A lot of environmentalists raise money talking about climate change, but their energy recommendations - mitigation, rationing, high cost - are regressive.

Scientists are interested in progress, and nothing has exemplified that like genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which optimize nature in order to speed up organic processes that may take centuries to happen naturally. From insulin to watermelon to any number of other foods, GMOs have made it possible to grow more produce on less land using less water and energy and chemicals per calorie than ever before.
Now a team believe GMOs can fix climate change, by reducing the amount of CO2 plants put into the atmosphere.

A new study found that natural selection, a key mechanism in biological evolution, favors pathogens with more virulence - how much harm they cause - at the point the disease emerges in a new host species.

Not too much, or else everything will be dead, but not too weak to matter either. 

Virulence and transmission are linked, with virulence arising because pathogens need to exploit hosts to persist, replicate and transmit. Low virulence will be detrimental for pathogens if they cannot transmit while virulence that is too high will also be a disadvantage if infection kills hosts so fast that the pathogen does not have time to transmit. 

A billion people still use wood for cooking and heating - and western countries are to blame. In the last decade, centralized energy production for developing countries was derailed unless they used solar or wind - neither of which are viable on their own.

That leave families cutting and burning wood or dried dung for fuel, both of which are far worse for the environment than coal. 

Yet there are other obstacles that even prevent people from even switching to local Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) - a belief that local firewood increases "wellbeing" for their families.

With the third coronavirus pandemic of the last 17 years, and this one worse than ever, there is a great deal of talk about a vaccine. Pfizer set off a lot of excitement with its preliminary results, which exceeded the 50 percent scientists expected. And there are 197 other vaccine candidates in the pipeline.

Yet by the time government, which will now want to be involved more than ever, gets any vaccine into the hands of people, the virus may have mutated. Like a flu vaccine, instead of having this go away, scientists may have to deduce what mutations will occur and create an annual vaccine based on that - because SARS-CoV-2 may develop resistance.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sent both political parties rushing to wrap themselves in the flag of science - even those voters who were historically more inclined to oppose vaccines and medicine and purchase organic food.

They should have been on Team Science all along, and a new analysis shows why; in a recent 16 year period, over 1.2 million people were saved thanks to 106 new treatments approved across 15 common tumors from 2000 to 2016 - including colorectal cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, leukemia, melanoma, gastric cancer, and renal cancer.

Everyone recognizes that less less food means fewer pests but when you have to grow food to keep billions from starving, yields matter. Farming has gotten more efficient, thanks to big data tools leading to targeted pesticide use and modern pesticides that are less toxic to the environment while still getting rid of pests, such as neonicotinoids. 

That's important. Even with modern science, insects cause losses of up to 18 percent and in older practices that use less-effective pesticides like the organic manufacturing process, those yield losses are even higher - along with food costs.