Science & Society

Do you want a better sex life and a better relationship to go with it? Sociologists say surveys show that if men take up more of the child-care duties, splitting them equally with their female partners, heterosexual couples have more satisfaction with their relationships and their sex lives, according to new research by Georgia State University sociologists. Daniel L. Carlson, along with graduate students Sarah Hanson and Andrea Fitzroy, all of Georgia State University, used data from more than 900 heterosexual couples' responses in the 2006 Marital Relationship Study (MARS). …

Democratic parties in four states have recently removed the names of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from their annual fundraising dinners, a move now under consideration in at least five other states. Proponents of this initiative argue that any party that seeks to identify itself with equality and diversity cannot afford to be associated with the slave-holding) Jefferson or the Native American-persecuting Jackson. At issue in such debates are deep differences of opinion about the relationship between the past and the present. Those who seek to depose Jefferson and Jackson believe…

In February, a blogger at journal publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS),  issued a random, unsubstantiated smear against the organization I now run, the American Council on Science and Health - she claimed, bizarrely, that we lost our credibility decades ago by being shills for Big Tobacco. Ironically, she is an award-winning journalist. The American Council on Science and Health is famous for being anti-smoking - any journalist who was worth a darn would spend five seconds researching and know that. The walls are quite literally adorned with anti-smoking ads - but I was…

Same-sex couples encounter more obstacles to fertility treatment than traditional couples,  said Ann V. Bell, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Delaware, who noted that the U.S. medical system is standardized to work with heterosexual couples. Bell made the conclusion based on interviews with 95 people -- 41 heterosexual women of low socioeconomic status, 30 heterosexual men, and 24 women in same-sex relationships. "These people are on the margins of our understandings of infertility, as it is generally viewed as a white, wealthy, heterosexual woman's issue," Bell…

Imagine if Big Ag industry lobbyists created a special section inside the US Department of Agriculture, where they got to define what artificial additives would go into their products and who could check their food for accuracy in labeling, all while claiming a special "health halo" for their products. Most people would object. The $100 Big Organic industry doesn't object, though.  The National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) does just that for them, and it is why there is no quality assurance for organic food and no surprise spot testing to make sure organic farming is actually organic,…

Dr. Chuck Benbrook is an economist who may be an adjunct at Washington State University but calls himself a research professor and tells the public he is an expert in biology. Why so many organic food proponents believe a guy about something as complex as genetic modification when he can't even get his own title correct is a mystery we can't solve today but we know his credibility sure won't be bolstered up by an op-ed he just published in the New England Journal of Medicine.   You may already be wondering why I am discussing an op-ed in NEJM by ironically using an op-ed on Science 2.0,…

Though it is the common metric, hospice use is not really an indicator of quality of end-of-life care. Instead, when researchers in the U.S. studied variations in patterns of hospice use between states, they found troubling trends.  Shi-Yi Wang, MD, PhD, Yale University School of Public Health and coauthors discuss the variations in the timing and duration of hospice enrollment and their implications in an article published in Journal of Palliative Medicine (doi:full/10.1089/jpm.2014.0425). They performed a retrospective analysis of Medicare patients who used hospice services during…

Recently we were treated to a repeat of a three part series, A Very British Renaissance by James Fox.  I found that the second episode had many overlaps with my area of interest.  North Americans in particular would have been interested in his coverage of John White (c. 1540–c. 1590), governor of the Roanoke Colony off the coast of North Carolina, the first English colony in America. Before I retired in 2010, I taught four years of History of Mathematics, and Thomas Harriot (ca. 1560 – 1621) figured in the lectures I gave.  According to his MacTutor biography he was “…

A decade ago, Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) cared little about science. They were run by a staffer from the Democratic party who was put in the place to mobilize soft-money donations from friendly foundations and political committees. Republicans were in power - times were good for them. Academic scientists barely noticed their partisan skew because Republicans Were Anti-Science. They accepted evolution by 9 percentage points less than Democrats, President Bush funded human embryonic stem cell research for the first time in the NIH but limited it to existing lines as a compromise, so…

As reporter Keith Kloor noted in his recent Nature story on the targeting of biotech professors and science advocates,U.S. Right to Know has issued yet a new Freedom of Information Act demand to Washington State University for the email records of Associate Professor of Nutrition Michelle McGuire. The FOIA has resulted in 12,000 documents (not pages) needing to now be reviewed by university lawyers and McGuire. An expert in human milk and lactation research, McGuire publicly discussed her yet unpublished findings that glyphosate, the target of anti-GMO groups who…