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.
A product like Zicam, which claims it can make colds shorter, shields itself from truth in advertising claims by admitting on the label its product is not actual medicine, it is homeopathy, a pretend drug for people who want to believe.If they were required to show it works, the way pharmaceutical products must, they'd be out of business. If they could pass a double-blind clinical trial, or any homeopathic product could, they'd spend the money in a second, because every supplement that wants to be legitimized yearns for U.S. Food and Drug Administration legitimacy. FDA may have flaws, like all groups do, but it is the gold standard for the world.
Friends of the Earth, social justice warriors, 1960s-era anti-science activists, occasional lobbyists, and current Political Action Committee (PAC) for Democrats (including Green New Deal darling Rep.
In 2011 I wrote a book with Dr. Alex Berezow of RealClearScience in which we noted the common cause among the anti-vaccine, anti-energy, and anti-GMO communities. They shared common beliefs about distrust of science and I made a challenge; I said if I drew a radius around a Whole Foods, I could predict with high accuracy how those people with those beliefs voted.
In January, the Chang’e-4 lunar probe landed on dark side of the Moon but it's a tiny relay satellite that is getting all of the buzz today.
"Bud Light", a lower carbohydrate beer produced by Anheuser–Busch InBev
of Belgium, made waves at the Super Bowl, among beer experts and competitors at least, by assuring their customers they did not use corn syrup.So corn syrup is bad? Well, no, they didn't say that, they just said they didn't have it, but such "nocebo" tactics - the opposite of placebo, making people feel healthier about a product they don't have - have been tried and true for 50 years.(1)
I got a butter shaper for Christmas. I asked for one because I make lot of butter in a mason jar and then just throw it in tupperware but my friends sometimes want butter and it feels a little dismissive to just hand them tupperware.Imagine my disappointment when I read the instructions which stated that it needed to be treated with "Organic Coconut Oil." Butter used to be something almost everyone made and now it was the providence of uninformed hippies, it seems. Or maybe this company was trapped in 2016?
When the HPV vaccine was first introduced, there were a number of reasons people listed for being critical. Some were just corporate cynicism - a company that just lost $5 billion in a Vioxx settlement was working its way under the same vaccine halo as polio and smallpox, they said. Others argued that it didn't work very well. And then there was a more subjective cultural claim that protecting teenage girls against a future cancer by making sex seem safer would lead to promiscuity.
Data from 110 counties in 33 states from 1998 to 2014
has found that brute preservation efforts, the 'nature cannot be touched by humans' kind promoted by aggressive environmental groups, leads to more greenhouse gas emissions.
During the Super Bowl, you can predict there will be a lot of beer commercials. As a non-drinker, this always puzzles me - haven't fans already bought their beer? - but advertising is a trillion dollar industry and I instead run a small non-profit so I am certainly not going to debunk capitalism.However, I am going to debunk junk science and their suggestion that because they use one type of sugar to help yeast and their competitor uses another theirs is superior.
During the George W. Bush administration, American furniture makers had a crippling disadvantage. While American timber was tightly regulated, foreign supplies had no limitations on where their wood originated from, and could engage in destructive practices and undercut U.S. companies.President Bush solved that by modernizing the Lacey Act, which was the conservation brainchild of Republicans a century earlier and had been modified a few times since. Under the new law, if a supplier could not show a legitimate trail of legal acquisition, it simply could not come into the U.S.
In a recent experiment, participants were asked questions to gauge how religious they were and then about their willingness to purchase a fruit cup. Half were told the fruit cup was organic and half were told it was gluten-free.People who were very religious had more favorable attitudes toward the gluten-free fruit cup and were more likely to say they would buy it than they would the organic kind.
For the last 20 years, insects have been touted as the next big thing in food, because they have a lot of protein and would be reasonable to produce at scale. And people who don't understand agriculture think land only suitable for animal husbandry could magically support amber waves of grain if we stopped eating steers.But are insects too icky? Perhaps to people who have never seen animals slaughtered but have killed an insect. However, people who claim to know a lot about animal welfare and food, vegetarians, are okay with insects. Zoologically, they are correct, insects are not animals the way they think of animals any more than sponges are, though all share the broad Animalia kingdom.
