Question 80

 Question 80

England has doubled the amount of forestland in the past 150 years, and now has as much land dedicated to forests as the year 1350.

Following the science:
A corporate income tax cut leads to a sustained increase in GDP and productivity, with peak effects between five and eight years. R&D spending and capital investment display hump-shaped responses while hours worked and employment are much less affected.
That is from a new NBER working paper by James Cloyne, Joseba Martinez, Haroon Mumtaz, and Paolo Surico.

Lawmakers pressed NIH leadership for answers about the mysterious disappearance of the Scientific Management Review Board, a committee that Congress empaneled in 2006 to ensure the agency was operating efficiently…
“There wasn’t any notification that we weren’t going to meet again — it was just that the meetings stopped getting called,” Nancy Andrews, a onetime board member and the former dean of the Duke University School of Medicine, told STAT in May.
She added: “I had the sense that we were asking questions in areas that they didn’t really want to get into, and I suppose Francis [Collins] in particular didn’t really want us working on.”

Legal decisions are getting stranger. perhaps because in a war with evil, the law must not be neutral.

As a recent example of common practices in science funding in North America, I was denied funding opportunities twice by Canada’s federal science foundations, both of which were detailed in these pages, purely because I said I would hire research assistants based on merit, regardless of their gender or ethnic or cultural backgrounds.
Over the past year, the encroachment of the cult of DIE into academia has only grown. There are now many positions that are simply off limits to straight white men who are not handicapped. One must pledge allegiance to these illiberal principles in order to be a practising scientist in 2022.-- Kambhampati