Robot Cockroaches Are All We Need To Make 2020 Just Peachy
2020 started out being a weird and devastating way to end the decade yet we naively thought those Australian wildfires were as bad as it could get.
Now people outside that country barely remember they happened. Because then we got coronavirus. Luckily, we dodged the murder hornets but then went right to race wars. New York, the city, county, and state, has had the worst of both COVID-19(1) and the looting, but fear not Manhattan, June is probably as bad as it gets for 2020.
Well, maybe, unless July really has a surprise in store.
American Agriculture Got Us Through Coronavirus, Why Are Academic Activists Still So Down On Farming?
In November of 2019 The Atlantic asked "experts" what they would change if they could go back in time. The experts had titles like "mythographer" - no scientists invited - so it's no surprise only one response had real-world relevance.(1) A historian at Rutgers wished agriculture had never been invented. Agriculture, that fundamental progressive achievement which made food plentiful so that we no longer spent our days foraging and could learn things and, you know, create universities, had to be undone.Some Good News: Yellowstone Won’t Blow Up This Year
From Australian wildfires to COVID-19 to murder hornets to race wars in Manhattan, 2020 looks to be a challenging year. It could still get worse, but science shows it won't be due to Yellowstone blowing its top.Yellowstone is one of those scenarios doomsday "preppers" worry about. They are right to be concerned if it does happen, but they don't understand hazard (what could happen) and risk (the likelihood of the hazard) any better than environmentalists worrying about weedkillers do.
New Flu? Coronavirus Might Become Cause Of A Seasonal Illness
The flu kills over 600,000 people each year and in 2020 another virus exploded in public health circles for the third time in 17 years; coronavirus.SARS-CoV-2, which causes the COVID-19 disease, has killed nearly 400,000, and given the risk factors it is hard to say how many would have been killed by any respiratory disease, but one question is not philosophical: is this the new normal?
Extinction: Maybe Cro-Magnon Wiped Out Neanderthals After All
Why is Homo neanderthalensis gone while Homo sapiens have bent the world to our will?In recent years, there has been speculation that climate change wiped out Neanderthal people, or interbreeding with us, since many of us have DNA shared by Neanderthals (we also share 60 percent of our DNA with a banana) but a new paper affirms the earliest belief about survival of the fitter, commonly called survival of the fittest; competition between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. And Neanderthals lost.
The Army Corps Of Engineers Wanted To Prevent Hurricane Katrina Devastation, Environmentalists Sued, Now They ‘re Doing It Again
Conservation groups have frequently sued the U.S Army Corps of Engineers claiming that government scientists do not "properly" evaluate the environmental impacts of its plans to mitigate flood risk.Epidemiologists Link Celiac Disease To Frying Pans And Then We Wonder Why People Don’t Believe In Masks
During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, when disease epidemiologists want to be taken seriously by the public, they face an uphill battle. Blocking their progress are epidemiologists who casually link everything to diseases, often using food frequency questionnaires which have no scientific legitimacy.Should Any Current COVID-19 Estimates Be Used To Make Policy Decisions?
There is a popular saying in statistics - "Everyone believes the data except the collector. No one believes the model except the modeler."An Argument To Force China To Pay Coronavirus Reparations
When President Trump said he was going to restrict travel from China earlier this year due to coronavirus, I didn’t engage in the reflexive politics of corporate journalists and call him a racist, I just though it an overreaction. After all, the Whole Health Organisation did not consider it a pandemic and they usually hyperventilate about everything. They had even assured us it could not be transmitted human to human.
Their source for both; the communist party in China.