Science 2.0

The science and medical response to activists claims that drinking water, weedkillers, and food coloring are killing people is to ask, where are the dead bodies?

They were there because those don't cause cancer, any more than manufacturing a PM2.5 air quality standard 30 years ago saves any lives, because they were never causing deaths.

read more

Telehealth, replies to messages or a quick video consulation with a health care provider, are designed to save time for everyone and reduce costs.
It may also be causing greater rates of physician burnout, according to a recent paper. 
Female physicians seem to be impacted most, according to the survey results. They spend more time on them, but get more messages they feel are negative or demeaning , and more frequently list messages as a source of burnout.

Greta Branford, M.D., and colleagues looked at data from a year’s worth of patient portal messages handled by University of Michigan primary care physicians, and survey results.

read more

Young women are at at increased risk of school dropout, transactional sex, gender-based violence, and early pregnancy, leading authors of a new paper to declare climate change a public health emergency rather than just an environmental issue.

read more

More and more people over the age of 50 are taking up physical exercise. Medical associations resoundingly agree that this is a good thing. Physical exercise is not only key to disease prevention, it is also a recommended part of treatment for many illnesses.

However, starting to move at this stage of life requires some care. This is especially true for those who have not previously been physically active, or for people who are overweight or obese.

read more

NFL Biosciences is has a Marketing Authorization Application for a smoking cessation technique derived from an allergen treatment in the 1970s that has been quietly used as an unauthorized smoking cessation tool for 10 years. A lot like vaping pens were before the Obama administration tried to claim all tobacco was as harmful as cigarette smoking, an actual carcinogen.

And it works better than placebo, just like vaping, but lots of people have quit using hypnosis and we know that isn't science. This helps due to off-target effects from its original purpose, preventing allergic reactions in workers who used tobacco plants, thanks to how it modifies glucose metabolism.

read more

Lichens on stone, those “still explosions” as the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop named them, remain unseen to most, which is remarkable when you consider how commonplace they are. It seems these ecologically and culturally significant whatever-they-ares unfairly fall victim to something akin to plant blindness, a known phenomenon and tendency of people to overlook plants, which many of us – when we first encounter lichens – identify them as, even though that’s not what they are at all.

read more

Illegal firearm trafficking is inseparable from the illegal drug trade: Weapons are often bought with drug money, can strengthen cartels and can be traded for drugs.

read more

Working people, and the poor, overwhelmingly voted for President Trump. Democrats seemed puzzled that The Deplorables they despise would vote for a candidate who offered lower costs of living. 'Red states use more government assistance' they jeered.

That's the problem. As a former poor person, an organic farmer living in poverty before President Clinton made it a government-endorsed grift as a gift for progressive elites, I know cost is everything. Progressives on Twitter think a dollar is only a dollar. To poor people, it matters. 

read more

The other day I finally emerged from a very stressful push to submit two grant applications to the European Innovation Council. The call in question is for PATHFINDER_OPEN projects, that aim for proofs of principle of groundbreaking technological innovations. So I thought I would broadly report on that experience (no, I am not new to it, but you never cease to learn!), and disclose just a little about the ideas that brought about one of the two projects.
Grant applications 

read more

Chicago Sun-Times writer Marco Buscaglia used the popular LLM ChatGPT to create the 2025 "summer reading list" they wanted for subscribers and had enough confidence in the result that he didn't check the work. 

The problem was that LLMs are not really AI, despite claims by companies selling this stuff that they are. They are certainly not Intelligent. So while the list had real authors, half of the books did not exist.

read more

A new paper argues that academic ecology is culturally corroded. 

'Stay in your lane', 'do you want to die on that hill?' and other territorial and undermining behavior were reported by 44% of predominantly ecologists who responded to a survey. They say it was most common as graduate students, a third of the time by their own supervisor. Of those, 18 percent reported they had experienced it multiple times.

read more

A whistleblower revealed a shocking document written by the French Ministry of Agriculture to the European Commission.

In response to America retaliating against Europe by placing tariffs on European goods the way European has them on American goods, the French government declared that for the first time this century they wanted 'access to innovation' - which means modern science and technology.

They want food sovereignty, and most bizarre of all from the French, fair competition. All things France has historically opposed in the name of the Green Deal and their Farm to Fork Idyll.

read more

It is often joked that 'prostitution was the first profession' and, that it is not a profession aside, the sentiment may be true. Someone with a lot of food and the ability to prevent it being taken may have worked out a deal with someone who had no food but willingness to satisfy a different basic need. It would still mean food gathering was the first profession but that's not as funny.

Lots of animals barter and steal and fight, humans are not even very good at it compared to most creatures, but the anthropological consensus is that humans are the only species to understand 'money.' Money is a token whose actual value may be negligible but with intangible value that is not only agreed upon by a larger community, it is fungible. It can be traded for many goods.(1)

read more

A new paper suggests that the world's largest polluters remain safe from the environmental damage they help create and the countries least to blame face the greatest threats because of, oddly, violent conflict.

This is counter-intuitive but it is the same argument we used to read about "virtual water". Those arguments are fine in a spreadsheet, it gets advocates worked up, but fails in the real world as readily as most economic projections do.(1) The authors argue that they correlate armed conflict and the environment.

read more

In the 1950s, the global infestation of bed bugs was nearly eradicated, thanks to the pesticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, popularly known as DDT.

Due to outcry from environmentalists and concern about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring(1), and over the objections of scientists, the attorney who had been appointed to run the new Environmental Protection Agency created by President Nixon, William Ruckelshaus, banned it.(2)

read more

Richard Garwin, who died on May 13, 2025, at the age of 97, was sometimes called “the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of.” He got his Ph.D. in physics at 21 under Enrico Fermi – a Nobel Prize winner and friend of Einstein’s – who called Garwin “the only true genius” he’d ever met.

read more

Over the last decade, there has been growing international focus on the role of food in conflict, particularly in Africa. The continent has seen an increase in jihadist terrorism in several regions.

Violence, like that exercised by terrorist organisations, is linked with food security conditions, causing a vicious circle of hunger and conflict.

Terrorism generates food disruptions. It undermines production systems and supply routes.

read more

With a new president in the White House bringing in a former Natural Resources Defense Lawyer and long-time anti-science progressive, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there is new concern about erosion of American leadership in science and health.

If leadership is just spending money on things like theater in foreign countries or paying yourself $100,000 to rewrite data from government surveys on why some people don't trust vaccines, we are not losing much.(1)

Hopefully with Republicans agreeing about some of the more ridiculous positions of the left - seed oils and vaccines are bad - acceptance of science will blossom among the nearly 90% of career government employees in Washington, D.C. who are Democrats.(2)

read more

Want to lose 16% of your retirement just like that? Run a computer simulation where the worst thing you fear is true.

A new paper sounds the alarm over a crash in virtual climate wealth. It isn't science, it is just a computer simulation and therefore more like dystopian 1960s fiction than science. 

read more

Though organic™ farmers sell bucolic imagery of hoeing by hand and sunsets over fields of corn, it is just marketing to the gullible. All farmers who make more than enough money to pay their real estate taxes(1) are high-tech gurus. They use real-time data on the health of their land and their crops, they want to use just enough product to get the most food with the least environmental strain.

It's a long way from the $3 billion environmental imagery of farmers with leaky backpacks drenching plants in science and cackling like Scrooge McDuck on a pile of coins about it.

read more