In 2007, with a majority in both houses of Congress, Democrats set out to force science and technology out of the free market and into government mandates. By replacing spoons in the Congressional cafeteria with corn-based alternatives they were going to kill plastic, and by banning incandescent light bulbs they would save us all from...something.

Well, plastic didn't die, the alternatives were actually annoying to everyone. The spoons melted in soup, the knives broke, people ended up using twice as many of them to get through lunch, and it cost a fortune. It also didn't help the environment to have the garbage shipped to Virginia in emissions-belching trucks where they were maybe composted.(1) The technology was not ready.

An Australian vegan claims her neighbor's right to cook ends at her ability to smell it. And she is suing to prevent further assaults on her olfactory sense.

Cilla Carden claims that the smell of neighbors cooking non-plants have ruined her quality of life. “All I can smell is fish. I can’t enjoy my back yard. I can’t go out there.”

The case was thrown out of the lower court so she appealed to the supreme court and in July, the supreme court judge rejected her claim but she has vowed return to court with a new suit against the human diet community. 

Stemell, Inc. of California and its president and Chief Executive Officer, Peyman Taeidi, Ph.D., have been warned by FDA to stop selling umbilical cord blood and umbilical cord products StemL UCB-Plus and StemL UCT-Plus.

The final straw was unhygienic manufacturing processes.

Thanks to President Clinton's 1994 gift to the supplement industry, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, wacky supplements are generally free from FDA oversight unless they claim to be medicine (rather than just hinting about "wellness" effects) or people keel over. All they have to do is put a disclaimer on the label that FDA has not evaluated the cosmic claims customers choose to believe.

But Stemell violates the law in two ways.

Insurance companies charge more at age 16 than age 21 because inexperience and youth make people more accident-prone.

This goes for robots also. 

ROBOpilot, developed by DZYNE Technologies as an easy way to make any aircraft autonomous, passed the Federal Aviation Administration’s Practical Test for piloting light aircraft and carried out its first flight on August 9 in Utah but then a few weeks later had its first incident and was damaged.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine laid it on the table recently; to him, Pluto is a planet. News outlets are calling him out, saying the "official governing body" does not agree.

The Paris-based  International Astronomy Union (IAU) is not really astronomy’s official governing body any more than NASA is. They often claim to be but they are a few hundred astronomers. They do not determine official designations any more than a few scholars with expert in CRISPR at a National Academy can tell FDA to stop treating harmless gene editing in plant varietals as a new drug in the regulatory scheme.

At the beginning of this decade, there were clear lines in science denial. If you denied evolution or global warming, you were more likely to vote Republican, and if you denied medical, agricultural, or energy science, you were more likely to vote Democrat.

The evidence was clear; if you took a compass and drew a circle around a Whole Foods store, you were going to find anti-vaccine beliefs, organic food, and insistence that solar power would keep the lights running. And Whole Foods stores were only in wealthy areas, 80 percent of whom had voted for President Obama.

White rhinos (Ceratotherium simum) are the second largest land mammal after the elephant. Adult males weigh up to 3.5 tons.

Called by some the square-lipped rhinoceros due to their square upper lip, they have a longer skull than black rhinos and a larger shoulder hump. They have two horns.

There are over 20,000 of them left, a big conservation win, but if you read environmental accounts they are going extinct, only two remain. 

How can there be 20,000 of a species and yet only two?

In 1979, the United States Department of Education was created and no one was sure why, since education is done at the local level. But both chambers had a Democratic majority and Carter was a Democratic president and they said it was for the children so they split up the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two Cabinet level departments.(1)

In science, the saying goes, if it can happen in nature it will. 

This Totalitarian Principle expressed by Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann actually originated with Plato. Nothing new there, what is interesting in a recent article by by Tom Siegfried in Science News is that Gell-Mann doesn't seem to have been inspired by T.H. White of "The Sword In The Stone" fame.

White did have that statement in the 1958 edition of "The Once and Future King" compilation but not in the prior books leading back to 1938. Gell-Mann had placed it in a strong nuclear force paper in 1956.