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Chloe Kim And Eileen Gu In Media As Anti-Asian Narrative

Olympians Chloe Kim and Eileen Gu are both Americans but have Asian descent. Yet Kim competed for...

Misandry Vs Manosphere: Both Use Unscientific Woo To Advance Their Beliefs But One Sells Better

Culture wars are as eternal as shooting wars, and that means there will always be war profiteers...

RIP To Dr. William Foege, The Man Whose Math Eliminated Smallpox

In the modern world, it is easy to be newly concerned about the World Health Organisation. They...

Scholars Who Got Sold On The Academic Life Feel The Pressure

Professor Peter Mitchell got a Nobel Prize in 1978 for a chemiosmotic hypothesis of how ATP is...

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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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Desire to have a short-term companion for the holidays - a "holidate" - is common enough that it gets its own portmanteau but the reasons may not always be positive. A survey commissioned by the American Psychological Association found that 43 percent of U.S. adults report stress levels during this time of year high enough it makes the season difficult to enjoy.

The pressure is all the usual stuff some people struggle more than others over, like money and difficult families, but they are magnified in this narrow window of time. It may be why Thanksgiving is the source of so many angry, depressing movies. 
A recent survey by found that over 28 percent of adults claim they have an intimate, even romantic relationship, with an LLM (Large Language Model), colloquially deemed Artificial Intelligence - "AI".(1)

It seems plausible because 41 percent of people believe in psychics and ghosts.

What may be surprising is the demographics of the people embracing this new technology. It isn't young people, they know it's not real, it is Baby Boomers. Not only are they fine with AI relationships, over 50 percent say they can engage in a romantic relationship with an AI guilt-free.
Ford is the latest company to take a massive write-off on current electric car production- nearly $20 billion. Because making them would be even more costly.
With criticism due to an overspending frenzy funded by student loan debt still in full swing, some universities want to get back to education and not be social justice platforms for its employees to groom children to their beliefs.
A doctor who told you to smoke cigarettes "in moderation" would likely lose their license, but alcohol has long been known as a legitimate class 1 carcinogen, deemed such before the International Agency for Research on Cancer was hijacked by activist epidemiologists as likely as not to be caught signing contracts with predatort trial lawyers, and has gotten 'in moderation' hand-waving by the medical community.

Maybe it is due to the amount of money the American Medical Association gets from the alcohol industry, maybe it is because there are 6X as many alcohol drinkers as there are smokers, but one thing certain is 'in moderation' free passes have nothing to do with science.
Environmental activists have claimed for decades that PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are "forever" chemicals that have been causing disease. Once former Natural Resources Defense Council environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. joined the Republican team, their belief in homeopathic effects and endocrine disruption was adopted by some on the right.