It is often joked that 'prostitution was the first profession' and, that it is not a profession aside, the sentiment may be true. Someone with a lot of food and the ability to prevent it being taken may have worked out a deal with someone who had no food but willingness to satisfy a different basic need. It would still mean food gathering was the first profession but that's not as funny.Lots of...
read moreA new paper suggests that the world's largest polluters remain safe from the environmental damage they help create and the countries least to blame face the greatest threats because of, oddly, violent conflict.This is counter-intuitive but it is the same argument we used to read about "virtual water". Those arguments are fine in a spreadsheet, it gets advocates worked up, but fails in the real...
read moreIn the 1950s, the global infestation of bed bugs was nearly eradicated, thanks to the pesticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, popularly known as DDT. Due to outcry from environmentalists and concern about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring(1), and over the objections of scientists, the attorney who had been appointed to run the new Environmental Protection Agency created by President Nixon,...
read moreWith a new president in the White House bringing in a former Natural Resources Defense Lawyer and long-time anti-science progressive, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there is new concern about erosion of American leadership in science and health.If leadership is just spending money on things like theater in foreign countries or paying yourself $100,000 to rewrite data from government surveys on why some...
read moreWant to lose 16% of your retirement just like that? Run a computer simulation where the worst thing you fear is true. A new paper sounds the alarm over a crash in virtual climate wealth. It isn't science, it is just a computer simulation and therefore more like dystopian 1960s fiction than science. read...
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