Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
The US Food and Drug Administration has issued a strongly worded warming about a product knowns as “Miracle Mineral Solution” or MMS. Their guidance is simple – “Do not purchase or drink it”. This is the second warning they have issued. Why? It is not simply a scam run by a fraudster, but is a … Read more
The short simple answer is that you can indeed Nuke a Hurricane. The problem is that you will not alter the storm. Instead you have simply added to the environmental problems you face. Let’s dig into this a bit. Why has this come up? Journalist Jonathan Swan of Axios published a story on 25th Aug … Read more
Previously I used the title “Weekly Weird Right-Wing Fundamentalist News”. That’s a tad long so I’ll try out this new title “Weekly Wingnut News”. Cue a band of internet surfing mechanics becoming bitterly disappointed to discover I’m not discussing hardware and instead that this relates to the slang term “Wingnut” that is used to label … Read more
Wildfires happening in the Amazon. Vast swathes of Brazil’s rainforest have been set ablaze. This of course is not natural, it is the result of farmers and loggers clearing land. It is also not new, it happens each year. This year is different, it has scaled up by roughly 84% compared to last year and … Read more
Reports of dramatic melt events in Greenland provoke different reactions. Some, (thankfully only a small number), sit back and observe, “It is summer, this is what happens in the summer“. Others respond more dramatically. During the last Democratic debate, long-shot candidate Andrew Yang urged people to move away from the coast because we are already … Read more
On 14th Aug 2019, a new paper was published in The Astronomical Journal that addresses the question of the quantity of earth like planets. Titled “Occurrence Rates of Planets Orbiting FGK Stars: Combining Kepler DR25, Gaia DR2, and Bayesian Inference” it attempts to answer the question. The abstract explains it as follows: We characterize the occurrence rate of planets, … Read more