An appeals court decision has invalidated laws against sleeping in the street, in California and several other western states.

A political trial in Egypt sentenced hundreds of protesters to prison and 75 to execution.

"Populist turbulence, viral panics, experts under attack: instinct and emotion have overtaken facts and reason in the digital age."

To win back trust for science, we have to root out the corruption of science by big business, including the pharma industry, the food industry (protecting sugar by blaming fat), the tobacco industry, and the fossil fuel industry.

Too much focus on measuring the success of organizations tends to mess them up.

"In every realm in which performance metrics are tied to rewards, practitioners find tools to fudge the data."

"Often, the things that aren’t measured are unmeasurable. They also tend to be things that are essential to the enterprise."

A few decades ago there was an obsession with using statistics to determine whether code was clear and understandable. Various statistics were found which correlated with clarity. But when programmers were taught to write to improve those statistics, their code did not get clearer, This seems to be a general phenomenon, that the statistics correlate with what really counts only as long as nobody but researchers study them.

Trash-collecting systems are being deployed in the Pacific Ocean to pick up floating plastic, which will then be taken — where?

There is something fishy in the figures in the article. If the system removes 5 tons per month, that is 60 tons per year. To remove 80,000 tons would require 1333 1/3 years.

Perhaps the 5 tons per month figure is for one structure and they plan to have 33 1/3 of them.

The article lists reasons why this method, even if it works, cannot be a full solution to the plastic waste problem.