Philosophy & Ethics

As the party season approaches, a timely reminder of the issues surrounding the binge drinking culture are again highlighted by research into 'young people and alcohol' a team lead by Professor Christine Griffin, at the University of Bath. The research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) suggests several considerations for future policy.  Focusing on the role of marketing practices in shaping young people's attitudes to alcohol consumption, the research included analysis of 216 alcohol adverts, both in print and broadcast. While extreme drinking and determined…

There is a serious side of Taoism which advocates becoming like a child. "Why do the enlightened seem filled with light and happiness like children? Why do they sometimes even look and talk like children? Because they are," said Lao-tse in the "Tao Te Ching." Those who make good quality films for children must engender the morality, intent and knowledge of a responsible adult and the sensitivity, curiosity and clear vision of a child. The makers of the film adaptation of the Dr. Seuss classic children’s book, Horton Hears A Who (1954) successfully apply those traits to the movie. I recently…

A group of French research students is launching an online register to flag up scientific papers that have been tainted by fraud and other types of scientific misconduct. Claire Ribrault, a PhD student in neurobiology at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, unveiled the Scientific Red Cards project last month at a workshop on research integrity sponsored by the European Science Foundation (ESF). The idea is to identify papers that have been shown to be fraudulent but are still in circulation. Scientific journals are the primary means by which the results of research are made public. Emma…

Women's magazines such as The Oprah Magazine and Cosmopolitan portray cosmetic surgery as a physically risky but overall worthwhile option for enhancing physical appearance but a University of British Columbia study has found they aren't really addressing possible emotional health risks. The study, published in Women's Health Issues journal, is the first to examine how women's magazines portray cosmetic surgery to Canadians, and also found that male opinions on female attractiveness are routinely used to justify cosmetic surgery and that a disproportionate amount of articles are devoted to…

Public confidence in the honesty of scientists is being harmed by a small minority of researchers who behave badly, heard attendees of a meeting in Madrid on 17-18 November that was organized by the newly formed Research Integrity Forum of the European Science Foundation (ESF) in collaboration with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).   The European research organizations agreed to work more closely to tackle the problem of fraud and other misconduct in science. Fraud in science includes inventing data (fabrication), manipulating data to produce an unjustified result (…

Would you insist someone change if they are left-handed?   90% of the world is right-handed.  Short?  That's relative but the average height for an American man is under 5'10".    Genes do a lot of things, and a new study from the Abramson Cancer Center and Department of Psychiatry in the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine says that smokers who carry a particular version of a gene for an enzyme that regulates dopamine in the brain may suffer from concentration problems and other cognitive deficits when abstaining from nicotine – a problem that puts them at…

Many people may not know that this past weekend marked the 400th anniversary of John Milton’s birth (he was born on December 9th, 1608). “But Milton remains incredibly relevant to us today,” says Shannon Miller, professor and chair of the English department at Temple University.  Milton is the seventeenth-century English poet who is considered equal or superior to William Shakespeare. “He is important to us both for the issues of political revolution in which he was invested and for his poem Paradise Lost which explores issues of political revolution within a narrative about the fall…

When it comes to the world of the very, very small — nanotechnology — we may have a big problem: Nano and its capacity to alter the fundamentals of nature could be failing the moral litmus test of religion. In a report published today in Nature Nanotechnology, survey results reveal some sharp contrasts in the perception that nanotechnology is morally acceptable. Those views, according to the report, correlate directly with aggregate levels of religious views in each country surveyed. In the United States and in European countries where religion plays a larger role in everyday life, like Italy…

Media coverage of clinical trials does not contain the elements readers require to make informed decisions. A comparison of the coverage received by pharmaceutical and herbal remedy trials, reported in BMC Medicine, has revealed that it is rarely possible for the lay public to assess the credibility of the described research. Tania Bubela from the University of Alberta, Canada, led a team of researchers who investigated 201 pharmaceutical and 352 herbal remedy newspaper articles, and studied the 48 pharmaceutical and 57 herbal remedy clinical trials that the stories referred to. For both…

A ban on fast food advertisements in the United States could reduce the number of overweight children by as much as 18 percent, according to a new study being published this month in the Journal of Law and Economics. The study also reports that eliminating the tax deductibility associated with television advertising would result in a reduction of childhood obesity, though in smaller numbers.  The authors found that a ban on fast food television advertisements during children's programming would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3-11 by 18 percent, while also lowering the…