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.
Dr. Norm Borlaug, the "father of the Green Revolution", is credited with saving a billion lives using agricultural science, and for the last 50 years he and his successors debunked the Malthusian claims of cynics like Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and their modern-day acolytes like Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, and Naomi Oreskes.When Holdren and Ehrlich (and the other Ehrlich) were trying to drum up support for mandatory birth control and a world government to enforce it(1), Borlaug and the science community quietly made farming more efficient than ever. Today, even the poorest people in most of the world can afford to be fat, something never possible before, and that is thanks to the legacy of Dr. Borlaug.
An exploratory study in cell cultures and mice finds that in their rodents high-fat diets throughout pregnancy (rich in polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acids) impacted fetal brain development. Don’t be alarmed, mice are not little people so a mouse study can only ever disqualify an effect, it can never show one in humans. Mice studies (and epidemiology) are termed "exploratory" because they can only suggest a link and will need relevant study before they can relate to humans, regardless what Huffington Post or Guardian may forget to note in their articles.
When Dr. Scott Gottlieb was named as head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the pro-science community cheered. Gottlieb had both academic and private sector experience, he had been both doctor and patient, and he had been a Deputy at FDA in the past so he knew where all the bottlenecks remained.
In September, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration held a public meeting to discuss FDA’s effort to modernize standards of identity as part the agency's Nutrition Innovation Strategy. In 2018, FDA declared its intent to modernize food standards of to achieve three goals: (1) protect consumers against economic adulteration; (2) maintain the basic nature, essential characteristics, and nutritional integrity of food; and (3) promote industry innovation and provide flexibility to encourage manufacturers to produce more healthful foods.
Writers are going to find a way to make their work topical. The most important article I ever wrote (in my estimation), in the Wall Street Journal, came out about five weeks after I wrote it, and with a different lede.The news cycle had kept pushing it back but then a new event occurred which made it compelling and the editor saw the hook and had me redoo it, but the rest was evergreen facts.
In 2014, the world's top polluter, China, told the United States president they unequivocally would not even discuss emissions caps or targets until 2030 and American speechwriters quickly tried to spin that into a positive. China had never even agreed on a future date before, they rationalized, so that was progress.Well, not really, but it was as much as almost everyone else was going to do under the Paris Climate Agreement.
In February, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a bombastic press release to announce its 2019 Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility was going to to Sarath Gunatilake and Channa Jayasumana, anti-glyphosate protesters who claim a causal connection between glyphosate and chronic kidney disease. AAAS has long been a political body, its leadership has come solely from one political party for the last 35 years. and that means it is often going to pick and choose the science it accepts based on its political skew. But a whole lot of Democratic scientists are in biotechnology, they recognize the consensus on glyphosate and GMOs is even greater than it is climate change, and the blowback to this award announcement happened rapidly.
It's November of 2019 which means that we have officially arrived at the opening of the science fiction cult classic "Blade Runner." Let's talk about what it got right.
I was at a local theater showing of "Evil Dead: The Musical" a few weeks ago and at the end was a lot of 1980s music. The crowd that evening was overwhelmingly high school theater geeks and they knew every song, from "Come On Eileen" to "Take On Me." They knew them well enough to mash up dances from other periods while they were singing.
Rutgers University wants kids to be afraid this year. Not of ghosts and goblins, but Halloween itself. So they have published 7 hyperbolic risks designed to terrify parents.Allergies! Marijuana brownies! Makeup!Getting advice from a poison control center at Halloween is as demoralizing as ordering a steak with a microbiologist: they know so much about absolute risk they have forgotten what real risk is.
Wildfires happen multiple times per year here in California, we even make light of it by joking "the mudslides will put out the wildfires" when the seasons turn. Given that pollution surges due to fires are well-documented here, it would seem obvious that if pollution was going to cause more deaths, it would be during wildfire season.
It's no secret to anyone with even modest command of history that America has long meant freedom. Every oppressed religion moved here, to the one country that did not have a national religion, separating it from the Anglican Church (imagine if the President got to approve the Bishop of Pittsburgh!) or any of the countries in the Holy Roman Empire.
Though a CBD supplement huckster was just convicted for selling synthetic marijuana and CBD oil is the culprit behind untold numbers of vaping illnesses and deaths, and a chiropractor was just lambasted by FDA for claiming his CBD supplement can fix everything from autism to Alzheimer's, if search engines are any indication, marijuana is not stopping.
