Science 2.0

The Biden administration recently issued a new report showing causal links between alcohol and cancer, and it's about time. The link has been long-known, but alcohol carcinogenic properties have been waved away with 'use in moderation' rhetoric. We don't tell young people to use cigarettes 'in moderation', even though nicotine doesn't cause cancer, only cigarettes smoke does, so that alcohol has gotten political free pass shows science is always second to politics.

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In British Iron Age society, land was inherited through the female line and husbands moved to live with the wife’s community. Strong women like Margaret Thatcher resulted.

That was inferred due to DNA sequenced from members of a single community, over 50 ancient genomes from a set of burial grounds in Dorset, that were in use before and after the Romans tried to do in AD 43 what they did to Israel a few decades later. They reconstructed a family tree with many different branches and found most members traced their maternal lineage back to a single woman from centuries before while relationships through the father’s line were almost absent.

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If a giant bọ biển (“sea bug”) in Vietnam hasn't been 'named' by an academic in a journal, does it really exist?

Yes, because they are impossible to miss. Isopods of the genus Bathynomus are 10 inches long so they are hard to miss, but discovery is a lucrative business in academia so a new one has been named and because the authors say it looks like Darth Vader from "Star Wars" they have deemed it Bathynomus vaderi. 

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Production of most major foods involve nitrate and phosphate fertilizers, but excessive fertilizer use is bad for the environment. 

That is why scientists came up with modern technologies that use less fertilizer and, on the other end, fewer pesticides. But some countries or processes like "organic" ban modern products, so their nitrogen runoff is excessive. Perhaps a new form of genetic engineering will be the first product to be allowed under their marketing guidelines since Mutagenesis.  

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In 2018, two black men were arrested in Philadelphia because that Starbucks store had a policy that did not allow people to use their facilities without purchasing something. Social Justice Warriors declared that racist and Starbucks changed their policy. Anyone could use the restrooms and anyone could take up seats, or smoke, or drink alcohol out of a paper bag.

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In a world where food is affordable and choice is high, some people will not have impulse control. Forget conspiracy mumbo-jumbo about corporations and ultraprocessed foods and addiction, some human somewhere will have fetishized everything so such an "addiction" means nothing, what is true is that foods are more delicious than ever and some people will eat too much.

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Despite nearly two decades of marketing campaigns insisting bees are in decline and science is to blame, the data show otherwise. Bees are not entirely irrelevant in the food supply, and do valuable pollination work in nature, but there are 25,000 other species of bees that are important also, it is only in boutique agriculture that honeybees are meaningful to our food supply.

For crops like almonds, bees are rented. They are flown on planes or shipped on trucks and do their work and then go somewhere else. California only has 1.3 million acres of almond trees, which means about 2.6 million honey bee hives are needed every year. That is why 90% of rented bee colonies are in California. It's a lucrative market and they can ship bees elsewhere as needed.

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The tide of culture has shifted away from more centralized government control and the social authoritarianism it brings. While those who ideologically profited from the 'old Twitter' and have all scampered to Bluesky to only talk to each other, the rest of the world is now trying to be mainstream again.

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I'm a Steelers guy now but I was a late fan. Where I was young in Pennsylvania, three teams in New York and two in Pennsylvania were the same distance to drive - and we did not drive to any of them. 

So I remained a Cowboys fan.(1) My brother, though, was an Eagles fan of early on. And he's never wavered.

Ants think that's the proper way to be. Eagle fans hold grudges and ants respect that, but there is no comparison between the level of grudge Philadelphia has against Michael Strahan or Terrell Owens or Kevin Allen or Jerome McDougle and what ants have against their enemies.

If they could write, it would be the stuff of legends.

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In early 2015, a small group of scientists and doctors noted that Dr. Mehmet Oz, famed TV physician and real-life surgeon at Columbia, was promoting so much quackery that the university should remove him from their ranks.

The knives immediately came out among progressive journalists in corporate media. The doctors and scientists criticizing Oz were "corporate shills" and the nonprofits they were affiliated with were suspect and probably front groups for Big Tobacco and Monsanto and probably racist against Muslims.

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