Science & Society

Science can't catch a break this week.   A site devoted to ridiculing Democrats is faux outraged that the NIH funded $3.6 million to study the menstruation cycles of rhesus monkeys on any number of addictive drugs.     That's not really one you or I can criticize the way they do.   For starters, that money was over a 10-year period and evaluating pharmacological interventions is necessary because drug addiction is an expensive problem, both for the economy and the culture.   Does hormonal status impact drug abuse and addiction?  If so, that would be downright…

Did science in newspapers die?  By 2009, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal ended their Science sections, leaving just the New York Times as a major paper with a dedicated science section.  CNN cut their entire science and tech team. Dana Topousis of the NSF discussed the role of the National Science Foundation in the new media landscape at a DCSWA workshop in 2009.  She noted that the NSF.gov's "Discoveries" gets the most traffic of the NSF site.  NSF sees its role as protecting scientist's free speech.  One venture they launched is…

Before getting to the review, I thought I'd share some of the lighter side of what comes from actively engaging people who think vaccines are responsible for all of today's ills. You know you've spent too much time on the internet when you dream that  Seth Mnookinborg (fascinating combination, no idea why, except for anti-vaccine folks linking all of the science-based writers together in various combinations that have me as a minion, an accolyte, or even Orac-in-a-skirt) is advising you on something related to blogging about vaccines. Before this sends any of those pro-safe-…

If I ask a science audience to guess, off the tops of our collective heads, which state would hold an irrational science position that was not only boneheaded but downright dangerous to each other and all of America, would you guess Alabama or Washington? Alabama is the South and everyone in wealthier northern and western states equate that with stupid - but highly educated, wealthy, progressive, organic-loving Washington state thinks that Big Pharma is is exploiting the American children and those of us who got our kids vaccinated are just part of the stupid bourgeois without any…

Samuel George Morton (1799 – 1851) was an American physician and scientist, perhaps best known for his Crania Americana, in which he described the results of the measurements, with a focus on cranial capacity, he performed on his ‘American Golgotha’, a collection of almost one thousand human skulls.     Figure 1: The Crania Americana, flanked by its writer, Samuel George Morton (Sources: http://www.gustavslibrary.com and http://www.facinghistorycampus.org) Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and science…

Here, for completeness, is the last in this group about the BBC series  All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace A series of films exploring the idea that we have been colonised by the machines that we have built, seeing everything in the world today through the eyes of computers.   The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed - so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we…

A pleasure it is, when Chemistry World drops through my letterbox each month, to read the Historical Profile therein. This month (June 2011) featured the discovery of nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas, in No Laughing Matter, by John Mann, emeritus professor of chemistry, Queen’s University Belfast.  The caption declares: Had it not been for nitrous oxide’s subversion as a recreational folly, its utility as an anaesthetic could have been uncovered much earlier. The stage was set for its discovery by the work of Thomas Beddoes(1760 – 1808), born in Shropshire, studied medicine and chemistry…

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Richard Glover jokes it is time to put a special mark on global warming skeptics - I assume he is joking, since he recognizes that is a little too Nazi creepy even for a progressive. But he doesn't like their intransigence and outright denial.   He doesn't like the climate change fetishists all that much other - the ones hoping the world will be ruined so they can be right.   Not that the other side isn't frustrating. There's a type of green zealot who appears to relish climate change. Every rise in sea levels is noted excitedly. Every cyclone is…

I suspect a lot of people will be posting this (today's SMBC), but hey, I will totally jump on that bandwagon, If only it was that easy! People don't subscribe to homeopathy for logical reasons anyway - which, considering how strange the logic is, is maybe not surprising. They subscribe to it because they are subscribing to an anti-big-pharma ideology, and because homeopathic "doctors" themselves are basically nice people - if a little deluded - and make you feel really nice. Which, because of the wonders of the placebo effect, often equates to "better" anyhow. They might stop subscribing…

Dear BBC, Before publishing an article like this... ...would you take a step back and think, "Is this really what my facts are telling me?" Because, if they don't, consider your position as a self-styled centre for top quality journalism, and don't publish misleading, irresponsible things like this. And please, don't adopt the Daily mail tactic of putting a caveat halfway down the page. Or in this case, literally in the second paragraph, However, any link is not certain - they concluded that it was "not clearly established that it does cause cancer in humans". A cancer charity said the…