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.

I get pitches for stories every day and sometimes I want to see if the world that opposes science has made any progress now that a member of a Republican administration who was formerly one of their own, former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is being helped by their rhetoric.

So when I got a message from a PR rep for the Real Organic Project™ about their client, I wanted to know if they still oppose hydroponic food. Hydroponic food uses no soil, which means in a controlled environment it needs no pesticides. The public loves that idea. The last time a survey was done, only 7% of the public wanted to know about GMOs in their food unsolicited while over 70% wanted to know what pesticides are used in food production.(1)

K2-18b, detected in 2015, orbits a star 124 light years away. Though it is over 800% as large as Earth, its space in the habitable zone of its star, like where we are, means the possibiliy that liquid water could exist on its surface.

The science community calls it The Goldilocks Zone. Like the character in the children's story who wanted porridge neither too hot nor too cold, a Goldilocks planet that might have life we could recognize would need to be in a similar narrow band.

In a bizarre experiment, scholars declared that survivors of one of California's annual wildfires instead suffered PTSD due to climate change.

It was a small group, 27 who had been near a fire in 2018, 21 who had seen smoke, and 27 in the control group. Participants had EEG brain scans taken while they engaged in behavior which could provide monetary rewards. The scholars also subjectively scored their Win-Stay behavior, basically how often they sought the highest long-term rewards.

President Donald Trump is about to sign an executive order restarting coal leasing on federal lands while classifying coal as a critical mineral. 

Social media critics, and academics being quoted in media, are declaring the end of the world due to American pollution. Are they correct?