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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a great deal of weakness in the federal government's ability to control, much less prevent, any diseases at all. The concern had grown during the last decade, when it began to take 6 weeks for CDC to inform the public that lettuce was tainted with E. coli but found time to invent concerns like prediabetes and a vaping epidemic.
Films have been common for over a century and a new paper laments that for much of that time men have been the unhinged scientists with a 'God complex', because by not having more 'mad' women in the 1930s, modern Artificial Intelligence routines are perpetuating gender stereotypes.

When you think of 'mad scientist' you probably do think of a man, and the authors argue that is a symptom of deeper sexism; so AI, which is going to pick a spot in brute force style and converge on answers from there, will perpetuate it. And that is true, except the issue is well-known and easy to work around, even for today's limited unintelligent AI.

In the past I have talked about the GMO candy I wish they'd make for Halloween, and all of the carcinogens in a 100% Organic Non-GMO Project Thanksgiving Dinner, but today I get to talk about the best pot for Valentine's Day.
During the Trump administration, it was discovered that the Obama administration had let Chinese efforts to manipulate US academics go unchecked while highlighting that the Russian government was funding domestic environmental groups in order to subvert US national gas and agriculture - energy and food being Russia's chief exports to Europe.
A lot of people went into 2023 hoping to lose some weight. It's no surprise. Putting it on is easy and rich countries make delicious food at affordable prices while our culture has not yet overcome our biological mandate to eat because animals are programmed to be unsure when the next meal will be.

If you went into 2023 trying some miracle diet - keto, gluten-free, Mediterranean, et al. - you have probably already failed. Yet each of those diets has proponents because it worked for them individually. With enough individual anecdotes epidemiologists will find correlation using food frequency questionnaires and claim it's data.
Some food grown in the US, especially high-cost luxuries like almonds, are pollinated using bees. Since bees are most often rented and transported for such purposes, keeping them alive is important to owners and growers. As their value for higher-cost foods has grown, so have bee numbers; they are up 85 percent in the last 60 years. You would just never know it if your source is Greenpeace, so when you use verbiage identical to Greenpeace press releases in an academic paper press release your work is going to be suspect. And that is a paper on bee deaths we'll discuss today.