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.
The National Agricultural Statistics Service of the United States Department of Agriculture has released its honey report for 2014 and found it's boom times for bees.Hives increased again, another 4 percent, up to a whopping 2.74 million colonies, and honey production is up 19 percent. Yield per colony averaged 65.1 pounds, which is up 15 percent.If there is a Beepocalypse, the bees have not gotten the memo.
The big question in policy circles for the last month has been, would the Obama administration that has repeatedly said that putting solar panels on public land should be allowed side with science or with environmentalists when it came to natural gas?
America has the luxury of being able to dash from one culture war to another, primarily because we are a wealthy country with plenty of food and medicine and energy, providing ample opportunity for people who have never lacked for any of those to be opposed to science related to food, medicine and energy, while others can claim pollution is our friend or worry about abstract ideas like the conflict between science and religion.
Whither The Celts?In the 1980s there was a terrific British documentary called simply "The Celts", made because of ongoing fascination by entitled western elites with indigenous people and perhaps the lingering hope/fear that maybe they were somehow better than the winners.The Celts were a blanket name for a lot of people who were just The Other to Romans, any number of tribes that the Romans ascribed names to based on region. They were basically a kind of "dark matter" for ancient authors, who didn't know what they were or how to figure them out, but knew they have to have existed because Caesar fought someone in France and Germany and he took really good notes.
A few years ago, bees suddenly had a sharp decline in numbers. This "Colony Collapse Disorder" as it is called, is a disorder in the sense that it is a recurring phenomenon, detailed for the last 1,000 years even when record-keeping just consisted of sporadic anecdotes. It was noted more frequently as record-keeping became more thorough. so it appeared far more often by the 1800s. By the 1900s, record-keeping had improved enough that there were seven recorded instances of this CCD phenomenon just in the United States.
Overpopulation, greenhouse gases, climate disruption - it's a doomsday prophet's Nirvana.You, dear reader, are basically a blight on the pristine goodness of nature, but even being told that you stink has not led most of you to demand policy action. Why not? And will a Nobel laureate telling you to get off your butt help?(1) Dr. Paul Cruzten, a 1995 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, the fellow who popularized the term "anthropocene epoch", hopes his latest editorial, with Stanislaw Waclawek, on the subject creates a tipping point for change.
"A personal redemption narrative sustains motivation to engage in prosocial behavior," write psychologists at Northwestern University. Since it is St. Patrick's Day, that is a fancy social science way of saying that is why some people "do good works", while "redemptive stories sustain hope that sacrifices today may produce future dividends" is Catholic guilt for secular middle-aged people who don't like religion but do feel like they perhaps haven't earned what they got.
We sometimes have to wonder about the decision-making of government agencies. Senator Tom Coburn produced an annual list of waste and duplication that included science and it made sense to address those flaws, unless you actually favor National Science Foundation money being used so someone could play Everquest instead of doing actual science. Likewise, energy researchers were not thrilled that the Department of Energy funded the Human Genome Project.But sometimes it makes total sense. Case in point: Dr. Ernest M. Allen, Chief, Division of Research Grants at the NIH, who once agreed to fund a rocket. For a 10-year-old.
Sometimes popular concepts catch fire with the public for no reason, even when they are shown to be incorrect - virtual water, a gallon of gas to create a pound of beef, you didn't build that - but usually those fade with time.Not the Drake Equation, which sought to parameterize what other life may be out there.
I am writing a book on mitochondria and after a few months of research you begin to see a common thread - serendipity. Sometimes big things happen because of what seems to be luck, a group of people all happen to be in one place at one time, they are all spurred on by each other and then dramatic things occur.
The Paleo diet is all made up, organic food just accepts one kind of genetic modification in its modern food over another, but booze? Yeah, scientists can really show how that was different in the past.
