The pesticides that farmers use to protect their crops have changed a great deal over the last few decades

While improvement is something we expect from technologies as diverse as pharmaceuticals to electronics, few people are aware of the positive developments in the chemicals used for crop protection.

 Dramatic change began with the establishment of the EPA in 1970 which led to the elimination of many problematic, old pesticides.  Also, there has been a steady stream of new product introductions with both safety and efficacy advantages.

Follow me on Twitter: @SteveSchuler20. Back in the day, some chemistry sets came with a mechanical centrifuge. They were operated similar to those old-timey pump style tin spinning toy tops. This is the style centrifuge that came with my chemistry set:

Note: I came up with this story idea long before I was able to find a second-hand salad spinner and now I can’t remember where I found this picture. I am unable to cite its source.

Here’s another example of a chemistry set centrifuge on Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ site:

Researchers have decoded the whole genome sequence of one widespread species and it turns out to be remarkably big -  6.5 gigabytes, largest animal genome sequenced so far. 

The honor goes to Locusta migratoria, the most widespread locust species. We all know about locusts: a single locust can eat its own bodyweight in food in a single day which is, proportionately, 60 times a human's daily consumption. They are capable of inflicting famine and wiping out livelihoods when they swarms, which can cost countries billions of dollars in lost harvests and eradication efforts.

By observing a high-speed component of the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0717.5+3745, an extraordinarily dynamic cluster with a total mass greater than 10¹⁵ (a million billion) times the mass of the sun or more than 1,000 times the mass of our own galaxy, researchers have detected for the first time in an individual object the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, a change in the cosmic microwave background caused by its interaction with massive moving objects.  \

Even "minimally buzzed" drinkers and drivers are more often to blame for fatal car crashes than the sober drivers they collide with, reports a University of California, San Diego study of accidents in the United States . 

UC San Diego sociologist David Phillips and colleagues examined 570,731 fatal collisions, from 1994 to 2011, using the official U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) database because it is nationally comprehensive and because it reports on blood alcohol content (BAC) in increments of 0.01 percent.

They focused on "buzzed drivers," with
blood alcohol content
 of 0.01 to 0.07 percent, and, within this group, the "minimally buzzed", a blood alcohol content
of 0.01 percent.

So the other day Julia Galef and I had the pleasure of interviewing mathematical cosmologist Max Tegmark for the Rationally Speaking podcast. The episode will come out in late January, close to the release of Max’s book, presenting his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH). We had a lively and interesting conversation, but in the end, I’m not convinced (and I doubt Julia was either).