Just over a year ago I testified before a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel in support of the iQOS device, a smoking replacement tool that heats tobacco but doesn't ignite it.

There is a big difference between a trial lawyer convincing a jury in one of America's most anti-science regions that an herbicide that only acts on plants might be able to cause human cancer, and scientists with knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology who know better.

Cows and chickens will never go extinct because they are food, and some useless critters like Aedes aegypti have managed to tough it all despite being just disease vectors. For everything else, it can be a crap shoot. Nature is out to kill us all.

A new index of scientific output has been released and it finds that the United States continues to dominate in research, bolstered by the private sector accounting for nearly 70 percent of science funding, where most other developed countries instead rely on government.

The analysis factored in the number researchers as percentage of population, patents, papers released, and GDP spending. 

When we think of Mt. Everest, it's usually imagery like Sir Edmund Hillary and his guide Tenzing Norgay in parkas and with oxygen tanks making the hazardous 29.000 climb. And then there are the dead bodies, nearly 300 of them, those who perished on the trek to the summit.

What we don't think of is a man running, yet that is what Kilian Jornet Burgada did part of the way in famous photos - and then after 26 hours and 31 minutes, the fastest climb ever(1), he came back down, rested, and did it again, all within a week.

Poor people live in areas with more pollution, but pollution is relative in 2019.