A new index of scientific output has been released and it finds that the United States continues to dominate in research, bolstered by the private sector accounting for nearly 70 percent of science funding, where most other developed countries instead rely on government.

The analysis factored in the number researchers as percentage of population, patents, papers released, and GDP spending. 

When we think of Mt. Everest, it's usually imagery like Sir Edmund Hillary and his guide Tenzing Norgay in parkas and with oxygen tanks making the hazardous 29.000 climb. And then there are the dead bodies, nearly 300 of them, those who perished on the trek to the summit.

What we don't think of is a man running, yet that is what Kilian Jornet Burgada did part of the way in famous photos - and then after 26 hours and 31 minutes, the fastest climb ever(1), he came back down, rested, and did it again, all within a week.

Poor people live in areas with more pollution, but pollution is relative in 2019.

Environmentalists may hate science but they love to ignore inconvenient truths about alcohol - namely that it is a toxic carcinogen the way they wish BPA, atrazine, fracking, vaccines (insert whatever they are raising money on this week) could be.

Zooey Deschanel, whose picture could be in the dictionary under "adorkable" thanks to starring roles in "Elf" and "New Girl", isn't well regarded in science, and hasn't been since for as long as she's been undermining it, which is as long as people have known her name. That's now a long time, since "Almost Famous" is about to turn 20.

In the movie "Erin Brockovich", actress Julia Roberts portrayed a clerk who got energy company PG&E worried enough about a jury being scared of science they wrote her boss a giant check. Because Hollywood is in California, the state government was motivated to declare the compound harmful and put in tighter restrictions.

The concern from the science community was that no one was being harmed. It's a slippery slope from demonizing a scary sounding chemical in water to doing the same thing to vaccines or weedkillers. Which is exactly what has happened, and California has led the way in both cases.