1. Just a week after we taunted anti-science activists for collaborating with Russian propaganda outlets to undermine US agriculture supremacy - those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes against sugar beets now, eh, comrades? - we were at it again, which means Russia Today and Sputnik will be hammering away at their political sympathizers in the organic food and solar power industry to hack our Wikipedia page and send out Tweets noting that 35 years ago we got a small grant from Chevron, or whatever they are doing to try and undermine science this week.
Like a batboy living in a cave, it used to be the obscure parts of Russia were the easy setting for American fantasy stuff because no one knew the places, but now Russia is creating its own nonsense about other countries.
<-----Russian science.
Their latest fabrication was that a mummy in South America was an alien. Dr. Alex Berezow took them to task yet again and media outlets rightfully turned on them. They have as little confidence in Russian claims as most people have in Natural Resources Defense Council.
The Kremin also claims they will be 100% organic by 2020. Yet if you do some simple math and look at the people and equipment they have and the yields they claim, it means they must be 500% better than America.
In the 1980s I was an Army Officer and when we got information about the USSR's military TO&E, we had to prepare as if it was all real, but we knew it wasn't. Just like their science.
2. In Romper, they discuss "natural" Easter egg dyes. They mention go-to hysterical scaremongers Center for Science in the Public Interest, one of Americas top anti-science litigation groups, before immediately debunking them using our evidence-based thinking. It's fine to buy all-natural whatever, it sounds like the price the author paid was reasonable, but dye is dye. Starbucks discovered this when they replaced modern dye with its natural alternative - which is made from bugs - and customers abandoned the product.
3. Progressive darlings in France were gleeful that at a Geneva human rights film festival panel about a faux documentary starring trial lawyers and featuring litigants hoping to sue Hawaiian seed companies, an anti-science activist who clearly did not care about human rights blabbered a bunch of nonsense about companies who gave us money 30 years ago.
The Les Temps blogger ignored the fact that Laurent Gaberell, who works for Swiss anti-chemical activists Public Eye, and Syngenta local radio commentator Maren Peters blatantly lied about me. It was the only coverage the film festival really got. Even in Geneva there was no publicity. But that sort of thing sells in France, which even for Europe is really anti-science.
But they were disappointed that Swiss company Syngenta saw through their agenda and declined to participate. Syngenta's communications manager Andrew McConville rightly noted that pesticides and seeds are the most regulated products in the world so allegations of a corporate conspiracy to promote good science were a little Flat Earth. "We decided not to participate in a forum that we felt would not allow a balanced, honest discussion and realistic about the issue of farmers' access to technology."
4. In The Smithsonian, Becky Little tackles the complex science of herpes, asking if we can gene edit it away. A vaccine has not worked, and likely never will, because the virus hides out deep in our bodies and stays there for life.
5. Famed physicist Stephen Hawking passed away and now that the eulogies are done it's time to discuss how in later years he devolved into bizarre anthropomorphic beliefs about the universe, with a heathy dose of scaremongering. In The Federalist, Drs. Alex Berezow and Ethan Siegel do just that. "He spoke with the religious fervor of a modern-day Jonathan Edwards, but instead of sinners in the hands of an angry God, we were humans in the hands of an angry universe."
