Science & Society

Is there such a thing as a Facebook murder? Is it different than any other murder? Legally, it can be. From a common sense point of view, there is no 'hate crime' status that should make a murder worse if a white person kills a latino person or a Catholic instead of a white person or a Protestant, but legally such crimes can be considered more heinous and get a special label of hate crime. But social media is ubiquitous and criminal justice academics are always on the prowl for new categories to create and write about so a 'Facebook Murder', representing crimes that may somehow involve…

In America, it is no surprise to see obese people. They know they are obese, they just don't care. In Britain, you see just as many obese people, but they don't care because they don't think they are obese. They don't even think they are 'very overweight'.  Fewer than 10 percent of clinical obese Brits think they have a weight problem. In results from a 2012 survey of around 2000 adults published in BMJ Open, only 11 percent of obese women acknowledged they were "obese", with most describing themselves as "very overweight" or "just right".  At least they know those positive body…

Can homeopathy actually work if someone knows it is a placebo? What if, for example, a skeptical Science 2.0 group was told they got a placebo and that nutritionists were getting medicine? Would we feel better anyway?(1) Of course it's possible, it just wouldn't be due to magic water. It's a mystery of biology why some people just feel better taking something. That is why homeopathy still exists a few hundred years after its invention even though it has never worked.(2) Does the placebo effect apply to dogs? Do they understand the concept of medicine? If not, they have a placebo effect. A…

Forget the Higgs Boson, the Landing on Comets, Missions to Mars, the Genome Project, Nanostructures and all that. This start of this new millennium looks like the dark ages to me if I have to gauge it from discussions I overhear in public places.  True, the internet has brought more people to science and scientific literacy is at an all-time high. Yet, there are superstitions and common credences that fail to die out, and continue to hamper human progress. Religions, of course; but religions, in my opinion, are on a league of their own - they are so ingrained in the fabric of most…

In the first decade of the the new millennium, there was a lot of hand-wringing about the cutting of science journalism jobs at mainstream news outlets. The groundswell of support was...okay, it was nonexistent, really just limited to science journalists. No one else cared. The only people concerned about fewer science journalism jobs were those in the science journalism community and those at the unethical schools that sold specialized journalism classes - Columbia's two-year program in "Environmental Journalism" for a whopping $80,000 comes to mind. Scientists said science journalists did a…

Black holes aren’t black. Warner Bros. By Alasdair Richmond, University of Edinburgh Note: this article has spoilers. In Interstellar’s near-ish future, our climate has failed catastrophically, crops die in vast blights and America is a barely-habitable dustbowl. Little education beyond farming methods is tolerated and students are taught that the Apollo landings were Cold War propaganda hoaxes. Against this unpromising background, a former space pilot receives mysterious directions to a secure facility. Therein, he finds the American space agency NASA’s last remnants devoting dwindling…

The Inamori Foundation has awarded the 2014 Kyoto Prizes to biomedical engineer Dr. Robert Langer in medicine, theoretical physicist Professor Edward Witten in math, and Fukumi Shimura in the Arts. Each laureate received a diploma, a 20-karat gold Kyoto Prize medal and a cash gift of 50 million yen (approximately US $450,000) in recognition of lifelong contributions to society.   Langer is an Institute Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and holds more than 800 patents as a leader in the advancement of medicine and engineering. Witten is Charles Simonyi Professor at…

Sunglasses are the first line of defense for celebrities. Marie Havens/Shutterstock By Vanessa Brown, Nottingham Trent University The fame of Lady Gaga is the stand-out phenomenon of 21st-century celebrity – the go-to example for any commentator. But in a recent interview for 60 Minutes she complained that being so famous wasn’t all peachy. Apparently, some people can’t see through her clothes (ironic given the frequency of very sheer fabrics and flesh-baring garments in her kaleidoscopic wardrobe). But what I’m interested in here is how she clothes her face: all too often with sunglasses.…

What is the best way to learn a dance sequence? Professional dancers make it look easy. A choreographer rattles off a long list of moves, kicks and turns and the dancers somehow remember it all. But what about the rest of us who will be hitting the club this weekend? Researchers from Bielefeld University and the Palucca University of Dance in Dresden are here to help. They  researched whether dancers learn a dance sequence better by seeing or by listening, that is, if a dance instructor first demonstrates the sequence, or if he or she first gives a spoken explanation. Dr. Bettina…

It’s been a disappointing couple of weeks for the Scotch whisky industry. Diageo reported that it is delaying plans on a £1 billion new-build distillery just north of Inverness following a slow-down in the company’s key whisky markets, particularly Latin America and China. Now leading whisky expert Jim Murray has awarded Suntory’s Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry 2013 top marks in the Whisky Bible for 2015, with no Scotch appearing in his top ten. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was an English whisky in the top 10 – almost the ultimate snub in Scottish eyes. Has Scotch whisky had its day?…