The “hard problem” – nuclear waste
Our bookshelves speak to our inner nature.
A sustainable diet is not a choice of meat or plants; it is meat and plants.
Much of the planet is now in the grips of a severe drought. This has prompted China to try cloud seeding to try to squeeze some water from the clouds. Is this real? Does it work? The Dreaded Chemistry Lesson From Hell is included at no extra charge.
McKinsey & Company, those highly paid consultants to entrepreneurs, corporations, and governments, make some general suggestions about “greening” our grocery stores. Let’s take a look at what they are suggesting.
Recent news reports have spurred concern that just touching fentanyl can be dangerous. Let's take a look at the chemistry behind this claim. Comedian Bill Maher recently attacked the fat-acceptance movement as a danger to public health, sparking ferocious criticism on social media. Sadly, few people recognized the most important point about Maher's commentary: he was right.
Recently, Contrafect, an antibiotic biotech company developing a novel product for the treatment of severe staphylococcal infections, suffered a failure in its phase 3 trial. The trail was designed to show the superiority of its new drug over standard treatments. Why is it so hard to show that one antibiotic works better than another in a clinical trial?
Is the U.S. heading for even more trouble from drug overdose deaths? Dr. Jeffrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and ACSH advisor, says yes. Modelers have predicted that ODs will accelerate because of even stronger fentanyl analogs and also due to mixing drugs that should not be mixed. Anyone still blaming the overprescribing of opioid analgesics for our soaring deaths should read this.
Tracking cookies – those bite-size snippets of code that log your internet behavior – come in as many forms as recipes for chocolate chip cookies. They are ubiquitous on all commercial websites, but as it turns out they can often be found on governmental websites. How did that come to be? Part of Big Brother’s surveillance or could it be a quiet “smash and grab” by social media companies?
Reporters have turned yet another study's underwhelming results into exaggerated headlines about the cognitive benefits of fruit consumption. Let's take a closer look at the paper in question.
Of all the world's problems, arguably the most pressing is "which Tootsie Pop flavor is the most natural?" Another would be "why is Dr. Oz's head in that picture?" A lesson on artificial flavors and people.
The last several months have been … interesting … at Europe’s largest nuclear energy station. Last March, Russian troops took control of the 6-reactor site, causing some damage during the battle and raising fears of a wider catastrophe. Several months passed, during which the Ukrainian operators continued running the reactors under the direction of Russian, providing power to their part of Ukraine; this interregnum came to a halt this summer when the Russians established a full-blown military base on the power site and began launching attacks from there, and disconnecting most of the power lines leading into the plant from the electrical grid.
