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Chloe Kim And Eileen Gu In Media As Anti-Asian Narrative

Olympians Chloe Kim and Eileen Gu are both Americans but have Asian descent. Yet Kim competed for...

Misandry Vs Manosphere: Both Use Unscientific Woo To Advance Their Beliefs But One Sells Better

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RIP To Dr. William Foege, The Man Whose Math Eliminated Smallpox

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Scholars Who Got Sold On The Academic Life Feel The Pressure

Professor Peter Mitchell got a Nobel Prize in 1978 for a chemiosmotic hypothesis of how ATP is...

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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 process uses harmless viruses that eat bacteria to form microscopic beads that can safely be applied to food and other materials to rid them of harmful pathogens such as E. coli. Though tiny, each bead is about one third the width of human hair, they have millions of bacteriophages. 
Ask some, and certainly companies selling remedies, and they will tell you there is so much depression during holidays that suicides rise noticeably.

If someone believes it, a producer or editor in corporate media will want to publish it, and therefore more people hear about it, and that is why many believe that suicide rates rise during the year-end holiday season. It isn't true, any more than there is more strange behavior in emergency rooms during full moons, but some will swear by their anecdotes.
Distributive justice is the subject of social, and therefore political, debate, but like 'sustainability' no one really knows what it means so it can mean anything to anyone. And therefore be used by everyone for their agendas. Socialists in New York City are against the mayor's plan to take people who are clearly mental ill in the homeless population and hospitalize them, for example, they say it is distributive injustice, while proponents say it is a way to decriminalize mental illness among the homeless and therefore compassionate and just for the most vulnerable.
A new paper accompanied by a scary-looking map claims "people who lived in cities with lead-contaminated water as children had worse baseline cognitive functioning at age 72" and may make every new parent worry their child's grades can be blamed on the water supply, but it leaves out important scientific context.
With a tiny fraction of the world population, the United States dominates science output. America dominates in Nobel prizes, and adult science literacy.

Yet leading the world in science literacy needs under 30% of its people, so it isn't that America is great, it is more that other countries are terrible. Anyone looking at the science policies of Europe - 'anything but science' is the default - when it comes to food, energy, and medicine knows they're regressing into the Dark Ages. Asia never stopped being the home of supplements and mysticism, it is why they lead the world in endangered-species-killed-for-folk-medicine occurrences.
Neuroscience is still in its infancy, despite claims by people using fMRI to suggest links between lots of things, but a few things are established, like that fear 'resides' in the amygdala.

Linking that same part of the brain to obesity in mice, and therefore humans, in a new paper warrants more skepticism. Mice are, as famously stated when science was science, not tiny people. We do have things in common with mice, just like we share 60% of our DNA with bananas, but no one suggests their study on bananas has 'implications' for humans the way every trial lawyer running a grift and wanting to sue an agriculture company suggests about mouse models.