Science & Society

The previous year has forced us to confront difficult science questions: Was processing patents Einstein’s real strength? Are there any other planets out there like Earth? Why is the universe composed of matter instead of antimatter? 2011 had a bumper crop of fascinating science and technology stories, so many that it’s impossible to call ten stories "the top” but the audience expects it.  So, courtesy of Ysabel Yates at Txchnologist, here are ten notable events from a long list, in no particular order and slightly edited. Faster Than Light Neutrinos?Albert Einstein taught us that…

“Malicious,” “diatribe,” and “preposterous” are words recently thrown at me. (How remarkable that I lived nearly 60 years before drawing this kind of vitriol. Maybe I haven’t been assertive enough!) When a scientific question has political implications, people have trouble separating the science from the politics. Anyway, it started like this… Daniel Sarewitz of Arizona State University wrote an astonishingly obtuse article in Slate (December, 2010) titled “Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That's a problem.” Sarewitz cited a 2009 Pew Research Center finding that 6 percent of U.S…

http://news.yahoo.com/alabama-professor-cites-mental-defect-university-… "Neuroscience essentially turns into a bioethics class. She's a liberal from "Hahvahd" and let's you know exactly how she feels about particular subjects." Which is codespeak for 'she is a socialist', which was stated in a comment by another student, but that comment got deleted. Apologists for Bishop blame job insecurity, since Bishop shot the place up after not getting tenure.  If only we could all have murder rationalized by not getting a promotion, though it seems more likely the quiet talk about her was her…

Los Alamos National Laboratory's top 10 science stories of 2011 include alternative energy research, world record magnetic fields, disease tracking, the study of Mars, climate change, fuel cells, solar wind, and magnetic reconnection.  Mars Habitability  Three Los Alamos technologies are aboard the Mars Science Laboratory mission's Curiosity rover, set to touch down on the surface of the Red Planet this coming August. Los Alamos radio-isotope batteries are providing power and heat to Curiosity, which is the largest rover vehicle ever deployed to Mars. These power sources will help…

What is a paltry $195 billion in real cost versus $1 trillion in potential savings? Fans of 'jobs created or saved' fuzzy economics will love a report by the Joint Center For Political and Economic Studies, which says that six new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air quality regulations, which will cost about $195 billion over the next 20 years, will save well over $1 trillion.  I italicize $1 trillion because it works best if you use a Dr. Evil voice to read it so I wanted to give you a visual hook. Like him, it may take some trial and error to figure out what number will have…

Think Christmas has gotten way too secular?  Turkey may be the place you want to move because they make sure kids stick with religion, though the 2.2% who are not Muslim will be tough to find so your Christmas dinner might be poorly attended.  Knowing how other countries treat science is important to help us appreciate how we do. Sure, people can whine in America if some kooky school district has right wing people wanting to give religion equal time in science classes but it's not exactly life threatening to tell kids dinosaurs ate coconuts - the anti-science left won't even give…

Let me begin by saying that I bleed blue. Not Yankee blue or horseshoe crab copper — IBM Blue. I was raised on a corporate paycheck and through all the years my mother worked for the computing giant (and the months I spent in sales internships with them) I never once shook an unfriendly hand or doubted a coworker’s ethics. We were all good people, selling a good product that we believed in — that I still believe in. But we were also part of corporate America, hard at work building the fortunes of the 1 percent. How can I reconcile what I know about the personhood of employees with the…

http://kipcurriercopyright.blogspot.com/2009/07/federal-research-public-... Andrew Richard Albanese, Publishers Weekly via Library Journal; Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) Reintroduced in Senate: "It looks like there’s a new copyright battle brewing in Congress after U.S. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe Lieberman, (I-CT) reintroduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bill that would require every federal department and agency with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more to make their research available to the public within six months of…

Imagine a world where Discover, Nature Networks, Science 2.0, Scienceblogs, Discovery and all the others worked together.   Yes, yes, I know we all do on occasion, but those times are based on personal relationships - we are all fans of people on various sites and link to them and support their work.   But the groups are inherently competitors due to a finite audience size and, as the Scienceblogs Pepsigate events showed, advertising is a finite pool as well and corporations will go to various lengths to get more of it. But the Pepsigate events did one other thing that, while…

`http://www.google.com/images?client=opera&rls=en&q=Brooke%20Magnanti&oe… http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/11/16/sex.blogger.identity/index.h…