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.
Most scientists and science journalists argue vehemently for basic research - and even more taxpayer money should be devoted to it, they say. Politicians usually disagree and feel like taxpayer-funded research should have a goal or at least a defined result in its framework.
With the end of the space shuttle, we may also be seeing an end to manned space travel as a science endeavor. I am not saying we shouldn't send people into space, we certainly should, but it should be just that - a bold voyage into the unknown and not rationalized with science, where it is not a very good one. Robots are cheaper and better and the Congressional hearings are less messy if a robot dies.President Obama likely agrees about robots, since he canceled the manned successor to the space shuttle, the Constellation project and there is no valid replacement in sight.
The LHC and its lower-energy counterpart in the US, Tevatron, have reported some important Higgs news this past week - details of six searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson at CERN and another in Chicago coming up.
Norway just had a tragedy - the kind of random violence that social scientists, who we all wish would take a holiday during horrific events, will try and find correlation and causation for, like he was right wing or he was left wing or he was angry about farm prices or a video game store didn't having something he wanted or even that he didn't get enough sex, once evolutionary psychologists dive in.
As I wrote in Like Freedom? Thank A Scientist - How Science Made America Possible, during the meetings of the the Continental Congress during independence discussions, Thomas Jefferson noted the temperature on four separate occasions. Jefferson, like many others present, was a citizen scientist long before there was government funding for it. The same climate of liberalism (liberals, not busybody progressives, as I have stated too many times to count) that makes science flourish made democracy possible.
The Redemption of Gus GrissomThe 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard's flight, the first American in space, was something of a big deal in pop culture. The 50th anniversary of John Glenn orbiting the Earth, arriving this winter, will likely be a much bigger deal because Sen. Glenn has a lot of name recognition.But between them in aerospace history, chosen to be among the "Mercury 7" test pilots who were picked when NASA was just six months old and who risked their lives flying into the great unknown, is a guy who doesn't get enough respect.
Militant progressives in academia are determined to fix a problem that does not exist - how to get more females in science. Despite there being no gender difference in math scores for the first time in history and more Ph.D.'s for females than men and more hiring for women in faculty positions than men, a subset of people lament it isn't enough.
The National Science Foundation and various other government groups with more funding than knowledge of the public wastes billions of dollars on STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) outreach, using the strange mentality that smart kids who might otherwise become veterinarians or game designers need to become scientists and engineers or America will collapse.
Progressive kooks in San Francisco want to ban Happy Meals but they can't have a beef with vegan burgers, right? Just down the road from 'Frisco, at Stanford, biochem professor (and founding co-director of PLoS - yayy, open access!) Pat Brown is trying to make vegan burgers that will appeal to humans and maybe keep McDonald's in business in the bay area.Brown wants to make a vegan cheeseburger to replace what you get at fast-food franchises like McDonald's, his goal being to decrease the global impact of animal farming.
Pesky animal rights activists may complain if you eat veal but they can't complain if you eat larvae, right? Those are bugs and people sitting in trees have to eat something while they keep the forest commission from clearing brush or removing dead trees to prevent wildfires.The California State Fair is coming up in a few weeks. It is earlier the last few years, because the old August dates were darn hot and with that sumbitch global warming it was only going to get hotter so they moved it back to July and, today, it is a balmy 70 degrees. For residents of the once-hot Sacramento area, climate change has been a real boon, though drought in the South shows that they are not so lucky.
I just finished watching the Women's World Cup semifinal football match, USA versus France, and am currently preparing to watch Japan versus Sweden and an important difference is immediately noticeable about womens' matches compared to men's.A lot less flopping.If you are not up on complex technical sports jargon, flopping is when, after a minor collision, you fall down and grasp a body part with a look of excruciating pain on your face, milk the drama to see if it draws a penalty and then look indignantly at the opposing team while you bravely resume as if nothing was wrong. If you don't watch soccer, think NBA.
I've long said that what NASA needs is not a James Webb Space Telescope but an actual James Webb for the 21st century.Webb, if you are not familiar with NASA lore, was a bold leader rather than a bureaucrat tasked with perpetuating funding, and it was due to his leadership that NASA launched 75 missions into space, including putting a man on the Moon.
