In the 1980s, Democrats produced data showing that a college degree meant hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime earnings difference than a high school diploma. It should be a right, they said, and universities readily agreed. Student loans became unlimited and suddenly it wasn't just rich dumb kids or scholarship winners, everyone could go everywhere.
In 2016, President Obama listened to reason and signed the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, which amended the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and created a mandatory requirement for EPA to evaluate existing chemicals using transparent methodology and risk-based assessment. No more simplistic epidemiology. Which meant no more junk that had anti-science activists declaring that a weedkiller turned frogs gay or PFAS in pizza boxes created greater risk for obesity than pizza.
Are kids walking at night on Halloween safe? What's the physics of ghosts? How many toxic chemicals are in that organic pumpkin I bought? Is there a Secret Sadist out there putting razor blades in candy? You can find out the answers to all those questions and more in Halloween Science 2.0. It covers the history of the holiday, of course, this is Science 2.0, not a textbook, through the lens of biology, anthropology and more!
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer and once such a pillar of the Democratic party that President Obama floated his name to run the Environmental Protection Agency.Now he controls the agency that controls EPA. That is a big win for anti-science progressives. And because they are playing chess, not checkers, anti-science Republicans think it's their idea.
Gen X is getting its own Captain America. This is a big deal. Culturally, the Boomer majority gave way to the next large demographic, Millennials, while Gen X got slighted. Even though we had the best music since the 1940s.On the plus side, being a minority means we don't get hate. Gen Z dislikes millennials for being cringe, millennials dislike Gen Z for being so Puritan, and everyone dislikes Boomers because they won't stop talking about Woodstock and Kennedy. Some argue that instead of being too small to matter we are the coolest but that's subjective.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has sent seven recent letters sent to companies selling products containing 7-hydroxymitragynine, also known as 7-OH.1, an illegal opioid.It became popular because it is found in the dangerous supplement kratom, illegal even in the country that exports it to the United States, and supplement grifters also began selling the compound in gummies, drink mixes, and shots.
It's always easy to be critical of government, but while the new administration cut grants for sociologists who want to "study" why people still play Everquest 2, it also boosted funding for the National Animal Health Laboratory Network, and programs like the National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program and the National Animal Vaccine and Veterinary Countermeasures Bank.
Once a decade, I buy a pair of good sunglasses. I didn't know I was doing that, it wasn't intentional, I only realized it when I bought a pair of Persol sunglasses in 2005 that my wife mentioned it seemed to be a pattern. It really wasn't. I still had a pair of Aviators from the 1980s and she bought me a pair of sunglasses in the 1990s so it wasn't really a trend, it was coincidence. In 2015 or 2016, while living in New York City due to running a nonprofit there, I was tired of my old glasses and walked into a Sunglass Hut on Fifth Avenue and bought a new pair.
In less than a week, France is implementing a ban on cigarettes in some public spaces, like near schools or on beaches. While this may not be a public health win right away, any more than boycotting Exxon on Tuesday changes gas prices, it could be a pollution victory sooner rather than later.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has released the first image using the largest camera in the world. The 3200-megapixel resolution wide field of view Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera.Its high-definition images use six different color filters can photograph 45 times the area of the full moon in the sky with each exposure. So wide it can capture the entire southern sky in just three nights of shooting.
