During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
A new computer estimate says that the ocean is an important carbon sink that absorbs 40 to 60 percent of China's anthropogenic CO2 emissions but tropical cyclones prevent the oceans from absorbing more.Understanding the impact of the ocean on sequestering carbon is important, because China builds two new coal plants each week and emits more pollution than the rest of the top 10 countries combined. Until they stop exempting themselves from pollution treaties it is important to understand what natural effects can help, since developed western countries have already sent their emissions per capita back 100 years and can't realistically get lower.
Californis is the largest dairy producer in the United States. It is also the most anti-science state, distrustful of the modern world. That is why coastal cities had measles parties until the COVID-19 pandemic happened; they believed the MMR vaccine caused autism in children. They love raw milk because they believed pasteurization eliminates magical nutrition that scientists can't detect.
The Supreme Court recently issued another ruling that seeks to end racial discrimination. most recently in specially-created political districts. What has not been an issue, because it was not obvious like universities and Louisiana politics, is how grants get chosen.A new study says that there was a component of racial favoritism in science funding as well, and it's only been revealed in the wake of NIH grant cuts.
Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is also Lenin's birthday. That's not coincidence. The leader of the first Earth Day was not a politician, as the movement has greenwashed Democratic U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson into being, yet credible journalists and an alarming number of commenters will invoke the Earth Day site or some anonymous Snopes blogger or even Wikipedia(!) and claim the primary sources from 56 years ago are wrong.
If a lot of the food and health claims you read and hear today seem like things left over from the 1970s, that's because they are. The food activist community, vegetarians and other diet groups, rebranded their beliefs as Make America Health Again (MAHA) after former Natural Resources Defense Council and pillar of the Democratic party Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. switched sides and joined Republicans in the Trump administration, but they are the same claims that were psychological platforms of progressives.
On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became the first to have his pitch speed measured during a game. Rockwell International experts clocked the ball velocity at 100.8 miles per hour.That was the fastest pitch ever recorded. Yet last season over 50 pitchers in Major League Baseball threw 100 MPH and 140 more hit that velocity in the minor leagues. In September of 2010, Aroldis Chapman threw 105.1 MPH. Clearly, pitchers have gotten a lot faster, due to superior training and better scouting identifying athletes who will excel at pitching and getting them to play baseball rather than basketball or something else.
Honeybees get attention in environmental fundraising campaigns because people don't understand pollination.(1)
Running a pro-science nonprofit is a poor business model. Especially compared to lawyer groups like Environmental Working Group or rich deniers like Greenpeace.'Your food is safe' is a terrible call to action but 'evil chemical corporations are killing you' gets the money rolling in - even though the former is true and the latter is a paranoid conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.
Social authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people do with the government assistance they are now reliant upon. It keeps those in control in positions of power. The most recent example is with government funding for food coming attached to strings telling people what they can buy with the money.
The Usual Suspects of the anti-science movement, Center for Biological Diversity(1), Environmental Working Group(2) and more, are back in court to try and force California to accept that money is magic and rich homeowners with solar panels should be paid for electricity they send to the grid - at full retail price.It sounds ridiculous. Imagine if a customer buys a vegetable your farm grows says they should have the right to force you to buy vegetables they grow in their garden at full retail price from them. Not the price you get, the full retail cost.You'd laugh. You have tractors and employees and materials. Liabilities. Even more ridiculous, you helped give them the money for the land they used to grow the vegetables.
The electric car industry is held back by reliance on conventional energy. Despite spending trillions of dollars on mandates and subsidies, solar and wind alternatives have made little difference in the share of energy filled by natural gas and oil. Some of that is economics. A subsidy prevents innovation because it props up the status quo, and environmentalists and the politicians they support remain opposed to nuclear power, but some is plain physics. Lithium-ion batteries are stuck in the 1990s because there are real challenges to be overcome in the next generation.
The bond between humans and dogs is one of the oldest stories in anthropology. It may also be a cautionary tale for other animals, though the organic, holistic, free-range, ayurvedic, shade-tree grown dog food is probably pretty good.A new study of bones recovered from Gough’s Cave and Pınarbaşı says we may have been dressing pets up in funny outfits even farther back. Evidence shows they were actually accompanying us on walks over 14,000 years ago, even before agriculture created the spark of civilization.
