Science & Society

I gave you my media secrets on how to get interviewed by NPR.  Now that I've heard the final cut of the Project Calliope segment, I can look at 'was it worth it'?  Short answer: absolutely yes!  I deem the NPR Project Calliope segment successful. It started a half hour into the program and ran a full 10 minutes and did not making me look like an idiot!  Yes, I have simple criteria for media exposure. The entire Calliope interview by Audie Cornish is up on NPR, with a little teaser material.  The final cut was very focused on DIY culture (as opposed to science or the…

It was bound to happen.  Something which should be used for good can also be used for malice.   Allison Aubrey, writing on NPR, discusses the results of an undercover investigation by the GAO which says patients are getting blatantly ridiculous advice. One guys says he can repair DNA damage.  One says their supplements can cure all kinds of diseases.  Sheesh. The GAO report says they made undercover contact with 15 DTC genetics companies, and asked about supplement sales, test reliability and privacy policies.   Then they consulted with experts about the veracity of…

I had a "driveway" moment today listening to NPR - you know, where the story is really interesting and you've arrived at your destination but want to hear the end and folks walking by your car stare at you like you're about to pull off a drug deal? Anyway, the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association announced the first new diagnostic criteria for Alzheimer's in about 25 years - the last diagnostic criteria were released in 1984. In brief, cases of Alzheimer's (arguably the most famous type of dementia) are growing exponentially. There are some rudimentary ways to "…

In the continuing wake of the Pepsigate scandal at Scienceblogs (it made a splash, and then seemed to die away, but suddenly there have been 18 departures) a writer at the Guardian takes that community to task for being insular. He's not the first to say so.  The running joke among other science media people is good luck being comfortable on Scienceblogs if you are religious or a Republican, but he echoed a point we also made - corporate scientists are, of themselves, not less ethical than academic ones, though we went further and said that if no one complained about all of the…

Big news, school lunch eaters - your rectangle-shaped pizza will soon be burned and served up cold1 with less sodium! Schwan's Food Service, based in the lovely state of Minnesota, is ahead of schedule by a year on reducing the sodium content of its Big Daddy line of school lunch pizzas, and by a larger percent than originally planned. Schwan's, which is the largest supplier of pizza to the National School Lunch Program and works with approximately three-quarters of the nation's schools, both public and private, announced plans in April for a 10 percent sodium reduction in all of its school…

In February 1999, the giant German pharmaceutical company Bayer celebrated the centenary of the launch of ASPIRIN, the world’s most successful legal drug. One thing they did NOT celebrate is the launch of HEROIN one year earlier. Both drugs are synthesized by adding acetyl groups to already existing natural compounds. Aspirin is produced by adding one group to salicylic acid, found in willow bark which had long been used as a traditional remedy for pains and fever, while heroin is produced by adding two acetyl groups to morphine, the active constituent of opium.  Here are the two…

On the 12th July 2010, I was watching Rich Hall's 'The Dirty South'.  The programme trailer says: Rich Hall sets his keen eye and acerbic wit on his homeland once again as he sifts truth from fiction in Hollywood's version of the southern states of the USA. Using specially shot interviews and featuring archive footage from classic movies such as Gone With The Wind, A Streetcar Named Desire and Deliverance, Rich discovers a South that is about so much more than just rednecks, racism and hillbillies. Now what would be interesting to us scientists is his take on the film "Inherit the…

Survivalism, British Style John Christopher’s 1956 No Blade of Grass is an extremely compelling page turner that portrays our moral traditions and social glue as being so fragile that they can be swept away in a day. Compassion, mercy, and even friendliness are not as hard-wired as we would hope, and they quickly dissolve when the urgency of survival forces us to view all other people as competitors. The plot line is an inversion of the grass catastrophe in Greener Than You Think. In Christopher’s book, an unstoppable ‘Chung-li’ virus is killing all grasses, which includes food staples like…

I happened to be reading Howard Bloom's book The Genius of the Beast when I saw something odd happening in social media - there was a minor blow up on a science blogging site called Scienceblogs.com over a new column that would be written by people from Pepsi, which threatened to become a major blow-up because of social media, and it got me thinking about re-purposing and symbol stacks. Re-purposing is nothing new - anyone who has turned a milk cartoon into a baseball glove, as I watched Sammy Sosa do one time, understands that re-purposing works.  And sometimes it is necessary.  …

Mercola, webster of woo, he of the get your vitamin D through our tanning bed fame, has a new post up at Huffington Post. I tell you, I find it endlessly comforting to know that these medically-related articles are reviewed by Ornish, you know? Okay, not. Can Huffington Post put up a health related piece that isn't woo? I mean, can they? Mercola's latest is on aspartame. I won't go into all the details relating to his assertion that aspartame is more evil than the devil. Aspartame has received a fair amount of attention from people who think it is at the root of a lot of health issues. No,…