The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating a multistate outbreak of hepatitis A illnesses potentially linked to blackberries from the grocery store Fresh Thyme Farmers Market in Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.

As of today, CDC reports 16 illnesses, with the most recent illness onset date on November 15, 2019.

This week you have likely been deluged with fast-talking influencers on television talking about how to stick to your diet this holiday season. They don't know what they are talking about, next week the same group of thin, hurried, fast-talking, overconfident people will be making gift recommendations.

Calories are a marathon, not a one-day spring. If you are fat, binging for one day didn't cause it, it is the chronic overeating that did. I lived in Manhattan, with some of the best Italian food on earth. Somehow I gained 10 pounds? There was no mystery, it was eating stromboli every day and pretending it was a treat rather than a lifestyle.

Land speed records used to be a big deal, in 1984’s “Buckaroo Banzai: Across The 8th Dimension”, the hero completes brain surgery because he has to drive his jet car to impress the Department of Defense, while his secret mission is to discover a portal to another dimension.

Now, it is not such a big deal. While everyone knows Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in a jet, few can tell you who broke Mach 2 or how fast planes can go today. And so it goes with cars.

On November 19th, 1969, Apollo 12 landed on the moon, but most people from the era don't remember much about it. Apollo 11, sure, a giant leap for all mankind, and Apollo 13 was the most successful failure NASA ever had, it got a movie made about it, but that leaves Apollo 12 a memory.

And that's too bad. Because they were the funniest Apollo crew, according to this NPR spot.

Wealthy western academics working at billion dollar institutions funded by trillion dollar governments are frustrated that African countries don't want to give away their climate data.

They're not wrong for wanting a piece of the pie, especially from Europeans. Europeans often take data from Africa and use it for colonial purposes, like keeping Africa reliant on European goods by scaring people about science that would give Africans a level playing field.(1) 

I didn't see "Star Wars" when I was in theaters the first time. We were poor and living in rural Pennsylvania and never went to a movie as a family, but I did see it when it was re-released in 1981, after "The Empire Strikes Back." They had given it a new name ("A New Hope") but it retained an old gaffe.(1)

Though the Japanese navy became famous for Kamikaze (Tokubetsu Kōgekita) suicide attacks using planes, it was really only during the last year of World War II that they occurred. And Vulcan Inc.’s Research Vessell Petrel's latest discovery may have been from the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which means it may have been due to the first instance of such a suicide plane encounter. 

After the Allied Invasion to reclaim the Philippine Islands on October 20, 1944, the Japanese sent an armada composed of the Main Body (Northern), First Striking Force (Force "A" and Force "C"), and the Southwest Area Force, to destroy the Allied fleet. 

On this day in 1919, exactly 100 years ago, the Volstead Act introduced Prohibition, which was signed into law and created a ban on alcohol. 

A ban on alcohol was necessary, according to social authoritarian groups like the Anti-Saloon League and Woman's Christian Temperance Union, because companies had created alcohol flavors that too many people liked, it was not safe to have alcohol even at a business, families were being ruined. It was for the children.

Dr. Jed Rose has spent his entire career trying to get people to smoke fewer cigarettes, and to do so he invented the nicotine patch. He even invented an e-cigarette in the 1980s because he understood how people became addicted to a drug that "doesn't get people visibly high", even when the cigarette smoke that came with it could kill them.

But he has been around long enough to know that "anti-" forces, in business only because of money they got from the Big Tobacco Master Settlement related to cigarettes, a dwindling market, are going to look for new targets and are using a thousand illnesses related to bootleg vaping juice to suppress the legitimate smoking cessation and harm reduction fields.