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Young People Have Become Jaded To Emotional Appeals On Screens - And That Is Good

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The Feel Good Fallacy Of Sugary Drink Taxes On Reducing Obesity

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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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Health care in America is broken and the chief reason is the government. In 2009, when Obamacare became part of the President's agenda, I said we should just write out the check for trillions of dollars and nationalize the industry. My reasoning was that anything else would mean we have worse access and much higher cost.
At the Hilazon Tachtit cave site, before it was Israel, before King David even fought the Philistines, the area north of Nazareth and west of the Sea of Galilee was populated by Natufians, an early settled people, and in 2008 archaeologists revealed details of a burial site unlike any other found in the Natufian period or the Paleolithic before it - instead of a mass grave, like those remains found nearby, it was a lone woman.
If you have been in science media for any period of time, you have seen a predictable pattern; epidemiologists look through columns and rows of foods people claim they eat and diseases or lack thereof and if they get enough to declare "statistical significance" they write a paper noting down at the bottom that they can't show a causal relationship but then send press releases to New York Times journalists who believe in acupuncture absolutely suggesting causation.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, chewing gum had a bit of a resurgence. Though gum companies disavow any health benefits - they like being in the candy aisle - people have always used it off-label for various benefits and did so to generate a response against possible virus exposures.  People have always had habits they like. If have a cold, for example, I like to eat a cheese sandwich. If I get nausea, I chew gum.
Astronomers have speculated that black holes eat slowly. A recent paper argues that their computer simulation shows just the opposite. 

Don't get too excited, this is still a computer simulation about theoretical physics, which isn't out there with science-fiction but is limited by the fact that we know very little about black holes - including how fast they consume the universe around them. The new estimate is that a black hole can tear apart space-time and consume the accretion disk of material around it in months, rather than the hundreds of years that some believe.
When a pandemic is happening in real time, it's only possible to know in hindsight what was a successful mitigation strategy, what was hype to help a presidential candidate, or even what was suppressed for geopolitical interests.

There is no question mitigation was good, but political and corporate media pressure to keep the world locked down and terrified into 2022 was always immunologically suspect. Many lives their lost due to the pandemic, some lost their lives because it was suggested people should not seek medical care due to imagery of COVID bodies stacked in parking lots, but a whole lot of damage won't be known for a decade or more.