Currently, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine produced by Pfizer/BionNTech is approved for people age 12 and older, whereas the Moderna vaccine is approved for those over age 18. If the current clinical trials in younger children prove successful, both vaccines will seek Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for inoculating children between ages 5 and 11 […]
President Joe Biden announced his six-pronged COVID-19 Action Plan this evening. One prong of the plan aims to dramatically ramp up testing for the coronavirus throughout the country—something that should have been done a long time ago. In that prong, Biden will invoke the Defense Production Act to spend nearly $2 billion on procuring 280 million […]
Above is a photograph of my stash of five at-home COVID-19 tests. After participating a conference in South Dakota in July where a lot of folks were ostentatiously unvaccinated, I used one so that if I tested positive I could quarantine myself to prevent infecting other people. Since I have been fully vaccinated since early […]
If you’re a troll online, you are most likely also a troll offline, at least with respect to political discussions, reports new research published in the American Political Science Review. In their study, Aarhus University researchers Alexander Bor and Michael Bang Petersen investigate what they call the “mismatch hypothesis.” Do mismatches between human psychology, evolved to […]
Diagnosed with COVID-19, the popular podcaster Joe Rogan reportedly says that he has taken the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a treatment for the disease. Although the 54-year-old has called himself a “fucking moron” with respect to his earlier misguided ruminations about COVID-19 vaccinations and said “I’m not a respected source of information, even for me,” […]
Hurricane Ida rapidly spun itself up to a Category 4 tropical cyclone—maximum sustained winds at 150 miles per hour—just before it made landfall on the coast of Louisiana on Sunday morning. Such rapid intensification is consistent with the effects of man-made climate change on hurricanes. The recently released Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) from the Intergovernmental […]
Useful and infinitely malleable, plastics are ubiquitous in modern life. They are also a mixed blessing. Plastic detritus litters landscapes and befouls the oceans, and Americans are estimated to ingest about nine ounces of microplastics a year. The U.S. annually generates about 280 pounds of plastics per capita. Despite all the earnest sorting by householders, […]
“U.S. population is much more multiracial and more diverse than what we measured in the past,” said Nicholas Jones, the Census Bureau’s director of race and ethnicity research, in a press release today. According to last year’s census data, whites remain the country’s largest racial or ethnic group. About 204.3 million people described themselves as […]
Establishing a new Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) is one of the items in the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion 2022 Budget Resolution Agreement Framework. According to that framework agreement, funding the new CCC would come out of $726 billion being overseen by the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; the $135 billion allocated to the Committee […]
Golden Rice, which has been genetically engineered to have higher levels of the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene, has finally received regulatory approval for planting by farmers in the Philippines. The grain gets its name from the golden hue imparted to it by the beta-carotene. Greenpeace anti-biotech activists have been slinging low, dishonest neoluddite propaganda against golden […]
