Science & Society

Are you excited about dozens of COVID-19 vaccine candidates? Do you get confused about whether or not it's as harmful to have been exposed to the 2019 SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus as it is to have COVID-19? Do you think the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine will either save you from COVID-19 or give you a heart attack? If any of the above are true, you have been reading too much corporate media and witnessed coverage that they can claim is resulting from peer-reviewed journals.  But what does peer-reviewed mean and why are corporate media consumed with it, which led to some academics fetishizing…

Are Proud Boys and Antifa fighting each other 'to oppose fascism' a product of the COVID-19 pandemic? No, militant groups have always attracted people with pathologies who just need a reason to be violent, but pandemics do cause social unrest, at least historically. There is a lot more isolation than in past pandemics but also a lot more community around SARS-CoV-2, the 2019 form of the coronavirus that has locked up most developed countries. Unlike the past, where nature was just trying to kill us, and the randomness of it all caused panic, people know where it originated and how. We know…

The reopening of cafes has been one of the highlights of relaxed COVID-19 restrictions for many Australians. During lockdowns, long queues for takeaway coffee were testimony to caffeine’s relevance to our lives. Yet the precarious employment of so many hospitality workers meant hundreds of thousands of casual café workers and café owners lost work. Rents and mortgages were suspended or lost, upturning countless lives. At the other end of the coffee supply chain, many coffee farmers in poorer countries, who were already struggling to make a living, are doing it even tougher. The pandemic has…

Findings based on a SIR (Susceptible, Infectious or Recovered) Model of Infection Dynamics, commonly used to determine infection scenarios, including COVID-19, and presented at the Artificial Intelligence and the Coronavirus workshop at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, say that New York and California may have reached herd immunity. In late June, New York State was close to reaching herd immunity, according to the SIR model, which is defined by a disease reproduction number of less than one. Considering a steady decrease in reported mortality rates since…

In late March of 2020, the Food and Drug Administration gave Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. The drug is already used off-label for diseases like arthritis and given how it behaves with human biology, it is plausible it might work on some with COVID-19. A peer-reviewed study found just that - but it was only epidemiology, and that is not how drug approval ever happens, any more than epidemiology alone should be how regulations happen at EPA or any policy-making group.  Other correlation studies found it did not work,…

There are disparities in many fields of academia; physics has fewer women, for example, while psychology has fewer men. Some contend that is due to discomfort in not having equal representation. But fewer members of the same sex is assuaged if there is more money, and that is the case for female academic surgeons. They are outnumbered by men but get more NIH funding than men do. They get nearly 50 percent more R01 grants. To make that determination, scholars queried the number of grants from surgery departments throughout the country to determine the percentage of R01 grants held by…

Standard English exist because not everyone in the world who uses English is a native speaker of English.  According to a group of English writing instructors it is racist to expect that in formal academic writing expecting standard English is racist.    In this one scientist opinion that is factually incorrect.  This Ain't Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! - Conference on College Composition and Communication https://t.co/IqZK9bmtJg — WI DPI Literacy (@WisDPILit) August 11, 2020 The Case For Standard English NOT all students are native…

Few care about nature as much as hunters, fishers, and other outdoor sporting enthusiasts. Yet, that is the opposite of the narrative created by more militant environmental groups, who promote the belief that land must be untouched by people and legally off-limits, even if it means government social authoritarianism. Yet in their desire to raise their $2 billion a year by keeping everyone on apocalyptic red alert, they miss something obvious; if no one is allowed to experience nature, they won't appreciate it or care about it in the future. And if they don't care because it's not valuable to…

POLITICIZATION OF SCIENCE. Reflections on the statement “The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has a clear ideology about Inclusion that has to be accepted by all its members” There are epochs in which science, academia and all intellectual activities are constrained by an ideological system to create monsters at the beck and call of political or religious agendas within totalitarian regimes that repress the free development of ideas. One of the most remarkable examples in the history of science is the prosecution of heliocentric ideas at the time of Galileo, because they contradicted…

Most adults will remember spending much of their childhood playing outdoors without much parental supervision. But fears for children’s safety plus the demands of modern life mean many parents don’t allow their children the same freedoms. We live in an age where people have distanced themselves from nature in favour of a world full of technology and indoor pursuits. Natural England confirms that only one in nine children have access to natural environments throughout their early lives. And a poll from 2016 found 75% of children in the UK spend less leisure time outdoors than prison inmates…