"Merkel, who is a doctor of physics, is expected at Wednesday’s event, which is happening in her constituency."
A nation lead by a leader that is both a women and a scientist. I would say this is progress regardless of the experiment outcome.
A nation lead by a leader that is both a women and a scientist. I would say this is progress regardless of the experiment outcome.
Thus it is fitting that Chancellor Merkel attends this event.
It's a great experiment and a wonderful achievement, but probably we had different priorities and even different scientific priorities - especially considering the large amount of money invested. There are lots of competing science areas which lack this funding.
The problem with it is that a small but significant portion of the population either allergies or sensitivities to it, so it's best that they avoid eating it. The rest of us don't have that problem. But those that do look for alternatives, leading to the rise of "gluten-free" foods today. Traditionally, making GF alternatives has been difficult because the gluten is what helps stuff stick together, so GF bread for instance ended up being hard and very brittle, not chewy like normal bread. But GF stuff has gotten better; I think Xanthan gum is a popular gluten substitute in such foods to give the same effect.
Anyway, I'm usually pretty well-aware of pseudoscience regarding stuff like this, "chemicals" in foods, etc., and I've never heard of anyone thinking gluten is an artificial chemical. The GF faddists (the ones who don't have a genuine allergy or sensitivity) usually just think that GF foods are somehow "healthier", though they have absolutely nothing to base this opinion on. However, it's not all bad: because of all these GF faddists, there's a much, much bigger market for GF foods now than there used to be, so people who are genuinely gluten-intolerant now have far more options than they used to. Just 5 years ago, such a person couldn't eat anything from, say, Domino's Pizza if their buddies were ordering from there, but now they can since Domino's has a GF pizza option.
Anyway, there's plenty of foods which are perfectly natural, yet some people can't eat them because they have allergies to them. I believe some people are allergic to shellfish, for instance. And of course, peanuts are a well-known food allergy; they can outright kill people in small doses, even though there's nothing artificial about a peanut. And don't forget the absolute poisons out there like hemlock, ricin, etc. Those are all-natural too. Even apple seeds have small amounts of poison in them.
I'm actually pretty intrigued.
Scientist: I want politicians to do the Right Thing not to build consensus, and I believe a scientist is better in today's world compared to another politician by profession that comes from a different non-specializing background. It could also be an expert linguistic researcher and would be fine as well, but the point is, the new challenges we face are often science related...
Seriously, look at all the female candidates we've had in the past half-decade: Sarah Palin (Republican war-hawk and all-around ditzy moron who didn't know Africa isn't a country), Hillary (war hawk, on the payroll of Goldman Sachs, voted for Bush's Iraq invasion), Carly Fiorina (probably the worst tech CEO ever, drove HP straight into the ground and helped destroy Lucent before that, Republican).
If you want someone who isn't going to rush to jump into another war, or someone who really wants to help people at home with better social policies (leave aside the debate on how realistic they are), then you need to look at white men: Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich back in '08, etc.
These days, it seems the sexist feminists would rather vote for a war hawk who'll screw over the middle class for her rich buddies, just because she has a vagina.