Science & Society

If sloppy, agenda-based science is all that is needed for activists to latch on to a belief and never let go, then the anti-GMO contingent may have found its Andrew Wakefield in French biologist Gilles-Eric Séralini. It won't matter that the methods in his latest study are causing biologists all over the world to facepalm, they will insist it must be true and Big Science is the squelching the results. In the Washington Post, for example, Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University who supports labeling of…

Anti-science people with a 'natural' fetish don't understand that the random and unpredictable nature of...nature...is a bad thing.  All of the funding campaigns and Internet rants of environmentalists are only possible because scientists and engineers harnessed the power of dangerous, unpredictable nature at one point in time - we don't try to power our homes and business with all-natural lightning bolts, we instead generate electricity synthetically and we do so as safely as possible. It can still hurt you but no one is waging a campaign against electricity today. But in the early days…

Like the rest of the developed world, Europe is getting a lot fatter, and public health experts in Europe have found a correlation for the upward spike in youth obesity - the low birth rate. They say only children, singletons, have a more than 50 percent higher risk of being overweight or obese than children with siblings. Over 22 million children in Europe are estimated to be overweight. They examined data of over 12,000 children in eight European countries. The results were controlled for other influential factors, such as gender, birth weight and parental weight. The children's…

INTRO:  On September 14, 2012, I served as the guest speaker at the grand opening and dedication of the new Structural/ Materials Engineering Building at UC San Diego (UCSD).  Present also and offering remarks were Frieder Seible, Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering; Pradeep Khosla, the new Chancellor of UCSD; Nathan Fletcher, State Assemblyman; Seth Lerer, dean of UCSD's Division of Arts and Humanities; and Karl Beucke, President of Weimar's famed Bauhaus University. Also present: Irwin Jacobs, founder of Qualcomm and benefactor of the Jacobs School, Bob Akins, my old…

The Society for Neuroscience recently hosted a webinar for all of its members on the topic of the budget sequestration event that will happen next year without some kind of positive action by Congress. The presentation was a call to action backed by a sense of urgency to protect American scientific research funding from a brutal, policy-induced beat-down. Sequestration will result, among many other things, in severe budget cuts for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Center for Disease Control, and other important research-funding institutions. Those cuts…

What would the world look like with 7 billion people and no way to scientifically have created better ways of producing food?   A lot of poor vegetarians, that's what.  And only rich people eating meat. Organic food corporations love to claim that their process is 'sustainable'. Vegetarians love to claim that meat is both unethical and bad for the planet.  It makes them happy partners ... as long as science is ignored. They are both wrong and those are two of the anti-science myths Alex Berezow and I tackle in Science Left Behind.  Organic food would be wonderful if it did…

Last week, a meta-analysis from a highly credible academic source (Stanford University, its medical school and nearby institutions), raised serious questions about the often-touted nutritional advantage of organic food.  They digested the contents of 237 peer reviewed articles comparing organic and conventional foods and diets.  They concluded that "the published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods."   This drew a great deal of attention and organic advocate defense.  Because even though Stanford is…

Instead of getting any public support, increasingly the mob starts to get out their pitchforks. Now I came across this gem over at the FQXi site – it is down on the comment thread, but it is written by the author of the article there, a technical writer and editor by trade (consistent with the terrible state of science writing for sure), Thomas Howard Ray: As predicted, the posts from Sascha Vongehr's site have disppeared. What has not disappeared, is the reason why one should care about whether Vongehr's idea of science is rational -- and whether it is important that the scientific…

Sometimes you put things in the platform of a political party because it's a lot of drama to exclude them even if you don't really believe.  So we get hilarity like last week, with Republican candidate Mitt Romney disavowing some of his own platform (he doesn't believe it all personally, he said) and then this week the Democrats had the same problem; The official platform of the Democratic National Convention decided Jerusalem was no longer the capitol of Israel and they removed any mention of God. Now, God had been having a tough decade among Democrats anyway, consistently dropping in…

Being on a UN committee to discuss climate change must be a lot of fun; you get to fly to exotic locations and no one ever expects you to get anything done.  I guess that applies to the UN overall. Bangkok held the latest meeting that accomplished nothing and everyone is gearing up now for the annual UN summit in Doha later this year, where the exciting news will be that they will take no further action on climate change this decade. Countries of the world, witness your tax dollars at work. Sure, "Long-term Cooperative Action" will be discussed - there has to be a reason to fly to exotic…