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This morning, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter lifted off on Mars, marking the first-ever powered flight on another planet. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover confirmed success.

It was all completely autonomous because the time between signals from orbiting satellites and NASA’s Deep Space Network is too long, so no joystick control from JPL. Total flight time was over 39 seconds, most of it hovering at 10 feet above the surface. This also was not monitored in 'real time' because of the distance but Perseverance was parked nearby and got pictures. 

The instructional website OMGYES asked over 3,000 US women ages 18 to 93 how they increase their pleasure during sex. This meant vaginal penetration.

Four techniques emerged:

Angling - 90% said they rotate, raise or lower their pelvis and hips during to adjust how penetration occurs.

Shallowing - 84% of women said they increase using “shallowing,” a penetrative touch.

Rocking - 76% of said they increase their own pleasure through “rocking”, which rubs against the clitoris during penetration.

Pairing - 70% use “pairing”, manual stimulation during penetration.
A giant concern about the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been economic. With government still spending like it's the 2017-2019 boom but tens of millions of Americans no longer working, there is a bill that will come due soon. A less urgent concern than the disease itself was mental health. A number of high-profile suicides occurred, which has led to worry that the mental health toll was being swept into a corner.

According to new National Vital Statistics System (CDC) data, mental health impacts such as suicide have not increased. Instead, suicides dropped last year, to the lowest gross total since 2015.
Alkaline water is just nonsense but anyone still buying it knows all of the science debunking and buys it anyway, so let's not berate rich dumb people any more than needed.

While they are getting no benefit, what “Real Water” brand alkaline water customers do obtain is acute non-viral hepatitis, according to the the FDA, CDC and the Southern Nevada Health District.
Dogs have keen olfactory sensory neurons, receptor proteins great for differentiating smells humans never notice. One reason is basic biology; they breathe and smell separately. Electronic sniffers mimic many of the same processes dogs have - and require far less specialized training.

So which is better? The Reactions team at the American Chemical Society wanted to get the latest.
Dogs have keen olfactory sensory neurons, receptor proteins great for differentiating smells humans never notice. One reason is basic biology; they breathe and smell separately. Electronic sniffers mimic many of the same processes dogs have - and require far less specialized training.

So which is better? The Reactions team at the American Chemical Society wanted to get the latest.
A new study found that Colorado's booming pot industry is causing more CO2 emissions than its coal - almost 50 percent more.

The reason is that marijuana in Colorado has to be grown in giant greenhouses which require air conditioning or heat, plus giant lights. This does not include emissions associated with storage and processing.
In Issues&Insights, I note that that activist groups are demanding the administration replace evidence-based research with activist-backed junk science. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), among others, is demanding a ban on 11 critical pesticides that farmers have relied on to feed the public during the COVID-19 pandemic.

These are all products that have been thoroughly evaluated by career scientists - not political appointees - at U.S. regulatory agencies numerous times, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. They are safe. And they are essential to keeping food affordable.
In Issues&Insights, I note that that activist groups are demanding the administration replace evidence-based research with activist-backed junk science. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), among others, is demanding a ban on 11 critical pesticides that farmers have relied on to feed the public during the COVID-19 pandemic.

These are all products that have been thoroughly evaluated by career scientists - not political appointees - at U.S. regulatory agencies numerous times, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. They are safe. And they are essential to keeping food affordable.
The pandemic of 2020 caused a lot of people to rethink science beliefs that were more luxury than reality. Did you want your family protected by some stuff that claimed to be organic and natural or did you want Clorox, Lysol, and Purell that actually worked? Did you want Peruvian tree bark sold by Chris Cuomo and his wife or a COVID-19 vaccine?
A few short years after NASA got money for the successor to the Hubble telescope, they told Congress that 11 years would not be enough time to build it. They told the public they couldn't put a telescope into space by 2002, even though that was more time than it took to start from nothing and have living breathing humans walk on the moon.

The James Webb Space Telescope is named after the NASA manager who oversaw that moon landing. Were he alive today he'd probably wish they had chosen Gene Kranz for the name instead. He'd certainly be skeptical that modern NASA can do any Big Science. Cute robots on Mars, sure, but not big stuff like this.
Activists like George Monbiot and Dave Goulson are parroting their environmental allies when it comes to neonics, but the science is clear - without thiamethoxam, sugar beet crops will continue to be devastated because older, less effective (but often certified organic) pesticides really only work if there are no pests to worry about.

Nostalgia is fine for their backyard gardens but not agriculture. In the real world of food production, neonics are better for the environment than legacy products that were sprayed everywhere. Instead of being mass spraying, which can lead to runoff and persistence, neonicotinoids are derived from natural mechanisms. They are seed treatments, for when plants are most vulnerable to pests.
With CRISPR-Cas9 finally getting its Nobel Prize pundits talk about who was excluded, like Feng Zhang and his research group at the Broad Institute, but only a few talk about entire countries left out. And left behind in the 21st century.
You may heard "chestnuts on an open fire" at Christmas but they are a lot of rarer than they once were. That is due to nature, and importation of a fungus that decimated 4,000,000,000 American Chestnut trees and caused this beautiful hardwood to disappear from eastern forests.

But after 28 years of research, an academic group solved the problem using a gene found in grains, strawberries, etc. It is completely harmless but prevents the tree from developing sores. It is nature fixing nature.
German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture data show that use of crop protection products, e.g. pesticides, went down last year and Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner notes that has been the trend since 2012. Klöckner says it shows Germany is "on the right track" when it comes to reducing use of pesticides but anti-science groups are angry.
There was once a time when theoretical physicists were prized because they were basically smarter than most people - about one or two things.
In 2020, we've all come to know "Karen" in popular culture. She is angry, wealthy, white, and she wants to speak to your manager right now.

In food circles, Karen has been around for much longer. She made Whole Foods great. Her asymmetrical bob has long prowled the aisles looking for free-range, shade-tree-grown, fair-trade spices, because she is not just more ethical than you Plebians buying in Safeway, she is smarter. She knows GMOs cause cancer.
I can save you some time. If the first few episodes of "Star Trek: Lower Decks" are any indication, CBS All Access won't be retaining a lot of new subscribers who signed up to watch it.

It's no secret that "Star Trek" from the 1960s and "Star Wars" from the 1970s hold a grip on cosmic fiction in culture, and they do so without much overlap. Their hardcore fandom, outside 'nerd' sterotypes on television shows, is pretty distinct. I prefer "Star Trek" because it's a little lighter in tone than the Sturm and Drang of the "Star Wars" universe, and that makes it perfect for a comedy.
"Regenerative agriculture" is the latest buzzterm advocated by people who primarily work at food marketing groups in cities, coming along at the end of the no-till, sustainable fads, but what it really means is so subjective it's "just nonsense" according to New Zealand soil expert Dr. Doug Edmeades.

Instead of getting an informed discussion of healthy soil, people are getting political spin, he worries. 

And the politicians and activists implying that local farmers are doing something wrong and wanting to shame them with regulations ignore the reality that they have been practicing actual regenerative agriculture quite well.

Thanks to President Clinton's belief in supplements and alternatives to medicine, in 1994 FDA lost the ability to regulate a whole lot of products - as long as the products made supernatural claims and not medical ones, and put a disclaimer on the packages that no science was involved.