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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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In the early days of changes in laws to products like alcohol, some people below the new legal threshold were still able to get it. It was impossible to arrest everyone selling illegally, and there was a certain freedom argument many made, i.e. why can I shoot a Nazi in Europe but not buy a beer in the US?
Calories cause obesity and while everyone wants a magic solution to eating too much for a prolonged period of time, those with the means can make it reality in the form of surgery.

COVID-19 set off a panic in much of culture. Schools were closed, people were ostracized if they didn't think flipping masks up and down between sips of water was clinically valid, but decisions were being made in real-time so a lot of things that once again seem silly in hindsight were the Precautionary Principle in all its glorious flawed reasoning.
New food surveys show what you probably knew; if you eat too much, you will get fat, and obesity is a risk factor for numerous health issues.
In the 19th century, charlatans traveled around selling magic potions, tonics, and salves but to stop them no one decided to ban actual medical research.

The issue facing "AI", which is short for Artificial Intelligence, is that the only people who will feel bound by top-down control were never going to be a problem in the first place. Large Language Models, termed Generative AI, can be a huge positive in health care, but because it is misunderstood and there is a lot of exploitative media coverage there are ongoing efforts to kill it before it really gets going.
A new paper in Canadian Medical Association Journal has linked irregular heartbeats in 322 Chinese cities to small-micron particulate matter, invisible pollution that needs an electron microscope to visualize. Given its minute size, PM2.5 is one-fourth the size of real pollution, PM10, there is four times as much of it, so the paper could have used PM10 and achieved the same statistical significance. It just would have been less dramatic
Prior to natural gas hydraulic fracturing making played out gas wells viable again, America was in a real climate emissions pickle. In 1994, Democrats finally won their war of extinction on nuclear energy, they cheered as President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry(1) created regulations that act as bans and eventually forced through a series of anti-nuclear activists at the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.