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.
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.
Can all nuclear energy be weaponized? It could, according to US politicians in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry mortally wounded nuclear energy development, to the cheers of their constituents. It was all based on claims by environmentalists that nuclear energy invariably led to nuclear weapons.
A recent paper in JAMA should have EXPLORATORY in giant red letter across every page, or else journalists will use it to promote fear and doubt about sunscreens. Which is already happening.
Survey results that will be presented during Heart Failure 2019 in Athens a few weeks from now are a good opportunity to discuss facts and myths about heart disease. Including some held by cardiologists.20 percent of believe believe, for example, that heart disease patients should avoid exercise while just over 50 percent know that exercise can be a treatment for their disease. Meanwhile, doctors are unsure about the conflict between cancer treatment and heart disease. Does cancer promote heart disease? There are common pathways in tumor growth and heart failure and some cancer therapies are toxic to the heart so it could be that, or the other way around.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was once a serious, revered organization with the somber task of tackling what environmental factors caused what cancers so that we could eliminate them.(1)And they did. Their decisions for the first 20 years were rock solid - there is no debate now that cigarettes, smog, and alcohol will kill you, especially if you routinely have high doses. When California chose to abdicated its science policymaking to a French group, there were concerns that its power might be abused but they were dismissed because there was no indication IARC was heading in that direction.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC is promoting a doomsday shortage where America is without 47-122,000 physicians, over a third of them being general practitioners, by 2032 and say it is due to the “graying” of America, both among providers and the public.
Just over a year ago I testified before a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel in support of the iQOS device, a smoking replacement tool that heats tobacco but doesn't ignite it.
There is a big difference between a trial lawyer convincing a jury in one of America's most anti-science regions that an herbicide that only acts on plants might be able to cause human cancer, and scientists with knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology who know better.
Cows and chickens will never go extinct because they are food, and some useless critters like Aedes aegypti have managed to tough it all despite being just disease vectors. For everything else, it can be a crap shoot. Nature is out to kill us all.
A new index of scientific output has been released and it finds that the United States continues to dominate in research, bolstered by the private sector accounting for nearly 70 percent of science funding, where most other developed countries instead rely on government. The analysis factored in the number researchers as percentage of population, patents, papers released, and GDP spending.
When we think of Mt. Everest, it's usually imagery like Sir Edmund Hillary and his guide Tenzing Norgay in parkas and with oxygen tanks making the hazardous 29.000 climb. And then there are the dead bodies, nearly 300 of them, those who perished on the trek to the summit.What we don't think of is a man running, yet that is what Kilian Jornet Burgada did part of the way in famous photos - and then after 26 hours and 31 minutes, the fastest climb ever(1), he came back down, rested, and did it again, all within a week.
