Science 2.0

If you don't trust Centers for Disease Control claims on vaping, opioids, or pre-diabetes, you are not wrong. In the last decade they became increasingly unreliable for anything where they don't just gather data from states, like vaccine rates and how many people vomit after buying unpasteurized milk

On numerous other issues, they seem to pick a position and then torture data until they confess. And that is a concern about all their findings. In the case of gun violence there is a concern about their numbers they replaced one hospital in a small (60) sample with one that had more than 100 times greater non-fatal gun injuries its predecessor ever had. The new hospital added over 22,000 gun injuries to the 2015 national estimate which made gun violence look more common.

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Climate Change and Land says that up to 183 million more people will be at risk of hunger and solutions proposed to mitigate climate change will lead to a ~20% increase in hunger in Africa, southeast Asia, and India but it will be felt everywhere. 

Devang Mehta says that's why he came away from the report more frustrated than ever with mainstream public environmentalism and what one policy expert has called, “the empty radicalism of the climate apocalypse.”

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Since 1981, the beef industry had reduced emission intensity by 14 percent and reduced emissions due to land use change by 42 percent, yet in Australia, as in other developed countries, activists have done with emissions what they did with low-fat diets: Exaggerated a problem that does not exist to get money advocating for a solution that won't make any difference.

Australians seem to be willing to stand up for reason at a time when American (and British) journalists are more interested in evangelizing claims by their political allies.

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The Juno mission, designed to help scientists better understand Jupiter's origin and evolution, was launched in 2011 to map its gravitational and magnetic fields and probe the planet's deep, internal structure.

It's found some mysterious gravitational readings which experts infer mean Jupiter's core is less dense and more extended that expected. 

Jupiter began as a dense, rocky or icy planet that later gathered its thick atmosphere from the primordial disk of gas and dust that birthed our sun so what if the recent data could be explained by a giant impact that stirred Jupiter's core, mixing the dense contents of its core with less dense layers above. Like another planet.

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If you are worried about climate change and don't embrace natural gas as a bridge to whatever energy wins the future - solar, hydrogen, nuclear - you don't understand energy density and emissions.

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Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 (TR4), The strain of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum that causes Fusarium wilt and which devastated crops in Asia, has been confirmed in Latin America, the world’s largest exporter of bananas. Signs of the fungus were first spotted in June in northern Colombia, and the Colombian Agricultural Institute (ICA) in Bogotá has now announced plans to eradicate plants on nearly 170 hectares of quarantined farmland.

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Supplement salespeople, senescence biologists, and demographers have been scrambling to find ways to say their products or research are the secret to longevity. And super-centenarians, those who live to be 110, are most prized of all in those efforts.

But commonality is hard. Some drink alcohol, some don't touch it, some smoke, some don't eat meat, but it turns out many of them share a common trait - lack of an accurate birth record, finds a recent study.

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An exploratory correlation claims that ozone levels can lead to lungs similar to the damage of someone who smokes a pack of cigarettes per day for three decades.

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Microbial communities living in deep aquatic sediments have adapted to survive on really old food, according to a new study.

Learning how these microorganisms function on old, poor-quality food at a very slow pace could have future uses in biomedical applications such as a technology that could slow down cell metabolism in human organs so they can survive longer during a transplant process.

To better understand how these microorganisms access this food, researchers tested different types of peptidases—digestive enzymes that work to degrade proteins—in sediment cores from the White Oak River estuary in North Carolina.

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The never-enacted Obama Clean Power Plan was scuttled by Supreme Court in 2016 and its defense later abandoned by the Trump administration, and though it is fashionable to claim that means Republicans hate climate science, the reality is it was an expensive mandate without a problem to solve.

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In 1692. the MacDonalds of Glencoe kept balking at swearing allegiance to King William III after the Jacobite uprising (basically, a secession promoted by France), so when they refused to take the oath for two years Scotland sent The Campbells to negotiate. And non-partisan history says they tried, ferrying messages back and forth while they were "billeted" by Clan Donald - a custom in Scotland since no one had much money. Clan Donald was hosted by the Campbells when they had been called on to police Argyll earlier.

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Comments opened on the recent EPA nominations to serve on the Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) established under section 25(d) of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), since three member terms will expire during the next year.

The name at number 7 on the list(1) is of particular concern, because he would be serving on an EPA SAP after stating that the EPA SAP once called about a study he got published in PNAS was collaborating with pesticide companies. That, coupled with his reputation as a serial misogynist, would be an unneeded distraction for an advisory body that is supposed to be neutral arbiters of science issues.

For that reason, I recommended he not be among the three selected.

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Decades ago, cheese Velveeta had to be labeled “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product" so that customers could have truth in labeling. It was not "cheese", said the government.  The U.S. Federal Trade Commission even even told Kraft they could not even advertise that their "singles" contained five ounces of milk because of the implication the cheese might have as much calcium as 5 ounces of milk when it only had as much calcium as 3.5 ounces of milk.

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In 2006, a provocative article in Trends in Plant Science claimed plants handle information in ways that resemble sophisticated animal nervous systems, even though they don't have brains.

Sorry vegans, you are eating another form of sentient life, creatures that can feel happiness or sorrow or pain, make decisions and even possess consciousness.

But the chances of that are “effectively nil,” retired plant biologist Lincoln Taiz and colleagues write in an a Cell article.

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Ancient pigs went through a complete genomic turnover after they arrived in Europe, according to a new study. They were domesticated in the Near East and logically would genetically resemble the Near East wild boar from which they derived, but they do not.

Instead, they resemble European wild boar.

The work involved sequenced DNA signatures from more than 2,000 ancient pigs including genomes from 63 archaeological pigs collected across the Near East and Europe over the last 10,000 years.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has told California it must remove glyphosate cancer warnings from pesticide labels, saying the state’s Prop 65 labeling requirement for products with glyphosate is misleading, since no science studies have found any links to human cancers, including long-term studies of 50,000 ag workers.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is again warning consumers not to purchase, much less drink, a supplement drink sold as a medical treatment that goes by all kinds of interesting names, from Miracle or Master Mineral Solution, Miracle Mineral Supplement, MMS, Chlorine Dioxide (CD) Protocol, Water Purification Solution (WPS) and probably more.

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Millennials can't be blamed for lower alcohol consumption, that's just smart health thinking. But they are a barometer of future drinking habits.

Across all age groups, around 40 percent of 1,166 U.S. adults say they're drinking less than they were five years ago. A year ago 31 percent of drinkers said they were drinking less while 56 percent said they stayed the same. Of course, that means up to 11 percent could be drinking more but even that is an improvement over two generations ago, when the majority in their 20s increased alcohol consumption.

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Raw dairy is diarrhea and vomiting waiting to happen, there is a reason heat pasteurization is credited with saving a billion lives, but a company in Australia has used a legal loophole to milk raw believers into buying their un-pasteurized product.

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Ever since telescopes were first invented, by some dutch lens grinder in the late XVIth century, and then demonstrated to be invaluable tools for investigating the cosmos around us by Galileo Galilei in the early 1600s, there has been a considerable, steady effort to construct bigger and better ones. Particularly bigger ones.

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