In recent Pew Survey data, 75 percent of moderate Democrats believe global climate change is a major threat to the well-being of the United States while 94 percent of Democrats who skew farther left believe that, up 30 percent from 2013.

Overall, more Americans feel that way, 57 percent this year versus 40 percent in 2013, but that increase is almost all on the left. Among the right, Republicans and people who vote Republican, that belief was 27 percent in 2019, up from 22 percent in 2013.

The salty ocean is the last place you'd expect to find fresh water but a remote-controlled vehicle deployed from the research vessel G.O. Sars found, collected and measured just that during a Norwegian Sea expedition in 2017. 

The Norwegian Sea is near the Arctic, between the North Sea and the Greenland sea, separated from the Atlantic Ocean by Iceland. 



The leakage likely originated from a large pocket of fresh water, otherwise known as an aquifer, hidden beneath the sediment of the seabed, a remnant of the last ice age.

If you insist your baby has to breastfeed for a year you have a cultural heritage to justify it. Extinct species such as Australopithecus africanus likely breastfed for that long.

How could scholars determine how long A. africanus  breastfed? Like trees, teeth contain growth rings that can be counted to estimate age. Teeth rings also incorporate dietary minerals as they grow. Breast milk contains barium, which accumulates steadily in an infant's teeth and then drops off after weaning. In a new study, researchers analyzed trace minerals in two sets of fossilized A. africanus teeth from the Sterkfontein Cave outside Johannesburg, South Africa.

One thing that makes the science community spit its Fresca out its collective nose is the organic industry's claims to be more natural than conventional.

Mutagenesis, where seeds are literally dunked in chemical and radiation baths in hopes to get a good mutation, is placed under the organic halo (along with 50 synthetic ingredients exempted because there is "no organic alternative") but if one gene is moved from a Pacific Salmon to an Atlantic salmon so the latter grows faster, it is Frankenfish to environmental lawyers. 

The microbiome is the collection of microorganisms in an environment and plays an important role in human health. An imbalance of 'good' microbes compared to 'bad' is linked to adverse health outcomes. A person's gut microbiome with a higher number of different bacterial species is considered a marker of gut health but no one is really sure what that means.

This is something puzzles and scares some people. Why is most of the Amazon jungle still untouched by fire? Isn't there a risk that the Brazilian wildfires sweep across the entire Amazon and destroy all the remaining tropical forest? However, we get wildfires in Brazil every year, and this hasn’t happened before. In 2005 for instance there were many more fires than today, yet only a small part of the Amazon burnt. So why is that?

I will also cover some other things that scare people, for instance many are scared we will run out of oxygen - no - this can't happen even if we burnt all the biomass on Earth, or even if all plant life magically stopped producing oxygen for thousands of years. Or they worry about the effect on the Paris agreement:

If marijuana has analgesic properties, people will try it to potentially manage their pain, but it is unclear if it does or not. Fortunately, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration signaled it is expanding its marijuana research program will draft guidelines for producing the drug for scientific and medical research. 

Until there are science answers it is people trying all of the above, and that creates confounders for other kinds of research. A new study says adults who take prescription opioids for severe pain are more likely to have increased anxiety, depression and substance abuse issues if they also use marijuana. But did marijuana cause the depression or is it being used to mitigate it? 

The ketogenic diet is a high fat, low carbohydrate diet that has become a health fad but it was originally posited as a benefit for people with epilepsy.

Some mosquito species, such as Aedes aegypti, have been able to weave their way through evolutionary time despite having no ecological value, basically being just delivery mechanisms for things like Dengue fever, the most common vector-borne disease in the world.

We could wipe them out and the rest of the ecosystem would be just fine but environmentalists have promoted a lot of fear about science-based mitigation approaches, like a male mosquito rendered sterile, and they hate pesticides more than they love poor people, so that leaves...clothes?

China bans some chemicals whether or not the evidence shows it, and the United States should be more like communist dictatorships, suggests a Center for Biological Diversity blogger in a press release for their latest op-ed in Environmental Health.