Science & Society

This is a story running in the news, even on the BBC website, which is scaring a few people. There isn't any prediction of an accelerating population collapse. Indeed our population is increasing and is expected to level off some time between 2050 and 2100 and AFAIK nobody is saying our population will collapse in 2050 except these two CEOs in their interview. This is another article I'm writing to support people we help in the Facebook Doomsday Debunked group, that find us because they get scared, sometimes to the point of feeling suicidal about it, by such stories. Do share this with your…

With fires happening in South America, the left has such dominance over social media in America they convinced the public that policies of right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil were to blame, while in Brazil the right's dominance of social media put him in power. Northwestern University computer scientists say they can prove that WhatsApp use played a key role in the electoral process. Their analysis shows that the Brazilian right in 2018 did what the American left did in 2008; they used social media to beat their opponents in a way that left them baffled. Right-wing groups in Brazil…

“A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it,” the physicist Max Planck wrote. MIT economist Pierre Azoulay and colleagues say it is probably true that science advances "one funeral at a time" in the life sciences as well. Existing scientists only believe there are 23 chromosome pairs, for example, one pair of which determines the sex of a person, while there are some young people who insist chromosomes don't determine sex at all, and…

China bans some chemicals whether or not the evidence shows it, and the United States should be more like communist dictatorships, suggests a Center for Biological Diversity blogger in a press release for their latest op-ed in Environmental Health. Like Andrew Wakefield with vaccines, who had an actual medical degree before he lost his mind, Nathan Donley is a degreed scientist, a Ph.D., proving there is at least one biologist in America who defies the well-established science consensus on...everything. Except global warming, which he knows nothing at all about. Outside that, there is no…

In America, more women than men receive Ph.D.s and at the faculty level are not 2:1 more likely to be offered a job. Not so in France. Only 35 percent of researchers at the French National Centre for Scientific Research are women and the reason may be bias in French culture.  In France, the concept of science remains much more strongly associated with masculinity than with femininity and it may lead to scientific evaluation committees putting women at a disadvantage during promotion rounds involving men and women researchers, say social science scholars. America is not without bias, of…

I didn't even know Scientific American Blogs still existed. They do, they were just irrelevant and no one remembered until a few days ago. Given their recent foray into nonsense, it can be the next place where denier for hire Paul Thacker pretends to be a journalist. Scientific American Blogs was the brainchild of blogging wunderkind Bora Zivkovic, who left Scienceblogs for PLOS, to build a blog network for them, and then when Scientific American wanted to retry blogging they recruited him. And for a time it was probably successful, although perhaps a little too cultural-focused to gain a…

America is producing more Ph.D.s than ever but federal funding for academic grants cannot keep pace with the expansion in university halls, bolstered by well-financed Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) outreach campaigns which promote the idea that technology is important for the 21st century, but then say that means working at a school. Meanwhile, tenured researchers are delaying retirement because they are still doing valuable work. With more applicants and experienced scientists with a proven track record competing at a later, is America in danger of a young brain drain? Yes…

The following table shows differences in responses to the science module of items deployed by the GSS during 2004 and 2006* by partisan identification. Some of the questions are inverted for viewer ease so that in all cases, the higher the percentage, the more knowledgeable the group is. The gold-silver-bronze color scheme doesn't work too well on a white background, so green indicates the highest level of relative knowledge, black the middling amount, and red the lowest quantity: Item Dem Ind Rep Astrology is not scientific 64.3% 55.7% 75.1% The benefits of science exceed the harms 73…

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/11/lies-dirty-tricks-and-45-million-k... This past election, California voters shot down an initiative to put labels on GMO foods, which adds to a puzzle about California other states do not understand. Namely, how a state with more support for gay people and more anti-science hippies than any state in the country can be 'against' gay marriage and labels on food. isn't this state 66% Democrats? Well, of course, Californians are not against gay marriage and food labels at all but no one likes bad laws and in both cases the original efforts were designed to…

http://www.sciencecodex.com/node/68900/edit?destination=admin%2Fcontent%... http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1767/20131193.short?r... It's election season and that means you will hear and read lots of reasons why you should vote for one political candidate or another.  Even science reasons. Science media, in the interests of making the American election topical, routinely invoke global warming and evolution acceptance as hot-button science issues. More on the right, for example, deny global warming and evolution. Yet funding for science overall says the Republicans are…