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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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California has an environmental problem. The state is overwhelmingly desert and rain is scarce for 10 months out of the year. Water instead arrives from the mountains. Yet the state legislature and government are allied with environmentalists. They want dams torn down, which means water from the mountains that melts in the spring and summer can't be gathered. Not only do environmentalists now hate dams, their political supermajority has even stalled the water infrastructure improvements voters demanded over 10 years ago, using endless government panel reviews.
A recent meta-analysis of 151 studies included 11,307 instances of some conditions physicians and scientists dismiss and critics of medicine deem it medical "gaslighting." Joining them are alternative medicine proponents, like Folk Traditional Alternative Complementary Integrative physician Jacob Teitelbaum, MD. As with Drs. Oz and Mark Hyman, he went to medical school only to declare that supernatural forces have been in play all along, forces that only herbs and supplements can help.
A new paper from a California university warns that dust is changing the microbiome of mice.

Because it is just in mice, and mice are not little people, this is only EXPLORATORY, but so are claims about vaccines, GMOs, and corn syrup and because scientists didn't stand up to those when epidemiology papers claimed their correlation was really causation, it might be worth nipping this in the rodent before the Los Angeles Times prints it as human fact.
'Green' chemical products have generally gotten a pass from the environmental community but with one of their own, former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, now in charge of a gigantic government health agency and going after the modern world, the lawsuit money is too good to pass up. So-called eco-friendly chemical products have come under fire.
The polyphagous Spodoptera frugiperda (fall armyworm), a Lepidopteran pest, has European farmers in a panic and, when the environmental NGOs government funds are not around, it has politicians concerned also. 

Though classified as a priority pest since 2023, fall armyworm remains easy to establish and fast to spread. Corn crops, a vital part of EU agriculture, remain at risk. Despite that, policymakers have been promoted using pesticides which work poorly but are approved by environmental groups while talking about climate change. The problem is clear but environmental activists have insisted human health and the environment will be impacted unless legacy products that are ineffective remain the sole solution.
In the 1980s, the majority party in Congress saw demography claims that people with college educations made more money than those without.  Universities began to lobby for student loan changes. Many smaller private schools were facing funding crunches and people going to college would fix that.

The drumbeat for equitable treatment for the poor got louder and as part of other governance, Congress included changes that made so student loans, which originated thanks to President Johnson in 1965, were now unlimited. Because governance is governance, a Republican president signed it over the objections of those who said it was turning a Bachelor's degree into the new high school diploma. Nearly everyone would have one, except with debt.(1)