A GMO wheat meant to reduce insecticide use rather than enable plants to survive heavy spraying that was being researched at public institution by government scientists rather than an evil biotech company is being celebrated by environmental groups...because it failed.

Union of Concerned Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Working Group and others who routinely side against science were still suspicious because it used a pheromone to scare insects away - a trick borrowed from mint plants - and that is confusing to the lawyers and lobbyists they spend their hundreds of millions of dollars on each year.

Want to distract from the issue of hate and racial crime in America? Get Al Sharpton talking about a Confederate flag.

And he fell right into the trap, American progressives readily gobbled up the bait so they don't have to think about the real issue, they can do something. Prior to that we had Rachel Dolezal and another dizzying bit of logical head flipping. The same people who told us 'race was simply a social construct' said she could not identify as another race...because she is white.

In New York, an 18 month old baby died after an ear infection and now the parents have been charged with involuntary manslaughter and endangering the welfare of children.

The parents should be charged with something more serious because the death was entirely preventable; all it took was some medicine and not being an alternative medicine disciple.

Are genetically modified foods necessary to feed the world's growing population and organic foods just too expensive and gimmicky? Or is it that 'fake foods' do nothing for health but are actually harmful?

Jayadev Calamur speaks to US-based experts Kavin Senapathy, a science writer, and Vani Hari, who fervently believes that organic is the way to go, so you can decide for yourself.

Link: Organic vs GM: finding the grain of truth

Most people don't realize it, but "GMO" is essentially a legal definition and only a vague scientific one. After all, what food has not been 'genetically modified' by now? When is the cut-off date that food remains "organic" and when it becomes icky science?

GMOs are in some instances banned in Europe, for example, but they did not want to put European farmers out of business in their zeal to penalize American companies, so they created a precise definition of GMO that excluded things made using mutagenesis, a less precise (and therefore more risky) form of genetic modification that preceded modern GMOs. So what have European companies gone back to in order to create new products? Mutagenesis.

Why does the moon look bigger when it’s near the horizon?

It's a mystery at least 3,000 years old. Physicists attributed it to refraction while the “angle-of-regard” hypothesis said it was due to the angle that our eyes (or head) make relative to the horizon. The more your eyes are angled upward, the thinking goes, the smaller something looks, due to the physiology of our visual system.

And then some psychologists today say it is a conflict between the conscious and subconscious mind, because, as Kepler said, “Perception does not belong to optics but to the study of the wonderful.”

Michael LaCour, the UCLA graduate student at the center of a bizarre "science" scandal - we'd do science a real favor if we stopped calling political science and sociology science, even if they get published in Science - apparently made up data in a different study about political bias in the media. The one that got people looking into his other work was his claim that if we just talked to each other, people would change their minds. It was a delight for the truly gullible and cultural activists and it made political science feel relevant.

That the Tennessee Valley Authority, arguably one of American history's most famous public works projects, has been pursuing the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City, Tennessee after 36 years is testament to endurance, namely being willing to persist in the face of bizarre government obstacles that the modern Nuclear Regulatory Commission, run by people without nuclear expertise, exists to create.

Though approved in 1973, the near-disaster at Three Mile Island in 1979 put Democrats squarely against nuclear science and concerns - some manufactured (quality assurance records with incomplete information) and some real (concerns about welding in non-critical areas) - led to delays.

A pat on the head is better than some kind words to your dog, found a study from January. If they have a choice, dogs will always take petting over praise, and that was found among shelter dogs and those with owners.

Phrased in fancy science talk: "We first assessed preference using a concurrent choice procedure in which dogs were able to choose between interacting with a person providing petting or a person providing vocal praise. The time allocated to available alternatives can be used as a measure of preference (Baum and Rachlin, 1969), in this case dogs’ preference for different types of human social interaction. By measuring proximity, our results might point to interactions that could be relevant in producing attachment behaviors."