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.
Think the 'chocolate as miracle food' hoax was something new?
The Shackled Man hypothesis rightly notes that if two people are running a race, and one has leg irons on, the shackled person is going to perform poorly. 50 yards into the race, if we remove the leg irons, claiming that everyone now has an equal chance to win is silly. For that reason, affirmative action when it came to college admissions made perfect sense two generations ago. We know there was institutional racism and we knew it would take time to cure (racists had to retire or die off, and each generation would be less bigoted, but that doesn't happen right away) so giving a minority that likely did not have access to the same education, but had no less ability, a temporary boost, was both ethical and unnecessary.
This isn't the Dr. Oz show or some nutrition site selling Vitamin D supplements or whatever the big Superfood/Miracle Vegetable craze is this week, 'miracle' is a bit of a dirty word in science. But when it fits, you have to use it.And Hepatitis C may have gotten its miracle. It's not well known, Hepatitis C does not have the PR of diseases like AIDS, but 3 million people have it, many of them Baby Boomers. Some got it of their own volition, using skin poppers or needles for drugs, but hygiene was a different beast 50 years ago and it was also possible to get it just by going to the dentist.
As I wrote in California Government Is The Big Water Management Problem, we can't make it rain but we could at least stop letting bizarre environmental lobbying get a super vote for how to mitigate the issue. While farmers and the public face mandatory cutbacks, anti-science beliefs about what is most important means that no matter how bad things get, we will have to force water for millions of people to be flushed into the Pacific Ocean.
Dr. Oz has done a lot of things right recently.
The Natural Resources Defense Council environmental lobbying group has created a coalition and they have drafted a petition demanding that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ban eight food additives they believe are carcinogens, in the interests of public health.The problem is that many of these are natural, which is one reason why they have never been banned. The other reason is they haven't been shown to be harmful, regardless of whether or not we have been trained by environmental lobbying groups to be scared of chemical names.
At the Biotech Literacy Project Boot Camp, held a week ago at the U.C. Davis World Food Center, I was on a journalism roundtable with Brooke Borel, Keith Kloor and Razib Khan, moderated by Professor Kevin Folta, and I was asked about the most important thing for scientists to keep in mind regarding increasing science acceptance.It's always difficult to pick just one but given the nature of the assault on food science, 'don't engage in deficit thinking' was my response. Basically, don't assume the other person simply lacks the proper facts or that if things are framed properly it would change their minds. It probably will not, at least for the most vocal critics.
In 2006 there was a serious decline in the number of honey bee colonies in parts of Europe and the United States and it brought renewed concern about another Colony Collapse Disorder, which had last occurred in the mid-1990s.
The Red Lady burial site in El Mirón cave, outside Ramales de la Victoria in Cantabria, Spain, dates back to the Upper Palaeolithic 16,000 years ago. The archaeological site was discovered in 1903 but it wasn't until 2010 that bones were discovered at the back of the cave, in a small space between the wall and a fallen block. Both the bones and the sediment under them were reddish.The remains turned out to be of a woman, between 35 and 40 years of age, and because of the color the Red Lady mystery was born. The reddish color means the use of ochre and ochre has been linked to religious symbolism in various cultures.
Have you been avoiding Taco Bell because of the Yellow No. 6 dye in its nacho cheese? Of course not. And if removing that or carmine from its red tortilla chips means you will suddenly think their food is healthy, you are being educated by advertising. Which is just what they are hoping.There is nothing healthy about Taco Bell or Pizza Hut or Chipotle yet they have all delivered similar intellectual placebos to the public in order to boost sales. And it's working, or at least they think it is working, since more and more junk food chains attach this health halo to their products because supposedly consumers are demanding it. Whether that turns out to be virtual money or real money is the question.
Like organic food, open access publishing has shrouded itself in a cultural halo, but it's still a business. No one is pumping out 40,000 articles per year, most of them with just a few check boxes called 'editorial review', because the 40,000 best articles happened to show up in their Inboxes, they do it to keep the lights on.
If you like mummies (and who doesn't like mummies?) you are in luck: The Anatomical Record has a special issue with 26 articles devoted to them, all open access. You may not leave the house this weekend.
