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Environmental Groups Back In Court To Help Fellow Rich White People

The Usual Suspects of the anti-science movement, Center for Biological Diversity(1), Environmental...

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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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No one is asking the Department of Energy to play venture capitalist with taxpayer money again, but basic research in dye-sensitized solar cells may bring the cost of solar down enough to allow for mainstream acceptance - primarily because dye-sensitized solar cells (also known as DSCs) are less fragile than panels that use crystalline silicon, also a benefit of thin-film panels, and don't require a clean room.
Temperatures above 100 degrees and drought-like conditions have taken a toll on corn and soybeans in the upper Midwest for weeks but it has brought a benefit to peppers and other crops: Their flavors have become unusually concentrated, producing some of the most potent-tasting produce in years.

"Peppers really like hot weather," said Irwin Goldman, a horticulture professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "When it's dry and hot outside, you'll get a higher concentration of alkaloids."
In 2010, when Dr. Paul Muizelaar of U.C. Davis began performing illegal experimental treatments on terminally ill brain cancer patients, he earned over $800,000. (1)

That's pretty good money for an academic, especially while we are enduring the political theater of universities canceling core curriculum classes to try and pressure taxpayers into agreeing to tax increases if we 'care about education'.  
Have you noticed a huge increase in the price of pork chops or bacon or hot dogs?

Neither have I, despite the fact that sow gestation stalls, or crates or whatever you may call them in your neighborhood, are disappearing.  The stalls are basically where pregnant sows are kept. Anti-science hippies who are always looking for ammunition in their war on human food contend big business uses these crates because they are, you know, eeeevil, but that isn't true.  Long before Big Pork even existed farmers kept sows apart because they fight.  And during pregnancy, if you screw with a female pig, you are asking to roll in the mud.   The American Veterinary Medical Association says stalls are safer and therefore better than pens(1).
The Los Angeles Times got a little Huffington Post-ish in an article July 17th about Oxitec's genetically modified mosquito to control dengue outbreaks in various poor countries - and perhaps even in the Florida Keys.
We just had Snowmageddon and then heat a heat wave in parts of the US. Local, short-term weather events are suddenly proof of long-term climate change once again, according to journalists and biased bloggers who claim to care about science.

"Generation X", as marketing people call the generation after the Baby Boomers, aren't buying it, despite the fact that awareness campaigns about global warming have gone on for most of their lives.