web analytics

Articles Here

If You Buy Magic Rocks, You’re The Target Market For HoLDI-MS To Detect Nanoplastic

Posted by on May 9, 2025 in Technology | Comments Off on If You Buy Magic Rocks, You’re The Target Market For HoLDI-MS To Detect Nanoplastic

Homeopathic levels of plastic are the latest environmental scaremongering fad (Nanoplastics! Microplastics!) dominating partisan corporate media when they are not suddenly simping for Trickle Down Economics, Vaccines, and Capitalism they distrusted just a short while ago.

Naturally, companies are rushing to keep you safe from plastic which can be detected in everything. If you want to detect it in your home and annoy your family talking about how much virtual cancer you want to avoid, A McGill team fired up the 3-D printer and made the hollow-laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (HoLDI-MS) test platform.

That's right, a plastic detector made from...plastic.

read more

Only Polarized People Want Companies In Polarized Political Issues

Posted by on May 8, 2025 in Psychology | Comments Off on Only Polarized People Want Companies In Polarized Political Issues

Last year, companies began to pull back from promoting their Diversity Equity Inclusion efforts and social justice activists blamed the incoming Trump administration. It has been a violation of federal law to discriminate for 60 years so to moderates it seemed odd to add a layer of discrimination in hiring, even one deemed positive. And they never considered it may have instead been done at all due to pressure from the previous administration.

The backlash was entirely predictable, but in both cases it was on the fringes. For no benefit, corporate CEOs were ignoring the 'stay out of it unless your customers are dominated by it' mantra.

read more

PM2.5 Is Killing You, Claim Ecologists, Except There Are No Deaths

Posted by on May 7, 2025 in Atmospheric | Comments Off on PM2.5 Is Killing You, Claim Ecologists, Except There Are No Deaths

A new simulation claims small-micron particulate matter, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, is killing 250,000 people each year. PM10, 10 microns in size, is a well-known killer. That is wildfires and smog but after smog was drastically reduced in the 1990s, the target went down 400%, to 2.5. Suddenly air quality maps could be orange and red again, even though the air is cleaner in wealthier countries than it has been since the 1980s.

read more

COVID-19 Border Closures Increased German Dislike Of Immigrants

Posted by on May 7, 2025 in Anthropology | Comments Off on 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.

read more

Opiate Of The Masses: Ancient Andes Used Hallucinogens To Keep People Positive

Posted by on May 5, 2025 in Pharmacology | Comments Off on 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 ChavĂ­n 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)

read more

How Things Are Made

Posted by on May 3, 2025 in Random Thoughts | Comments Off on 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.

read more

Cigarette Smoking Is A Pediatric Disease, And Kids Today Want No Part Of It

Posted by on May 2, 2025 in Public Health | Comments Off on 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. 

read more

Fortified By Silk: Nutrients And Pesticides Get A New Targeted Approach

Posted by on Apr 29, 2025 in Technology | Comments Off on 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.

read more

Safe Water May Be Killing You

Posted by on Apr 28, 2025 in Chemistry | Comments Off on 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.

read more

‘Here Is The Letter That Has Destroyed My Universe’ And 4 More Astrophysics Revolutions

Posted by on Apr 25, 2025 in Random Thoughts | Comments Off on ‘Here Is The Letter That Has Destroyed My Universe’ And 4 More Astrophysics Revolutions

‘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.

read more