Is anyone still blogging?
Total abstinence isn't good for you
Whatever your claim, you can find a study that supports it: A daily pint reduces risk of a heart attack and angina by a third, a big data study of Brit adults has found, while total abstinence increases the risk by 24 per cent.
Source: theregister.co.uk/2017/03/23 BMJ Alcohol Study
How green is the Electric Car?
Electric cars and batteries use lots of rare earth metals like lithium:
At this mine [The Jiangxi rare earth mine in China], those rare earths amounted to 0.2 percent of what gets pulled out of the ground. The other 99.8 percent--now contaminated with toxic chemicals--is dumped back into the environment.
Source: wired.com/2016/03/teslas-electric-cars-might-not-green-think
Climate Change
Is the climate changing? Are we changing it?
Take a look at some Unwelcome Data
Organic Food
Do you have a friend who will buy nothing but organic, claiming that it is so much better for you? Well, it isn't.
BBC Two in their Trust me I'm a doctor series did some experiments and found that while people preferred the taste if organic apples and tomatoes, they actually preferred the non-organic carrot!
Concerning pesticides they state that current scientific research suggests that the fruit or veg sold in the UK does not contain levels that could be harmful -- whether organic or not.
What about the nutritional value? This Stanford analysis looked at more than 200 studies of the content and associated health gains of organic and non-organic foods. "The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods."
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22944875
Just what the more level-headed among us have always thought. If you believe organic is worth the huge price difference then it's all just in your head. You will see it when you believe it. Watch the 2009 Penn and Teller on Organic Food; they may not be right with everything they say, but the scene where they set up a street banana tasting illustrates the point: it's a plain non-organic banana cut in half, but people are told that this half is organic, and all agree that it tastes so much better -- and look pretty silly when they learn the truth.
The Exxon Valdez Otter
Remember the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska? Many animals perished as a consequence, and as part of the cleanup a sea otter was rescued, cleaned, fed, and finally released back into the wild. It may be just an urban legend that at the big release ceremony the otter was immediately eaten by an orca; however, the cost of the operation was $80000! Undernutrition causes 3 million child deaths each year, but that does not make it into the news anymore, when sea otters are so much cuter.