Chemistry
Hank |
This year, you're going to pay 24 percent more for a turkey, a tough bite out of the wallet for poor people and a dose of reality for economists and armchair pundits who claimed prior to today's "stagflation" that higher prices are no concern.
Imagine how much higher prices would be if food suffered the yield losses that occur without modern pesticides. This year I am thankful for my health and my family but also science. Outside my house are signs thanking healthcare workers, delivery people, and farmers - and if they made one for science, including vaccines and pesticides, I'd own it.
Yet a…
As the crown jewel of Henry VIII’s, its flagship, the Mary Rose, patrolled the Atlantic with her heavy cannons for 34 years. It then spend 437 more buried beneath the turbulent English Channel before being recovered and placed on display at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England.
The Mary Rose sank during a naval battle with France in 1543 and was excavated in 1982, along with 19,000 objects from the Tudor period. There remains one thing the 510-year-old English warship can't defeat; nature.
After more than 400 years at the bottom of the English Channel, the wooden ship's hull is…
Hank |
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the American public fell back in love with science. In the first 19 years of this century, Californians denied vaccines to such an extent a law had to be passed to prevent coastal parents from creating a Whooping Cough pandemic. Every building had cancer warnings somewhere - even oncology wards in hospitals warned cancer patients they might get cancer by visiting their doctor - and Non-GMO Project rock salt(!) took off.
That has now changed.(1) For most of the country, Purell, Clorox, and Lysol replaced bottles of useless green-labeled goop that claimed to be…
Hank |
A reader sent me an email asking about chewing gum and if it was really made of plastic and my first thought was 'Why ask me? Do what scientists do and go to Google, skip the first 10 entries, which will all be gamed by SEO experts at anti-science groups like Ecowatch, and then you will find the answer' but I was hooked when I saw the article linked was in The Economist.
That I was going to read because The Economist is one of the most important and tightly-edited publications in the world - or was. This instead read like it was written on Treehugger. It may be that Cambridge doesn't…
Hank |
A study by the Silent Spring Institute(1), with funding from the politically sympathetic National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences during the days of organic industry keynote speaker and Ramazzini Institute member Linda Birnbaum, claims that hundreds of chemicals are endocrine disruptors.
Okay, it is only correlation, but for the sake of argument let's take it as science and not just an "exploratory" claim; what isn't an endocrine disruptor? The coffee I am drinking while writing this is 100 percent guaranteed to have changed my hormones. Does that mean my coffee caused breast…
An unknown methane-producing process is likely at work in the hidden ocean beneath the icy shell of Saturn's moon Enceladus, suggests a new study published in Nature Astronomy by scientists at the University of Arizona and Paris Sciences&Lettres University.
Giant water plumes erupting from Enceladus have long fascinated scientists and the public, inspiring research and speculation about the vast ocean that is believed to be sandwiched between the moon's rocky core and its icy shell.
Flying through the plumes and sampling their chemical makeup, the Cassini spacecraft detected a relatively…
Gold should be uniformly scattered throughout the Earth's crust, not in giant deposits, because it is unreactive. It is one of the most inert metals in the whole Periodic Table, it doesn't easily react with other substances, so it should not have come together in sufficient quantity to mine.
Yet it did, and became prized for its purity and stability and later for its rarity. It's still rare. The World Gold Council estimates that all the gold ever mined in the world would fit into a 20x20x20-meter cube.
Chemists may have found an answer as to why it should not form into deposits yet did…
As Carl Sagan once said, “extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence.”
You may have recently read some extraordinary claims that
total sperm count has dramatically declined among “Western” men and that
endocrine disrupters - but only the synthetic kind, not natural ones - are the
reason. The extraordinary evidence is lacking.
Scientists
from the Harvard GenderSci Lab are putting the brakes on the
alleged “apocalyptic” trends in male reproduction.
The peer-reviewed
Harvard paper, by Marion Boulicault, Sarah Richardson, and colleagues,
re-evaluated the meta-analysis by authors…
Hank |
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, located in San Francisco, is unsurprisingly the most 'progressive' appeals court in the United States. That their judges are so California when it comes to decisions is why they dominate the others when it comes to being overturned by the Supreme Court.
San Francisco is a great place to file a lawsuit if you are anti-science and that is why when a fellow with cancer claimed it was due to a weedkiller, the federal multidistrict litigation lawsuit was filed there.
Much of the public may not be aware of this, but a jury trial…
Hank |
A new paper uses emotional verbiage like "forever chemicals" and sketchy correlation to try and claim that fires are not what firefighters should be worried about when the alarm rings, it's the chemicals created by Evil Corporations they should fear.
Firefighters are going to be enraged if they see it, and they should be. It puts their lives at risk. This is not junk science, it isn't science at all.
Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are compounds in use since the 1940s in too many useful and safe (and safety) products to count. In the eternal quest to find new things to raise money about and…