, a financial economist at Southern Methodist University.They looked at 3.5 million pitches from 2004 to 2008 and found that minority pitchers are so convinced white MLB umpires call strikes more often for white pitchers than for minority pitchers that they throw 'safe' pitches and therefore hurt their own performance.
One long-standing myth is that any law claiming to be good for the environment is actually good for the environment. Anyone living along levees in the South who watched environmental lawsuits block improvements in the 1990s and then heard the Army Corps of Engineers criticized after Hurricane Katrina for not previously making improvements had to wonder why the media didn't cover one obvious source of blame for the entire region not being more resistant to floods.No, instead we got treated to Sean Penn carrying a shotgun, apparently to mow down the zombies the media claimed were floating in New Orleans and everyone blamed Pres. George Bush because the tropical storm turned into a hurricane.
Can professional teachers in a crowded classroom hobbled by arcane government policies teach kids well? Probably, in most cases, but institutionalized education and their unions have gone to war against any changes to the status quo, even when the status quo is clearly broken. The only acceptable change is more money.Home schooling can do a great job, if it is structured and has a formal
curriculum. It may even be an advantage, according to a new study in Canada.
Unfortunate subsets of some militant environmental groups believe that anyone who uses the land, including quite responsibly, is an enemy.
The Lacey Act is one of few government regulations I have praised for its effectiveness. Few government regulations are actually designed to help anyone, they are either designed to hobble someone in order to artificially level the playing field or they are designed to boost a special interest. This act levels the playing field, but for the benefit of companies that are ethical.
Haute couture through history? It is when St. Pölten takes the Catwalk!If your only knowledge of Stone Age fashion is stricly limited to old Flintstones cartoons, you are in luck. On September 23rd the University of Applied Sciences (UAS) in St. Pölten, Austria
will be parading clothing from over ten millennia, a journey through time and
the world of fashion. Wilma Flintstone - fashion maven from the Stone Age. © Hanna-Barbera.
