Science 2.0

Europe, the market that once wanted to ban lower cost "ugly" fruit because it looked discriminatory against poor people, while ignoring how much food waste and resulting environmental strain their desire for cosmetic fruit caused, seems to have turned a corner.

10 percent now claim they think about carbon footprint when buying food. While that doesn't sound like much, especially when 80 percent of Europeans are happy to ban both DNA and Dihydrogen Monoxide in food, it is quite a lot. So much so that if you believe it I have a bridge in Amsterdam I'd like you to buy. 

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Until about 8,000 years ago, the British Isles were instead a peninsula attached to mainland Europe by a now-submerged world archaeologists call Doggerland. As the Ice Age ended, sea levels rose and former villages were swamped - but one event turned the slow rise of the sea into an apocalyptic terror. An underwater cliff collapsed along the edge of the Norwegian continental shelf that runs for six hundred miles along the Atlantic Basin and over 50 Mount Everests, of rock broke off and slid into the deep ocean, reaching a speed of 90 mph underwater. 

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This paper has been much misreported in the media. The thing is that an 88% reduction in population does not actually mean what it seems to mean. It does not mean that there are 88% less total numbers of large fish in our rivers and streams.

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This fossil specimen of the fruit of the lotus, Nelumbo, was found by Green River Stone (GRS) in early Eocene outcrops of the Fossil Lake Member of the Green River Formation. The awesome possums from GRS are based out of North Logan, Utah, USA and have unearthed some world-class specimens. They've found Nelumbo leaves over the years but this is their first fossil specimen of the fruit. 

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You've been in a supermarket check-out line where it say 10 or 15 items and a self-important jackleg wheels a cart full of stuff in there. Stores don't police their own policies, they just throw up a sign, because they don't want to alienate anyone and get a social justice campaign against them on Twitter.

For those of you who have ethics, a cashierless store seems like the way to go. 

Amazon wants to have 3,000 "just walk out" locations by 2022, and other companies want to compete against Bezos and company, grocery stores aren't waiting and are funding their own.

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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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