The U.S. Is Getting a Crash Course in Scientific Uncertainty


By BY APOORVA MANDAVILLI from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3zgiXUA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why We Should Be Spending More on Space Travel

Image
April 12, 2021 at 08:39PM Let’s stipulate one thing: there’s absolutely no reason for us to go to space. It does nothing to feed us, to clothe us, to protect us, to heal us. It’s dangerous and hideously expensive too, a budget-busting luxury that policy makers and administrators have spent decades trying to defend—always unsuccessfully because the fact is, there’s no practical defense for it. So stand down the rockets, take down the space centers, pocket the money and let’s move on. Still want the adventure of going to space? That’s what they make movies for. Now that we’ve established that, let’s stipulate the opposite: Space is precisely where the human species ought to be going. We accept that we’re a warring species. We accept that we’re a loving species. We accept that we’re an artistic and inventive and idiosyncratic species. Then we surely must accept that we’re a questing species. Questing species don’t much care for being stuck on one side of an ocean and so they cli...
Read more

Trillions of ‘Brood X’ Cicadas Are About to Emerge Across the U.S. to Sing, Mate and Die. Here’s What to Expect

Image
April 14, 2021 at 07:12PM This coming May, millions of people around the United States will have front-row seats to an extraordinary entomological event: Trillions of Brood X cicadas across 15 states will emerge almost synchronously after having spent the last 17 years underground. The males will take up elevated positions, each buzzing as loud as a lawnmower to attract females. After mating, the adult cicadas will die off en masse just about as quickly as they arrived—likely sometime in late June or July—while their offspring tunnel underground, not to emerge until 2038, when the dance will begin anew. Annual, or “dog day,” cicadas appear across the U.S. every summer, when their signature mating song becomes as much of the seasonal soundscape as a passing ice cream truck. But the cicadas taking center stage in this year’s event—distinctive for their black bodies and red eyes—are part of a periodical “brood” of the insects that emerge in predictable cycles of 13 or 17 years....
Read more

The Case for Abandoning ‘Corporate Responsibility’ When We Judge Company Practices

Image
April 20, 2021 at 04:30PM In an earlier era, green referred to grass and trees and jealous eyes. But over the past half-century, green has taken on a life of its own. The Green movement deals with the collisions and contagions of the contemporary world—how to view them, and how to cure them. The book from which this essay is excerpted, The Spirit of Green , examines a wide array of social, economic and political questions from a Green vantage point. These questions include established areas such as pollution control and global warming . But they also involve new frontiers such as Green chemistry, taxes, ethics and finance. The example that follows concerns an approach to large corporations, or what is called social responsibility. One of the major developments in corporate management is corporate social responsibility , which is the projection of Green philosophy into the business world. The idea is that corporations are more than money­making machines that buy steel, ...
Read more