In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
Chronic lyme disease does not exist, but if you say it does long enough, a scholar will begin to study it, and then others will cite 'emerging evidence', and journalists will 'teach the controversy', and soon enough doctors who don't want to get sued will sign off, no differently than California pediatricians gave wealthy parents vaccine exemptions to prevent autism during the first two decades of this century.
Half a decade ago, France's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) tried to fight for its credibility in the face of a scientific onslaught against their latest epidemiology findings by actually lowering the "risk" of something.Like everyone else, when it was announced they were 'studying' it - in IARC, that only means mouse models that support claims of cancer and surveys that can be linked to cancer - I assumed they would finally do what they had wanted to do since the early 2000s; declare coffee a carcinogen.And get $15,000 an hour expert witness contracts from lawyers who could then sue, claiming someone who cut the lawn and drank a cup of coffee got cancer due to the coffee.
The American Heart Association is concerned that stroke and heart attack survivors don't think enough about 'risk' of LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, now colloquially termed 'bad' cholesterol.
Prior to the Olympics in Beijing, China solved a pollution problem they previously claimed they never had by banning all cars except those for communist party elites. It did little for CO2, Beijing had a PM10 (smog) problem, but it showed drastic interventions could help the air.
If a school doesn't have a strong sports program, universities that have seen faculty and administrative salaries skyrocket have used the unlimited student loan debt program created in the late 1980s to fund growth. Yet a few years prior to that, a science fundraising option had also been made available.In 1980, Democrats passed the Bayh-Dole Act and it reversed long-standing policy that if a discovery was made using taxpayer-funding, it could not be privately monetized. It became possible for scientists who did applied work to start a company or sell a patent so a corporation even if the American people had paid for it.
Obesity is closing in on smoking and alcohol as the top killer among lifestyle diseases. Over 25 percent of the world is overweight and in countries like the UK and US, that number is approaching 70 percent. It is correlated to things like heart disease.Is it a genetic issue, and therefore exculpatory? A new paper hopes to show that. The authors analyzed brain scans of 1,351 young adults across a range of
body-mass index (BMI)
scores. They found that the overall volume of the hypothalamus was larger in overweight and obese people. They declared a significant relationship between volume of the hypothalamus and BMI.
Malaria infects 250,000,000 each year and kills nearly 700,000. It is so rare in America that academics and activists can lament chemicals that kill mosquitoes which transmit it to humans, and even block mosquitoes engineered to prohibit reproduction, but the damage is too great to risk on tinkering with alternatives.
In 2019, nearly 12 percent of Black individuals experienced pre-term births compared with 7 percent of White individuals, according to a new demography paper.
Most opioid addicts are recreational users, not those who started on prescription pain medication and continued to have pain and migrated to illegal routes when doctors behaved ethically and shut them off. It just makes people feel good. It is no surprise that opioids are involved in far more deaths each year than guns. If opiods were legally available without a prescription, they'd be in the same category as alcohol when it comes to lifestyle killers. That is what addiction does.
With historically high levels of LGBTQ2+ visibility, hardly a TV show exists where no matter how small the character list, someone isn't a sexual minority, a new paper says that coming out can still mean drama - even from those inside the LGBTQ2+ community if you don't match the style and tone of the cool clique.
Prior to 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic, American Democrats led the anti-vaccine movement. They couched it in anti-corporate terminology and that let politically allied academics and journalists turn a blind eye to the harm their thinking caused. In 2015, after a decade of effort by Science 2.0 and many others, California passed a law banning 'philosophical' objections, a haven that had only been used by fringe religious groups before the 1990s, but in California had led to more un-vaccinated children on the coasts, in places like Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Marin County, than the entire rest of the United States combined.It was a struggle to educate parents that vaccines were safe and necessary when they instead believed in supplements, organic food, and solar power.
A new survey says lots of people opt for 'healthier' substitutes like chicken instead of beef and vanilla-flavored plant juice instead of milk, and 56 percent of them claim to feel better doing so.Well, they probably do feel better. The reason is not the food, it is that they changed their diet and it is a psychological adjuvant for lots of other positive things, like fewer calories or more exercise or just feeling like they are 'doing' something by getting on a scale.
