Science

The government has to do something about health care just to bring its own costs down (it already pays for about half of all health care in the U.S.) It could do this sensibly, by changing the tax rules that lead to the wrong kind of insurance. If this isn't going to happen,

Today's "Let's spend good research money to demonstrate the obvious" story comes from Purdue University, where an exhaustive study has shown that people can, indeed, worry themselves to death:

I don't know whether we should be hopeful or worried that, according to The New York Times, Indiana's two senators are "considered fence sitters" on major climate change legislation moving through Congress. The analysis even goes so far as to say that their votes "could be the deciding factors, and obtaining those votes will be challenging."

The list of new diseases to worry about just keeps growing:

Cases of nausea, headaches, insomnia and other ills have become common enough in states with wind farms that they've been given a name: "wind turbine syndrome."

U.S. Rep. Mike Pence apprently had a lot of applause lines during a recent town hall meeting in Muncie, including this one:

The time has come for America to build 100 new nuclear power plants in the next 20 years.

Gosh, here's a shock:

LONDON (Reuters) - Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.

Well, well, well, well, well.

Well, this won't waste anybody's time:

Tom Turpin, an entomology professor, hopes to amend Indiana's status as one of five states void of an official state insect.

Legislatures dismissed the “Say's Firefly” bill in the mid-90s because it was perceived as a dumb bill and not a priority amongst state economical issues.

[. . .]

Monday will be the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. Of all the remarkable achievements of the 20th century, it's the one most worth celebrating.

Well, duh, yes:

Could the best climate models -- the ones used to predict global warming -- all be wrong?

Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience.  The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.