If you have read about feminized frogs due to pesticides, or other scary claims by environmentalists, you may wonder why the EPA does not use those studies when registering chemicals.

The reason is because they often have no parallel to the real world. Chemical companies, despite claims by their cultural detractors, want to be overly cautious, while anti-science activists want to use enough exposure to create the effect they want to write about. In both cases, they use gavage dosing.

Anti-nuclear activists have done everything they can to keep the best green energy available, out of America, continuing a successful blockade they got President Clinton to implement 20 years ago. Back then, they misstated the science and insisted any nuclear physics was going to lead to nuclear bombs. Today, they insist that, thanks to gigantic regulatory hurdles, including a Nuclear Regulatory Commission run by an anti-nuclear activist, nuclear energy is too expensive.

It's often said that if we do make contact with Extra Terrestrials (ETs), e.g. detect a radio transmission from a distant galaxy through SETI, that maths would be one of the few things we would have in common with them. But - how similar would their maths actually be to ours?

Modern maths- with its many sizes of infinity and logical paradoxes, has lead to much debate and puzzlement over the last century or so. Would this be the same for ETs? And would it lead to many different ideas about maths and the philosophy of maths, as we have here, or would they find some other solution none of us have thought of?

Scare journalism is big business. Hardly a day goes by without mainstream media promoting "X is harmful to your health" claims based on surveys, epidemiology and suspect methodology.

As a result, people are taught to be afraid of Subway bread, beer, high fructose corn syrup, MSG and even gluten without a reason.

It's not a shock that a certain demographic is going to be be easily driven by fear and misperception. But who? The easy answer has long been Whole Foods shoppers, because they are against vaccines, traditional farming and increasingly seek more laws and regulations to save them from the unknown. States like California, New York and Washington are hotbeds of anti-science beliefs.

Elites in California and Washington and New York like to claim they are showing leadership with every fad they embrace - they should be showing leadership by telling their citizens to stop promoting anti-vaccine nonsense. 

Otherwise, the US could end up like the UK, where an ongoing culture war against genetic modification, vaccines and the other science wars of progressives have results in a 20 percent chance that a child with a persistent cough have Pertussis - whooping cough - even if they have been vaccinated.  Whooping cough is a highly transmissible infection which can cause symptoms such as coughing, vomiting and whooping. However, whooping cough can lead to serious complications in unvaccinated infants. 

Adults diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome are nine times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than people from the UK general population, according to a paper The Lancet Psychiatry which consisted of a survey of 374 individuals (256 men and 118 women) diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome as adults between 2004 and 2013 at the Cambridge Lifetime Asperger Syndrome Service (CLASS) clinic in Cambridge.

Asperger Syndrome is an autism spectrum condition. In Asperger Syndrome, people show some of the social symptoms of autism but don't have delayed language or intellectual disability. In the UK, one in 100 people (around 700,000) has one form of autism spectrum condition or another. 

Driving is no fun any more. When is the last time you saw someone buy a pair of driving gloves? These days, it is a chore. It would be much better to let someone else take the wheel but the only viable alternative is public transportation - and about the first time some crazy hobo screams at you and your family, they are never going to want to take it again. 

A computer analysis of photographs could help doctors diagnose which condition a child with a rare genetic disorder has, using a computer program that recognizes facial features in photographs, looks for similarities with facial structures for various conditions, such as Down's syndrome, Angelman syndrome, or Progeria, and returns possible matches ranked by likelihood. 

Using the latest in computer vision and machine learning, the algorithm increasingly learns what facial features to pay attention to and what to ignore from a growing bank of photographs of people diagnosed with different syndromes.

Just a few short years ago, sugar growers and packagers had to have felt pretty good. Thanks to a rash of suspect epidemiological claims about high-fructose corn syrup, and then marketing claims and labels touting a lack of HFCS (even pancake syrup, made of corn syrup, got labels saying it was not HFCS), they had to feel good about the future.

No more. The low-fat, low-calorie, gluten-free diet craze has also clearly turned on sugar, if New York Times stories are the barometer for that demographic. And it is.

A new study using snow during a Minnesota blizzard gave researchers new insight into the airflow around large wind turbines.

Thanks to subsidies, wind turbines are not going away until at least February of 2017, so improving wind energy efficiency is essential, especially in wind farms where airflows from many large wind turbines interact with each other, a problem that no one included in estimates of cost versus value.