Science 2.0

If you believe your electric car is not using the 80 percent of electricity generated by conventional fuels, you may also believe the high cost is worth it to save the environment. But there is no running from the environmental problems created by the cars themselves. 

There can be no sustainable value chain when we haven't had new batteries in 30 years. Unfortunately, as long as mandates and subsidies are in effect, there is no incentive to create better technology, which means the only hope is to reuse old, inefficient batteries in order to mitigate the high social and environmental toll electric cars extract now.

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Activists who live in a bubble where solar is 'ready' and electric cars save the planet spend a lot of time waffling when it comes to reality; pipelines are bad except when railroads are in the news, but one thing US anti-science activists don't flip on is nuclear energy.

They hate it, and have since the 1960s. In 1994, American Woomeister-in-Chief President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry (now President's Biden's Special Presidential Envoy for Climate)(1) officially got nuclear science run out of the US, long a goal of Democrats, during which time a series of suspect alternatives have been touted, from hydothermal to natural gas to ethanol to solar. 

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Right now, 17 percent of the US is cropland while 51 percent is open and essentially unused. We have more open space in the US than the entire continent of Africa, only 3 percent of our land is urban, but you might not be aware of that because activists insist that urban blight is ruining the country.

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Once upon a time, American standards of identity were so strict that a sliced cheese company was forbidden from noting how much milk when into its cheese lest consumers believe that is how much calcium it had.

Were American consumers that stupid in the 1990s? If so, FDA no longer believes it, nor do they believe that consumers will be fooled by anything, because products made from juice squeezin's can be called "milk." The public knows it is not really milk, FDA says. Alternative milk companies don't like it anyway.

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The complexities of the human brain and its underlying genetic and biological mechanisms are truly fascinating. A recent study by scientists at Aarhus University sheds new light on the genetic factors underlying attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a common neurodevelopmental disorder affecting millions of people worldwide. By studying over six million genetic variants in nearly 40,000 people with ADHD and almost 187,000 without ADHD, the researchers identified 27 genetic risk variants for the disorder. These risk genes are expressed in the brain and neurons, particularly dopaminergic neurons, which play a role in reward response and the concentration of dopamine in different brain regions.
The Importance of the Study

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If you have ever seen pictures of people doing yoga with goats or sunning their butt-holes(1), you may have assumed it is California, but that is unfair. It is just as likely to be any state on the west coast.

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To adult audiences in 1977, "Star Wars" was the most realistic special effects they had ever witnessed while to younger people of today, the defects are obvious. Some of that is due to better technology, a cheap TV has better clarity and resolution that an IMAX screen a generation ago, but some of it is that they are trained to see better.

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If you have ever had a CT scan using a contrast material like iodine, you were probably told to drink plenty of fluids to flush it out of your system. It is one-size-fits-all advice more to protect people who may have received a lot of them, because the dose makes the poison, or those who have chronic kidney disease. Allergies can happen but claims of build-up or toxicity in otherwise healthy people are in the same camp as endocrine disruption and other homeopathic effects.(1)

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During my long trip to South America, which just ended (leaving me fighting with a record pile of unanswered emails, an even higher pile of laundry, and a headache for jetlag-induced sleep deprivation), I had the real pleasure to make acquaintance with a Colonel of the British army (Guy Wood) during a cruise of the Galapagos archipelago. One of the recurring topics of our evening chats was of course international travel - the cause of our encounter - and in one occasion he pointed out that Air France is the airline with the worst record in terms of plane accidents.

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Bookieboo LLC claims to be the largest wellness consulting firm targeting moms on social media in the world. There is no basis provided for that claim,  and when you see the kind of anti-science conspiracy gibberish they promote, you have to wonder if anything they say is true.

Their beliefs about science sure aren't. When you see posts like that a dishwashing detergent can affect your microbiome, you know the target demographic is not just the anti-science left, but the anti-science left that is also wealthy and female.

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The Environmental Working Group wants to insure allied journalists like Sheila Kaplan that their new "dirty dozen" list is almost ready to be copied and pasted into articles promoting the organic industry.

They just need actual scientists to compile everything for them. That's right, EWG employees do no real work at all, they are instead beholden to government scientists they intend to smear and insist are secretly controlled by the companies that compete with the companies who give Environmental Working Group up to $10 million per year. 

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Imidazole dipeptides have been been linked to beneficial effects such as relieving fatigue and, with far less credibility, preventing dementia, and a new study has found that 2-oxo-imidazole-containing dipeptides (2-oxo-IDPs), which have one more oxygen atom than normal imidazole dipeptides, are the most common variety of imidazole dipeptides derivatives in the body.

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With ChatGPT a huge fad, students may be excited that their next paper will be easy, because if it is truly AI it will start from the unique seed you give it. Yet it does not work that way. Language models that generate text in response to user prompts use a lot of the same training materials, which means they can plagiarize content in multiple ways.

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Ask an environmentalist and there is not only a conspiracy to hide 'the truth' about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, but there is a convergence of accidents designed to draw attention away from something more sinister.

Among the false claims making the rounds by activists are that animals are dying hundreds of miles away and residents have been locked out of their homes. Neither is true. Some fish may have died but the Ohio river was shown to have safe levels of butyl acrylate and no vinyl chloride. There were no toxic chemicals detected in any homes. People were told to evacuate as a precaution but all were back home by February 8th. Over 500 refused to leave their homes and were fine.

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The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a great deal of weakness in the federal government's ability to control, much less prevent, any diseases at all. The concern had grown during the last decade, when it began to take 6 weeks for CDC to inform the public that lettuce was tainted with E. coli but found time to invent concerns like prediabetes and a vaping epidemic.

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COVID-19 has done little to boost vaccination rates against other viruses, according to a new analysis.

In a recent survey, just over 50 percent said they had received a flu vaccine, unchanged in a representative national panel from the comparable period last year and within the usual range of years prior to the pandemic. Before people thought COVID-19 was just a bad cold (coronavirus is in the same family and was only declared distinct in the 1960s) they thought the flu was a bad cold. Or believed they were more likely to get the flu if they had a vaccine.

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We have a body clock that changes with exposure to sun and a new study finds that while humans don't hibernate, we do sleep longer in the winter. 

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The World Health Organisation has admitted they will never get answers to how COVID-19 happened, because China won't let them. How much of that was pre-planned with WHO remains a mystery, since WHO is the United Nations body that said there was no pandemic long after there was, and then only agreed to let a group chosen by China into Wuhan nine months after the Wuhan wet market was scrubbed clean - for four hours of pre-planned questions. It is entirely possible that they are subtly blaming China as part of a deal because both know China, like Russia, does not care about criticism.

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A train accident in Ohio, and the controlled release of chemicals that can be toxic at high levels will put the Biden administration of asking his appointees how they can make things safer for people. The answer is something his administration and the Obama administration when he was Vice-President opposed; pipelines.

The United States has the most stringent environmental protections in the world and a pipeline is the safest of the safe. Railcars, ships, nothing compares to the safety, and therefore nominal environmental risk that pipelines afford. Yet time and again politics has pushed science to the back.(1)

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It's easy to get a penalty waiver from the federal government if your wind power installation kills an eagle, but if such alternative energy ever becomes more widespread, winged creature deaths of all kinds could be substantial.

Current mitigation strategies are efforts like blanket curtailment, which slows blade rotation to less than one revolution per minute at the low wind speeds which have been found to cause the highest number of bat fatalities. Wind power is not viable now, and such an unsophisticated procedure applying a general wind speed threshold for all wind turbines for a longer period of time causes even more loss of energy generation.

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