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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 »

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Though the left-right culture war (all Republican bad, all Democrat gooooooood) is still raging in a small segment of the overall science population (some bloggers, whatever science journalists remain), the rest of America has moved on. People recognize that in the 1990s Democrats were anti-science and in the 2000s Republicans were and now that pendulum has swung again and it will keep happening. Today, food, energy and medical science, the three most pressing short-term issues we face, are vilified by the left.

But the right's subversion of science is not dead yet. Climate change is still a pesky issue for them and though the percentage of people who deny evolution is only slightly higher on the right, their efforts to subvert it are much greater. 
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.