Science 2.0

If you need any new evidence that science is just another arm of politics, look to the switch in the Republican party once President Donald Trump embraced former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer, friend of Obama, and anti-science zealot Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.(1)

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Colleges and universities are struggling to stay afloat.

The reasons are numerous: declining numbers of college-age students in much of the country, rising tuition at public institutions as state funding shrinks, and a growing skepticism about the value of a college degree.

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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.

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More than 60% of traffic collisions at intersections involve left turns. Some U.S. cities – including San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Birmingham, Alabama – are restricting left turns.

Dr. Vikash Gayah, a professor of civil engineering at Penn State University and the interim director of the Larson Transportation Institute, discusses how left turns at intersections cause accidents, make traffic worse and use more gas.

How dangerous are left turns at intersections?

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The year is 2028. Donald J. Trump declared himself king a few months ago. After denouncing as fake news the perfectly true fact that he shat himself at his coronation ceremony, he spiraled into a rant so incoherent that he was admitted to a care institution. He is visited on alternate days by Hope Hicks and Karoline Leavitt. He directs vile, copulatory remarks at both of them.

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People dedicated to the art of grilling often choose lump charcoal – actual pieces of wood that have been turned into charcoal – over briquettes, which are compressed charcoal dust with other ingredients to keep the dust together and help it burn better.

The kinds of wood used to make lump charcoal affect how it burns and how the food tastes when grilled. Dedicated grillers are often willing to pay a premium for higher heat, no additives, particular flavors and the cleaner burn they get from particular wood species in lump charcoal.

Buyers probably expect the label to accurately report how much charcoal they are getting, what kind of wood it is, and where the wood was grown.

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In 1915's The Temperance Program, Thomas F. Hubbard et al. laid out the progressive case for why alcohol needed to be banned so convincingly that in 1917, with Democratic control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they got the 18th Amendment to the Constitution out of Washington, D.C. and into voting by the states.(1) Because people irrationally sided with elites then as they do now, Democratic states immediately ratified it and it raced to the 36 needed so quickly that the two Republican-controlled states that voted it down, Connecticut and Rhode Island, were irrelevant.

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Former Natural Resources Defense Council Attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. didn't get more pro-science by becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services, he instead acts like his beliefs in The Ancient Ways - no cell phones, no vaccines, food scarcity - have been validated.

He has proposed "wellness farms" to combat various problems he insists are lifestyle issues only government can fix. Basically, he is piling onto beliefs he advocated when his friend and fellow Democrat President Barack Obama was in office.(1) By his second term, President Obama wanted government so desperately in the lives of people he manufactured two things that "Obamacare" could fix; a prediabetes and a vaping epidemic.

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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.

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s decision to claw back US$3.7 billion in grants from industrial demonstration projects may create an unexpected opening for American manufacturing.

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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.  

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In the 1980s, there was a conflict raging about recycling. Governments were starting to do it while states that had a 'bottle bill' - a deposit on bottles you got refunded upon return - wanted to keep their success.

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Scholars have developed a method to encode binary and Morse code messages in ice.

A 'message in a bubble' has limited practical utility, information storage in Antarctica and the Arctic is expensive but less challenging than storing message in ice, but they are more covert than paper documents and can easily be carried.

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The discovery of the Denisovans 15 years ago set off a chain of evolutionary research into how they contributed to modern East Asians and Oceanians. A new study adds evidence. Researchers have confirmed that a nearly complete hominin skull from 146,000 years ago that was discovered near Harbin belongs to the Denisovan lineage even as it is a new species, Homo longi.  

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In the Cradles of Civilization, there are entire cities covered in sand that were once thriving places. The climate shifted and humans did with it. One of our greatest cultural achievements has been our ability to adapt to a natural world that is out to destroy and rebuild everything, including us.

A new study shows we were adapting to diverse areas and environmental changes long before the creation of agriculture and resulting civilizations. Even before worldwide migration, we were bending African forests and deserts. Failing to do so was why the probably earliest migration efforts seemed to have disappeared with barely a trace. 

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Over 40 years ago, President Ronald Reagan, the most pro-science president of the 20th century, proposed a lot of bold initiatives. A Superconducting Super Collider was one goal, a big boost for government funding of basic research was another, and he also laid out a Strategic Defense Initiative. A missile defense system. That last one was dismissed by Democrats in Congress and media corporations as "Star Wars" fantasy.

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Screen time is a concern for parents and mental health advocates but looking at screen time may be treating the symptom rather than the disease. What is a true harbinger for risk of mental health problems is addictive behavior in young people.

National surveys have documented rising screen use but a new paper mapped longitudinal trajectories of addictive use specifically, rather generic limits on screen time.The data were social media use of nearly 4,300 children enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, starting at age 8, and how use changed over the next four years. 

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Disinformation and misinformation are common tactics and in the 2008 they entered the social media realm. Senator Barack Obama came from behind to overtake Senator Hillary Clinton to secure the Democratic nomination and then used the 100% greater funding he got by reneging on his promise to limit himself to public financing, as his opponent Senator John McCain did, to pour money into social media and an easy victory.

That's all factually true but if enough people object to that framing and demand a Community Note and then the Community Note is clarified by people like them, I would be a data point showing that Clinton supporters are far more likely to engage in disinformation than Obama ones.

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As the developed world becomes more removed from science and health, it is easier to embrace beliefs that science and medicine are not needed at all, with some claiming that vaccines and pesticides are not really needed, the natural world can do it without modern tools.

Companies will cater to that also. If enough people mobilized by politicians and activists insist they don't want some harmless food coloring or BPA, companies will remove those and simply charge more. The products won't be healthier, just more costly. Yet sometimes mimicking the natural world can be beneficial, like with neonicotinoid seed treatments based on natural pesticide effects and have reduced mass spraying and off-target effects so well that bees have rebounded and now exist in record numbers.

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