COVID-19 Border Closures Increased German Dislike Of Immigrants
Early in 2020, the President of the United States said America should cut travel from China due to COVID-19 concerns. This was dismissed as xenophobia by states like New York and California, because the World Health Organisation had not declared it a pandemic.(1)In Europe, 18 countries knew better than to wait for WHO to ignore claims from China that it was not a pandemic and closed their borders.
Opiate Of The Masses: Ancient Andes Used Hallucinogens To Keep People Positive
Americans like to be outraged by things, in 2025 the right is outraged by seed oils while the left is outraged about lack of capitalism, but older civilizations wanted people to stay calm.When we think of the Andes today, we may think of the Incas, but they were colonizers just like Spain. Some 2,000 years before the Inca the Chavín had extensive farms and art and architecture throughout what Europeans later named Peru. And they did it with a lot less violence than most other prehistorical cultures on the continent.(1)
How Things Are Made
If the supply chain collapsed tomorrow, could you build a toaster?Would you really even want to try? People make homemade jam and all-natural weedkillers that are ironically stuffed with chemicals but no one makes their own toaster. It would be among the first things dismissed as unimportant in a post-apocalyptic world.
Cigarette Smoking Is A Pediatric Disease, And Kids Today Want No Part Of It
Cigarettes are a known carcinogen because you are inhaling smoke. Any time you inhale smoke, PM10 from fires or marijuana or anything else, you are rolling the dice of your future.Decades of health awareness campaigns by us and groups like us have made a difference among the young, just like smoking cessation and harm reduction tools such as nicotine vaping, gums, and patches have helped older people mitigate harm. Recent data show our "5 by 35" campaign begun in 2008 - down to 5% of Americans smoking cigarettes by 2035 - seems to be on track.
Fortified By Silk: Nutrients And Pesticides Get A New Targeted Approach
Greenpeace is in a longstanding campaign to oppose a public domain Golden Rice created by scientists so that it can be grown to create more Vitamin A and prevent blindness in children of poor countries.It is part of their long history of promoting claims farming is a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. The reality is that farmers simply want ways to safely and affordably improve yields. Science is the best way to create that and corporations are the best way to make it scale. No conspiracy needed.
Safe Water May Be Killing You
The drinking water treatment process is designed to remove harmful pathogens that are prevalent in nature, but a new study suggests that it may be harmful also.Scientists know that inert ingredients are not harmful you but the authors of the new paper invoke the environmental "chemical cocktail" MacGuffin. Since every harmless product has not been tested in every possible combination with other inactive ingredients, they suggest agricultural, pharmaceutical and other common products could be hazardous to our health in ways that scientists don't know about.
‘Here Is The Letter That Has Destroyed My Universe’ And 4 More Astrophysics Revolutions
On this day, April 25, in 1929, the world learned how astronomer Edwin Hubble had discovered that the universe was much larger than we had believed. On this day in 2025, you can preorder a book and on the 29th learn about this and four other Astrophysics discoveries that changed how we see the universe - and ourselves - in The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions.
By Ersilia Vaudo, translated by Vanessa Di Stefano. If you use this link we get a penny or something.
Big Organic Continues To Oppose Food That Uses No Pesticides
I get pitches for stories every day and sometimes I want to see if the world that opposes science has made any progress now that a member of a Republican administration who was formerly one of their own, former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is being helped by their rhetoric.So when I got a message from a PR rep for the Real Organic Project™ about their client, I wanted to know if they still oppose hydroponic food. Hydroponic food uses no soil, which means in a controlled environment it needs no pesticides. The public loves that idea. The last time a survey was done, only 7% of the public wanted to know about GMOs in their food unsolicited while over 70% wanted to know what pesticides are used in food production.(1)
No Goldilocks, Webb Telescope Didn’t Discover Life On K2-18b
K2-18b, detected in 2015, orbits a star 124 light years away. Though it is over 800% as large as Earth, its space in the habitable zone of its star, like where we are, means the possibiliy that liquid water could exist on its surface.The science community calls it The Goldilocks Zone. Like the character in the children's story who wanted porridge neither too hot nor too cold, a Goldilocks planet that might have life we could recognize would need to be in a similar narrow band.
Climate Change Is Causing More Snowflakes
In a bizarre experiment, scholars declared that survivors of one of California's annual wildfires instead suffered PTSD due to climate change.It was a small group, 27 who had been near a fire in 2018, 21 who had seen smoke, and 27 in the control group. Participants had EEG brain scans taken while they engaged in behavior which could provide monetary rewards. The scholars also subjectively scored their Win-Stay behavior, basically how often they sought the highest long-term rewards.