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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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When people talk about sustainable food in 2013, they really mean something with an 'organic' label that they can attribute all kinds of other ethical and environmental traits to - sustainable food the way those people mean it is not sustainable at all, there is no way organic food can feed anyone except the rich 1% (the economically rich and the food gentry lucky enough to be born into agriculturally rich lands) but if food enthusiasts mired in such first world guilt really want to try sustainable food there is a new solution published in PLoS One.

Dr. Vandana Shiva, eco-feminist - whatever that means - philosopher and environmental activist does not like that Mark Lynas has changed from being an anti-GMO crackpot, like her, to accepting science.

On her Twitterfeed, which is chock full of lunatic rantings for the 17X as many followers of her nonsense as I have, she provided an extra-special treat for her acolytes: she said that allowing farmers to use GMOs was the same as telling rapists it is okay to rape.
The anti-biology community that has created the Big Organic $29 billion corporate juggernaut is not as creepy as the anti-vaccine community who distrust medical science - anti-vaccine people want your kids to be experimented on so theirs can stay safe from the evil 'toxins' in vaccines, after all - but they can still be pretty heavy-handed.
British environmentalist Mark Lynas was an early advocate against GMOs and, as he tells it, that meant he was an early advocate for demonizing scientists.

While most actual scientists did not give much credence to an offhand claim by researcher Árpád Pusztai in the mid-1990s that a genetically-modified potato damaged the immune system of an animal, because the results were unpublished and unverified, UK media of the scare journalism kind and British activists took off with it and the "Frankenfood" movement was born.

Here is what Lynas writes about his early efforts (bold mine):
I like Jennifer Aniston and not simply for the reason you might expect - I am a healthy, heterosexual man - but because she is good at what she does and after actress Marlo Thomas was on the "Friends" TV show while back, Aniston started doing advocacy work for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital (started by Danny Thomas, father of Marlo), one of my favorite groups - and still does it.  Plus, Brad Pitt left her for Angelina Jolie, so she must be normal.

Czech researchers have hypothesized that carp in large tubs at Christmas markets possess a capacity to sense geomagnetic fields.