In 1979, the United States Department of Education was created and no one was sure why, since education is done at the local level. But both chambers had a Democratic majority and Carter was a Democratic president and they said it was for the children so they split up the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two Cabinet level departments.(1)

In science, the saying goes, if it can happen in nature it will. 

This Totalitarian Principle expressed by Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann actually originated with Plato. Nothing new there, what is interesting in a recent article by by Tom Siegfried in Science News is that Gell-Mann doesn't seem to have been inspired by T.H. White of "The Sword In The Stone" fame.

White did have that statement in the 1958 edition of "The Once and Future King" compilation but not in the prior books leading back to 1938. Gell-Mann had placed it in a strong nuclear force paper in 1956.

Federal law requires known allergens such as eggs, peanuts and other ingredients to be declared on food labels. Even if they are organic apple cookies from Whole Foods. So frosted “Decorated Red Apple Cookies” have been recalled due to unlabeled allergens, in this case eggs.

The company removed the product from stores in in Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada.

Secular modernity requires the weeding out of all the baloney. Yet it’s not clear that we are any less credulous than before, notes Emily Ogden. an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, in Aeon magazine.

In the summer of 2018, the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft arrived at the Ryugu asteroid and in October of that year sent out the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) lander to gather information about the surface.

Now the images taken during its 17 hour mission have revealed something interesting. The asteroid, just over half a mile in diameter, has rocks like carbonaceous chondrite meteorites but there seems to be no dust, like is on the moon. The rocks are instead "bright, with smooth faces and sharp edges, or dark, with a cauliflower-like, crumbly surface."

Mung bean protein, canola oil, onion puree and turmeric - it's what's for breakfast. Maybe.

Fake versions of foods are all the rage but egg farmers who survived the Vegg ("nutritional yeast flakes, Sodium alginate, Kala Namak, beta-carotene") can't rest easy just yet. Joining any number of eggless egg substitute concoctions, Just Egg is rolling out in 2,100 Kroger stores nationwide.

Unlike most others, which are just used as a leavening agent or a binder so egg is substituted by xantham gum or tofu or some other chemical and isn't really for cooking, three tablespoons of Just Egg is touted to be just like a regular egg and can be used for an omelet or scramble.

So if you don't want to eat liquid chicken, you can eat whatever this is instead.

Iceland is not really icy and Greenland is not really green (nor it is for sale, it seems) so Iceland prizes its glaciers. One, Okjokull glacier, disappeared 10 years ago so they recently decided to give it a funeral in a the made-for-media political theater memorial that only unemployed people mobilized by professional activists have time to engage in.
 
About 100 people actually did walk up the volcano, with the kids (naturally) featured prominently. 

Whether or not to allow unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico is a U.S. political debate but left out of it is how poorly Mexico allows migrants to be treated along the way.

Mexico is not the only place where this is a problem. People trying to avoid immigration laws face peril around the world, no matter what country they visit but America provides the largest undefended borders in the world so the problem is just more easily seen here. 

In 2016's "Tom Clancy's The Division", eco-terrorists bioengineer a fast-acting mutation of Smallpox in order to cull humanity by using the greed of people - they placed it on a fomite, dollar bills in Manhattan's largest department store.

Game reviewers at the time were as perplexed by that but to the science community the rationale made perfect sense. Environmental groups that want to cull humanity want the culling to be among those they regard as less fit, even if they don't admit it. By using dollar bills they would be targeting people who don't have credit cards. The poor, not organic food shoppers that listen to NPR.  So this modern form of eugenicists and social Darwinists could eliminate non-elites and slap consumerism at the same time.