ast March, Mexican President Lopez Obrador announced he was indefinitely postponing a scheduled April 1 ban of the herbicide glyphosate. It gravely disappointed advocacy environmentalists. They blamed pressure from the United States government doing the bidding of the agricultural industry. Glyphosate will remain the herbicide of choice for Mexican farmers, the government said, until it … Read more

Public concern about the environment has not always been part of the social conscience in North America. After all, European colonialists viewed the ‘new world’ as a vast and inexhaustible wilderness.

obert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK Jr.) isn’t known for subtlety. As the ringleader of America’s anti-vaccine movement, the rogue presidential candidate and tort lawyer has boldly endorsed seemingly every paranoid conspiracy theory the internet has to offer. Among his many strange musings, Kennedy has claimed the World Health Organization planned the COVID-19 pandemic; that Cheerios are poisoning America’s … Read more

In a first-ever human clinical trial of four adult patients, an mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida quickly reprogrammed the immune system to attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor.

The Covid vaccines, a triumph of science and public health, are estimated to have prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths. Yet even the best vaccines produce rare but serious side effects. And the Covid vaccines have been given to more than 270 million people in the United States, in nearly 677 million doses.

The decline of the bumblebees is highly concerning as they are vital for ecosystems. They pollinate flowers and crops. If populations were to continue to decline, crops would not be able to produce fruits and vegetables. Despite being small, they are crucial to nature’s delicate balance.

Reducing emissions from farming will be key to meeting this country’s climate goals. Agriculture is the fifth largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. One climate-friendly growing technique called biochar involves literally burying carbon in the ground.

When the term organic farming was first used (ca. 1941; Paull, 2014), it was as a response to the introduction of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to farming (Watson et al., 2008). Its founders believed that these materials were not compatible with the “natural” ways of farming and so should not be used (this assumes that … Read more

A roomsize computer equipped with a new type of circuitry, the Perceptron, was introduced to the world in 1958 in a brief news story buried deep in The New York Times. The story cited the U.S. Navy as saying that the Perceptron would lead to machines that “will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.”

By now, almost everyone knows people who have had COVID. Although most recover within a few days or weeks, it has killed almost 1.2 million Americans (with the weekly death toll still in the hundreds); and even those with mild infections can experience “long COVID,” marked by persistent, sometimes debilitating, symptoms that last for months or even years following the acute infection.