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Posts made in February, 2016

Organic Consumers Association Doubles Down On Pesticides And Zika Claims

Organic Consumers Association, which funds Denier For Hire cabals like the anti-science group U.S. Right To Know, has baffled the science community once again by just making stuff up. When groups made claims that a larvicide named pyriproxyfen was part of a Monsanto conspiracy to promote Zika to give Monsanto a problem to solve(1), they were dismissed by even Washington Post reporters, so OCA has...

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Advocacy Research: How Serious Is The Problem?

Advocacy Research: How Serious Is The Problem?

A decade ago, the media perception was that the only "advocacy" research (science-y sounding stuff out to achieve a cultural goal) was small groups getting a little bit of money to deny things like global warming. In reality, the public knew better, and that scientization of politics had been going on ever since government started to take over science funding. read...

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What Munchies? Marijuana Users Are Likely To Be Thinner

A running meme throughout most of my life - and I came of age in the late 1960s and '70s, when pot was all the rage - is that people get stoned, then they get hungry. Any number of media portrayals showed it, and still do now. No surprise, marijuana is the most commonly used non-legal drug in America, so references to it resonate with a lot of people. And the munchies after smoking it do as...

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Elusive Substances: New Way To Classify The World’s Rarest Minerals

In a forthcoming American Minerologist paper, Hazen and Ausubel outlined a new mineral-classification system to help geologists better understand the designation of “rare.” They based their work on a similar system by the biologist Deborah Rabinowitz, who studied rare biological species.According to Rabinovitz, a species can be considered rare if it meets at least one of three criteria: a...

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Elusive Substances: New Way To Classify The World’s Rarest Minerals

In a forthcoming American Minerologist paper, Hazen and Ausubel outlined a new mineral-classification system to help geologists better understand the designation of “rare.” They based their work on a similar system by the biologist Deborah Rabinowitz, who studied rare biological species.According to Rabinovitz, a species can be considered rare if it meets at least one of three criteria: a...

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