Science & Society

This from the BBC: “Germany has been named as the most supportive country for overseas students, in an international league table.” If you are a student looking for international experience, you should go to Germany. Why the hell go to the US and pay huge fees for worse education, mostly confined in the culturally impoverished, numbing atmosphere of US cities with one of the few exciting aspects being the fear of getting shot at? (I was shot at in LA!) Well, the language of course! Guess what – the new reason for studying in Germany instead of the US or UK is: German lecturers speak better…

I just became aware of a letter that is being sent to a couple of US Senators by a large and illustrious collection of scientists, and I decided to put my signature below it. The letter is clear and I will not comment it here - suffices to just paste it here. By the way, I do not think that more signatures are necessary to it, but if you agree with the contents and wish to participate your support, please do so by adding your name below, in the comments thread. It will just take you thirty seconds of your valuable time, but it might have an impact here too. ----------- Senator Dianne…

If we're being honest in retrospect, the first decade of the 2000s was bad for science journalism.    Too many journalists decided they wanted to be cheerleaders for science or, worse, had scientist envy and wanted to be included in cool discussions about the mysteries of the universe.   Basically, journalists stopped asking the awkward questions of scientists that journalists in other fields know makes their careers (see: Dan Rather and Richard Nixon).  Result: While the science audience is up and science knowledge has tripled since 1988, jobs in science journalism are…

On the face of it, Al Gore conducting a global warming conference during a blizzard a few years ago looked bad.   But maybe it was a teaching moment. The weather has always had swings and separating weather from climate is a key aspect in understanding why (a) pollution is bad and (b) we should have less of it, even if the weather is nice. Chris Mooney, writing on desmogblog.com, starts off the discussion of a recent UCS press conference rather poorly when he notes "The Union of Concerned Scientists, a group I greatly admire..." - really, journalists wanting to advocate good works…

People are sometimes surprised to hear that I am both a research scientist and an artist, but I see them as quite similar in purpose, only different medium. They both involve imagination, visualization, and communication of those ideas in a way that makes it accessible and interesting for an intended audience. For me, they go hand-in-hand. The cover of this year's Open Laboratory 2010, designed by myself, Andrea Kuszewski. Naturally, I was thrilled to see this aspect of science communication being highlighted at the  Science Online 2011 conference in January.  "Science-Art: The…

Mnookin's siteOffit's site    Vaccine Epidemic's site All three of these books came out on the heels of each other. Two, as most readers familiar with the subject area know, are books that analyze the anti-vaccine movement and how it poses a danger to society. The third book, published by Skyhorse Publishing who also published Wakefield and Stagliano's books, has a very different take on vaccines and view vaccines as the danger. What struck me as these books arrived, was how very similar they were in packaging: bold capitalized black titles on a…

                                                         Does changing a word, reducing its usage, change the world? Does it change attitudes? Or do we use new words in place of old words to convey the same dismissive, derisive attitudes? If we rid the world of the word r*tard, will that be enough to get the intellectually disabled the acceptance and equality that is their right as fellow human beings? Meanings, and the attitudes behind the…

CLICK HERE for some pictures showing how giant African pouched rats are being used to detect land mines and tuberculosis in Tanzania and Mozambique. Their noses are very sensitive to TNT, and they are proving to be much easier to train than dogs.

We all do it: we define things from our own perspective. One example I see over and over again is the idea that autism is whatever it looks like in our own kids, or own experience of it, not someone else's. If autism is accompanied with other problems, it's those problems, too. Our natural tendency is to define things based on our personal experience. Even parents who argue they don't define their children by their autism will have the same tendency to define all symptoms and issues their children have as part of their autism. It's Gregory House writ small: the need to find one cause for all…

One of the fairly common things out of the "pro-safe" vaccine crowd insists is that there's inadequate research on vaccines. What better way to look at how information has grown over time than to look at the evolution of a vaccine textbook and how it has grown over five editions. In 1988, Vaccines was one third the size of the present edition, published 20 years later. Product Details (from Amazon)"Hardcover: 656 pages Publisher: Saunders (W.B.) Co Ltd; 2nd edition edition (August 1988) Language: English ISBN-10: 0721619460 ISBN-13: 978-0721619460" The…