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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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Many might want to believe the United Nations, a world political mediation body created in the aftermath of World War 2, would be a friend of climate science since they are the governing body behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - but they are instead advocates.
  
When advocates take center stage and make cringe-worthy statements over and over again, they actually hurt the science they are advocating.   The UN has said baffling things to such an extent they have hurt the reputation of climate science, resulting in backlash about climate change because no one knows what to believe any more.
   
If you're not one of the 172,000 Japanese people living within a dozen miles of the Fukushima Daiichi plant who have been advised (read: forced) to leave, you are breathing a sigh of relief while you hope things turn out okay.

But a new analysis carried out by Nature and the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center at Columbia University says two-thirds of the world’s 211 nuclear power plants have more people in the same radius than the ones who have had to flee their homes in Japan.  They're not all on known earthquake faults, obviously, but disaster concerns are an important public policy issue in times of disaster.
It's Earth Day tomorrow, a day when environmentalists want to remind you that you are a parasite ruining a pristine ecology and there should be less of us.   Well, by 'us' they mean you - they can't be killed or no one would be around to care about the environment.
Anania Shirakatsi (Ananias of Shirak) was an Armenian scientist and mathematician, famous there for authoring two important works, Geography and Cosmography and the Calendar, which tackled astronomy, meteorology, and geography.

He is considered the father of natural sciences in Armenia and his books, while readable to a lay audience, were also technical enough to be used as textbooks for centuries.   
When European politicians picked a target date for greenhouse gas emissions in the Kyoto accord, American environmentalists applauded despite the motivation - economic harm for the US with little to Europe, since Germany simply had to scuttle Soviet-era factories they acquired in the re-merger with East Germany and France switched to more nuclear power in order to try and meet their CO2 targets.
In the 'we need to make sure all people can abdicate any responsibility for their actions' department, a new study makes obesity exculpatory by determining that a mother's nutrition during pregnancy influences the child's risk of obesity many years later.

Whew.  And here you were worried too many pizzas would influence the risk of obesity.

The downside to epigenetics studies is that they run the risk of turning legitimate aspects of biology into the DNA equivalent of evolutionary psychology by making bizarre correlation-causation claims.