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.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-05/wkh-bwi051419.phpCan wisdom be measured? Wisdom is a subjective concept - to most it is understanding that goes beyond knowledge - but a review in Harvard Review of Psychiatry hopes to show wisdom can be empirical; however, since it is a review, it is using papers which argue for its conclusion. And that's an ironic confounder in wanting to be called scientific.
After attracting scorn with bizarre classifications of a weedkiller, bacon, and hot tea, the French statistics group known as the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) decided to puncture claims that activists had manipulated the process by doing a flip-flop on coffee. Though they were widely expected to increase the hazard designation from 1991's already bizarre "possibly carcinogenic", they suddenly reversed course and lowered a classification of a product for the very first time.
Pop culture is in a bit of a quandary. Though food is essential for life, culturally it is no longer a basic necessity, and that's thanks to science. We grow more food on less land than ever dreamed possible. Even Europe, with all its political limitations in agriculture. Food is a cheap commodity and that makes it a values issue.
RIP to Professor Murray Gell-Mann, who passed away last week and was famed (including a Nobel prize) for quark theory. I never met him, but if you spent time at Caltech you probably did. He was not like Einstein, I am told, he was approachable if you were a young scientist, but you had to know what you were talking about. A few years ago I taught a class there, invited by my friend the best-selling author and science journalist Greg Critser, who was an instructor for science journalism at the school. He had previously agreed to be on an AAAS panel I was moderating in San Francisco and I was returning the favor for him by being a guest speaker for his class at Caltech.
If you want to annoy someone in their late 30s, joke that all they care about are avocado toast points or beard grooming or running off to Coachella when a project needs to be finished. Because they are millennials.You can also stereotype Baby Boomers or Generation X(1) and get a rise out of them. Everyone seems to know that these "generation" classifications were entirely manufactured by advertisers, but they caught on and have become part of the lexicon. Advertisers created these sweeping generalizations based on demographics.Yet they may not be right at all. They may even be shockingly wrong.
If you have cooked a steak or a hamburger you know that by the time you are ready to serve it, and certainly after you cut or bite into it, there will be liquid that oozes out of it. Anti-meat groups know it isn't blood(1) but they use that imagery to try and sway people to their cause. And groups who make substitutes for meat also use that imagery, because they think that's important to meat eaters. Because marketing groups have long used it, people think it's blood, and even use the term "bloody."
Beinecke MS 408, commonly called the Voynich manuscript (after Wilfrid Voynich, a book dealer who bought it in Italy), has long been dismissed as gibberish by most, but beginning in 1915, and certainly since the 1960s, it has also been a source of fascination for people who believe it must be a code. Or a recipe book. Or something. It is actually a proto-Romance language, according to a new paper. It just had never been written before because educated people used Latin, says Dr. Gerard Cheshire.So uneducated people wrote in a language from 2000 years earlier?
Scientists seem to have finally had enough of activists who promote every study in mice as if it were relevant to humans. A Twitter account, @justsaysinmice, calls out such bad behavior and quickly grew to 57,000 followers by linking to studies produced each day and noting they are just in mice. Clearly there was a lot of frustration pent up about hyperbolic claims in media using animals.
Homeopathy, now two centuries old, proceeds from a fascinatingly bizarre premise; that there is a u-shaped curve for dose. Reasonable people know the dose makes the poison; a medicine that can help you at normal levels can be harmful at high levels. Homepaths (and the Endocrine Disrupting Chemical community) instead also believe in an upward curve at other end, that chemicals at extremely low levels can also affect people. This u-shaped curve allows all manner of homeopathic "remedies" to be foisted off on people, not to mention allowing anti-science activists to attribute magical statistical harms to chemicals that science can't detect.
Glyphosate, a common weedkiller, doesn't have a mechanism that acts on the biology of humans, at least without falling into a tub full of it and drowning, but trial lawyers know science does not matter to a jury, emotion does. And emotionally an agriculture company can come off stiff compared to a couple who used the product for 35 years and then both got non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
There is renewed controversy about a pesticide called chlorpyrifos and like most science issues it has come down along political lines; Democrats, who have almost all anti-science activists but ironically also a lot of science academics under their umbrella, want to ban it, while Republicans, who have a lot of industry and private sector scientists under their umbrella, say it should continue to be regulated but not banned.
U.S. Right To Know, an industry-funded trade group that was created to harass and intimidate scientists, has teamed up with a few academic allies to promote 129 Freedom of Information Act requests they submitted related to Coca-Cola. To harass scientists as effectively as possible, they make requests overly broad so they can claim to "reveal" some suitably cosmic number, in this case 87,000 documents.
