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Batteries Are Stuck In The 1990s Because Solid-State Batteries Keep Short-Circuiting

The electric car industry is held back by reliance on conventional energy. Despite spending trillions...

Dogs Have Been 'Man's Best Friend' For 14,000 Years

The bond between humans and dogs is one of the oldest stories in anthropology. It may also be a...

Is This The D'Artagnan Made Famous In 'The Three Musketeers' By Dumas?

“I have lost D’Artagnan, in whom I had every confidence,” wrote King Louis XIV to his Queen...

No Danger, How A Stranger Can Be A Game Changer - A New Book About Making 'Small' Talk

The future career arc for my house is a library bed-and-breakfast. It will be just like it sounds...

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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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A new simulation claims small-micron particulate matter, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, is killing 250,000 people each year. PM10, 10 microns in size, is a well-known killer. That is wildfires and smog but after smog was drastically reduced in the 1990s, the target went down 400%, to 2.5. Suddenly air quality maps could be orange and red again, even though the air is cleaner in wealthier countries than it has been since the 1980s.
Early in 2020, the President of the United States said America should cut travel from China due to COVID-19 concerns. This was dismissed as xenophobia by states like New York and California, because the World Health Organisation had not declared it a pandemic.(1)

In Europe, 18 countries knew better than to wait for WHO to ignore claims from China that it was not a pandemic and closed their borders.
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.