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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...

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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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Let's be honest, if you are a Republican, you don't care about the environment because you received your own oil well when you registered to vote.  And you like vampire babies. So you do not care about the emissions of your yacht.

But if you are a rich Democrat, things are a little dicier.  Buying pretend carbon offsets for a 29,000 square foot house can only get you so far. If you want to own a superyacht too, that's a lot of liberal guilt to agonize over. What to do?
Max Lugavere, founding producer and host for Current TV, the Emmy winning cable network started by Al Gore, started a column on Psychology Today and came up with this gem.(1)

He writes that he saw a piece by Nick Cox, a writer living in Cambridge, MA, called How To Be Emotionally Stable Without Getting Bored and liked it so much he...put it to music.
If you do not have your 11-year-old child in a car seat while driving and in a bicycle helmet while playing, you are putting them at severe risk.  We have to protect them.  Or not. While we expose kids to all kinds of harmful cultural stuff at earlier and earlier ages (sex, violence, political debates) we don't trust their physical competence or their judgment.

Heck, the people behind the government health care plan think 25 should be the earliest age for adulthood.
If you're an anti-science hippie obsessed with the notion that 'natural' is always superior to whatever 'inorganic' means to people who know nothing about science or medicine or food or generally what carbon-based life means, I have good news for you; you may soon be able to determine if that caffeine in your Organic, Free-Range Red Bull is really natural.

What? Organic, Free-Range Red Bull doesn't exist?  Well, it should. Farmer's Market shoppers will dutifully line up for that, I can just feel it.
With the hundredth anniversary of the maiden voyage, and subsequent sinking, of the RMS Titanic (covering April 14th-April 15th, 2012) fast approaching, you probably expect someone in the world of 2012 to implicate global warming.

Donald Olson, a physics professor at Texas State University, has a more interesting idea. Along with fellow TSU member Russell Doescher and Roger Sinnott they lay out the hypothesis in Sky&Telescope that the Moon was involved. And the Sun too.
One of our popular topics last year was earthquakes.  That makes sense, with the earthquake in Japan.  It's not like there was some greater instance of earthquakes but if you are a Doomsday fearmonger, any event is a good event; that means anti-science activists determined to send us back to the 13th century looked for ways to make earthquakes result from fracking.

If you dispute that, you get meaningless gibberish responses like 'you can't prove the earthquakes did not come from fracking', which is true, in the same way you can't prove I am not the disembodied brain of Adolf Hitler writing this piece from my Antarctic Fortress where I am plotting the Fourth Reich - but it's sort of silly to live your life believing it.