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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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Do you care about children?  

If so, says Arianna Huffington, you'd better ask for more regulations that augment helicopter parenting with nanny government - and you'd better be part of the 1% that will be able to afford food when all pesticides are banned. What is her evidence?  Rachel Carson started telling us 50 years ago that scientists were out to kill us all.
How will the Universe end?  And when? It's been speculation in religion and philosophy since man realized he was special.  Can physics offer anything new?

Let's go to the Dark Energy hypotheses and see.  1998 really messed us up, theoretically. Until then, we knew the Universe had to slow down - well, theoretically.  But then the Hubble showed us truly distant supernovae and we got the uncomfortable reality that the Universe was actually expanding more slowly in the past than it is now.  That meant gravity has not been slowing Universal expansion, it has been accelerating. 
No one is asking the Department of Energy to play venture capitalist with taxpayer money again, but basic research in dye-sensitized solar cells may bring the cost of solar down enough to allow for mainstream acceptance - primarily because dye-sensitized solar cells (also known as DSCs) are less fragile than panels that use crystalline silicon, also a benefit of thin-film panels, and don't require a clean room.
Temperatures above 100 degrees and drought-like conditions have taken a toll on corn and soybeans in the upper Midwest for weeks but it has brought a benefit to peppers and other crops: Their flavors have become unusually concentrated, producing some of the most potent-tasting produce in years.

"Peppers really like hot weather," said Irwin Goldman, a horticulture professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "When it's dry and hot outside, you'll get a higher concentration of alkaloids."
In 2010, when Dr. Paul Muizelaar of U.C. Davis began performing illegal experimental treatments on terminally ill brain cancer patients, he earned over $800,000. (1)

That's pretty good money for an academic, especially while we are enduring the political theater of universities canceling core curriculum classes to try and pressure taxpayers into agreeing to tax increases if we 'care about education'.  
Have you noticed a huge increase in the price of pork chops or bacon or hot dogs?

Neither have I, despite the fact that sow gestation stalls, or crates or whatever you may call them in your neighborhood, are disappearing.  The stalls are basically where pregnant sows are kept. Anti-science hippies who are always looking for ammunition in their war on human food contend big business uses these crates because they are, you know, eeeevil, but that isn't true.  Long before Big Pork even existed farmers kept sows apart because they fight.  And during pregnancy, if you screw with a female pig, you are asking to roll in the mud.   The American Veterinary Medical Association says stalls are safer and therefore better than pens(1).