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.
Smoking is in decline to such an extent that there is no longer fear about creating Prohibition-style casual criminals with totalitarian rules or outright bans, so the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is doing the next best thing; mandating graphic warnings on packages.
With coronavirus all over media and politicians looking for ways to leverage concern into votes for their political party this November, a number of parents will want to take their children to a doctor at the first sign of a cough "just to be sure" and doctors say that's a bad idea. It burdens a health system that could be overtaxed if aggressive projections about the impact of COVID-19 come true.Those parents are not being rational, doctors will note, most kids will not be harmed by it any more than they would a bad cold or flu, and yet the American medical system is overrun by "defensive medicine" that engages in the same behavior.
Though COVID-19 as a disease is rather difficult to get, spreading the coronavirus itself is as easy as spreading influenza viruses. The big risks will be from a sneeze, though COVID-19 doesn't have much sneezing, or a cough, or touching someone's hands who did either and then touching your own face.Why do people subconsciously touch their face if they felt something weird on their hands? That is a mystery of psychology, but it's why that is the best deterrent to catching coronavirus or spreading it. Yet if someone sneezes and you don't touch their hand, how long will the virus in its "aerosol" state hang around?
In 2015 I began to wonder when CDC, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had lost its way. Since I am neither Republican or Democrat, I had to wonder if the Obama administration was the problem, the same way Democrats insist Trump is the problem now.But where does that end? Did the CDC that mishandled H1N1 in 2009 do so because of Obama? Was SARS 2003 botched because of Bush? Of course not, the issue is bureaucracy creep due to career government employees inside CDC itself, not temporary political appointees like Dr. Robert Redfield, who has become a political pincushion for Democrats despite three decades of HIV research. Meanwhile, Republicans are claiming liberal media is exaggerating coronavirus to hurt Trump this fall.
Do you want to believe a mom with no credentials who opposes modern agriculture can keep your baby from getting autism? Do you want to believe fracking will set your tap water on fire or that COVID-19 was caused by 5G cell phone service in Wuhan?There are prominent Facebook pages for all of those. An osteopath named Joe Mercola will even sell you supplements to prevent getting coronavirus, and he makes $100 million a year leveraging social media to latch onto to anything people are willing to believe.
A new paper tries to "suggest" that a silent killer may be among us - particulate matter so tiny you need an electron microscope to detect it, left behind on furniture by smokers who sat there at some point in the past. Even movie theater seats. And then vapers may be doing the same thing, with nicotine.This particulate matter, inference goes, jumps from their bodies onto seats, where it waits for you to perch, then leaps onto your body, worms its way through your skin, enters your organs, bioaccumulates, and causes cancer.
There could be a lot more COVID-19 cases than the 164 instances CDC lists, even up to 9,000 in the U.S., but even that would not be reason for alarm.
A new paper reports again about the successful cultivation of red romaine lettuce, Lactuca sativa cv ‘Outredgeous’ plants from surface-sterilized seeds grown in Vegetable Production Systems growth chambers on the International Space Station during the years 2014 to 2016.Unlike what you'll get in Chipotle, this lettuce is free of disease-causing microbes and safe to eat.
While 2020 looked to be another year when corporate media journalists would provide the same old Product X "linked to" Disease Y "a new study finds" articles as they have for the entire century, the latest coronavirus, COV-19, has saved us from all that.While in the past people were willing to pretend concern about what diseases the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences was willing to correlate to useful products on a spreadsheet, those days are gone. Chemophobia is a luxury for the idle rich, much like organic food or the anti-vaccine movement.When people do have something to be concerned over, data dredging goes by the wayside. Reality sets in. Science is back to being a force for good.
March is the time of year when even people who aren't college basketball fans get involved - because of March Madness pools, online or in the office. Most, even experts will fail, because they do one thing wrong - they start in the beginning, which this year is March 17th, with dozens and dozens of teams, and work their way toward the NCAA Final. Yet that is the wrong way to go, according to a new study. Most people will be lured by the prospect of an upset along the way and are out of it by the Final Four.
The Organic Trade Association has canceled The Organic Center's Annual Benefit Dinner due to venue concerns about coronavirus in Anaheim during the Natural Products Expo West, where the dinner was going to be held. Naturally.
Packages and labels can be a bit of a mess in the 21st century. What is GMO plastic? Who knows? Yet a company named World Centric is selling ZeroWare 2.0 Reusable Dishware - "alternative" tableware they note is not only free of melamine, which they claim is killing people, but is also made from "Non-GMO plastic."Naturally, I asked their PR rep what Non-GMO plastic was and got no response. Every one of these shady companies claims they are about science and health, but they are about money and will ghost anyone who asks an obvious question, like how they can be an alternative to GMO plastic when plastic has no organism to genetically modify.
