Attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his US followers over the last 25 years have staunchly opposed vaccines, latching on to any claim that they cause autism or should be available for lawsuits even if they harm no one.

They really won't like a new experimental vaccine for Smallpox and Monkeypox that avoids the side effects of a current live virus version while not needing two doses, as the replication-deficient virus version does. It uses the horsepox virus as a protective agent to confer the safety of a multi-dose vaccine in a single shot. 

General medicine, routine visits and such, have gradually gone from M.D.s to including Osteopaths and now Physicians Assistants with no decline in quality, and Large Language Models, colloquially called "Artificial Intelligence", like ChatGPT can assist at very low cost.

Italy as we know it today had not been such since the days of the Roman Empire. You can see that last remnant today in the existence of The Vatican smack in the middle of Rome but at one point they held a substantial amount of territory. 

Like Americans, Italians are inherently rebellious. If you are on a plane flight and a flight attendant complains about someone smoking a cigarette, savvy travelers know it's an Italian in the bathroom. It is part of the reason Americans love Italian people. Unlike Americans, Italians had to fight not only each other for over a thousand years, they had to fend off French and Germans and even Africans.

In 2008, fresh off a decisive victory over Democratic establishment candidate Senator Hillary Clinton in the primary and one over highly-regarded Senator John McCain in the general election, President-elect Obama began to engage in worrisome behavior.

His transition team, those who set the tone for his Cabinet and first 100 days, was over-represented with UFO believers. His inner circle included a guy who thoughts girls can't do math. I was only two years into science media by then so I believed that science academics were a cross-section of America - diverse - and that President George W. Bush hated science and everything else. Yet none of the choices President-elect Obama made seemed to concern those who insisted that science was paramount.(1)  

Nowadays we study the Universe using a number of probes and techniques. Over the course of the past 100 years we moved from barely using optical telescopes, that give us access to the flux of visible photons from galaxies, supernovae, and other objects of interest, to exploiting photons of any energy - gamma rays, x rays, ultraviolet and infrared radiation, microwaves; and then also using charged cosmic radiation (including protons and light nuclei, electrons and positrons), neutrinos, and lastly, gravitational waves. 

Cigarettes are the top lifestyle risk factor for getting cancer, though alcohol and obesity have begun to close the gap as awareness of the risks of cigarettes, coupled with more nicotine smoking cessation and harm reduction tools, have caused cigarette use to decline.

Even if you get cancer, quitting smoking improves outcomes. 

When Senator Elizabeth Warren had her claims of native ancestry debunked by DNA testing, it was a warning shot to everyone who identifies that way - don't take a test. Most native Americans had long said that anyway, they knew how biology worked better Washington DC staffers. After five generations there is a chance there will be no evidence of an ancestor so natives have long told their communities not to participate. If there are only a few hundred in a database, the database is meaningless and natives tribes can continue their 'we agree you are and you agree you are native' policy rather than having evidence.

Testicular cancer is the most common solid tumor in young men, with approximately 10,000 diagnoses in the U.S. each year.

The 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, who many have called “the godfather of AI”. The award seems apt for the time we are in.