Science 2.0

A train accident in Ohio, and the controlled release of chemicals that can be toxic at high levels will put the Biden administration of asking his appointees how they can make things safer for people. The answer is something his administration and the Obama administration when he was Vice-President opposed; pipelines.

The United States has the most stringent environmental protections in the world and a pipeline is the safest of the safe. Railcars, ships, nothing compares to the safety, and therefore nominal environmental risk that pipelines afford. Yet time and again politics has pushed science to the back.(1)

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It's easy to get a penalty waiver from the federal government if your wind power installation kills an eagle, but if such alternative energy ever becomes more widespread, winged creature deaths of all kinds could be substantial.

Current mitigation strategies are efforts like blanket curtailment, which slows blade rotation to less than one revolution per minute at the low wind speeds which have been found to cause the highest number of bat fatalities. Wind power is not viable now, and such an unsophisticated procedure applying a general wind speed threshold for all wind turbines for a longer period of time causes even more loss of energy generation.

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Films have been common for over a century and a new paper laments that for much of that time men have been the unhinged scientists with a 'God complex', because by not having more 'mad' women in the 1930s, modern Artificial Intelligence routines are perpetuating gender stereotypes.

When you think of 'mad scientist' you probably do think of a man, and the authors argue that is a symptom of deeper sexism; so AI, which is going to pick a spot in brute force style and converge on answers from there, will perpetuate it. And that is true, except the issue is well-known and easy to work around, even for today's limited unintelligent AI.

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In the past I have talked about the GMO candy I wish they'd make for Halloween, and all of the carcinogens in a 100% Organic Non-GMO Project Thanksgiving Dinner, but today I get to talk about the best pot for Valentine's Day.

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When you think of relaxing, you probably don't think of Washington, DC. Contrary to beliefs by many in the 50 states, Washington, DC employees, overwhelmingly political staffers, are very nice. They hate each other as part of the job, like Sam and Ralph in "Don't Give Up the Sheep", by Chuck Jones for Warner Bros.(1) They then clock out and are lovely, usually to each other but almost always to everyone else.

And they work hard, usually for little money. While career government jobs tend to pay better than the private sector, for Congressional staffers it is somewhere between earning nothing and having a poverty lifestyle in one of America's most wealthy places.

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During the Trump administration, it was discovered that the Obama administration had let Chinese efforts to manipulate US academics go unchecked while highlighting that the Russian government was funding domestic environmental groups in order to subvert US national gas and agriculture - energy and food being Russia's chief exports to Europe.

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For as long as wheat flour has been used for food, a small number of people have been allergic to the gluten in it. These celiac disease sufferers experience stomach pain, nausea and even intestinal damage. More recently, gluten-free food became a new diet craze and while it was ridiculous biologically, it turned gluten-free food into a diverse $4 billion market, which was good for the celiac community.

Flour can now be made from banana peels, almonds and various grains and new work adds sweet potatoes into the mix.

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Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland and dowager Queen of France, returned to Scotland in 1561 a foreigner in the land she ruled. She married again and gave birth to a son, the future James VI, before being implicated in her husband's murder and deposed.

It only got worse after that. She escaped her imprisonment a year later and fled to England seeking help from Queen Elizabeth, but since Mary was the daughter of Henry VIII's sister, she had a claim to the throne of England also. And since Henry VIII had created a competitor to the Catholic church in order to run off with all the women he wanted (he was the head of the Anglican church and could annul anything he liked) Elizabeth was disliked by Catholics.

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A new study found that a cup of coffee with milk may create a combination of proteins and antioxidants that doubles the anti-inflammatory properties in immune cells. 

That doesn't mean you should listen to 'food is medicine' advocates and start putting dairy in everything, this was a cell study, which is even lower than studies in mice on the human relevance scale.

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For decades, the anti-vaccine movement was squarely on the left. Anti-vaccine, anti-cell-phone, anti-everything lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was even on the short list for a cabinet position in the Obama administration before we got Democrats who cared about science and reason to join us in pushing back on that, leaving only over-representation of UFO believers and a guy who thought girls can't do math as part of the concern.

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Thalattosuchians are ancient relatives of the ancestors of modern-day crocodiles, a biological aunt if you will, and part of the head, backbone, and limbs of Turnersuchus hingleyae have been found on what paleontologists call the Jurassic Coast, in Dorset of the United Kingdom.

The name derives from Paul Turner and Lizzie Hingley, who discovered the fossil in 2017. The ending “suchus,” is the Latinized form of “soukhos,” Greek for crocodile. 

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A lot of people went into 2023 hoping to lose some weight. It's no surprise. Putting it on is easy and rich countries make delicious food at affordable prices while our culture has not yet overcome our biological mandate to eat because animals are programmed to be unsure when the next meal will be.

If you went into 2023 trying some miracle diet - keto, gluten-free, Mediterranean, et al. - you have probably already failed. Yet each of those diets has proponents because it worked for them individually. With enough individual anecdotes epidemiologists will find correlation using food frequency questionnaires and claim it's data.

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