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.
Imagine a world where government decided they would mandate and subsidize existing cellular phones. With no incentive to improve, we'd still be using Motorola StarTacs.
One of the odder disconnects in western culture is people who claim to care about the environment but will only eat fish that is caught in unsustainable ways - in the wild. I suppose I get the appeal of knowing laborers risked their lives for your food and that farmers in $300,000 tractors don't have the same cachet.(1) Yet those same people are horrified at the thought of hunting game like rabbit and venison, they want those farmed. Insisting on only wild salmon seems irresponsible. What if we did that about lettuce or strawberries? They'd be expensive and our nutrition would suffer.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences may have science in its name, but they remain since the earliest part of the last decade a group funded by taxpayers that exists to scare taxpayers about science. Their in-house publication Environmental Health Perspectives has a new claim, and this one does not even involve questionnaires or cell studies hoping to "link" some chemical to some effect; it just picked a bunch of papers the authors liked and did a review of them to manufacture 'weight of evidence' about a term activists coined and NIEHS epidemiologists promote every chance they can - "forever chemicals."
Conservation in modern times is a misused term that trial lawyers often invoke to win lawsuits against companies before progress can commence but Brunei on the island of Borneo, which is about the size of the state of Delaware, has a great reason for all countries of the world to preserve it. The current landscape is similar to what was present during the Pliocene Epoch, 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago.
You probably know someone who takes an aspirin to reduce chances of a heart attack, just like you may know someone who says wine, containing alcohol, a true class 1 carcinogen, is 'good for you.'They were never settled science, they were instead epidemiology, statistical correlation, which then got transformed into clinical claims, much like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVD-19. How did that happen?
Up to 15 percent of women are diagnosed with pregnancy complications and a new paper says that boys are more likely to be the cause than girls.The authors speculate it may be because boys grow faster in the womb, needing more energy and nutrients from the mother through the placenta but after around 100 billion childbirths in human history that doesn't add up. Maybe it is the case in mice, and that is the caveat with the study. Mice are not little people, though you wouldn't know that from claims made by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC.)
Everyone knows droughts are bad. They increase risk of wildfires and damage life in the affected region. They are not always predictable, when I lived in Pennsylvania in the early 1990s there was a drought with no known mechanism involved, but they are often cyclical, which makes them at least broadly predictable.The Dry 2 Dry program at Ghent University believes droughts are not only predictable and cyclical, they can propagate in a kind of feedback loop; instead of being local, evaporated water is moved to other areas, so less of it is taking drought with them.
The last time the Russians went to war in Europe, it was the Cold War. After World War II ended, the USSR wanted Germany to remain relatively weak. The US instead believed that part of the reason behind World War II was a Germany that had been too heavily penalized by other European countries after World War I. After defeat, Germany had been divided into four sectors, controlled by America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union and three of those sectors 'united' so that there could be a common currency, a new German mark, and goods supplied by the US under the Marshall Plan would bring stability. But the former capital, Berlin, was in the USSR sector, and the USSR wanted its section of Germany to be Soviet, and communism.
A new report says that the alternative meat industry, plant-based products designed to look and taste like meat, raised $8 billion even during the pandemic. That's a big success.They want more but oddly lament that most of their money comes from the private sector. They want the trillions of dollars in subsidies that solar and wind have gotten, claiming it will fight climate change. That's a big problem.
A new study says that drying a load of laundry in a machine releases "microfibers" into the air but chemicals made by a $76 billion company will save us.Microfibers? Is that a thing? Sure, we have defined healthy down to such an extent that no one is without a disease of some kind. With endocrine disrupting chemicals, small micron particulate matter, and supermarket food it is amazing any of us live more than a day. But is it really meaningful? As with Micronauts, it sounds like something that might be the science equivalent of an MCU show but on closer examination is really more like Hasbro latching onto a fad.
Japan has a high suicide rate, so it was news when there were reports from the National Police Agency that October 2020 had more suicide deaths in just that month than they had deaths due to COVID-19 for the year.(1)
Though nearly everyone recognizes that smoking cigarettes is a known carcinogen, many marijuana users think marijuana smoke is safe. They may not realize it is inhaling the smoke, not that the smoke is from one plant or another, that is the worry. Nicotine or THC is as harmless as caffeine, but when combusted in a leaf with paper and inhaled, everything becomes harmful. Including marijuana plants.
