Modern life has many benefits. Transport, comfy furniture, smartphones, TV, the internet, dentistry and advanced medicine would be at the top of most people’s lists. Our bodies also show signs of responding positively to modern life. In almost every part of the world, we are much taller than we used to be. We also live much longer, with life expectancy inching towards 80 in many wealthy countries, while everyone “knows” ancient humans usually died in their twenties. But what I discovered while researching my book, is that things are more complex than that.

America is the most science literate country in the world, we are dominant in Nobel prizes and science output, and we are thankful we are not France, but a new survey by Harris shows that we still have a long way to go.

The results of the new survey reveal that 47 percent of people ages 18 to 37, our future leaders, have become convinced by efforts to promote alternatives to medicine and think they can cure cancer with food or supplements or ancient Chinese wisdom - 40 percent overall.

How did we get here?

Three ways.

Comic books of the 1950s and 1960s made a point of their potential to terrify, with anthologies from Entertaining Comics, such as Haunt of Fear, Vault of Horror, and Tales of the Crypt, boasting covers with straplines such as “Within these pages dwell creatures from the terrifying beyond!”

Anti-gun proponents like to produce headlines showing a young child accidentally shot another family member with a pistol, but that kind of cultural framing may be doing more harm than good, because a new study reaffirms what most gun owners knew: Gun harm is not caused by lazy or irresponsible gun owners letting their kids get them by mistake, it is from assaults by men. And teenagers at greatest risk for committing acts of violence are at greatest risk of receiving it, not pre-schoolers.

Of the over 75,000 youths who visited emergency rooms for gun-related injuries from 2006 to 2014, 86.2 percent were males and overwhelmingly in large cities.

Fake news has become a common claim, and for good reason. The Russians, for example, have been caught using environmentalists, food activists, "journalism" professors, and trade groups to promote fear and doubt about American science and technology
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But organic food shoppers and people scared of natural gas are not alone in believing fake news. A new study shows that dogmatic individuals, fundamentalists and delusional people of all kinds are more likely to believe fake news. The less open-minded a person is, the more likely they are to be swayed by fake news claims.

In California, we have warning labels on trees, because they will give us cancer. And that is not even the strangest of California's warnings about nearly 1,000 chemicals on hundreds of thousands of products.

We call it "leadership" to put warning labels on the things activists are not yet allowed to ban. "Leadership" is a dog whistle for the kind of social authoritarian mentality that is the enemy of science and progress.  And we are very much the enemy of science and therefore progress. 

I woke up from a nap, on my back, looking up through my bedroom window at a brightly lit blue sky and saw them again: numerous small, uniform dots swimming in my field of view.

This time I paid attention. They went right past the images of floaters in my eye. So they are on a different plane. They moved at what seemed like nearly uniform speeds, although they sometimes went in arced trajectories. Each disappeared individually, sometimes seeming to radiate from a point, acting a bit like sparks in fireworks. They all remained in focus.

Before the arrival of European immigrants to the western United States, up to 12 percent of it would burn each year. Somehow, even though science is well aware of that fact, political media today claim that wildfires are unprecedented and we are doomed. 

A new study notes again that the amount of wildfire occurring in the western U.S. remains far below the acreage burning when native Americans were not managing the ecology. The context is not to debunk modern beliefs about how superior native Americans were, but to talk about water.

I am getting many people contacting me scared of this asteroid, which was proved to miss Earth back on 1st August 2002! Right now, it is coming from below Earth's orbit, but not directly towards us. We are circling the sun at the same time. It crosses Earth's orbit ahead of us. By the time we get to the place where our orbits cross, it is already high above our orbit and moving away. It will be closest on 13th January, but even then it is at a vast distance of 61 million kilometers away. We already knew this back on 29 July, 2002,

As the scale and impacts of climate change become increasingly alarming, meat is a popular target for action. Advocates urge the public to eat less meat to save the environment. Some activists have called for taxing meat to reduce consumption of it.

A key claim underlying these arguments holds that globally, meat production generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. However, this claim is demonstrably wrong, as I will show. And its persistence has led to false assumptions about the linkage between meat and climate change.