After Chris Wild took over the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a UN-funded body in France that looks for statistical links between food/chemicals and cancer, they made a switch in their policies regarding participation; an epidemiologist who had ever consulted for industry could no longer vote on what to label a carcinogen.

Even though it was hypocritical - epidemiologists working for trial lawyers or environmental groups were recruited - few inside IARC objected. Nor did anyone think they might. Environmental groups have manufactured an ethical halo so well that even their lawyers look like better people than other lawyers. They are, they assure us, poorly paid evangelists for health and safety against Evil Corporations. 

Last week I was in Amsterdam, where I attended the first European AI for Fundamental Physics conference (EUCAIF). Unfortunately I could not properly follow the works there, as in the midst of it I got grounded by a very nasty bronchial bug. Then over the weekend I was able to drag myself back home, and today, still struggling with the after-effects, am traveling to Rome for another relevant event.

Despite Vermont's Agricultural  Innovation Board (AIB), created to inform regulatory recommendations using science, flatly stating there was no basis for a ban on a class of safe pesticides called neonicotinoids, and agreement by Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, the Vermont Senate just passed House Bill H706, which will ban such insecticides despite decades of safe use.

Evolutionary psychology, the discipline that claimed we're being manipulated by flowers and evolved to like the appearance of black men, also made the bold assertion that the income of your parents during pregnancy made you...gay?

With a porous southern border, street fentanyl continues to enter the United States and be purchased by recreational drug users, all while the U.S. government continues to treat suffering cancer patients like criminals when it comes to legitimate pain medication access. It isn't much better in Canada, according to a new study.

A year ago, corporate media promoted the provocative claim that dinosaurs like Tyrannorsaurus rex had so many neurons they had to be substantially more intelligent than assumed, since these high neuron counts could directly inform on intelligence, metabolism and life history.

They even added that T. rex was monkey-like in some of its habits and may even have used cultural transmission of knowledge as tools. Corporate media sells ads so they love such 'scientists are baffled by' narratives and a scenario where dinosaurs could be ruling on other planets. Other scientists were instead baffled that it got by peer-review.

From April 30 to May 3 more than 300 researchers in fundamental physics will gather in Amsterdam for the first edition of the EUCAIF conference, an initiative supported by the APPEC, NuPecc and ECFA consortia, which is meant to structure future European research activities in fundamental physics with Artificial Intelligence technologies.

If even a wealthy like Germany has to lie about emissions to placate government-funded environmentalists and burn wood and buy gas from Russia, it seems unfair to criticize a poor country like Congo, but the culture war on oil can't think about any of that.

If you don't want to look like a rich, white progressive telling poor black people that the climate is more important than their children, the way to do it is to write...anonymously.

And an ironically-named humanities journal like Critical Historical Studies will still publish it, uncritically. 

China has quietly overtaken France to become the world's second-largest producer of nuclear energy.

In a world where we live hostages of advertisement, where our email addresses and phone numbers are sold and bought by companies eager to intrude in our lives and command our actions, preferences, tastes; in a world where appearance trumps substance 10 to zero, where your knowledge and education are less valued than your looks, a world where truth is worth dimes and myths earn you millions - in this XXI century world, that is, Universities look increasingly out of place.