If you had a choice, would you rather set your own hours or work around your schedule around family needs, or would you prefer being forced to go into an office where a corporate manager applies constant pressure to do more in the same amount of time and you have to pay for babysitting?

Many people opt for the former, and the "gig economy", where you set your own schedule, has been a boon for them. But fewer employees mean less payroll taxes and California has $500,000,000 in unfunded liabilities, primarily for government pensions and debt, so if a company is not paying payroll taxes to the state, California's recent policy actions have shown they have to go.

A new series of experiments by an Alphabet (the parent company Google created) group shows lab-bred mosquitoes that cannot successfully reproduce might be able to stop malaria and other mosquito-spread diseases in countries where those are still endemic - two billion people per year.

Malaria is not endemic to the U.S. any more and we can thank DDT for that but we still face risk of numerous diseases from mosquitoes.  Other countries where diseases like dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever are common barely blink at the coronavirus pandemic that has paralyzed the U.S. after only causing as many deaths as a bad flu year. But infectious diseases can always spread. How would we manage dengue and malaria today?

A new paper claims that treatment with the antiviral drug remdesivir does not speed recovery from COVID-19 versus placebo in hospitalized patients who are critically ill.

But this needs to be interpreted with caution. The Lancet rushed to publish these results but they are from just 237 adults from 10 hospitals in Wuhan, and China has fooled the world before. The study was funded by the government's Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Emergency Project of COVID-19, it was not independent.

You may have heard of the Freshman 15; the weight gain some college students experience their first year, when they have unlimited dining at the university cafeteria. Coronavirus may leave behind a new pandemic when people emerge from their homes and discover their work clothes are tighter.

The developed world was already undergoing an obesity crisis thanks to affordable food. Agricultural science, which used to struggle with environmental doomsday narratives that farmers were too incompetent, now have to defend against New York Times and Guardian editorials claiming farming is too successful. Because for the first time in the history of the world, the poorest people can afford to get fat.

Filtered coffee has been linked to lower risk of type 2 diabetes by an epidemiology group ... Before you get too excited about this "filtered" coffee preventing diabetes, we need to remember what they are measuring - numbers, not coffee. This is not a science finding, it is an "exploratory" result. Drinking coffee, filtered in paper or Turkish in a pan, is not going to prevent diabetes any more than a juice cleanse prevents whatever that stuff is claiming to prevent.

COVID-19 has brought high levels of attention to coronavirus, which few outside the microbiology community had heard of even after two pandemics in 17 years, SARS and MERS.

Terms like ventilators, respirators, and N95 masks were also less commonly thrown about. While it's difficult to trust corporate journalism doomsday narratives one thing is sure; coronavirus has already killed more many people in three months as flu does in its average six-month season. COVID-19 hasn't reached 2018 flu season levels yet but it likely will.(1)