Most people don't realize it, but "GMO" is essentially a legal definition and only a vague scientific one. After all, what food has not been 'genetically modified' by now? When is the cut-off date that food remains "organic" and when it becomes icky science?

GMOs are in some instances banned in Europe, for example, but they did not want to put European farmers out of business in their zeal to penalize American companies, so they created a precise definition of GMO that excluded things made using mutagenesis, a less precise (and therefore more risky) form of genetic modification that preceded modern GMOs. So what have European companies gone back to in order to create new products? Mutagenesis.

Why does the moon look bigger when it’s near the horizon?

It's a mystery at least 3,000 years old. Physicists attributed it to refraction while the “angle-of-regard” hypothesis said it was due to the angle that our eyes (or head) make relative to the horizon. The more your eyes are angled upward, the thinking goes, the smaller something looks, due to the physiology of our visual system.

And then some psychologists today say it is a conflict between the conscious and subconscious mind, because, as Kepler said, “Perception does not belong to optics but to the study of the wonderful.”

Michael LaCour, the UCLA graduate student at the center of a bizarre "science" scandal - we'd do science a real favor if we stopped calling political science and sociology science, even if they get published in Science - apparently made up data in a different study about political bias in the media. The one that got people looking into his other work was his claim that if we just talked to each other, people would change their minds. It was a delight for the truly gullible and cultural activists and it made political science feel relevant.

That the Tennessee Valley Authority, arguably one of American history's most famous public works projects, has been pursuing the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City, Tennessee after 36 years is testament to endurance, namely being willing to persist in the face of bizarre government obstacles that the modern Nuclear Regulatory Commission, run by people without nuclear expertise, exists to create.

Though approved in 1973, the near-disaster at Three Mile Island in 1979 put Democrats squarely against nuclear science and concerns - some manufactured (quality assurance records with incomplete information) and some real (concerns about welding in non-critical areas) - led to delays.

A pat on the head is better than some kind words to your dog, found a study from January. If they have a choice, dogs will always take petting over praise, and that was found among shelter dogs and those with owners.

Phrased in fancy science talk: "We first assessed preference using a concurrent choice procedure in which dogs were able to choose between interacting with a person providing petting or a person providing vocal praise. The time allocated to available alternatives can be used as a measure of preference (Baum and Rachlin, 1969), in this case dogs’ preference for different types of human social interaction. By measuring proximity, our results might point to interactions that could be relevant in producing attachment behaviors."

The KFC Tray Typer is a paper thin, durable, rectangular, standard QWERTY keyboard that you link to your device via Bluetooth and use it to type answers, questions, stories, thoughts or impressions to your personal contacts. Use SMSes, emails, tweets, or whatever else you have on your phone. You can echarge it via USB when it runs out of juice.

Most importantly, you won't get your device all greasy because, you know, you can't go 5 minutes without showing people your chicken bones on Instagram.

DogTilligent has developed the All-in-One Smart Dog Collar with GPS, WiFi capability, an accelerometer, a thermometer, a speaker, LED lights, and a microphone.

It helps a dog owner keep track of the dog by warning when the collar has traveled beyond a predetermined location. The Virtual Leash warns the dog when it’s moving away from a human companion by whistling, vibrating, and simulating a tug on the collar.


H/T Neatorama

In 1849, Abraham Lincoln was still 11 years from becoming President but his experience as a deck-hand on a Mississippi flat-boat would make him the first U.S. President to have a patent - No. 6,469 for utilizing inflated cylinders to float grounded vessels through shallow water - "buoying boats over shoals".

Also of note: 

In 1649 the famed French mathematician, physicist and inventor Blaise Pascal obtained a monopoly by royal decree for his computing machine.



And Orville and Wilbur Wright received the first airplane patent in the USA, for "new and useful improvements in Flying Machines" (U.S. No. 821,393).

What if everyone ate an American diet?

Well, it would mean the developing world finally has parity with the developed world, which has been the entire goal of progressive culture. But now that it is achievable, progressive doomsday prophets who have taken over an alarming chunk of the environmental movement (and there are hundreds of these sites, all of them making money and paying people) are saying that we need to go back in time, when only rich elites had a healthy normal diet and everyone else ate rich or bread or whatever.