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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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The future career arc for my house is a library bed-and-breakfast. It will be just like it sounds; every bedroom is also a library, as is the house. Except not a government library, with sterile walls and floors that echo, the whole thing will be comfortable.

Because some readers are less social than others, when they reserve a room people will be able to choose to designate Book Club or Book Worm. If they just want to be left alone, they are book worms so they'll get the polite basics. Warm but not outgoing, read in a comfy chair in front of the fireplace in peace. If they are book club, they can talk to me and have coffee and such. 
"Medical" marijuana is legal in many places but often just an excuse to buy recreational drugs, as shown in uptake data that 60 percent of pain patients are older women while 75 percent of medical marijuana prescriptions are for young men.
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System "concentrated" solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert is by any measure an unmitigated disaster.

The party that is now claiming they are rescuing the Ivanpah they mandated to exist was scheduled to be closed this year - because its low costs were always a pipe dream and its maintenance estimates were the optimism no scientists believed.

But California ignores scientists. We ignore them about 80,000 Prop 65 cancer warning labels on harmless products, we ignore them on pesticides, and we ignore them on energy.
Personalized online ads must work for the same reason advertising must work; it wouldn't be a trillion-dollar industry if it didn't work. Even supplements and organic food are only $140 billion, and those are really popular things that don't work. Advertising is not popular at all but good luck succeeding without it.

Yet there are limits for what people accept without being uncomfortable. In robots and animation, that has long been termed the 'uncanny valley' - where something is not lifelike enough to look real but too lifelike to be acceptable. Some digital marketing has its own uncanny valley; where it becomes unsettling. Examples are people who say they mentioned something in the presence of their Amazon Echo and then ads on Facebook began to target them.
A new paper says teens are not getting enough sleep and a lot of parents with teenage children may disagree. Others reflexively blame phones and tablets.

It isn't a new concern, though. Nor is technology new in getting blame. In 1905, The Lancet published a study saying that kids in British boarding schools were getting less sleep than was healthy, and the reason was the new popularity of affordable lighting. “Late to bed and early to rise is neither physiological nor wise,” the authors wrote.

By the 1950s, the concern was in culture again, this time due to radio and television keeping children up. In all instances, overstimulation, mental health, and poor academic achievement is invoked.
Publicly doctors say all of the things you'd expect a group with heavy state and federal scrutiny to say about weight loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy but privately they say things like 'people will be on it for the rest of their lives.'