Science Education & Policy

Deb Haaland is the U.S. Representative for New Mexico's 1st congressional district since 2019. Predictably, she is a lawyer. Less common is that she was a casino executive. If you are wondering if any of those count as qualifications to run the Interior Department, you are not alone. In the Washington Examiner today, I outline some of the science concerns that people on the left and right who care about wildlife refuges should have when it comes to someone with a fringe political agenda handling public land. Progressive sites claim that nearly everyone Interior deals with is a Cliven…

Within days of being sworn in, President Joe Biden elevated the Science Advisor to the President to a Cabinet rank, with a seat beside the Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury. This bold move signaled the administration's commitment to an evidence-based approach to policymaking. Yet some are already threatening to undermine this forward-thinking policy. Activist groups that helped put President Biden in the Oval Office are demanding the administration replace evidence-based research with activist-backed junk science. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), among others, is demanding a…

Every day we are inundated with various social media posts and news sources telling us about what does or does not work, that some things may be harmful, or that a product is not safe because it contains a chemical that causes cancer or other adverse health effects in animals. You may wonder if you should start avoiding certain products in hopes of keeping you and your family safe.. It's confusing for other scientists as well, and you may not be sure how or where to start when trying to make informed  decisions, so here are a few tips that help me sort it out: 1. Understand Exposure…

If you sell hot dogs at a baseball stadium, you probably do well in revenue. Now imagine the stadium puts 6 hot dog competitors next to you. Will you still do well or will your hot dog revenue go down? Unless you are Paul Krugman you know the price will go down. Now imagine the stadium tells you 6 people just like you doing the same job is a positive thing; more people will enjoy hot dogs and the market for hot dogs will probably grow because there are so many choices.  That may be true, yet it does not help you one bit. This is the plight of new Ph.D.s who discover that a large part of…

Medicine misuse is a public health issue but there is little consistency in what it means.  Prior to 2020, everyone wanted to claim Big Pharma and medicine were bad, so whatever they wanted to write about got a broad misuse umbrella; misuse, abuse, medication errors were all called misuse.  All such deceptive framing accomplished was to muddy the waters and create a clear need for classifying and selecting terms and definitions to understand which situations truly involve medicine misuse. A new systematic review looked at 51 relevant studies from 2008 to 2020 and found there…

In the United States, meat substitutes like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are now fixtures in culture. Vegetarians who miss meat want to eat them because they use plants while environmental activists don't want to eat them because they use science. That keeps them in the public eye. Left behind in the discussion is a 21st century approach to actual meat, one which mitigates claims by those who avoid a good steak on humanitarian grounds; meat grown in a laboratory, no living animals needed. While lab-grown meat may sound odd at first, that's only because corporate journalists have done hit…

In its 47 year history, the Endangered Species Act went from an essential law to protect actual endangered species to a hammer with which to pummel companies and landowners. What started with an American bald eagle became holding housing development projects hostage by getting an obscure endangered designation for some creature and then demanding huge settlements and fees to 'protect' it. In one case, the Mississippi Gopher Frog, they were even able to hold landowners in a completely different state, Louisiana, hostage, until the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling against the federal…

Dear students, If you ask about your grade, I’ll gladly tell you that you’re doing well in the course, or that you really need to do better, as the case may be. More specifically than that I will not say. The main reason for this is that if I were a hiring manager at a company, the very last thing I would ever think to ask you about would be your grades. When you interview for a job, you should show that you understand the company’s situation, that you have knowledge, skills and experiences that prepare you to do the job, and that your personality and way of working fit the company’…

Internal documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request show that the two largest teacher unions, the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers (AFL–CIO), have donated to a Democratic political advocacy organization named "Center for Media and Democracy" which produces numerous products for its base. One of them, Sourcewatch, is a wiki written by progressives to attack conservatives and they are also unsurprisingly opposed to most science. Because they think science is a vast right-wing conspiracy. Donations to Democrats by education unions are hardly a…

In early 2020 the U.S. government reacted to worrisome death figures for COVID-19, the SARS-CoV-2 form of coronavirus that erupted in Wuhan China in late 2019, and restricted air travel. This was xenophobia, political critics charged, and not based on evidence. Closing borders was not going to work anyway. Among the early adopters of travel restrictions with significantly lower death rates are countries such as Australia, Israel and the Czech Republic. Germany, which introduced its first travel restrictions on 16 March, belongs to the late-adopter group, but countries such as Great Britain,…