British environmentalist Mark Lynas was an early advocate against GMOs and, as he tells it, that meant he was an early advocate for demonizing scientists. While most actual scientists did not give much credence to an offhand claim by researcher Árpád Pusztai in the mid-1990s that a genetically-modified potato damaged the immune system of an animal, because the results were unpublished and...
read moreCaperea marginata, pigmy right whales, are the last survivors of an aquatic family that evolved 15 million years ago but little else is known about how they behave, what they eat or how many there are in the world's oceans.What scientists do know is that it is not a right whale at all but is instead a type of baleen whale, part of the Cetotheriidae family of whales and that it probably...
read moreOn New Year's Day of 1888 in eastern Kentucky, the Hatfield clan set Randolph McCoy's cabin ablaze and gunned down two members of the rival family.That property, which deeds have traced back to Randolph McCoy, is now owned by Bob Scott, a Hatfield descendant who suspected for years the land was the site of the attack and now excavators have found bullets believed to have been fired by the...
read moreNew Zealand author and film-maker Ray Waru has examined military files buried in the national archives and found that a top secret operation, code-named "Project Seal", set out to test a 'tsunami bomb' doomsday device - one of many secret super weapons researched by the Allies and Axis powers during the war. About 3,700 bombs were tested, first in New Caledonia and later at Whangaparaoa...
read moreAmericans, Italians and Brits can rejoice - health science has finally caught up to their waistlines. An analysis of 100 studies including three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9)...
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