Science & Society

You may recall seeing public outrage over Mylan's Epi-Pen recently. The company had successfully convinced everyone that anaphylaxis was routinely killing kids with allergies and so they needed an epinephrine pen everywhere they went. Corporations desperate not to get shamed on Twitter jumped on the bandwagon and started putting them in as a marketing expense. Then Mylan raised the price for consumers. It caused a Congressional investigation and the public blamed Big Pharma. But it's a generic medicine. Big Pharma greed did not cause that issue, the government did. The only large competitor…

A new statistical analysis in Injury Prevention found an association between county-level income inequality and the number of firearm deaths per 100,000 residents. Higher rates of firearm homicides were statistically linked to greater income disparity, they highlighted that this was especially persistent among African-American populations, where the firearm homicide rate was almost 10 percent higher for every 0.04 greater value of the Gini index, a common measure of income inequality. The authors say the source of the problem is income inequality, so presumably government needs to close the…

Is there something in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields that penalizes new parents? Perhaps. An analysis of longitudinal survey data from U.S. STEM professionals collected between 2003 and 2010 by the National Science Foundation finds that 43 percent of new mothers and 23 percent of new fathers leave STEM fields within seven years after the first baby arrives. There are a few issues that muddy the results, though they provide an easy narrative for those who want to slam STEM as intolerant.  First, the respondent numbers were really small, consisting of 841 who had…

Citizen science has existed for as long as science. At one point, being an amateur was actually more prestigious than doing science as an occupation, in the same way the amateur detective Sherlock Holmes was considered superior to the police, because he did it as passion rather than blue collar occupation. Though bird watchers and amateur archaeologists still exist, and amateur astronomers are likely on par with paid government scientists when it comes to new discoveries, citizen science has become more widespread than ever, and that is all thanks to "gamification" of science; making…

Many American journalists have dispatched any pretense of objectivity, according to a new think tank report. Some of the switch away from Who, What, Where, When (Why, How) news to narrative and editorializing in stories may be in response to market forces. Online advertising is dominated by Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which means content has to be tailored to people who can specifically pick what they will read. Readers pay the bills. Whereas editors and journalists could once claim a "wall" between content and revenue, online it is pretty easy to see that one is leading to the other.(1)…

Some will say that walking a dog is a conversation starter and the fitness benefits of walking are well-known, but most who walk their dog simply enjoy it, not because of health or social benefits. Using 26 interviews combined with personal written reflections of dog walking experiences, the authors of a International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health paper found that while owners may say the reason they go walking is to benefit the dog, the importance of their own improved happiness and wellbeing is clear. These feelings of happiness, however, are contingent on the…

The Voynich Manuscript - Speech Notes for a Presentation? What is this image for, what is it about and what language is that? René Zandbergen:- "Over the years, I have formed many different opinions about the MS, or particular aspects of it, but many of these have changed, or I have simply discarded them. Several times, I have gone through the process that I noticed something striking, and was convinced that I was onto something. Very often, I found it impossible to convince anyone else of my striking discoveries, and typically, I ended up deciding that it was probably nothing after all…

If you want to annoy someone in their late 30s, joke that all they care about are avocado toast points or beard grooming or running off to Coachella when a project needs to be finished. Because they are millennials. You can also stereotype Baby Boomers or Generation X(1) and get a rise out of them. Everyone seems to know that these "generation" classifications were entirely manufactured by advertisers, but they caught on and have become part of the lexicon. Advertisers created these sweeping generalizations based on demographics. Yet they may not be right at all. They may even be shockingly…

Scientists seem to have finally had enough of activists who promote every study in mice as if it were relevant to humans. A Twitter account, @justsaysinmice, calls out such bad behavior and quickly grew to 57,000 followers by linking to studies produced each day and noting they are just in mice. Clearly there was a lot of frustration pent up about hyperbolic claims in media using animals. There is nothing wrong with animal models, of course, we would be doomed without them. But they are exploratory. A mouse study can disqualify a benefit or harm for humans, but it can never show it. That is…

Cigarette smoking among kids has continued to fall and since, as we have long noted, "smoking is a pediatric disease". if people don't take it up as children they likely never will. That will pay public health dividends. But with a problem about to be eliminated so is hundreds of billions of dollars that have been given to anti-smoking advocates, and many of them are scrambling to justify why their funding should continue. Politicians say higher taxes are the reason, science and health groups like ours note it's greater education and the availability of smoking cessation tools chosen by the…