Less Air Pollution Has Meant More Fertilizer In Farming
You wouldn't know it from listening to epidemiologists inside EPA or local weather personalities, but American air quality is better than it's been in 150 years. So clean they had to define "clean" down and start touting small micron particulate matter (PM2.5) one quarter the size of real smog, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, as a concern.Well, it isn't. No one has ever died from PM2.5 and asthmatics are at greater risk in the perfume section of Macy's, regardless of hyperbolic air quality maps that routinely show red and orange despite much of the US having the same air quality as untouched sections of Siberia.
A Sign The Pandemic May Be Over: Media Tout Study Claiming Nutrasweet Gave A Mouse Anxiety
Things are getting back to normal because even though activist journalists are now covering a Tripledemic of COVID-19, flu, and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) they have also found time to promote a story that claims a zero-calorie sweetener, asparatame, common in products like Diet Coke, Crystal Light, whatever causes anxiety.That's right, media have taken time from writing about something that may be important for the public to write about a paper claiming that aspartame gives mice anxiety.
We must be safe when we're back to covering mouse studies about safe products.
EU COST Action Hopes To Replace Impossible Standards With Risk-Based Meat Inspection
Vegetables have had a lot of foodborne outbreak scandals, but two times since the 1980s they have also impacted meat in a big way.Mad Cow disease in 1986 and Listeria in 2019 killed people. Mad Cow disease was due to poor quality control and a lack of coherent meat-chain understanding - the annual Burns Supper is coming up but you still can't buy haggis from Scotland - while more recent Listeria was just sloppy controls. Those can happen anywhere in the food chain but there may be ways to reduce the risk without making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Activism Or Outreach – A Call For New Ways To Communicate Climate Change
Critics of scientists and science writers who speak plainly usually note it is better to be more neutral in tone, informational - 'show them some slides.'Yet very little actually gets done that way. A few places can stay in existence writing 'the universe is mysterious' articles but environmentalists know how to move the needle, financially, politically, and cultural. And it is not by being informational. Though their work is often hyperbole and misinformation around a kernel of scientific truth, they see positive results as the goal, not science.
The Renewable Energy Paradox – When Everyone Gets It No One Will
Unlike US environmentalists, Belgian greens didn't flip and suddenly regard hydropower as a bad thing, they regard it as a viable part of their renewable energy strategy. All options are on the table, 50 percent of their electricity is even nuclear. That's smart, nuclear is 2 times the energy capacity of natural gas and obviously an order of magnitude greater and more reliable than wind and solar.The Animals We See As Friends Versus Food
Ask a hunting guide about what your first experience as a novice hunter should be and they will say a turkey. No one ever cried over eating turkey whereas a rabbit would be a bad idea for many.A new survey in Human-Animal Interactions attempted to assess social perceptions in Singapore about ‘food animals’ versus 'friends' and 'worth fighting for', broken down as ‘Love’, ‘Save’, ‘Indifferent’ and ‘Dislike.’
Waterhemp Weed Has Evolved Into A Major Pest – Blame Farmers?
Over 200 years ago, the age of modern agriculture began with fertilizer that wouldn't give you food poisoning if traces of it remained, like manure will.A new paper found what you would expect, and a key reason why legacy pesticides used in the organic process require nearly 600 percent more chemicals per calorie; pests evolve as the science does.
Does Organic Food Cause Cognitive Decline?
A new paper accompanied by a scary-looking map claims "people who lived in cities with lead-contaminated water as children had worse baseline cognitive functioning at age 72" and may make every new parent worry their child's grades can be blamed on the water supply, but it leaves out important scientific context.Like Junk Food? Blame The Mouse Amygdala
Neuroscience is still in its infancy, despite claims by people using fMRI to suggest links between lots of things, but a few things are established, like that fear 'resides' in the amygdala.Linking that same part of the brain to obesity in mice, and therefore humans, in a new paper warrants more skepticism. Mice are, as famously stated when science was science, not tiny people. We do have things in common with mice, just like we share 60% of our DNA with bananas, but no one suggests their study on bananas has 'implications' for humans the way every trial lawyer running a grift and wanting to sue an agriculture company suggests about mouse models.