Conspiracy Theories Hinder Progress On COVID-19
Do you believe that COVID-19 was created by Bill Gates so he and his Big Pharma pals could get rich selling a cure? Do you believe career government employees are exaggerating COVID-19 to sway the election to their side?Smokers Use E-Cigarettes To Quit
When e-cigarettes - vaping - began to gain in popularity in the early part of this decade, critics like Dr. Stan Glantz at UC San Francisco claimed they were only going to be used in addition to cigarettes, so risk reduction and smoking cessation would not happen.Former smokers dismissed both him and his Johnson & Johnson funding - they make nicotine patches that compete with vaping - as a little too convenient, and data since has shown his claims were unfounded.
COVID-19 Has Brought ‘Thirdhand’ Smoke Epidemiology Back From Its Science Grave
With COVID-19 and worries about the SARS-CoV-2 virus keeping millions of people at home, activists and lawyers are hoping to resurrect worry about a problem dismissed by scientists as a money grab; third-hand smoke.Some U.S Cities Could Subsist On Locally Grown Food – If The Local Area Is Large Enough
A new estimate says that of 378 metropolitan areas, many could actually exist on locally grown food - if the local area is up to 200 miles away, which means New York City could claim farms in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are local to New York.Even then, diets would have to change, because progress has meant having diversity and choice, and if locally-grown were really necessary, the population would starve along the Eastern Seaboard and the Southwest of the U.S. And meat would only be for the rich.
Social Media Political Ads: Less Negative, But More Partisan
While it is said that around six percent of voting Americans decide elections - the truly undecided - it is more the case that getting out the vote among your own party matters most. That is why political parties will drive their own to polling places while telling the other side the date of the election has been changed.Climate Change: Engineering Models Hope For Best Outcomes – And Any Chess Player Knows That’s Terrible Strategy
Did you read a paper saying we can prevent ocean damage under climate change scenarios by dumping iron into water to spur phytoplankton growth? Germans did, and were so convinced they began doing illegal live experiments.The model used a best-case scenario, which any entry-level chess player knows is a bad idea - they forgot to falsify their own hypothesis in their zeal to do something. A new paper notes that many ambitious climate action plans rely on climate engineering technologies where the risks are unknown. They are more like TED talks than real plans.