As we approach the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdowns, there has been ample time to look at what went wrong, and perhaps how we didn't learn much from history.

There are many examples and while politicians ignored it, storytellers have not. In "The Division" game, for example, eco-terrorists spread their pathogen using cash. That made sense. If you are a zealot, disease can do what eugenics and population control efforts did not; get rid of a lot of poor and minority people without controversy, and no one can be blamed because disease is both egalitarian and exculpatory.

Unless it isn't.
The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates about 35 million tons of plastics are generated just in America, and 12.% of that becomes is garbage like plastic containers and bags and even appliances.

Sorry folks, politicians in states like California who insist it's being recycled are lying to you, scientists know better. What really happens to plastic, even if your government is shipping it to China to be "recycled" is landfilling and incineration. A new study finds that measuring how much carbon dioxide a potential chemical looping system would pump out compared to conventional processes to produce synthesis gas could reduce emissions by up to 45.
As part of the celebrations for 20 years of blogging, I am re-posting articles that in some way were notable for the history of the blog. This time I want to (re)-submit to you four pieces I wrote to explain the unexplainable: the very complicated analysis performed by a group of physicists within the CDF experiment, which led them to claim that there was a subtle new physics process hidden in the data collected in Run 2. There would be a lot to tell about that whole story, but suffices to say here that the signal never got confirmed by independent analyses and by DZERO, the competing experiment at the Tevatron. As mesmerizing and striking the CDF were, they were finally archived as some intrinsic incapability of the experiment to make perfect sense of their muon detector signals.
Yesterday, the Senate confirmed former Congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Though the Trump administration has promised reform, there will be big challenges in that. Though high-profile jobs are appointees, the nuts-and-bolts work of governance is done by career employees, and nearly 90 percent of them are Democrats.
Gym Bro, Curl Gurl, Gym Rat if you choose not to identify as any gender - everyone knows what it means, and it can be pretty intimidating if you walk into a fitness center as a new member. Imagine feeling like you have to get in shape before you can join a gym to get in shape.

Fitness executives don't want that but store managers know not to alienate their best customers for someone who will join on a special deal, go for a month, and then cancel the first time they download RocketMoney and remember they have a gym membership.
A new study examined the effects of marijuana use of 1,003 adults aged 22 to 36 from the Human Connectome Project collected between August 2012 and 2015 and found that 63% of heavy lifetime cannabis users exhibited reduced brain activity during a working memory task, while 68% of recent users also demonstrated a similar impact.
While off-label uses of medication may be controversial in political media, in science and health they lead to important gains. A new example is the cardiac disease drug digoxin used at a low and safe dosage for one week for nine patients with metastatic breast cancer.
An analysis of 300 million United Kingdom Ministry of Transport test records, which tries to estimate the ‘health’ of every vehicle on UK roads between 2005 and 2022 and determine potential vehicle longevity (basically survival rates for different powertrains) has concluded that electric vehicles now match the lifespans of conventional counterparts and may even be more reliable.
When people see labels or menus listing the calories in their food, it doesn't change their consumption in any way beyond what experts call "statistical wobble." About two fewer almonds worth of calories per meal. But two almonds over time can add up to a lot.

That's the conclusion in the data of a systematic review by The Cochrane Collaboration. The team of academics reviewed 25 papers which discussed the impact of calorie labeling on consumption and found a minute reduction in the foods selected - about 11 calories.
"Long Covid", the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted in Wuhan, China in 2019 and spread worldwide, causing millions of deaths, is difficult to pin down.

Pediatricians report it affects on average 0.5% of children who got the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that caused COVID-19. It has a few names, like Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, but Long Covid is the common term, and is generally characterized as persistence of COVID-19 symptoms 12 weeks or more weeks after the disease.