Science & Society

If you ever watched/read the advocacy cartoon/book/Darwinian morality play "FernGully: The Last Rainforest" you might think that ruining the rainforests is a modern phenomenon brought on by McDonald's hamburgers or guitar makers or whoever and ancient man lived in harmony with nature. It's a great mythology but just that - nature does not live in harmony with anything. Since almost the moment the last Ice Age ended, prehistoric man has kept fighting nature, including rainforests in Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Thailand and Vietnam, which had been termed 'untouched by humans.' A new study shows that…

A new analysis has affirmed what many in the science audience already knew; mainstream media prefer weak observational studies. It's why you're reading this article here instead of the New York Times. And that is not just in regards to social psychology correlations made using surveys of college students or sociology mysticism, it happens in medical coverage too. The examination found that observational studies get far better coverage than actual randomized controlled trials, which are what should really be important to most people. The authors compared the coverage of 75 medical/clinical…

Some recent poll results show that right wing people in America have widened the gap of evolution acceptance. Generally, only a few points on this issue have separated the parties but if you know your framing of the last decade, you know that meant it's been okay for Democrats to say Republicans are 'more' in denial of science. This latest Pew survey (1,983 adults, +/- 3 percent at a 95% confidence interval, weighted results) shows the acceptance gap has widened in numerous demographics - but if you do a search about these results you will find people are only talking about the stupidity of…

While it's going to make government accountants cringe, 2,000,000 people in England could be eligible for weight loss surgery, according to a paper in JRSM Open. That figure far exceeds previous estimates of eligibility in England for bariatric surgery. People fulfilling the national criteria were more likely to be women, retired, have lower educational qualifications and have lower socioeconomic status. But in fuzzy estimates, proponents say spending the money on bariatric surgery – a set of surgical procedures performed on obese people to decrease their stomach size – now can greatly…

Jon Entine is executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, where this article first appeared. The ethics controversy over Food and Chemical Toxicology’s decision in November to retract a controversial GMO corn rat study by Gilles-Eric Séralini and colleagues at Caen University in France continues to simmer. Writing for the Hasting Center’s Bioethics Forum blog, two Georgetown University professors—Adriane Fugh-Berman, an associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology and in the Department of Family Medicine, and Thomas G Sherman, director of the university’s…

The pesticides that farmers use to protect their crops have changed a great deal over the last few decades While improvement is something we expect from technologies as diverse as pharmaceuticals to electronics, few people are aware of the positive developments in the chemicals used for crop protection.  Dramatic change began with the establishment of the EPA in 1970 which led to the elimination of many problematic, old pesticides.  Also, there has been a steady stream of new product introductions with both safety and efficacy advantages. To document how pesticides have changed, I…

Sex is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. And people like all kinds of pizza. It's entirely subjective so if you ask people about their sexual satisfaction, you might as well take the answers at face value. Rich, Spanish women have better sex lives than poor ones. There you have it, according to the first Spanish National Sexual Health Survey carried out in 2009. But that doesn't mean anyone feels like their sex life is particularly bad. Spanish people are apparently having a great time. Scholars from the Barcelona Public Health Agency (ASPB) analyzed the influence…

Want to be a teenage mother on your way to becoming a porn star? Probably not. The Farrah Abraham career arc has helped in significantly reducing births to teens, according to a new paper. How could that be determined? It's an economics claim so correlation-causation is not all that stringent.  Wellesley College economist Phillip B. Levine and University of Maryland economist Melissa Schettini Kearney just go ahead and declare that MTV's "16 and Pregnant" and "Teen Mom" did the opposite of what social conservatives thought would happen when teen pregnancy was glorified; they say the…

If you donate money to Greenpeace and get a tax deduction, is your act less moral? Indeed it is, at least in the perception of other people, according to a new psychology paper on the "tainted-altruism effect", which suggests that charity in conjunction with self-interested behavior is viewed less favorably because we tend to think that the person could have given everything to charity without taking a cut for themselves.  Of course, plenty of people give to charity or commit charitable acts without thought of any benefit. Perception about altruism is in the eye of the beholder…

No one wants to work for free; doctors have to pay for insurance and employees and their medical school loans, drug companies spend billions on each drug and 95 percent of the time the drugs will never make it to market. And that chain of money flows to cancer patients as well. Cutting-edge pharmaceuticals are expensive and for poorer people, unless they get a cost waiver from the company, even the co-payment for insurance may be too much. It's no surprise that when the patient's share of prescription costs becomes too high, many patients skip doses or stop taking medication…