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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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The National Toxicology Program has released its latest warning on things that 'give' you cancer and they include two things people come into contact with every day.

If you have walked into a new house and smelled that 'new house' smell, you are now ingesting a carcinogen, according to the report.   Let the lawsuits begin.   The issue is formaldehyde and they say, as they also said about carcinogens in their previous 11 reports, that the science is clear, but it turned out that the science in second-hand smoke was more cultural politics than data and the risk from tanning beds in cancer is the same as in cell phones and drinking coffee.
Science can't catch a break this week.   A site devoted to ridiculing Democrats is faux outraged that the NIH funded $3.6 million to study the menstruation cycles of rhesus monkeys on any number of addictive drugs.    
If I ask a science audience to guess, off the tops of our collective heads, which state would hold an irrational science position that was not only boneheaded but downright dangerous to each other and all of America, would you guess Alabama or Washington?

Alabama is the South and everyone in wealthier northern and western states equate that with stupid - but highly educated, wealthy, progressive, organic-loving Washington state thinks that Big Pharma is is exploiting the American children and those of us who got our kids vaccinated are just part of the stupid bourgeois without any intellectual independence or healthy skepticism.    Alabama just accepts the science.
People still believe in secret societies because there are secret societies - some groups just don't want attention, even if they do anonymous charity work - but secret cabals that control a nation or the world are irrational, yet belief in them persists.

Go ahead, ask some left wing kook about George Bush and they will trail off into gibberish about the Skull&Crossbones and list all all these other people that were in it, as if being in a dinner group made them successful as opposed to being smart enough to get into an Ivy League school.   Really, if I am believing some secret Yale cabal is controlling America, I am going with The Whiffenpoofs.   Nothing else explains the popularity of "Glee".
"Physicists seek simplicity in universal laws. Ecologists revel in complex interdependencies. Together, these two approaches may help solve the problems of global warming," wrote John Harte, professor at Berkeley, in Physics Today.

Republicans are more skeptical of global warming than Democrats yet about the same when it comes to acknowledging climate change.   And global warming skeptics conserve energy just as much as believers.
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