In 2008, Senator Obama won the election against Senator John McCain to become America's 44th President. It brought a lot of excitement to the science community. Before social media, opinion was easy to manipulate. Academics who, let's be honest, are almost 90% Democrats, were ready to believe the worst about Republicans. Bush banned stem cell research and it would cure Alzheimer's if a Democrat was in office(1), they repeated. Solar was ready but Republicans blocked it, while nuclear energy had to stay banned because it always led to nuclear weapons, they insisted.(2)

In 2016, President Obama listened to reason and signed the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, which amended the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and created a mandatory requirement for EPA to evaluate existing chemicals using transparent methodology and risk-based assessment.

No more simplistic epidemiology. Which meant no more junk that had anti-science activists declaring that a weedkiller turned frogs gay or PFAS in pizza boxes created greater risk for obesity than pizza.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer and once such a pillar of the Democratic party that President Obama floated his name to run the Environmental Protection Agency.

Now he controls the agency that controls EPA. That is a big win for anti-science progressives. And because they are playing chess, not checkers, anti-science Republicans think it's their idea.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has sent seven recent letters sent to companies selling products containing 7-hydroxymitragynine, also known as 7-OH.1, an illegal opioid.

It became popular because it is found in the dangerous supplement kratom, illegal even in the country that exports it to the United States, and supplement grifters also began selling the compound in gummies, drink mixes, and shots.

Once a decade, I buy a pair of good sunglasses. I didn't know I was doing that, it wasn't intentional, I only realized it when I bought a pair of Persol sunglasses in 2005 that my wife mentioned it seemed to be a pattern. It really wasn't. I still had a pair of Aviators from the 1980s and she bought me a pair of sunglasses in the 1990s so it wasn't really a trend, it was coincidence. In 2015 or 2016, while living in New York City due to running a nonprofit there, I was tired of my old glasses and walked into a Sunglass Hut on Fifth Avenue and bought a new pair.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has released the first image using the largest camera in the world. The 3200-megapixel resolution wide field of view Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera.

Its high-definition images use six different color filters can photograph 45 times the area of the full moon in the sky with each exposure. So wide it can capture the entire southern sky in just three nights of shooting.  

After Spain instituted paternity leave reform on 2007 - what the Spanish needed to help their highest unemployment in Europe was even fewer people working - male fertility went down, according to an analysis of birth records before and after the switch.

This is in contrast to some claims that maternity leave can boost fertility. 

Uptake of the new paternity leave was very high among new dads. Then something strange happened. 

Working people, and the poor, overwhelmingly voted for President Trump. Democrats seemed puzzled that The Deplorables they despise would vote for a candidate who offered lower costs of living. 'Red states use more government assistance' they jeered.

That's the problem. As a former poor person, an organic farmer living in poverty before President Clinton made it a government-endorsed grift as a gift for progressive elites, I know cost is everything. Progressives on Twitter think a dollar is only a dollar. To poor people, it matters. 

With a new president in the White House bringing in a former Natural Resources Defense Lawyer and long-time anti-science progressive, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there is new concern about erosion of American leadership in science and health.

If leadership is just spending money on things like theater in foreign countries or paying yourself $100,000 to rewrite data from government surveys on why some people don't trust vaccines, we are not losing much.(1)

Hopefully with Republicans agreeing about some of the more ridiculous positions of the left - seed oils and vaccines are bad - acceptance of science will blossom among the nearly 90% of career government employees in Washington, D.C. who are Democrats.(2)