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

Running a pro-science nonprofit is a poor business model. Especially compared to lawyer groups...

The Feel Good Fallacy Of Sugary Drink Taxes On Reducing Obesity

Social authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people...

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...

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...

User picture.
picture for Fred Phillipspicture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for picture for Hontas Farmerpicture for Atreyee Bhattacharyapicture for Patrick Lockerby
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 »

Blogroll
Pew has announced they will no longer use 'generational labels' and instead use age cohorts. It makes sense demographically but it never made sense that anyone used them in the first place. 

When I was born, the Baby Boom was an event - a post-World War II increase in births due to soldiers returning home. But when they grew up they were reading the works of people who felt 'lost' because they hadn't been in World War II or the Depression, and dreary mopes like Kerouac and Ginsberg infected a whole lot of teenagers who wants to feel cheated too.
Unless you hate movies, you know this weekend was "Barbenheimer" - two highly regarded, very different films were on track to smash some records. And they did. "Barbie" did over $150 million while "Oppenheimer" did $80 million, a combined total unmatched for two competing opening weekends and "Oppenheimer" was the first time a movie had exceeded $50 million when another opening went past $100 million.
Espresso is a coffee extraction process where hot water is forced through finely ground coffee at a barometric pressure of nine - which means nine times the usual pressure you feel at sea level, which translates to about 130 pounds per square inch, about 400 percent of your car tires.

Some people drink it diluted with water, an Americano, or with milk, as a latte. In modern times, some people even drink it cold. If an in vitro (cell culture) study holds up, people may even drink it to help ward off Alzheimer's disease. 
With allied epidemiologists placed inside the US Environmental Protection Agency, and scientists pushed to the side, environmentalists feel like they are about to get a win when it comes to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that have been common for 80 years.

And it will be a win - for the yacht payments of their lawyers. For the public, we will be no safer, we're not being harmed now, but the costs to 'clean up' a problem we don't have will be onerous. And we're all going to be harmed by that.


Environmental Working Group, the Extinction Rebellion of affordable produce, is always in a war on strawberries - unless they only contain pesticides their organic industry corporate donors use or sell.

For the scientifically literate, those with at least the intellect of 17th century peasants who understood 'the dose makes the poison', strawberries are healthy and safe. as is the rest of the EWG Dirty Dozen list that just happens to never include organic food sprayed with toxic chemicals the day it's shipped to Whole Foods.

This year, strawberries will be even better than usual. There are two reasons: rain and a cooler spring. Those mean larger fruit, and also extended shelf life, which means less waste. That is a win on every level.
A new case study sounds the alarm that per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are detectable in Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The authors say the levels are alarmingly high.

What does that mean? No studies have shown health issues related to PFAS yet and if they were a health concern, it would be known after 100 years. Yet cancer is not up, no environmental or lifestyle health issues are up except obesity, and that is due to an abundance of affordable food even for the world's poor.

PFAS are so ubiquitous they are detectable in the Ittoqqortoormiit villagers of East Greenland, which means if they are harmful people should be dropping left and right, yet the only casualties so far are mice who get 10,000 times the exposure humans will get in their lives.