China has no problem blaming other countries for SARS-CoV-2 - they tried to blame the US for it, claiming it was brought into China in frozen food and the hand-picked World Health Organisation panel said nothing - but their willingness to retaliate is clear. So clear that a panel of experts worried that even discussing the possibility of an accidental leak was cautioned against because it might risk "international harmony."

A Wellcome Trust email from Dr. Jeremy Farrar, current director of the Wellcome Trust and former Oxford professor, stated on February 2 2020 that a likely explanation for the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was a leak from one of the nearby labs in Wuhan.

For Christmas, my wife purchased a Keurig K-Supreme Plus SMART, the latest iteration in coffee pod machines from the company. It came out a few months ago, I even got a special pre-order offer, but when I went to the website a few times there were persistent failures in being able to buy it. So I forgot about it.

After using it, you may be wondering if the website issues were created by the same groups doing the code for the machine. When it works, it is fine. The problem is it does not work too much of the time.

The encapsulated introduction to it is that this is a smart device. It is hooked up to your network and using an app you can customize your coffee to your preferences. That sounds great, but there are caveats.

The James Webb Space Telescope successfully launched earlier today from French Guiana, ending years of doubt and skepticism that the successor to Hubble would ever be finished. 
The Europeans did their part with Ariane 5 and now it's up to a NASA that's been under constant criticism about overruns and a low joint confidence interval since the first delays were announced in the early part of the century and routinely since. 

If you have been in the pro-science community for even a short while, you know that the anti-agriculture and anti-vaccine and anti-natural gas contingents have tremendous overlap. Take a compass and draw a circle around a Whole Foods and you are going to find a nexus of people believe their Tesla uses electricity, but not fossil fuels, for energy, that organic food and supplements make medicine unnecessary, and that cancer is caused by things like cell phones, formaldehyde, or other supernatural things.

If you are reading this, you have already seen the Disney+ series "Hawkeye" episode 5, and you may have seen any number of articles pointing out all of the "Easter eggs" - hidden hooks - to other Marvel stuff, but if you have been around for a whole, you know they are not really Easter Eggs at all.

When 40 million people were unemployed while government employees negotiated with themselves on ways to give a trillion dollar stimulus package to government employees, to independent experts that was just politics as usual.

A company named Arcflash Labs says they will sell you a Gauss rifle, an actual Railgun that uses electromagnetics to fire bullets.  
The U.S. Navy has been working on this for big ships for a while but this is the first time I've seen a handheld version sold to the public.

It sounds like science fiction but it's entirely plausible. The muzzle speed is low, you can't won't kill anyone with it, but you can shoot anything metal that fits. 

Organic food is a huge Big Ag market segment, $135,000,000,000, but it is still a tiny fraction of the agriculture business. Feeding 7 billion people takes science and technology while feeding wealthy white people only takes 'think about the children' posturing and reusable bags.

That is why it is important that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization listens to voices from the entire field.

A 54-page manuscript written jointly by Albert Einstein and Michele Besso just sold for over $13,000,000, quadrupling its pre-sale estimate - a new world auction for any science manuscript.

The Einstein-Besso Manuscript on General Relativity is one of only two surviving manuscripts documenting the genesis of general relativity. The other, known as the Zurich notebook from late 1912/early 1913, is in the Einstein Archive at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The just-auctioned work provides insight into Einstein's work and documents a crucial stage in the development of the theory of general relativity, which reshaped modern understanding of how the universe works.