absurd feeble

Imagine there’s no evolution: Yoko says oh no to Expelled Yoko Ono is incensed that the antiscience film Expelled: No Intelligence used a snippet of late husband John Lennon’s 1971 paean to peace Imagine sans permission. So she sued the film’s producers and distributors, demanding that they yank the track from the controversial movie, which stars Nixon-speechwriter-cum-actor-cum-pitchman Ben Stein. The BBC reports that the former Beatle’s widow balked when, among other things, the film triggered a blogospheric backlash against her, because it appeared that she had authorized the song’s use and, so, endorsed the movie’s creationist antievolution claims....

Whether via West Coast wildfires that shrouded New York City’s skyline in smoke or historic floods in Germany, in 2021, signs of the climate crisis were everywhere. A group of the world’s leading ecologists summarized humanity’s predicament when they recently argued that our main goal now as a species is to “avoid a ghastly future.” So far, we have responded to the threat of environmental collapse primarily by trying to modify our technologies, whether in moving away from combustion engines or making solar energy cheaper and more efficient....

Most Americans do not think that Black people are any more likely to be affected by pollution than white people, despite significant evidence that racism is a root cause of environmental injustice in the United States, a survey has found. Numerous research papers over the years have shown that people of colour and poor people are significantly more likely to live in areas of high pollution — a result of the deliberate construction of polluting industries in these communities, says Dylan Bugden, an environmental sociologist at Washington State University in Pullman....

Roughly 50 percent of all mental health conditions begin before people are in their mid-teens even though most go undetected and untreated. Adding to this, suicide is one of the top causes of death in young adults. The unprecedented disruptions of the pandemic has aggravated such problems, especially for younger age groups. All of these factors mean there is no better time to support and strengthen mental health education among teenagers....

After the latest gut-wrenching Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, with the United Nations Climate Change Conference ahead, and with the school year in full swing, a question arises: How should we be teaching young people about climate change? This is no longer a niche topic. As we are forced to confront the fact that the climate is connected to every aspect of our lives and the world around us, teachers at numerous levels (from middle school to college), across multiple subjects (from the sciences to the humanities), find themselves engaged in climagogy—teaching students about different aspects of the climate crisis....

There’s a place in Austin, Texas, where the residents have agreed to be the test subjects for a renewable energy and smart grid future—and it’s named after a nut. The Pecan Street demonstration project—part of the newly built 280-hectare neighborhood known as Mueller—has become the largest concentrated community of electric vehicle (EV) owners in the world. The community now has nearly 60 Chevy Volt owners alone, thanks to the demonstration project’s commitment to match the federal government’s $7,500 rebate incentive, effectively halving the price of the hybrid electric cars....

GlaxoSmithKline has developed what looks like a cure for a rare and deadly disease, and it’s going to cost $665,000 for a single dose. That sky-high price tag—more than twice the average price of a house—is likely to stir what’s already a long-simmering debate in health care: How much should curative therapies cost, and how should society pay for them? GSK’s drug, called Strimvelis, is a gene therapy for severe combined immune deficiency, an inborn illness that leaves children unable to protect themselves against infection....

The eminent mid-20th century British historian of medicine F.N.L. Poynter once said of Gray’s Anatomy that “what began as a book has become an institution.” Like all progressive institutions, this one periodically looks itself over, evaluates its development and takes measures to be sure that it has kept up with the times. Keeping up has occasionally required increasing the complexity of its operations, necessarily expanding its bureaucracy, and seeking new and forward-looking leadership....

Most animals that fly or swim bend their wings or fins in similar geometrical proportions and by similar angles, a study says. The seemingly universal principle, which applies to creatures as diverse as moths and sharks, holds lessons for researchers designing devices that propel themselves through air or water. The work is published today in Nature Communications. The quest to develop flying machines based on the aerodynamics of flapping wings is hampered by a lack of information about how birds achieve stability and control....

By David DeKok HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - A court injunction obtained by Texas-based Cabot Oil & Gas is preventing Pennsylvania resident Vera Scroggins from going to her local grocery store, her friends’ homes, schools, or even the hospital. That’s because those properties sit atop the more than 200,000 acres in Susquehanna County that the energy producer owns and leases for gas extraction - land on which Scroggins, a determined anti-fracking activist, is not allowed to tread....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The dominant position that China holds in global manufacturing means that for many years China has also been the largest global importer of many types of recyclable materials. Last year, Chinese manufacturers imported 7.3m metric tonnes of waste plastics from developed countries including the UK, the EU, the US and Japan. However, in July 2017, China announced big changes in the quality control placed on imported materials, notifying the World Trade Organisation that it will ban imports of 24 categories of recyclables and solid waste by the end of the year....

US Representative Lamar Smith, the controversial chairman of the US House of Representatives’ science committee, will retire when his term expires late next year. Smith, a Texas Republican, has repeatedly questioned the science behind climate change, sought to pare back the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) research portfolio and has launched dozens of probes into alleged wrongdoing by individual scientists and US government science agencies. Since taking the helm in 2013, the politician has transformed the science panel from a relatively deliberative group into an investigative weapon....

Pfizer and BioNTech announced today that their experimental vaccine against the novel coronavirus is more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease COVID-19, based on initial analysis of results from their large phase III trial. The two companies also report that no serious safety concerns have arisen thus far. To create the vaccine, researchers genetically engineered SARS-CoV-2 genes, captured their blueprint, embedded that blueprint into an RNA molecule in solution and injected the solution into the bodies of trial participants....

A pain-free recovery from surgery certainly sounds appealing, but where should doctors draw the line when prescribing opioids? Should a patient being discharged after minimally invasive outpatient surgery be prescribed the same number of painkillers as a someone who underwent a total knee replacement? Are there alternative, non-opioid treatments that could replace these addictive compounds? As opioid addiction reaches epidemic proportions in the U.S, killing approximately 130 people each day, doctors are increasingly asking these questions....

Anyone who has spent even a little time with an autistic boy or girl soon becomes familiar with the behaviors that set these children apart: lack of eye contact, trouble verbalizing, overreacting or underreacting to activities around them, difficulty in expressing their feelings and in understanding the emotions of others. But how do parents and doctors know if a baby, who is too immature to be gauged on any of these traits, has autism?...

When someone has serious trouble breathing, care providers often use a mask with an attached bag—which has to be manually squeezed—to pump air into the lungs until a patient can be put on an automatic ventilator. In many highly developed regions, this “manual bag valve mask” is usually just a short-term, stopgap measure. But in places with limited medical staff and few—if any—ventilators, “it’s up to you to keep your family members alive” by squeezing the bag for much longer periods, says Rohith Malya, director of emergency medicine at Thailand’s Kwai River Christian Hospital....

For years scientists have sought to create the ultimate cancer-screening test—one that can reliably detect a malignancy early, before tumor cells spread and when treatments are more effective. A new method reported today in Nature Communications brings researchers a step closer to that goal. By using a blood test, the international team was able to diagnose cancer long before symptoms appeared in nearly all the people it tested who went on to develop cancer....

Close your eyes and imagine “space,” and there’s a good chance your mind will pull up a picture taken by Hubble. The space telescope became a household name in the 1990s as the images it captured appeared on TV and in magazines, newspapers and movies. Over the decades it created a shared visual lexicon of outer space and seeded multiple generations’ imaginations with visions of glowing nebulae, haunting planets and faraway galaxies....

Some people adore it; others abhor it. Now, the tropical durian (Durio zibethinus) has had its genome sequenced — and the analysis reveals exactly what’s responsible for the fruit’s distinctive stench. The sequence, reported by researchers in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, should also allow scientists to identify genes involved in disease resistance and drought tolerance, the team says, as well as flavour profiles. This information is important to growers in southeast Asia, where the durian is a major crop....

For dentists, a cavity is a conundrum—in order to save the tooth they must further damage it. Currently, the primary way to treat a cavity is to excavate the decay and the surrounding area before filling the resulting crater with a durable surrogate material such as metal, plastic or glass cement. But what if instead of drilling holes into teeth and patching them up with synthetic fillers, dentists could coax our pearly whites to regrow themselves?...