Science & Society

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-gerson-the-strange-tensio... Obviously this is a chance for militant atheists - invariably progressive in all ways but tolerance of people outside their belief - system to go on about how dumb religious people are. It's not that simple. Obviously the Big Bang - and that cosmic inflation evidence - could be right out of the Book of Genesis. It didn't take days, it took microseconds. Framed that way, God is even more crazy powerful than postulated. I want to be that guy the next time I play D&D. Scientists, I have the answer for why so many…

President Obama is getting credit for one odd thing in a new paper - diminishing American exceptionalism and confidence. America is a lot less egotistical than it used to be. American exceptionalism rose considerably throughout the 19th century - European nations discussed America in conferences the way China is discussed now - and America's entry into World War I solidified the perception that America was already a world power. What progressive President Woodrow Wilson called "a crusade to make the world safe for democracy" was also a continental coming out party. When General "Black Jack"…

If you are skeptical of nutrition advice in general, or Miracle Vegetable of the Week claims in mainstream media, you have good reason: In a world where the United Nations body on cancer meta-analyses, which self-identifies as the most important carcinogen-finder in the world, lists sausage as the same level of hazard as cigarettes and mustard gas, it's fine to roll your eyes and groan and wonder how long before yet another meaningless Prop. 65 warning label shows up in California. In a world where nutritionists have lost their minds - they can't even agree in what a vegetable is - it's…

The latest Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa also took its toll socially on one of the fastest growing populations in the United States - African immigrants. Guy-Lucien Whembolua, a University of Cincinnati assistant professor of Africana studies, reviewed reports in mainstream U.S. media related to African immigrants and the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). The search turned up 21 news articles that matched the criteria for the study - articles focusing on African immigrants in the U.S. and the Ebola virus. The researchers found that these African immigrants experienced stigma similar to…

Organic food has managed to wrap itself in both a health and ethical halo and a lot of the credit for that has to go to outstanding marketing and the work of trade groups that represent organic farmers. They have turned what was once a niche market focused on a different process into a $100 billion juggernaut where mothers chide other mothers as bad parents if they don't buy organic. That will be taught in business classes for decades. But while organic shoppers and some farmers can just gaze at the end result and be happy, science and health media has to witness the dark money underbelly of…

A new survey reveals that couples enjoyed more frequent and satisfying sex for both partners when men made a fair contribution to housework. The same paper also says there's no relationship between the amount of housework male partners completed and the sexual functioning of a couple. The goal of the new survey was to contradict a widely reported 2012 paper "entitled Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage" (Kornrich et al. 2012) that said that when men perform what is regarded traditionally as female housework, things like doing the dishes, cooking and laundry, the couple…

38 percent of state public health workers plan to leave the public health workforce by 2020 but it isn't just retirement, they want to get out of a health care system that is even more micromanaged and financially motivated that when HMOs and insurance companies were the big problem - government control.  The article in Journal of Public Health Management and Practice (JPHMP) is based on the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS), the largest-ever study of the public health workforce.   Some of the survey findings make sense and some are more bizarre, for…

This year to celebrate Halloween, Digital Science have compiled their top five spooky scientific research papers.   Supernatural movement A group of Dutch physicists have studied one of the most puzzling ideas in the universe.   The concept of quantum entanglement — or “spooky action at a distance” —suggests that objects separated by great distances can affect each other’s behavior instantaneously. No less a personage than Albert Einstein famously rejected the notion, which appears to violate core principles of traditional physics. However, Scientists at Delft University of…

Citations are a time-honored measure now used to assess scholarly standing and evaluate academic productivity by funding committees that control government research. For that reason, citations that are critical in nature, and point out limitations, inconsistencies or flaws in previous work, can be detrimental. A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that negative citations were more likely to criticize highly-read papers, they tended to originate from scholars who were close to the authors of the original articles in academic discipline and social distance…

It's no secret that cigarettes and heavy drinking are linked, people who engage in risky behaviors tend to do so in multiple ways, but a link to e-cigarettes, which have no tobacco, is new. A paper in Addictive Behaviors also found that more women than men use e-cigarettes socially, like when drinking, opposite to patterns seen in regular cigarette smoking. Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, were developed to mimic real cigarettes, giving users the nicotine they are addicted to, along with the same feel and experience as smoking a cigarette, without the harmful chemicals in smoke. They…