With endorsements from five previous FDA Commissioners and a Republican Senate deciding his fate, Stephen Hahn, M.D., is certain to become the next Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

He's qualified, but most FDA heads have been(1). He also understands politics, and that is always part of FDA because a Commissioner has to let career scientists do their jobs while navigating demands from both the White House and Congress, which can often be politically motivated. And he s a lung cancer doctor, so he understands better than most what really causes lung cancer (smoking) and what is hype promoted by pharmaceutical companies and other groups who have tremendous influence inside organizations like the American Medical Association.

“The history of the bow and arrow is the history of mankind,” said Fred Bear.

If you want to get a fresh turkey for Thanksgiving, you don't need to spend $120 for something that calls itself Heritage, you can honor your actual heritage and go get one the way your ancestors did. With a bow and arrow.

Since that time, a lot of has improved about archery. Though guns haven't changed much in the last 100 years, archery has gone through a technological renaissance. Entire science conference presentations are devoted to it, and that happened this weekend at the annual meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics in Seattle.


Credit: INSEP, France.

"Many people have dogs. We have stem cells," says Cedars-Sinai Hospital lab manager Loren Ornelas-Menendez about why they will be working on Thanksgiving, hand-feeding a special formula to their charges and making sure they stay at just the right temperature. Like they do every day, 365 days a year.

This is not just any lab, it houses stem cells derived from hundreds of healthy donors and patients, and a catalog of human ills, including diabetes, breast cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and Crohn's disease.

Short summary: A Koala population in New South Wales has been severely impacted by fires with loss of perhaps 70%, at least 350 of them killed, and it could be more, leading to headlines of "1000 koalas killed". However there is no way even this population is functionally extinct (i.e. can't produce a new generation). It will recover again, not immediately but in a couple of decades. A koala population can triple in population in 12 years. It depends on eucalyptus leaves and those trees have died, but the eucalyptus grows quickly too.

When it comes to news literacy, schools often emphasize fact-checking and hoax-spotting. But as I argue in my new book, schools must go deeper with how they teach the subject if they want to help students thrive in a democratic society.

As a new poll shows that Americans struggle to know if the information they find online is true, news literacy remains essential in student education.

This is the latest of several articles I've done about NASA / ESA’s plan to return a sample from Mars. The samples would be geological ones, but they also could contain life indeed NASA motivate the mission by the possibility of life, especially past life but present day life can't be ruled out. This means it could lead to extraterrestrial life coming into contact with Earth's biosphere. That leads to the question - what are NASA or ESA doing to prepare the planetary protection procedures and the supporting environmental legislation for a sample return?

The 1950s were the first sign that with a booming economy, progressive busy-bodies were going to once again turn their sights on controlling behavior. Though Prohibition had ended the Puritan Piety attack on alcohol, and Hitler had put a halt to progressive dreams of eugenics, the war on inferiors continued by well-meaning elites unabated after the soldiers came home.

Is there a fifth force of Nature, beyond the four we know about ? This question has been around ever since it was understood that 
1 - electric charges attract and repel, and influence one another, due to the action of the electromagnetic force;


2 - hadronic matter is held together by the strong force;


3 - quarks transmute into other quarks due to the action of the weak force (and leptons do that too);


4 - bodies carrying mass feel attracted to one another, although very weakly, by the gravitational force.

You know you are in a wealthy country when there are articles about how people are depressed if they can't get a $2,000 Macbook, young people can talk about how bored they are, and poor families live in more square footage than the middle class in France.

Oh, and a majority are fat, even among poor people. It was never before possible for poor people to be obese, abundance of food used to be a sign of wealth.

Many people feel anxious about the prospect of their death. Indeed, some philosophers have argued that death anxiety is universal and that this anxiety bounds and organizes human existence. But do we also suffer from birth anxiety? Perhaps. After all, we are all beings that are born as well as beings that die.

Whereas philosophers have said a lot about our anxiety about death, they have said little about birth anxiety. This is part-and-parcel of the broader neglect of birth in the Western philosophical tradition. The guiding thought has been that ‘all men are mortal’ (‘men’ in the sense of ‘human beings’) rather than ‘all human beings are mortal and natal’.