Americans like to be outraged by things, in 2025 the right is outraged by seed oils while the left is outraged about lack of capitalism, but older civilizations wanted people to stay calm.

When we think of the Andes today, we may think of the Incas, but they were colonizers just like Spain. Some 2,000 years before the Inca the Chavín had extensive farms and art and architecture throughout what Europeans later named Peru. And they did it with a lot less violence than most other prehistorical cultures on the continent.(1)

If the supply chain collapsed tomorrow, could you build a toaster? 

Would you really even want to try? People make homemade jam and all-natural weedkillers that are ironically stuffed with chemicals but no one makes their own toaster. It would be among the first things dismissed as unimportant in a post-apocalyptic world.

Cigarettes are a known carcinogen because you are inhaling smoke. Any time you inhale smoke, PM₁₀ from fires or marijuana or anything else, you are rolling the dice of your future.

Decades of health awareness campaigns by us and groups like us have made a difference among the young, just like smoking cessation and harm reduction tools such as nicotine vaping, gums, and patches have helped older people mitigate harm. Recent data show our "5 by 35" campaign begun in 2008 - down to 5% of Americans smoking cigarettes by 2035 - seems to be on track. 

Greenpeace is in a longstanding campaign to oppose a public domain Golden Rice created by scientists so that it can be grown to create more Vitamin A and prevent blindness in children of poor countries.

It is part of their long history of promoting claims farming is a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. The reality is that farmers simply want ways to safely and affordably improve yields. Science is the best way to create that and corporations are the best way to make it scale. No conspiracy needed.

The drinking water treatment process is designed to remove harmful pathogens that are prevalent in nature, but a new study suggests that it may be harmful also.

Scientists know that inert ingredients are not harmful you but the authors of the new paper invoke the environmental "chemical cocktail" MacGuffin. Since every harmless product has not been tested in every possible combination with other inactive ingredients, they suggest agricultural, pharmaceutical and other common products could be hazardous to our health in ways that scientists don't know about.

On this day, April 25, in 1929, the world learned how astronomer Edwin Hubble had discovered that the universe was much larger than we had believed. On this day in 2025, you can preorder a book and on the 29th learn about this and four other Astrophysics discoveries that changed how we see the universe - and ourselves - in The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions.


By Ersilia Vaudo, translated by Vanessa Di Stefano. If you use this link we get a penny or something.