American Academy Of Pediatrics: Children Don’t Transmit COVID-19, Schools Should Reopen This Year
The American Academy of Pediatrics is a rather reflexive group much of the time, so it seems bold for Pediatrics, the in-house journal for an organization that tried to argue kids should not be allowed to even walk to school until they are age 10, to take the position that children infrequently transmit COVID-19 to each other or to adults and that most schools can and should reopen in August.American Cancer Society Nutrition Statements Are More Aspirational Wellness Than Evidence-Based Guidelines
Can you prevent cancer? Not really. The number one risk factor for cancer is old age, if you live long enough you are likely to get some form or another. Despite the beliefs of the Longevity crowd, we are biologically self-terminating.To Have Great Science Literacy, We Must Have Greater Digital Literacy – An Experiment Shows How
The anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements are products of the digital age. While there were always vaccine deniers, they were a tiny religious fringe until the 2000s, when it took England and the coasts of the U.S. by storm. Similarly, odd beliefs about food always existed but they were relegated to obscure stores.Social media changed all that. Facebook and Twitter became hotbeds of misinformation because anti-science activists mastered creating 'buzz' by getting cabals of individuals, sympathetic journalists, and groups who capitalized on it to swarm around bombastic claims. Now those tweet storms become 'and here's how Twitter reacted' articles by lazy media outlets.
5G Update: Belief In Harm Is Still Belief In Magic
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, Berkeley psychologist Joel Moskowitz, and other anti-science conspiracy theorists use the language of science against it to advance their beliefs that we're all being harmed by the modern world.So when they see a scientific statement like "very low risk" of harm from any cell phone service, including 5G, they have a ready retort to mobilize the coastal Karens and Darrens who make up their ranks; that's not no risk.
Coronavirus Has Shown Alternative Energy Is Luxury Spending, Not Part Of A Realistic Strategy
If you know the government is going to subsidize your business, you are a lot more agreeable to starting a company with questionable prospects than if you have to compete in the free market. If government subsidies decline, you are in real trouble if you have not shown your business model works.That is the plight of alternative energy like solar and wind and ethanol today. Though pundits have insisted their economic models show it works, you can't spend virtual money. Financial reality is that without subsidies funded by governments who force conventional users to pay for those $25,000 solar installations, the industry will collapse. Governments can't tax economic models. They can't tax an expense.
New Study: Beef In A Healthy Diet Does Not Increase Risk Of Heart Attacks
For decades there has been a statistical controversy about meat. By statistical I mean it was never a real health issue. Instead, though we clearly evolved to eat it, epidemiologists statistically correlated meat to dying and said therefore we shouldn't eat it. Though such studies noted down at the bottom that the relationship was not causal, they wanted the public to believe it because they highlighted the causal inference in press releases, and so media rushed to claim that meat causes heart attacks.A few years ago, epidemiologists at France's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) joined in, using their own meta-analyses to declare that meat was just as hazardous to health as plutonium. And smoking. And mustard gas.
Mosquito Diseases Kill Tens Of Millions Per Year Worldwide But American Parents Worry More About Ticks
A few species of mosquitoes are nothing but carriers of disease, so pesticides were used to wipe them out in much of North America. Worldwide they remain a public health problem and while some ecologists claim a mythical (and scientifically debunked) 'balance of nature' and therefore insist Aedes aegypti might have some benefit, if we turned them extinct we'd have nothing but less yellow fever, dengue fever, and Zika worldwide, the way we do in the U.S.Robot Cockroaches Are All We Need To Make 2020 Just Peachy
2020 started out being a weird and devastating way to end the decade yet we naively thought those Australian wildfires were as bad as it could get.
Now people outside that country barely remember they happened. Because then we got coronavirus. Luckily, we dodged the murder hornets but then went right to race wars. New York, the city, county, and state, has had the worst of both COVID-19(1) and the looting, but fear not Manhattan, June is probably as bad as it gets for 2020.
Well, maybe, unless July really has a surprise in store.
American Agriculture Got Us Through Coronavirus, Why Are Academic Activists Still So Down On Farming?
In November of 2019 The Atlantic asked "experts" what they would change if they could go back in time. The experts had titles like "mythographer" - no scientists invited - so it's no surprise only one response had real-world relevance.(1) A historian at Rutgers wished agriculture had never been invented. Agriculture, that fundamental progressive achievement which made food plentiful so that we no longer spent our days foraging and could learn things and, you know, create universities, had to be undone.Some Good News: Yellowstone Won’t Blow Up This Year
From Australian wildfires to COVID-19 to murder hornets to race wars in Manhattan, 2020 looks to be a challenging year. It could still get worse, but science shows it won't be due to Yellowstone blowing its top.Yellowstone is one of those scenarios doomsday "preppers" worry about. They are right to be concerned if it does happen, but they don't understand hazard (what could happen) and risk (the likelihood of the hazard) any better than environmentalists worrying about weedkillers do.