When you think "Hamilton" in 2019, you think $800 tickets to a Broadway show in Manhattan, and when you think Manhattan, you think urban wealthy elites and the denial of science that seems to go with it.

Not so for "Hamilton" producer Jeffrey Seller and Broadway photographer Josh Lehrer, who are instead funding efforts to use science to clone and plant 100 of the world's oldest and largest trees, called Champion Trees. Like California Redwoods.

From herbicides to vaccines to pollution, there is a science consensus but there are still pockets of people who refuses to accept them. They are bolstered by disinformation campaigns. When it comes to food or what car to drive, the difference is higher cost or kicking the pollution can down the road for future generations to solve, but vaccine denial is harming people with immune issues right now. 

Many American journalists have dispatched any pretense of objectivity, according to a new think tank report.

After attracting scorn with bizarre classifications of a weedkiller, bacon, and hot tea, the French statistics group known as the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) decided to puncture claims that activists had manipulated the process by doing a flip-flop on coffee. Though they were widely expected to increase the hazard designation from 1991's already bizarre "possibly carcinogenic", they suddenly reversed course and lowered a classification of a product for the very first time. 

Pop culture is in a bit of a quandary. Though food is essential for life, culturally it is no longer a basic necessity, and that's thanks to science. We grow more food on less land than ever dreamed possible. Even Europe, with all its political limitations in agriculture. Food is a cheap commodity and that makes it a values issue.

RIP to Professor Murray Gell-Mann, who passed away last week and was famed (including a Nobel prize) for quark theory. 

I never met him, but if you spent time at Caltech you probably did. He was not like Einstein, I am told, he was approachable if you were a young scientist, but you had to know what you were talking about. 

A few years ago I taught a class there, invited by my friend the best-selling author and science journalist Greg Critser, who was an instructor for science journalism at the school. He had previously agreed to be on an AAAS panel I was moderating in San Francisco and I was returning the favor for him by being a guest speaker for his class at Caltech.