Science & Society

Teens who drink more than five cans fizzy soft drinks per week - less than one per day - are significantly more likely to commit violence or carry weapons, suggests research in Injury Prevention, part of the British Medical Journals.   U.S. lawyers have successfully argued in the past that a defendant accused of murder had diminished capacity as a result of switching to a junk food diet, a legal precedent that became known as the "Twinkie Defense" – and, since it is nearing Halloween, delicious, sugary Twinkies were also an allegory for paranormal activity in "Ghostbusters", which had…

Donna Laframboise’s book “The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert: An Expose of the IPCC” is out. Negative reviews on amazon are very helpful. Forget the positive ones; they are seldom useful. Reviews that give the writer a low score are the most revealing. Often, they are witness of an informed person who has spend time on a charitable reading but who found the work nevertheless lacking for good reasons. In this case however, the negative reviews are lightning fast reactions of well known people (Scott A. Mandia, Peter Gleick) who have obviously not read…

A new climate group sought to replicate findings from recent analyses - and did - and Richard Black at the BBC seeks to spin that as stating Phil Jones of East Anglia University needs an apology. Did anyone really doubt the numbers would match?   While the 'hockey stick' was an unfortunate Frankenstein-ed series of graphs to make a point, the data was not fraudulent, no one says it was (well, no one not a partisan kook) but they instead say that the researchers had a bunker mentality and sought to block freedom of information requests and to pressure contrarian findings out of journals…

If you're a man, no matter how funny you are, your wife thinks you are not.  Well, men, science is giving you the last laugh. Sort of. Men are funnier than women, though mostly to other men, according to a psychology study from the University of California San Diego.  Men edged out women by 0.11 points out of a theoretically possible perfect score of 5.0, while about 90 percent of both male and female study participants agreed with the stereotype that men are funnier. The study team ran two separate but related experiments. The first experiment had 16 undergraduate males and 16…

Freedom To Cheat? Do the laws and constitutional safeguards which guarantee freedom of speech grant a freedom to cheat?  According to a basic principle of common law, freedom of speech ends where cheating begins. Xavier Alvarez of Pomona, California has falsely claimed amongst other things: “I’m a retired Marine of 25 years.  I retired in the year 2001.  Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor."  That last statement was in direct contravention of the Stolen Valor Act, 2005, a federal law.  Alvarez has challenged that Act as imposing an…

Quick, which British cell phone do you use?   No?  Okay, which French microprocessor is in your PC?  No again? America leads the world in innovation, the legacy of historical laissez-faire approaches to fixing big problems using the private sector.  Obviously that is different now, even in science, where Pres. Obama made good on his promise to add more science to his cabinet but erroneously thought all of science was composed of progressive academics who think more taxpayer spending is the only way science gets done, leading to the Solyndra boondoggle and more to follow.…

Recently a news item from Duke University appeared: "Cute" Chimps in Ads May Harm Species' Survival "We were testing the argument that the entertainment industry has made that exposure to chimpanzees in human settings makes people more sympathetic to their plight," said Brian Hare, an assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke.  "In fact, the opposite is true. We found people became less concerned about the risks chimpanzees face after they'd seen the entertainment clips." (This observation is treated in greater depth on Science 2.0 at Why Chimpanzees Should Not Be In The…

What does the future of science look like? About a year ago, I was asked this same question. My response was: Transdisciplinary collaboration. Researchers from a variety of domains—biology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, economics, law—all coming together, using inputs from each specialized area to generate the best comprehensive solutions to society's more persistent problems. Indeed, it appears as if I was on the right track, as more and more academic research departments, as well as industries, are seeing the value in this type of partnership.  Now let's take this even a…

Due to difficult economics and an aging population that needs social services, Finland is finding itself desperate for workers, but jobs cannot simply be created by giant corporations anymore and the only way to sustain the welfare state seems to be through new ventures and entrepreneurship.  Except government restrictions and regulations that discourage giant corporations hurt small businesses most, and Finns are conservative when it comes to risk anyway. Finns are by culture very risk averse and the biggest reason for not setting up a company is the fear of failure, surveys say. So…

Dethinking The Unpossible A closed mind is totally incapable of being shown real world facts.  Lead a person with a closed mind step by step through a very logical process; show them a simple experiment in actual progress; show them what every kid learns in science class: what happens?  The closed mind, having seen proof that a thing is real, must employ a strange chain of illogic to show that the proof was not merely impossible but unpossible.  A thing which has just been shown to be possible can only be shown to be unpossible by a reverse logic in which thoughts themselves…