Science & Society

Psychology of Women Quarterly, the scientific, peer-reviewed journal of feminism, contends that there are gender stereotypes in the media - photographs of men focus on male faces while photographs of women are focused on female bodies. Such "face-ism" is even more extreme in cultures with less educational, professional, and political gender discrimination.Study authors Sara Konrath, Josephine Au and Laura R. Ramsey examined these differences in face-ism by measuring the facial prominence of over 6, 500 male and female political figures in photographs from more than 25 different cultures.…

An iron dumping experiment was recently conducted by an environmentally concerned group who believe controlled geo-engineering may be the solution to impending science issues. It was conducted without involvement from the scientific community and without proper governance. I am talking about activist Russ George, the businessman who dumped iron dust off the coast of Canada in July, right?  No, I am talking about the LOHAFEX expedition in 2009, which had 50 scientists and 20 tons of iron sulphate, the idea being to create an algal bloom and suck up some evil carbon. The difference…

In the scientific community, researchers call it salami slicing. Appropriately, the act consists of shaving down a collected dataset until a scientist reaches the smallest scrap of result that still constitutes an original idea. This decontextualized whisper defines the least publishable unit: the publon. The researcher proceeds to neatly separate the salami slice from the rest of the data and use it as the meat of a submission to a peer-reviewed journal. The next step fills out the sandwich: Authors repeat the submission process several times with various combinations of the same publons…

The L'Oréal Foundation and UNESCO has announced the five women scientists who will be honored as the 15th L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Laureates. On March 28th, 2013, the five Laureates will be honored at an Awards ceremony in Paris and will receive US$100,000 in recognition of their accomplishments.  The research of the 2013 Laureates ranges from contributing to better understanding of climate change to advancing research on neurodegenerative diseases and potentially uncovering new energy sources.  The Laureates of the 2013 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards in Physical Sciences are:…

Three reasons why government can look less efficient than it really is: 1. Cherry-picking in privatization. Let’s suppose we could rank government agencies or services in descending order of productivity: 1, 2, 3, and so on, with agency 1 being the most efficient and productive. As a reality check, let’s note that such a ranking is indeed possible, in a rough way. For the sake of a simple example, though, imagine a government with only seven services. Taking “efficiency” to mean providing a needed service[1] using the least amount of dollars, and indexing the most efficient of the seven to…

Giving a hard number as a critical threshold for dangerous climate change -  temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius - has not helped climate negotiations.  The USA, for example, has led the developed world in reducing emissions from energy, though to be fair the anti-nuclear stance of the US led to runaway emissions from the 1980s on so things are now only getting back to even there. Yet for all the emissions the US has reduced, the rest of the world has accelerated. China is the world's top polluter but has been exempt from all negotiations because it is considered a developing…

Michael Brutsch appeared to be an upstanding citizen. He is the father of a teenage son who joined the Marines, loves cats, and lives with his disabled wife in Arlington, TX. As a programmer for a financial services company, he punched the clock daily and paid his bills. Yet behind this normal, even bland, exterior lives a monster, famous for being one of the most vile people on the entire Internet (which, as you may guess, is saying a lot). As the troll codenamed Violentacrez on social news site Reddit, Brutsch was responsible for some of the most disgusting, prurient, and transgressive…

As pointed out recently, a new type of creationism has entered popular discourse through the backdoor. That was mostly about computer geeks and physicists trying to outperform "old atheists" in fashionable, gadgety ways, thus unwittingly bringing God back in. But there is another form of implicit denial of evolution worth mentioning, and it is similar in that it is again mostly done by “progressives”, atheists and humanists who claim to defend science, especially evolution! Let us focus on only three today: Bio-centric, empoverished depiction of evolution, the Overambitious rejection of “…

To people who are brand new to the culture wars, California's Proposition 37 might be scary. It has demonstrated that the world is a very small place, lies and hysteria can travel around the world and be perpetuated by the blogosphere, the Tweety pages and the Faceyspaceys well before there can be any fact checking or even common sense checking. A hackneyed activist-driven study by Gilles-Eric Séralini caught fire because it said something anti-science activists worried about not having; a link between GMO foods and health issues.  Sadly, some science journalists caved into the…

A new phase in the Gene Wars is about to begin—this time focused on the nexus of genetics and economics. Nature carried a provocative article last week laying the ground work for what should be a fiery debate over the nascent field of genoeconomics. The prestigious American Economic Review is set to publish a peer reviewed paper co-authored by two economists, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, that argues that a country’s economic well being could be linked to the population’s genetic make-up. Earlier versions of the article have been available on the web for a few years, and it’s…