Science 2.0

Hank Campbell

Hank Campbell

Hank Campbell is an American science writer, author of the bestselling book 'Science Left Behind', and the founder of Science 2.0®, the world's largest independent science communications site. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Wired, Chicago Tribune, CNN, and many more places.

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Humor Works Better Than Scorn At Fighting Science Denial

Humor Works Better Than Scorn At Fighting Science Denial

A few years ago, much of the academic science community finally turned on the anti-science progressives that dominated the coasts of the U.S. and who refused to vaccinate their children. Standing up to their political allies definitely turned the tide, even California Governor Gavin Newsom grudgingly conceded and signed a law banning the arbitrary vaccine exemptions for kids that had become common in places like San Francisco, where he'd been the mayor, and Los Angeles. Some schools there had vaccination rates under 30 percent.(1) Pretending the problem did not exist set California back, especially when coastal cities had more vaccine exemptions than the rest of the US combined, but scorn so long after it was common likely did not make much difference.

Can AI Help Slow Future Pandemics?

Can AI Help Slow Future Pandemics?

If you missed the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, wait a few years and catch the next one. One happened in 2012, and in 2003, and since it was only discovered as distinct from the common cold in the 1960s, they may have been happening forever.If it isn't coronavirus, it could be a new flu. 

Conservationists Move Species To Create Natural 'Fixes' To Problems, And Sometimes Create Pandemics

Conservationists Move Species To Create Natural 'Fixes' To Problems, And Sometimes Create Pandemics

Using their own proprietary consultant as the sole source for their "evaluation", US Fish and Wildlife Service once tried to extort up to $30 million from a private landowner in Louisiana, by stating they needed to created a habitat for an "endangered" frog and that was the only suitable location. And the landowner had to pay for it.Except the frog already lived just fine in Mississippi. Its name was literally the Mississippi Gopher Frog.Had sue-and-settle groups like Center for Biological Diversity actually won, not only would they have gotten fat from 'legal fees' paid by you and I, they could have created an ecological disaster chain, in the form of foreign parasites and diseases carried by those frogs.(1)

Trust In Corporate Media Linked To Less Actual Knowledge About COVID-19

Trust In Corporate Media Linked To Less Actual Knowledge About COVID-19

If you see someone on "TODAY" hawking four products per minute they claim are going to make your life better, there is a 100 percent chance it is a paid influencer invited because a producer needed content. Such influencers get paid because it works.This marketing strategy is also common on Facebook, Twitter, and outlets like Mother Jones, where organic food, supplements, and alternatives to medicine are popular for their demographics who have money and a distrust of science.

91% Of The World Don't Live In Polluted Air, And It Has Not Made COVID-19 Worse

91% Of The World Don't Live In Polluted Air, And It Has Not Made COVID-19 Worse

COVID-19 has been worse than the coronavirus pandemics of 2012 and 2003 yet the air is cleaner than ever, so a new op-ed claiming that 'virtual' pollution - so small you can't see it without an electron microscope - is the reason SARS-CoV-2 has been so bad comes across as silly, and bordering on deceptive.Even sillier, they claim that 91 percent of planet earth lives in unsafe air.

Standard Model Rethink: Does Measurement Of Muon Magnetics Mean New Physics Are Coming?

Standard Model Rethink: Does Measurement Of Muon Magnetics Mean New Physics Are Coming?

Muons are leptons(1), fundamental particles formed in the atmosphere by cosmic rays that are a heavier cousin of electrons. The Standard Model has three generations of leptons; electrons, muons, and tau plus their three neutrinos. The Standard Model is in line with "the big bang" and measurements of the hydrogen/helium ratio - because the number of types of neutrinos affects the prevalence of helium.Things were great, or at least in a kind of intellectual détente on the Standard Model, until recently.

Just Correlation: Meat And 'Higher Risk' Of Death

Just Correlation: Meat And 'Higher Risk' Of Death

Your risk of death is 100 percent. Yet your risk of early demise can be mitigated if you avoid things like ingesting alcohol and cigarettes and mustard gas.Those are clear killers. What about salt, sugar, and meat? Those have not been established as science at all, they are instead examples of correlation. To create correlation is easy, it only requires looking at a group of people, finding what diseases they have, finding what foods they eat, and creating a "statistically significant" link between them.

EU Says It Will Recycle 70% Of Electric Car Batteries - Here's Why That's Actually Worse For The Environment

EU Says It Will Recycle 70% Of Electric Car Batteries - Here's Why That's Actually Worse For The Environment

Electric cars are popular, thanks to government mandates and subsidies, but they have a problem in the distance; massive amounts of battery waste.The EU, for example, wants to have 30 million electric cars by 2030 and while politicians can ignore the fossil fuel demands and strain on the grid, electric cars bring something they can't ignore; the environmental impact of giant toxic batteries in landfills.

Imaginarity: New Paper Says The Imaginary Part Of Quantum Mechanics Can Be Observed

Imaginarity: New Paper Says The Imaginary Part Of Quantum Mechanics Can Be Observed

Mathematics is a language and languages can be used to create stories. It just takes imagination to create time travel or wormholes or theories of strings or lots of nice things theoretical physicists throw into arXiv.Sometimes math has to create a story because real numbers don't work, even if the physics does.Wave-particle duality, a foundation of quantum mechanics, has a fascinating science history. James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations govern the device you are reading this article on, couldn't explain everything - he died of cancer at age 46. It was left to Albert Einstein a generation later, in his 1905 paper, to describe light as photons containing properties of both particles and electromagnetic fields - the waves of Maxwell.

Being A New Mom Can Make You 'A Little' OCD

Being A New Mom Can Make You 'A Little' OCD

A new survey estimates that 8% of pregnant women reported symptoms that meet criteria for a clinical diagnosis of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and in the 38 weeks after having a child that jumped to 17% - a huge increase over other surveys.

UCSF Publishes Its Annual 'Science May Be Killing Us' Paper

UCSF Publishes Its Annual 'Science May Be Killing Us' Paper

Tracey Woodruff, PhD, MPH, of the University of California San Francisco, frequent collaborator of anti-vaccine activist and organic industry trade group head Gary Ruskin (US Right to Know) and sue-and-settle attorney Raphael Metzger, is back with a new paper claiming they can 'detect' chemicals in pregnant women.