Science & Society

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist I and many other astrophysicists look up to has been accused of rape by Tchiya Amet  who was a student at UT Austin at the time that Neil DeGrasse Tyson was a graduate student TAing her Astronomy 101.  As if that wasn’t awful enough Tchiya Amet lived with it for 30 years.  Then when she comes forward with a blog post about it her story is met with over a year of solid deafening silence.   That this has occurred, and that the response to it has varied from very little support to outright hostility is what I find most disturbing.…

Thousands of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students recently found out whether they had been accepted into Australian medical schools. Selection is a highly competitive process, requiring an impressive combination of high secondary school results (ATAR/GPA), high results on various medical admissions tests (UMAT/GAMSAT), cogent personal statements and/or performance in multiple mini interviews. Only the most successful students are selected.As selection interviewers for an Australian medical school, one of our scripted questions was “How have you helped disadvantaged people?” A …

Dr. Gilles-Eric Seralini, the go-to researcher for Big Organic marketing groups and the partisan media enablers (SourceWatch, US Right To Know, Mother Jones) they fund, finally wrote something accurate in a paper - "it was not designed as a scientific experiment", even though the Deniers For Hire on his side claim it was just that. He's generally ridiculed for his retracted paper of a few years ago, which set out to try and claim that GMO foods could cause cancer in rats. The problem with his paper was that he used a strain of rats almost guaranteed to get cancer if they lived long enough -…

"The X-Files" resumes tonight and if, like me, you might give it a try, here are 5 good episodes to watch in advance.  I was able to sort through a lot of shows thanks to a blizzard in New York City, which kept me inside and was not accompanied by losing electricity. My non-loss is your gain. In the beginning, the show was a sort-of fanboy effort for UFO believers(1), a science versus supernatural thing where you knew the supernatural would win. But back then I only watched one episode, after it was already a full-blown phenomenon. I was unable to finish the one I watched back in the…

The return of The X-Files to television screens after a 14-year absence was met with justifiable excitement and trepidation. It was an important show, combining Twilight Zone-style fantasy with humor, drama and emotion. The X-Files took its subject matter seriously, and was taken seriously by viewers. Along with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which aired at roughly the same time, it might well be seen as a precursor to titles like True Blood, Heroes, Game of Thrones or the relaunched Doctor Who. The X-Files was a template for shows that take traditionally wild or outlandish narrative themes and…

Nearly 60 percent of Americans, if they buy a new handgun, are willing to purchase a smart gun -- operable in the hands of an authorized user -- which is not really a surprise after the entertainment news program "60 Minutes" featured them in November. The claim is that smart guns will prevent accidents, suicides and stolen guns being used in crime because of the biometric technology involved.  And the public supports them, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, even though the public doesn't know they don't actually work. The nationally representative, web-…

At all levels of academic science men outnumber women by a great deal.  Whites outnumber black by a even larger margin regardless of sex or gender.   Out LGBT are outnumbered by an even larger margin.  Without loss of generality I hypothesize that MOST of the sexual, racial and other tensions in the science lab is at root caused by this lopsided representation of people.   TL;DR: Male behavior + few females = Sexually Hostile astronomy workplace for women. That is the real #astroSH.  The court of law can help with this.   First some data that shows…

I live north of Harbin Hot Springs, a "health resort," which catered (it burned in the 2015 Valley Fire) to new-age types  who have yet have to find an alternative-anything that they don't like. Alternative medicine. Alternatives to clothing. They distrust modern technology (except computers and mobile phones, which they use to complain to their friends about how awful modern technology is), especially biotechnology. New-agers will name their child Raspberry. You can spot them easily in the Safeway supermarket; they are the ones, usually with dreadlocks, peering intently at the label of…

Brain training has come into the spotlight with Tuesday’s announcement by the Federal Trade Commission that the popular website Lumosity will be forced to pay a $2 million settlement for making false advertising claims. Lumos Labs, Inc., which does business as Lumosity, was ordered to pay the money by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to settle an FTC complaint that the company claimed its games could improve everyday tasks, delay age-related cognitive declines, and improve a variety of other mental impairments. The FTC also charged the company with failing to…

Science writing resists metaphors because no one seems to a Science journalists don't think much of science bloggers (1) and they have a good reason, at least given the bulk of blogging.  It is mostly riffs on press releases or making fun of religious people, which is a little thin.  At least when Republicans were in power they could mix up the ridicule a little. On the other side, bloggers don't think much of anyone in big media unless a job at a big media company is advertised; then the Twittersphere is abuzz with excitement, and the biggest talking heads in the blogosphere don't…