Over 40 years ago, President Ronald Reagan, the most pro-science president of the 20th century, proposed a lot of bold initiatives. A Superconducting Super Collider was one goal, a big boost for government funding of basic research was another, and he also laid out a Strategic Defense Initiative. A missile defense system. That last one was dismissed by Democrats in Congress and media corporations as "Star Wars" fantasy.

Screen time is a concern for parents and mental health advocates but looking at screen time may be treating the symptom rather than the disease. What is a true harbinger for risk of mental health problems is addictive behavior in young people.

National surveys have documented rising screen use but a new paper mapped longitudinal trajectories of addictive use specifically, rather generic limits on screen time.The data were social media use of nearly 4,300 children enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, starting at age 8, and how use changed over the next four years. 

  

Disinformation and misinformation are common tactics and in the 2008 they entered the social media realm. Senator Barack Obama came from behind to overtake Senator Hillary Clinton to secure the Democratic nomination and then used the 100% greater funding he got by reneging on his promise to limit himself to public financing, as his opponent Senator John McCain did, to pour money into social media and an easy victory.

That's all factually true but if enough people object to that framing and demand a Community Note and then the Community Note is clarified by people like them, I would be a data point showing that Clinton supporters are far more likely to engage in disinformation than Obama ones.

As the developed world becomes more removed from science and health, it is easier to embrace beliefs that science and medicine are not needed at all, with some claiming that vaccines and pesticides are not really needed, the natural world can do it without modern tools.

Companies will cater to that also. If enough people mobilized by politicians and activists insist they don't want some harmless food coloring or BPA, companies will remove those and simply charge more. The products won't be healthier, just more costly. Yet sometimes mimicking the natural world can be beneficial, like with neonicotinoid seed treatments based on natural pesticide effects and have reduced mass spraying and off-target effects so well that bees have rebounded and now exist in record numbers.

Today’s large language models (LLMs) process information across disciplines at unprecedented speed and are challenging higher education to rethink teaching, learning and disciplinary structures.

As AI tools disrupt conventional subject boundaries, educators face a dilemma: some seek to ban these tools, while others are seeking ways to embrace them in the classroom.

Both approaches risk missing a deeper transformation that was predicted 60 years ago by Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan.

If you think you are in a totalitarian regime because the US President federalized National Guard troops, you may need to get a little more intellectual diversity. An experiment instead showed that those on the right are more likely to look into the facts and learn that federalizing the National Guard first happened in 1794. By order of President George Washington. Then it happened again in 1799, by order of President John Adams.

A new paper has found that flower strips along fields and ditches may be more than just a gimmick that lets people feel like they are improving the environment or saving bees. They may attract pests that eat pests that eat crops.

If so, this could help Europe, which has declared it wants to reduce pesticides 50% by 2030 but found its efforts stymied when they had to engage in limited boycotts of its primary food exporter, Russia. Even though they exclude Organic™ pesticides from their goals, despite those being up to 600% more chemicals per calorie produced.(1)

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: