News — Science

Enlarge / Senator John Cornyn (center, black suit) takes a photo with the 2017 astronaut class. (credit: NASA Johnson) On Friday, Texas Senator John Cornyn took to Twitter with some advice for scientists: models aren't part of the scientific method. Scientists have responded with a mix of bafflement and exasperation. And Cornyn’s misconception is common enough—and important enough—that it’s worth exploring. Cornyn’s beef with models echoes a talking point often brought up by people who want to reject inconvenient conclusions of systems sciences. In reality, “you can make a model say anything you want” is about as potent an argument...

Enlarge (credit: Orange County NC ) Plastics have a lot of properties that have made them fixtures of modern societies. They can be molded into any shape we'd like, they're tough yet flexible, and they come in enough variations that we can tune the chemistry to suit different needs. The problem is that they're tough enough that they don't break down on their own, and incinerating them is relatively inefficient. As a result, they've collected in our environment as both bulk plastics and the seemingly omnipresent microplastic waste. For natural materials, breaking down isn't an issue, as microbes have evolved...