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.
In wealthy western breadbaskets like France and the United States, environmental groups who get donations from the $130 billion organic food industry claim it is viable everywhere else too. It's not just that they don't understand agriculture or science, though that is most of it. It is that they don't realize their modern White Savior Colonialism puts Africans at risk.There is a reason that as Kenya has gotten better about feeding itself, none of it is using the "organic" process - that whole market is just 0.69% and is mostly people who wish they had the money for pesticides. The reasons organic food don't work outside places where food is easy to grow involve climate, poor soil, limited water, and pests and diseases that ruin crops.
Pew has announced they will no longer use 'generational labels' and instead use age cohorts. It makes sense demographically but it never made sense that anyone used them in the first place. When I was born, the Baby Boom was an event - a post-World War II increase in births due to soldiers returning home. But when they grew up they were reading the works of people who felt 'lost' because they hadn't been in World War II or the Depression, and dreary mopes like Kerouac and Ginsberg infected a whole lot of teenagers who wants to feel cheated too.
Unless you hate movies, you know this weekend was "Barbenheimer" - two highly regarded, very different films were on track to smash some records. And they did. "Barbie" did over $150 million while "Oppenheimer" did $80 million, a combined total unmatched for two competing opening weekends and "Oppenheimer was the first time a movie had exceeded $50 million when another opening went past $100 million.
Espresso is a coffee extraction process where hot water is forced through finely ground coffee at a barometric pressure of nine - which means nine times the usual pressure you feel at sea level, which translates to about 130 pounds per square inch, about 400 percent of your car tires.Some people drink it diluted with water, an Americano, or with milk, as a latte. In modern times, some people even drink it cold. If an in vitro (cell culture) study holds up, people may even drink it to help ward off Alzheimer's disease.
With allied epidemiologists placed inside the US Environmental Protection Agency, and scientists pushed to the side, environmentalists feel like they are about to get a win when it comes to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that have been common for 80 years.And it will be a win - for the yacht payments of their lawyers. For the public, we will be no safer, we're not being harmed now, but the costs to 'clean up' a problem we don't have will be onerous. And we're all going to be harmed by that.
Environmental Working Group, the Extinction Rebellion of affordable produce, is always in a war on strawberries - unless they only contain pesticides their organic industry corporate donors use or sell.For the scientifically literate, those with at least the intellect of 17th century peasants who understood 'the dose makes the poison', strawberries are healthy and safe. as is the rest of the EWG Dirty Dozen list that just happens to never include organic food sprayed with toxic chemicals the day it's shipped to Whole Foods.This year, strawberries will be even better than usual. There are two reasons: rain and a cooler spring. Those mean larger fruit, and also extended shelf life, which means less waste. That is a win on every level.
A new case study sounds the alarm that per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are detectable in Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The authors say the levels are alarmingly high.What does that mean? No studies have shown health issues related to PFAS yet and if they were a health concern, it would be known after 100 years. Yet cancer is not up, no environmental or lifestyle health issues are up except obesity, and that is due to an abundance of affordable food even for the world's poor. PFAS are so ubiquitous they are detectable in the Ittoqqortoormiit villagers of East Greenland, which means if they are harmful people should be dropping left and right, yet the only casualties so far are mice who get 10,000 times the exposure humans will get in their lives.
A new paper laments fine particulate matter in Asia. which is like worrying about third-hand smoke when actual smoking is still killing people there.
Most of the world relies on a 113-year-old chemical reaction used every day. It is the Haber (or Haber-Bosch) process and while its contribution to energy usage and emissions is negligible compared to its benefits, the private sector is always looking for ways to keep things affordable. That means trying to come up with a fundamentally better way to fix nitrogen than the one invented before The Great War.
After spending thousands of years converging on the perfect beers, this century culture went crazy and overdid hops, tinkered with grains, and generally made niche beers at high cost. Yet there is no question craft beers are big business, a growing segment when balanced lagers are in decline.
If you believed Monsanto controlled 500,000 biologists who accepted GMOs and weedkillers worldwide while Whole Foods, with more revenue, was standing alone selling organic food that made you healthier, you are a conspiracy theorist. You're not alone, even if the demographics changed. A few years ago, conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his claims that cell phones cause cancer and vaccines cause autism were embraced by the crazy fringe of the Democratic Party, like Organic Consumers Association and their puppet attack groups such as US Right To Know and SourceWatch. Now he is embraced by the crazy fringe of the Republican party, who think the COVID-19 vaccine is a Big Pharma effort to control our brains.
A crippling flaw in much epidemiology is that it takes survey results as truthful and then seeks to correlate that to some benefit or harm. It's why epidemiologists said butter was bad and trans fats were good, until butter was good and trans fats were bad. If you were gullible enough to buy quinoa, teff, or any other superfood, some influencer you believed had an epidemiology paper on their side.
