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.
Marta Venier, an environmentalist at Indiana University, recently teamed up with a Michigan activist group to "test" car seats and declared they had toxic chemicals.Obviously that is media clickbait but if you are reading here, you want to know science truth and will leave the fake news to Mother Jones. So let's get to itIn 2018, we can detect anything in anything
The North American Free Trade Agreement won't see its 25th birthday. The United States, Canada, and Mexico have signed on the dotted line for its replacement, The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement. The debate fell outside usual positions. Free trade is the hallmark of Republicans, they say, but they seemed to be unhappy with NAFTA. Democrats, in the old days, were protectionist about American workers, yet their criticisms suggested they wanted to keep manufacturing jobs in Mexico and for Canadian farmers to have a good deal in the U.S. while America got penalized in Canada.What gives?
Do you want to believe that your car grill is determined by your personality or that lap dancers get better tips when they are ovulating? You probably like evolutionary psychology. Want to believe that surveys of psychology undergraduates at elite schools represent humanity, without the expense and risk of dealing with real people, who can be pretty sketchy? Social psychology is for you.(1)Scientists don't think much of either and would prefer they stay in the humanities buildings, because evolutionary psychologists want to make everything about sex, while social psychologists claim there are no differences between sexes.
Want to know how to create a $1 million company? Give $60 million to someone claiming they are going to revolutionize journalism by hiring a bunch of young, edgy people who don't care about business or making money, but who believe success happens by being popular on Facebook.You know who is the only company with long-term success being popular on Facebook? Facebook. For everyone else, it is a terrible business model. "Field of Dreams" was just a movie, folks, wishful thinking and building something no one wanted is not why Reaganomics worked.
Women May Earn Just 49 Cents on the Dollar, is the title of an article by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic.It's only below the fold that, after laying out lots of links and obfuscation and conflicting claims designed to make the audience believe the situation is oh so complicated that we get this quiet disclaimer:
John Wiley & Sons Inc., the global academic publishing house with nearly $2 billion in revenue, recently got embroiled in a Twitter controversy about the efforts of one publication to go open access.
Though vitriol and outrage are common in western culture in 2018, when it comes to claims that a researcher in China used CRISPR technology to edit a human embryo, bloggers, journalists and scientists on social media have taken it to another level.Without even reading the paper. Because there isn't one. Nor is there any data.It's just some guy claiming he did it, not once but twice. And based on that people are going on tirades about how it violates ethics - well, their subjective notion of ethics, none of which have anything to do with the culture of China.
When Dr. He Jiankui
announced that he had used CRISPR to prevent future HIV infection in twin girls, there was outrage across the United States, but most of it had nothing to do with science. It was instead concern that a mad scientist with suspect ethics had used a new technology to edit human embryos, and if that remains unchecked Frankenhumans could be born. It may be 2018 but it feels like 2001 all over again.
There is a reason that environmental groups and other anti-science activists out-earn the pro-science non-profit world by 1000X, and that reason is emotion.See a scientist be emotional or aggressive in defending their work and any number of people, including other scientists, will chide them and say that is not how scientists are supposed to act. Meanwhile, the trial lawyers who run environmental groups know that they have set the bar for how they are supposed to act differently; they are supposed to be passionate. It's expected.
Two weeks after people were sickened by E. coli on romaine lettuce, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control told the entire country to throw theirs out, which alarmed people for little reason and cost farmers hundreds of millions of dollars. People shouldn't have been alarmed because most people would have thrown it out anyway. Up to 94 percent of people throw out lots.And that's not as alarming as media reports are making it sound. We are constantly told to eat less "processed" food and more of the fresh kind, which aside from statistical correlation has never been shown to be valid health advice, and fruits and vegetables that are not "processed" by being canned or frozen are going to rot.
In 2017, action star Chuck Norris and his wife Gena sued 11 companies for $10 million over gadolinium used in her MRIs, stating she was poisoned by the contrast agent.
In March of 2016, a game called "Tom Clancy's The Division" was released. Unlike other "shooter" games such as "Destiny" and "Call of Duty", "The Division" has a compelling science story.(1) And the plot began on "Black Friday", the busiest shopping day of the year.
