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.
I don't smoke, I never have, and even just a few years ago I was in the "quit or die" camp regarding smokers. I got more compassionate after learning about the issue, when "vaping", the action verb for poorly named "e-cigarettes", got war declared on it by the Obama administration. It wasn't my knowledge of the science that changed - I already knew nicotine is not as harmful as tar and arsenic and hundreds of other toxic compounds found in cigarette smoke - it was more my empathy. Someone who's never been addicted to anything can't really be organically empathetic about smoking cessation and harm reduction, so I had to try.
Before I begin, to the general science public who visits Science 2.0 (some 300,000,000 in 12 years, so thank you for supporting independent science media!) - this article is of no value to you, unless you like "inside baseball" discussions of why people do the thing the public visits here to see them do.
The Washington Post has long been a left-leaning publication and it is said that's the paper satirist Mort Sahl was lampooning when he began joking about the headline of a liberal outlet after a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR: “World Ends: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.” Some are concerned that since being taken over by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos they lurched even farther from the center and that may sound truth-y, if you believe America is more polarized than ever, but it's not like Washington Post was ever seen as centrist by most. It was on the left in 1988, when Sahl made his joke, and it was so in 1968 and before I was even born.
Ben&Jerry's is not going to roll out ice cream derived from geneticaly modified cells in a lab any time soon - their buying demographic hates science (although their parent conglomerate Unilever loves it) - but the public wants it now.
Viking 1, an unmanned U.S. probe headed for Mars, was launched on this day in 1975 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, which is Brevard county on the Atlantic Ocean and across the Banana River east of Merritt Island where Kennedy Space Center is which is itself east Titusville across the Indian River.Yet even though Viking 1 took off from Cape Canaveral, formerly called Cape Kennedy, it did not take off from its more famous adjacent site, Kennedy Space Center, formerly called NASA Launch Operations Center. It instead took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station headquartered at Patrick Air Force Base, actual Cape Canaveral, not Merritt Island, which had once been renamed Cape Kennedy Air Force Station. Sound confusing?
In 2006, when Science 2.0 began, it felt like the world was ready for a writing network composed of scientists. There had already been two attempts, one failed and one wildly successful, albeit more focused on cultural issues than science.The reason it felt time was because the public didn't trust journalists, who were (and are) often overtly partisan while scientists didn't trust journalists because they were (and are) often wrong. Why not make scientists the journalists?
A recent paper claims the ketogenic diet (basically the Atkins diet, except you can't sell new diet books using old names) will help with migraines.Other more dangerous claims are that it will help with schizophrenia and epilepsy. The reality is that if the ketogenic diet could do any of those things, meal plans would be in double-blind clinical trials right now. Those diseases are a trillion dollar market.
If something is free, do you use it more? It seems so, in New York City ambulance usage for minor injuries (abrasions, minor burns, muscle sprains) rose by 37 percent after the Affordable Care Act was implemented.An ambulance for a scrape? Yes, nearly 3,000 more each year of them, and that is just in one city. All paid for by everyone whose premiums went up.
If you are worried about climate change and don't embrace natural gas as a bridge to whatever energy wins the future - solar, hydrogen, nuclear - you don't understand energy density and emissions.
The never-enacted Obama Clean Power Plan was scuttled by the Supreme Court in 2016 and its defense later abandoned by the Trump administration. Though it is fashionable to claim that means Republicans hate climate science, the reality is it was an expensive mandate without a problem to solve.
Comments opened on the recent EPA nominations to serve on the Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) established under section 25(d) of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), since three member terms will expire during the next year.
Decades ago, Velveeta had to be labeled “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product" so that customers could have truth in labeling. It was not "cheese", said the government. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission even even told Kraft they could not even advertise that their "singles" contained five ounces of milk because of the implication the cheese might have as much calcium as 5 ounces of milk when it only had as much calcium as 3.5 ounces of milk. Government was all about mandating consumer trust in labels then.
