For decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging, looking at changes in the brain's blood oxygen, has over-promised and under-delivered, which made it a punching bag in the science community. People in the field tried to claim changes in pretty pictures meant more neurons working and suggested that meant X part of the brain controls Y behavior. It was never a valid link.

By 2009, a paper even showed how easy it was to use a dead fish to make interpretations about emotion, and achieve the sought-after "statistical significance." Gone was the promise of clinical information that might help with depression, cognitive decline, and brain disorders, and the reason was humans.(1)

Hershey is rolling out Reese’s Plant Based Peanut Butter Cups this month, and it is a great idea. Plant-based foods are all the rage - unless the entire market is about to collapse - and people who like vegan stuff are willing to overpay for food they can then annoy everyone at parties by going on and on about.

Weren't peanut butter cups already vegan? No, they contain milk and vegans say any milk produced by an animal is bad. This new thing swaps out the milk for highly-processed oats and continues their efforts to appeal to everyone with money to spend on their belief system.

Farms have a lot of open land and that has made them ideal for solar power installations. For example, though it is in defiance of the bucolic imagery sold by food and solar marketing groups, which show lush farms with an old tractor on one side and panels on homes charging an $80,000 Tesla on the other, New York has large-scale solar installations on 40 percent of their farms while up to 84 percent of farms will be great for solar.

Not just because of open land but because farms make solar more efficient also.

NIMBY - not in my back yard - is an acronym for those allies who express support for a cause, as long as it is 'somewhere else.' Wind power, for example, is well-liked by people on the coasts of the US and Norway, until government decides to actually put wind power installations there. Then it's time to bring in Greta Thunberg.

In San Francisco, nearly 80 percent of residents say they want to help the homeless but routinely hire private security to patrol their own neighborhoods - to keep out the homeless.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of confusion about what would help mitigate risk and what would not, and when rules seemed arbitrary (e.g. you can go to a tattoo parlor but not get a haircut) it may have caused resentment - and therefore quiet dissent.

Smallpox is no longer with us, but what gets left out of United Nations history is that smallpox was eradicated in spite of the World Health Organisation saying it could never happen, not due to UN leadership. It was driven by US advocates who went around UN bureaucracy, all while being told it was a waste of time and money.

Polio has long been gone from the US as well, and the efforts that made it possible could help the world, but the challenges in achieving that are both cultural and structural.