Science 2.0

On surveys, parents believe they are doing a great job helping teens be more independent, but today's kids are just too immature.

That last part is probably not true. It was overwhelmingly people in their mid-20s who won World War II and put man on the moon, we're the ones who've now decided that age is not mature enough to buy health insurance. If we want to do the dishes it is the nature of other human beings to let us do the dishes, because other people think that makes us happy. Believing that someone else will eventually want to do the dishes when they mature is wishful thinking.

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A decade ago, if you wanted to find a wealthy neighborhood, you looked for a Whole Foods. They knew that if they stuck a store in a wealthy location they would also find opposition to science, medicine, and agriculture - their ideal customers.

Now things are less clear. A new national study of grocery stores' impacts on nearby home values found the biggest payoff in neighborhoods with a Trader Joe's. The average home value near Trader Joe's is $608,305, compared to $521,142 near Whole Foods. They also sell lots of organic stuff but don't have employees pretending you're bad parents if you don't buy it, so perhaps that is why more wealthy people are going there. Which makes them open more stores which will allow them to sell Two Buck Chuck.

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I'll admit, I wanted to rather title this post "Billionaire Awards Prizes To Failed Theories", just for the sake of being flippant. But in any joke there is a little bit of truth, as I wish to discuss below.
The (not-so-anymore) news is that the "Special Breakthrough prize" in fundamental physics, instituted a decade ago by the Russian philantropist Yuri Milner, and then co-funded by other filthy wealthy folks, recently went to three brillant theoretical physicists: Sergio Ferrara, Dan Freedman,  and Peter van Nieuwenzhuizen, who in the seventies developed an elegant quantum field theory, SuperGravity. 

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There are claims that the modern world of science and medicine (conventional food, cell phones, vaccines, natural gas, trace chemicals, whatever) is making kids ill but that is just shoddy correlation.

Writing at Science Based Medicine, former Scienceblogs contributor Dr. David Gorski separates fact from myth.

Researchers have published the results of the largest prospective multicenter trial conducted of FDG-PET/CT in head and neck cancer, providing data on clinical decision-making.

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On The Joe Rogan Experience podcast (which you can view a video of below, because podcast doesn't mean what it used to mean) Senator Bernie Sanders pledged to release government information about aliens. He says it's an issue for his wife.

It's also an issue for Democrats. When I wrote Science Left Behind with Dr. Alex Berezow in 2011 there was a lot we had to leave out. Why, I had wondered in articles prior to that, did our Scientist In Chief in President Obama surround himself with UFO believers, a vaccine denier, and a guy who thought girls couldn't do math?

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The 'mind-muscle connection'. Ancient lore for bodybuilders, latest buzz for Instragram fitness followers, or more for aesthetes than athletes?

A new analysis in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living suggests that to lift heavier, or longer, it is better to focus on moving the weight itself - not your muscles.

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It's a mystery why humans would go to a place even colder during an ice age, and live on giant rats. Yet they did. Most people don't associate Africa with mountain living today, but Ethiopians moved to the Bale Mountains during the Palaeolithic period 45,000 years ago.

At around 4,000 meters above sea level, the Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia are inhospitable region. There is a low level of oxygen in the air (making activist protests against astronomy by claiming sacred heritage on Mauna Kea in Hawaii even more silly, since it's higher) temperatures fluctuate sharply, and it rains a lot.

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Chick-Fil-A has dethroned In-N-Out as America's favorite fast food restaurant. I actually thought In-N-Out was just California so I was surprised they could win any poll, but I learned they are in Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and Utah as well.

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Pacific Standard, the social justice magazine founded by its chairman, Sara Miller McCune (who is also the founder of academic outlet Sage publications), is shutting down.

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Alligators prefer men who live in Florida over tourists.

There are numerous confounders in this. It may be that Florida men get bit more often because the stereotype of Florida people is based on a kernel of reality.

Does it work to communicate the scientific consensus to the public?

If anti-science beliefs about energy, medicine, and agriculture are any indication, sure.  We don't get bans on science in the U.S. the way Europe aggressively denies the consensus precisely because the American science community does a great job at talking with the public about data, exporting critical thinking is a big reason we are creating Science 2.0 Europe. European scientists have been impressed at how well we have beaten back ban-happy activists. They want to make positive changes there as well.

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Kids say the darnedest things, like they could tell "there was something else ground up in the ice cream."

Children have revolted against ice cream and frozen treats made from beets, spinach and soy. You can fool them a little, by mixing in sugar with plant juice and pretending the Tooth Fairy turned that into milk, but kids draw the line when you throw mashed carrots into ice cream and call it a treat.

The Great British Beer Festival banned drinks with 'sexist' names. Sorry, Slack Alice fans, social justice has prevailed.

Living in California, I don't know what the wine industry would do if provocative names were banned. If my town is any indication, women would revolt.

It seems awfully heavy-handed to ban certain names because some women said they wouldn't buy them. 

If only someone would invent a free market where consumers could ban products they dislike, by simply not buying them. We can only dream.

In 2012 we had an uneventful election which was so easy to predict absolutely no one neutral got it wrong. But it was heralded as a victory for scientific polling and a new era for predictive analysis.

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You can always find bad news if you look for it.With the internet and social media we learn about every bad thing that happens throughout the entire world almost instantly. However the good news doesn't get shared so much. For instance how many of you are aware of the vast amount of work being done worldwide to restore eroded damaged landscapes (see below). How many people share them? Hardly anyone.

While working on my posts for the Debunking Doomsday blog, I come across a lot of good news that never gets into the mainstream media. Sharing some of them may help those of you who get depressed and scared by the journalist exaggerations and pessimism.

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Restless Legs Syndrome is a condition that causes an overwhelming urge to move the legs. Patients complain of unpleasant symptoms such as tingling, burning and painful cramping sensations in the leg and more than 80 people of people who report restless legs syndrome say they experience their legs jerking or twitching uncontrollably, usually at night.

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After California realized that their coastal counties not only led the country in vaccine denial for personal preference, they actually had more than the rest of the U.S. combined, the legislature passed a law eliminating exemptions for all but medical reasons. Sure enough, those same counties where rich white people believed vaccines cause autism suddenly had a surge in medical exemptions. Wealthy people found doctors willing to agree that their child needed a medical exemption even if they were not immune compromised.

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Palaeontologists have discovered the world's largest parrot, standing up to 1m tall with a massive beak able to crack most food sources, and given it the name Heracles inexpectatus to reflect its Herculean myth-like size and strength and the unexpected nature of the discovery.

Being a giant in a country like New Zealand, well known for giant birds, is common. Moa dominated avifaunas but giant geese and adzebills shared the forest floor, while a giant eagle ruled the skies. But a giant extinct parrot? That is special. 

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