Science 2.0

The pandemic of 2020 caused a lot of people to rethink science beliefs that were more luxury than reality. Did you want your family protected by some stuff that claimed to be organic and natural or did you want Clorox, Lysol, and Purell that actually worked? Did you want Peruvian tree bark sold by Chris Cuomo and his wife or a COVID-19 vaccine?

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With the climate crisis being a consideration at the forefront of energy generation today, it's no surprise that solar power is receiving so much good press. However, despite that, there's very slow adoption of the alternative energy source. In the US, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy mentions that there's enough solar power generation to power twelve million American households. Yet, in a country with over three hundred million residents, this seems like a drop in the bucket. Why has solar not garnered the sort of traction one would expect for a population that's so involved in changing over to alternative fuels?

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Wait, I can almost hear you say it: "Xi_b what? Let's move on, where's the sports section?" Ok, if you need to, please go. But do not underestimate excited Xi_b baryons. They are a helluva lot of fun to watch as they pop into existence and then decay in stages, as if stripping piece by piece, throwing out opaque layers of matter one by one, and finally exposing their naked beauty in full bloom.

Are you getting aroused yet? we are talking about a haDR-on here, don't be mistaken, but the matter is not less sexy than the stuff you'd get on the sports section anyway. For, you know, there is simply so much we still do not know about how quarks can create excited states of nuclear matter, that one cannot ignore any new development. 

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In past years there has been ongoing concern that not enough people got the annual flu vaccine.

Some of it was laziness, some of it was lack of education. There were few outright deniers that flu was a problem. Instead, it seemed to be the opposite. If someone had a bad cold they still said they had the flu, and some said they think they might have the flu, which led most doctors to remind people that if you think you have the flu, you don't have the flu.

The real vaccine deniers were more coastal elites who believed a discredited former doctor, Andrew Wakefield, who was interested in selling a competitor to existing vaccines, and used a tiny sample of hand-picked kids to claim that vaccines caused autism in a paper that was then retracted.

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For much of 2020, it looked like media was trying to pivot the anti-vaccine movement from being predominantly left wing to one afflicting right. More right-wing people than left in America didn't want to wear masks, after all, so it seemed easy to claim they would be less likely to take a vaccine.

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A small fish in central Texas, a freshwater mussel in the Mobile River basin, and another mussel in Alabama’s Coosa and Cahaba Rivers have something strange in common; they appeared on an EPA list of threatened species “likely to be adversely affected” by a popular herbicide named atrazine.

I don't see how could things get worse for the San Marcos gambusia, the Upland Combshell and the Southern Acornshell. They're all extinct. I lived in the southern US in the early 1970s and never saw a Southern Acornshell. It would have been impossible, it was gone by then.

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Rather than making affordable health care reality, the Affordable Care Act sent costs for many privately-insured people up as much as 700 percent. The federal government allowed insurers to pass through their new losses to everyone else and even with that, many insurers fled states due to the program being insoluble.

Perhaps the solution is not to have people pay 700 percent more, but to force hospitals to be transparent about costs. And that would mean more realistic pricing without a reduction in quality.

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I still believed in God (I am now an atheist) when I heard the following question at a seminar, first posed by Einstein, and was stunned by its elegance and depth: ‘If there is a God who created the entire universe and ALL of its laws of physics, does God follow God’s own laws? Or can God supersede his own laws, such as traveling faster than the speed of light and thus being able to be in two different places at the same time?’ Could the answer help us prove whether or not God exists or is this where scientific empiricism and religious faith intersect, with NO true answer? David Frost, 67, Los Angeles.

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The Pennsylvania Game Commission manages 1.5 million acres of land for its citizens and all "public land owners" are able to use it for hiking, hunting and various activities.

Despite such an enormous responsibility, the Game Commission receives no General fund appropriations. The Game Commission and state biologists instead get to be stewards of nature thanks to nearly all of its $120,000,000 in funding coming from licenses like deer hunting. 

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Once upon a time, it was important that farmers - the first agricultural scientists - create seeds that were larger, more nutritious, and more resilient to environmental stress. Nature might bring rain, it might not, pests were going to eat their way through whole fields if they could. 

As agriculture improved, civilization followed. Seeds such as wheat, rice and corn directly provide about 70% of the calories eaten by people every day. What isn't directly eaten is still contributing, either by providing feed for livestock or by being grown into fruits and vegetables. 

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Coca-Cola and Disney do not simply share being on Interbrand's Global Top Brands, says a new paper, they also share linguistically feminine names, and that helps their success with men and women. In fact, the highest-ranking companies have, on average, more feminine names than lower-ranked companies, they claim.

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Imagine you hire a plumber and he needs to work on your plumbing and instead of coming over to fix that he sends his cousin who owns a lawn service.

That is analogous to what is happening at EPA regarding a common herbicide (the second most popular in the U.S.) named atrazine.

There is nothing wrong with it scientifically, it is causing no harm, but EPA is still going to hand it over to a group like the US Fish and Wildlife Services and let them just decide whether or not it might harm endangered species. No science needed.

They are even blaming it for extinctions that occurred nearly 50 years ago.

The Forever War on Science story has been in development...forever...but this is the first time they introduced time travel.

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'The right thing, the wrong thing, do it with authority is a common' is a common statement for leadership behavior.

Humans take comfort in confidence. Even in things like facts; the faster the answer the more likely others will believe it. 

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[This is the second part of a two-part article on Cosmic Messenger astrophysics. For part 1, please click here.]

We can also "see" showers of secondary particles from cosmic rays thanks to the Cherenkov light they produce. Cherenkov light is emitted when charged particles travel in a medium at speeds higher than the speed of light itself! Light, in fact, slows down a little when it traverses a medium; energetic particles do not, so they create a conic "shock wave" similar to the boom of supersonic airplanes. 

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In the age of the dinosaurs, you could have walked from one pole to another. At that time, the continents were all joined together, forming the supercontinent Pangea. 

Yet they didn't.Though sauropodomorph dinosaurs first appeared in Argentina and Brazil about 230 million years ago, it took them 15,000,000 years to migrate to the northern hemisphere.

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Do you think food is medicine? While Whole Foods imagery touted that in 2019, the coronavirus pandemic that began in Wuhan later that year punctured efforts to convince the public that health is a moral or economic issue - you owe it to your kids to buy overpriced food. SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic showed that eating expensive onions won't save anyone from anything. 

What may help save people is remembering the past rather than wishful thinking about the present. In this case, looking back at the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic which killed far more than COVID-19.

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If a tourist doesn't know messing around with a coral reef is bad, they may try to touch them or pet turtles, but after being told by someone local that it has risks for the nature they are there to see they far less likely to do so.

A new paper found that such "nudges" works well. Which would mean we often don't need government 'ignore of the law is no excuse' type shaming policies to change behavior.

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Have you ever looked up to a clear sky on a moonless night, in a place away from large cities? If you have, you will remember seeing hundreds of bright stars, and maybe even the faint collective glow of 250 billion more within the Milky Way, our own galaxy.

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There are a few known risk factors for heart disease; age is the big one, and then genetics and smoking. Everything else is instead a risk factor for a risk factor for heart disease or even more circumstantial. So butter was a risk factor for cholesterol which was a risk factor for high blood pressure which was a risk factor for heart disease.

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At the turn of the 20th century Carrie Nation smashed up a saloon in Kansas, gold was discovered in Alaska, and New York City's boundaries became set with the inclusion of Queens and Staten Island.

America had five new states and they had a big problem.(1)

Water. 

Homesteaders wanted to move out west, and government wanted to help, but there was a water issue. When rain was happening things were fine but nature is fickle. Weather was less predictable then and even if you lived near a river, there was no guarantee you'd have water.

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