Fake Banner
Misinformation Common Among Women With Breast Cancer

Vaccines are getting American media attention now that Republicans are engaging in misinformation...

Even With Universal Health Care, Mothers Don't Go To Postnatal Check-Ups

For decades, health care costs have been a political topic in America. Advocates argue it is the...

Happy Twelfth Night - Or Divorce Day, Depending On How Your 2026 Is Going

Today is, in Christian observance, Twelfth Night, the end of The 12 Days of Christmas in that song...

Blood Pressure Medication Adherence May Not Be Cost, It May Be Annoyance At Defensive Medicine

High blood pressure is an important risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease and premature...

User picture.
picture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for Fred Phillipspicture for Hontas Farmerpicture for picture for Patrick Lockerbypicture for Ilias Tyrovolas
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
Imagine a world where the tedious moments of life, cleaning or driving a car or whatever, could be spent visiting the Louvre or meeting new people or learning history. 

The whole universe of information is at your fingertips. The only evidence of intelligence is how well you utilize the system, multitasking and parsing information while chatting and even letting someone ride shotgun in your experiences. Genius itself would be redefined.

Then imagine it all disappeared. Could you remember what people told you without a digital archive of the conversation? How they look? Could you find your way home?
At a time when the EPA is rushing to place new regulations on the one thing that is still cheap and increasingly environmentally effective in America, energy, it may seem strange to laud the EPA. But career scientists do solid work there.

In 2007, after a marketing blitz for climate change during much of 2006 and the release of a new UN IPCC report, mentioning that methane had 23X the global warming effect of CO2 would get you shouted down and sternly reminded that CO2 lasts far longer.

That is absolutely correct. Yet recently, twice in the same week, two papers warned us that methane will cause global warming regardless of CO2.

Cosmos, hosted by Science 2.0 fave Dr. Neil Tyson, is wrapping up and it seems to have found its niche.

Its 3,450,000 viewers yesterday is way down from its debut but it is nowhere near the crash-and-burn Seth MacFarlane has just experienced with A Million Ways to Die in the West. The good news is that, like with his western comedy, Cosmos did not have a high budget and people who stuck it out this long are going to buy the DVDs - but it has already made a lot of money.
Imagine this as a business model: You own a large potato farm. You have workers who grow and process the potatoes, you hire people to pay them, you have a sales force to sell them and then you pay trucks to ship them and have people to collect the money. You have fixed and variable costs and you charge enough money to pay those and make a profit. You have created jobs.

The government decides that it wants to encourage everyone to grow potatoes. So they pass a law saying that if people will grow their own potatoes, they will subsidize it using tax dollars generated by other companies and workers. Then they mandate that in order to make growing potatoes appealing to more people, you will have to buy potatoes from individuals at the same price you sell them.
How dare biologists create something not found in nature!

Well, mankind has a lot of experience in trying to keep nature from killing us - the war between man and nature is a grudge match whose history and resentments run deep.  When scientists stop trying to keep nature from killing us is when we should worry.