Science & Society

Organic food has terrific marketing. Despite being mega-corporations in a multi-billion dollar business, they have convinced their customers they are all small and unique and wholesome; kind of like Apple has managed to do with its technology products. You know it is big business when companies sue each other over an employee and 'trade secrets'. Trade secrets?  You mean organic milk is not locally-grown, all-natural, GMO-free deliciousness? Of course not, that is why anti-science hippies trying to get warning labels for GMOs specifically exempt 'organic' food from the legislation.…

Over the last year there has been increasing recognition that it isn't "the right" who are anti-science. The left has far more anti-science people; percentage-wise, there are more anti-vaccine people who vote Democrat than there are Republicans who deny evolution or global warming.  Ditto for anti-GMO stances, people who believe in psychics and UFOs, etc. The list of kooky positions that turn out to be held by people on the left is huge but you wouldn't know that from science media of the past decade.  In science media of the 2000s, the list of 'anti-science' positions seemed to…

Last year I wrote about somewhat silly claims that Wikipedia must be sexist because it had poor female representation. Wikipedia is an open, voluntary community, I argued, some people are just not going to do it. Since then, the Science 2.0 wikipedia page has been hijacked to a point where there is no mention at all of Science 2.0, it is instead some jargon about being a subset of open access and mentions virtually every site except us. I don't even bother to link to their Science 2.0 page because that might increase their authority in search and I generally feel like, at least from the point…

Sometimes Science 2.0 has to swim against the stream. The stream, in this case, has been the long-standing irrational belief that America 'needs' more scientists. There are two reasons I have always had for going against the grain of science media mantra about recruiting more and more students into science:  The first reason is that creativity in science is one instance where quantity does not matter.  While I am a big believer in the power of crowdsourcing for many things, and have endorsed it in too many instances to count, science does not really work that way.  That…

Sense About Science, the British charitable trust that tries to educate the community on the correct handling of scientific claims, and to "work in partnership with scientific bodies, research publishers, policy makers, the public and the media, to change public discussions about science and evidence", has produced today a very interesting booklet on peer review. The document, which can be downloaded in pdf format here, is an assessment of the merits of peer review in scientific publications, and of the challenges that are posed to its good functioning. It is very cleanly written and it is…

It's no secret that an alarming number of left-wing people hate science - and scientists.  But why do far-left anarchists really hate science, enough to get violent about it? And why don't the right do anything more than be Freedom of Information Act pests? Sure, more people on the right than on the left deny evolution, but they aren't shooting evolutionary biologists, we just have to be embarrassed that fringe sectarian zealots in backwater counties try to teach children how God planted fossils as some sort of faith-based head fake. There is no physical danger. But science is deadly if…

Telstar 1 enabled the first transatlantic TV broadcasts, was the proof that communications satellites were viable, and began start of an industry.  It also provided the first US #1 Billboard song hit, from a song about Telstar 1 by a group called the Tornados.  The song was simply called 'Telstar' and is also notable as an early piece of electronica. Telstar is a 1962 instrumental record performed by The Tornados. It was the first single by a British band to reach number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and was also a number one hit in the UK. The record was named after the AT…

How soon after the claim that the Higgs discovery is 'international' did self-loathing Americans and Europeans ridicule the American institutions that issued press releases noting their part in the work? About a day.  The smug intimation was because America did not want to fund the whole LHC completely - understandable given the fiasco of the Superconducting Supercollider - that we somehow 'lost out' on the discovery and made no contributions worth mentioning. The 97 American institutions and 1,700 Americans and the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy have every…

When the only organization who thinks continued funding of your technology is the United Steelworkers union, you may have a business problem. Gamesa Wind Corporation has announced a layoff of 165 workers at plants in Fairless Hills and Ebensburg, Pa.  The United Steelworkers (USW) says non-renewal of the the Production Tax Credit (PTC), which expires on December 31st, 2012, is the problem. "The PTC is vital to creating a strong U.S. renewables market with clean energy manufacturing jobs," said USW International President Leo W. Gerard. "Without it, there is little incentive for existing…

When I wrote about watching the Higgs discovery, I chided scientists on Twitter for over-reaching regarding what was being said and lauded science journalists for showing some moderation, but that does not mean all journalists could resist being silly.  And it doesn't mean all scientists were over-reaching. Italian particle physicist and ATLAS experiment chief Fabiola Gianotti, for example, was doing the opposite and wrote just two weeks ago in an email to the New York Times, "Please do not believe the blogs" because Dr. Peter Woit had info that they were going to release results showing…