Science & Society

With historically high levels of LGBTQ2+ visibility, hardly a TV show exists where no matter how small the character list, someone isn't a sexual minority, a new paper says that coming out can still mean drama - even from those inside the LGBTQ2+ community if you don't match the style and tone of the cool clique. In the 1980s, coming out was a transformative act, it was still a casually homophobic society. By the 1990s, it was much different. Television never leads in culture, actors and studios follow the money, so shows with presumably gay characters like "The Facts of Life" led to openly…

Pew has announced they will no longer use 'generational labels' and instead use age cohorts. It makes sense demographically but it never made sense that anyone used them in the first place.  When I was born, the Baby Boom was an event - a post-World War II increase in births due to soldiers returning home. But when they grew up they were reading the works of people who felt 'lost' because they hadn't been in World War II or the Depression, and dreary mopes like Kerouac and Ginsberg infected a whole lot of teenagers who wants to feel cheated too. Marketing came to the rescue by declaring…

Unless you hate movies, you know this weekend was "Barbenheimer" - two highly regarded, very different films were on track to smash some records. And they did. "Barbie" did over $150 million while "Oppenheimer" did $80 million, a combined total unmatched for two competing opening weekends and "Oppenheimer was the first time a movie had exceeded $50 million when another opening went past $100 million. I couldn't see both, my teenage sons had little interest in "Barbie" but we saw "Oppenheimer" on an IMAX screen to get the full Christopher Nolan treatment. I know that history is about 80…

A decade ago surveys showed that Millennials were less concerned about environmental claims than Baby Boomers or Generation X. The reason was speculated to be environmental fatigue. Millennials saw that government recycling was only making China rich and Americans pay higher taxes, that being miserable at home while Al Gore got rich selling carbon credits made no sense, and assurances that weather were not climate during a snowstorm but were climate during a heatwave made little sense. Not now, say media teachers in academia. They found that seeing frightening news about climate change day…

The UK Daily Mail published a story with the misleading headline “Humans DID live with dinosaurs…” The story then talks about placental mammals that coexisted with dinosaurs. This shows a lack of basic knowledge by the writer, the editors and anyone else involved in the story. Placental mammals are not humans. They are a large group of mammals that give birth to fully developed offspring. These ancestors were not human 65 million years ago or even 6 million years ago. They were not even primates, which had not evolved yet. The closest relatives of humans in the Cretaceous period were small,…

Most if not all deep submergence vehicles that take people to the deepest parts of the ocean have a spherical pressure hull, not a cylinder. There is a simple reason for this: symmetry. The spherical symmetry of these crafts ensures that the pressure and forces will distribute in a way that causes, as much as possible, the cancellation of the forces acting on the hull. Ocean Gate’s Titan being a cylinder with two hemispherical end caps, one under the pointed fairing, violated this principle to an extent. The curved cylinder does have this same effect going on… but not to the same extent as a…

A new demography paper argues that there is a reason more black women have voted for Democrats than men have since 1980 - more black men are in jail. Black voters have historically voted overwhelmingly Democratic, even after 1972, when moderate white Democrats switched to the Republican party due to Democratic lack of support for racial equity, as in the Civil Rights Act of 1966, and having an avowed segregationist, former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, as the front-runner for the party's presidential nomination. Since 1980, Republicans have made little progress, notably among Black women, and…

Rachel Carson, who launched the modern environmental movement with her 1962 book “Silent Spring,” was a highly private person. But on one occasion she allowed an interviewer to ask, “What do you eat?” Her sardonic answer: “Chlorinated hydrocarbons like everyone else.” Carson was referring to a family of chemicals used for insect control that included DDT, the principal target of her book. Even though Carson tragically died of cancer just 18 months after publication of “Silent Spring,” her best-seller had powerful and lasting effects. Congress moved to create a new federal Environmental…

There were 93 school shootings in the US in a recent two-year period but they were rarely committed by students. Sometimes they were former students of the school but new a survey analysis say their mental health issues may have been aggravated by memories of bullying. Results from Data on 28,442 participants from the CDC’s National Youth Risk Behavior Surveys from 2017 and 2019  found that 3.3% of US high school students carried a weapon of some kind - club, any form of knife, or something that can be used as a club - at school. Males and females were respectively 3.5 and 3.9 times more…

The USERN organization (Universal Scientific Education and Research Network) will soon issue its next bulletin, to which I contribute with an opening message in the function of the president of the organization. I thought the contents of the message would be of some interest to some of my readers here, so I decided to attach below my original text. Before we go there, though, I would invite all of you to learn about USERN by visiting its web site, and consider becoming a member (it is free!) - or even better, if you share our views, support us! A message from the USERN President For good or…