A few short years ago, the western left - America and Europe - had a holy trinity of things they opposed; medicine, food, and energy. There is no hope for energy, even 100% higher electricity rates in places like Germany and California won't get them to budge from insisting solar and wind are viable, but all it took for them to rethink vaccines was for one of their former chief evangelists, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to become a member of the Trump administration.

A Facebook friend opined that Los Angeles protesters could “turn LA into another Portland.” I expand for you my rejoinder to his post:

Some 88 million years ago, Madagascar broke off from India.

Isolated from all other landmasses, plants and animals evolved in seclusion, creating a biodiversity hotspot unlike anywhere else on Earth. One way biodiversity spreads is by endozoochory, which is the process name for animals eating plant seeds and then pooping them out somewhere else, which may cause them to grow in the new location. Birds are an obvious mode of transport but a new study takes a look at the role lizard poop has played. 
Human evolution and culture have been shaped by our increasing ability to communicate.

A new review from China believes that brain-computer interfaces mark the next leap: a direct connection between mind and machine. They note breakthroughs in neural signal decoding, AI, and bioengineering but what should really worry residents of a communist dictatorship is how they believe it will shape autonomy, identity, and mental privacy.
Applications for MSCA Post-doctoral fellowships are on, and will be so until September 10 this year. What that means is that if you have less than 8 years of experience after your Ph.D., you can pair up with a research institute in Europe to present a research plan, and the European Commission may decide to fund it for two years (plus 6 months in industry in some cases).

In order for your application to have a chance to win funding, you need to: 
  1. have a great research topic in mind, 
  2. be ready to invest some time in writing a great application, and 
  3. pair up with an outstanding supervisor at a renowned research institute. 
University of Southern Denmark recently demonstrated a soft robot capable of navigating complex terrains using a combination of inflatable actuators and a patterned "kirigami" skin, all moving via rectilinear motion.

You probably think it looks like a worm and it can certainly go places only small things could go.

It's not very fast, only 11 millimeters per second, but it can twist, turn, and navigate through tight spots thanks to its anisotropic anchoring and flexible skin.


Credit: SDU Soft Robotics
When most people think of hurricanes, they imagine winds gusting over 100 miler per hour, but water has been responsible for 86 percent of all direct hurricane and tropical storm fatalities in the United States for almost this entire century.

Floods, rip currents, and storm surges are the big risk, with freshwater flooding inland accounting for over half of drownings. To help with real-time, the Southeast Atlantic (SEA) Econet network of atmospheric and hydrological monitoring stations provide the real-time data used by the National Weather Service.

An old adage goes that 'if life gives you lemons, make lemonade', which basically means turn something negative into something positive. 

Pollution is bad but a new study shows that it may some day be a net win for energy.
Processed and Ultra-Processed™ foods have been heavy-rotation buzzwords in the food activist community since the Obama administration but gained increased attention once the Trump administration came into power and a chief evangelist against modern food, former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was placed in charge of the world's most important government science agency, the National Institutes of Health.

Now, epidemiology has become a Supreme Court over science and instead of evidence-based decision-making, the default has become that if a harm or benefit can be suggested using food or chemical surveys, government will ban it and then tell scientists to figure out why.