Other Science News

Forming Lines The real Pinocchio Breeding a happier chicken Shhh!
Here is the narrative: if we reduce manmade greenhouse gases and their companion aerosols, like PM2.5, we will reduce global warming and improve our health. Unfortunately, the climate is a bit more complex. Our best plans come with unintended consequences. A new study shows that reducing those manmade aerosols also increases the “climate forcing” bringing about global warming.
A Modern History of Bail Streetlights illuminating the Street, and some unwarranted (?) surveillance Calling people names stifles understanding. Presentism - wokeness reinterprets history
Take a deep breath Food strikes back and tries to kill you Dr. John Ioannidis, pre-pandemic, on public health communication
Why special? I had some free time, so I read a bit more; this edition includes Besties? ! A step-by-step guide to producing pseudoscience Quals vs. Quants Unelected, Unknown, and Highly Influential – The Corporate Deep State
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.
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.
Certainty and extremism Will we ever know the origin of COVID-19? What can the Talmud teach us about Twitter and Facebook? And now, a moment with Hans Rosling.
In 1974 I called a nuclear engineer to interview him for a term paper on nuclear fusion power. We talked about all the advantages of fusion power, its prospects for the future, the impact on civilization, and so forth…and at the end of the interview, I asked him when he expected to see commercial fusion power. “I think it will be about 20 or 25 years from now that we see the first fusion reactor come online.” And that’s been the standard joke about fusion power since before I wrote my paper – that it’s about 25 years in the future…and always will be. But maybe that’s changing.
Water (H2O) is essential to life and is ubiquitous; found even on planets, asteroids, and comets. It is a deceptively simple but very complex entity with many facets. Many people in developed countries consider access to quantities of drinkable (potable) and other water to be a given and at a low cost. The United Nations says that access to sufficient, safe water is a human right, but you get what you pay for.  Access to universal assured safe drinking water has existed for only about 120 years with the development of microbiology to test for pathogens and engineering for filtration and disinfection water treatment.
Is the climate crisis a population problem or a poverty problem? Are you more disabled as a composer if you are blind or deaf? A Dutch pastime - Uitwaaien Medicare can negotiate prices; what might go wrong?
The last several years have even given skeptics reasons to consider reducing our fossil fuel use and replacing it with something else. The problem is that so many of the “something else” alternatives can’t be counted on to keep our cities powered up (try using solar energy at night), and we currently don’t have the technology to store excess energy for a (literal) rainy or windless day. Sure, lithium-ion batteries are growing in capacity, but they’re not yet city-sized and tend to catch fire from time to time. We need a stable, safe, reliable source of power that doesn’t rely on burning fuel – something like nuclear energy.