Fake Banner
Physician Burnout Is Common - And Informal Rationing Is One Big Cause

If the government promises every home a great gardener, most people recognize they won't get a...

Cancel Culture Prevents The Best Researchers From Engaging With The Food Industry

After Chris Wild took over the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a UN-funded...

Vermont Should Stop Showing Leadership In Overruling Scientists On Farming

Despite Vermont's Agricultural  Innovation Board (AIB), created to inform regulatory recommendations...

Evolutionary Psychology: Your Parents Income During Pregnancy Made You Gay

Evolutionary psychology, the discipline that claimed we're being manipulated by flowers and evolved...

User picture.
picture for picture for Hontas Farmerpicture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for Fred Phillipspicture for Jim Myrespicture for Heidi Henderson
Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

Blogroll
It is America's worst kept secret - the government has top secret military installations.

But the hype around Area 51 rapidly grew to be about aliens and UFOs. Instead, it was a more typical Cold War tale.  President Eisenhower had signed off on a secret reconnaissance plane and the military wanted it flown from a secret location.

The plane became the well-known U-2 and a CIA official, an Air Force officer and the now legendary Kelly Johnson, first team leader of the Lockheed Skunk Works and the guiding hand behind the P-38 and later the U-2 and the SR-71, flew over Nevada to find a location.
I am making the call: despite all the buzz it is currently getting due to crowdsourced funding for lots of projects, by wading into the anti-technology culture war, I am predicting the demise of Kickstarter. 

The people behind Kickstarter have declared that they are going to artificially pick the winners and losers of crowd funding and once that happens, the road to ruin is sure to follow. 
Humanitarian research at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is geared toward various projects, among them saving millions of children from death and blindness due to Vitamin A deficiency.
It's not often that I can say I am stunned by a judicial decision but I have been talking about Yucca Mountain since President Obama took office and immediately honored his deal with Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada to kill the project, after every study by scientists found it the safest place for 70,000 metric tons of high-level waste and a whole lot of money had been spent.

It was the most flagrant scientization of politics in recent memory - and the court has taken notice.
Chipotle, the burrito restaurant chain, served more than 120 million pounds of beef, pork and chicken last year.  It now has a problem - sales continue to go up. Its "never ever" policy regarding the use of beef that has never been ill and must never have gotten antibiotics means it can't find enough meat. At least find enough and remain competitive.

So the company has floated the idea of buying beef that got antibiotics due to an illness. That means its "never ever" policy which, let's face it, was never evidence-based and solely a feel-good gimmick anyway, may be going away.

It's that, or raise prices a lot, or settle for lower-quality meat. 
It's not right for cobia not to be carnivorous but researchers in Baltimore have scientifically modified these fish so that they no longer occupy their usual place in nature's circle of life: they are now unnatural vegetarians.

During four years of experimentation, these "scientists" created a synthetic mixture using taurine, a chemical found in human energy drinks, plant-based (not fish) proteins and fatty acids and fed it to these unsuspecting creatures and it ruined their diets; they became addicted to this new Frankenfood and changed their feeding patterns.