A certain demographic have long had concerns about vaccines causing autism, along with fears about GMOs and cellphones causing cancer.

That last one has been the least active. Rich people have always been able to afford organic food and to count on poor kids getting enough vaccines to create herd immunity for their special snowflakes, but cell phones are more challenging because they are individual - and getting a new iPhone was a status symbol. Due to their omnipresence, signals are everywhere, just like TV and radio and cosmic rays before them, so most elites give up and recognize that unless Jimmy Choo makes a hat lined with tinfoil, they are stuck.

In the fall of 2003, Starbucks tested a new latte in two cities and autumn hasn't been the same since. The pumpkin spice craze was born. 

How did it all happen? We can thank free market economics. The company already had Christmas locked up with cups and flavors, like Peppermint Mocha and Eggnog latte, and wanted to do the same for Halloween. Or Thanksgiving. Whatever period lasts as long as Christmas seems to, they wanted to make money and the way to do that was to come up with something new, or at least new for their customers. 

Some cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove later and they had...pumpkin? Yep, except for some whipped cream on top there was no pumpkin in at all.

To most people, food production, home ownership, and energy don't have much in common, but in the hands of 'science is a corporate conspiracy' theorist Dave Goulson, humans are ruining the planet. The common cultural cancer underpinning of our problem, he believes, is capitalism.

Rachel Carson believed misuse of DDT was harming birds, Goulson claims our very existence is. And his solemn false dichotomy choice to prevent it is Draconian. Start culling the human herd or create a level of social authoritarianism that even John Holdren, Paul Ehrlich, and Anne Ehrlich didn't advocate in their book "Ecoscience." And they embraced eugenics.(1)

I used some spare research funds to open a six-months internship to help my research group in Padova, and the call is open for applications at this site (the second in the list right now, the number is #23584). So here I wish to answer a few questions from potential applicants, namely:
1) Can I apply? 
2) When is the call deadline?
3) What is the salary?
4) What is the purpose of the position? What can I expect to gain from it?

5) What will I be doing if I get selected? 


Answers:

There is no question that COVID-19 is the worst pandemic of my lifetime. It has led to greater absolute US deaths than the Asian Flu of 1957 and the Spanish Flu of 1918, though obviously we are 2X and 3X the population, respectively, of those pandemics so in relative terms they remain way ahead.

Where we also lead over the two other large US pandemics of the last 100 years is fear and misinformation. That is due to corporate media. Thanks to corporate media, an anti-vaccination movement that was overwhelmingly Democrats two years ago has now lurched to being Republicans. Thanks to media, the risks of COVID-19 are so blown out of proportion that neither group has a real handle on facts. They are just yelling at each other.

In 2019, three free-ranging cheetahs in the Namib Desert died within 24 hours of each other. Scholars set out to determine why.

On October 5th 2019, the carcass of a GPS-collared cheetah in the Namib desert was found dead from the air. After they went in on foot to investigate, two other cheetahs were also found dead. The GPS data showed they had all died within a short period of each other so the team then identified a cluster of GPS locations approximately two kilometers away from the location where they were found dead.

The US military has quietly led to a lot of technological advancements that few know about. One recent example; before we had a serious COVID-19 infectious disease problem to worry about, the US National Institutes of Health tried to use Ebola in parts of Africa to ask Congress for $100 million in emergency funding to combat it. In the US. Where it did not exist.