Science & Society

Female fertility begins to decline at an accelerated rate after the age of 35—however, more and more women are delaying having children for several reasons, including pursuing careers, having not found the right partner, and simply not being ready to have children. The age of first birth for women in developed countries is now near 28 and the birth rate in the USA is at an all time low. Reproductive endocrinologist Dr. Robert Greene, MD, on MedPage Today advocates for egg (oocyte) freezing and its benefit of being a “technologic bridge” from a woman’s reproductive prime to her preferred…

Male doctors have nearly a 250 percent greater chance of having medico-legal action taken against them than their female counterparts. It'a a defensive medicine culture, and fear of lawsuits are why there is so much unnecessary testing and high health care cost and overuse of medication. Even then, lawyers are finding reasons to sue. In the US, between the years 2008 and 2012 there was a 17 percent increase in the number of medical licenses that have been revoked, denied or suspended. In the UK, the medical regulator, the General Medical Council, has seen a 64 percent increase in…

The latest dubious tactic of global soft-drink giant Coca-Cola has now been revealed for what it is - a move by an industry with a threatened financial future to confuse science, policy and the public, in order to buy time, and protect profits. On paper it seemed harmless enough; the recent founding of the Global Energy Balance Network may have even sounded like a good thing. A group of scientists wanting to bring more attention to the global and serious challenge of obesity, and encourage policy makers to recognise the importance of exercise in its mitigation. On further reading though, it…

US Right to Know of Oakland, California, is using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to suppress and harass scientists and imply they have unethical links to the agricultural biotechnology industry - in short, the group insists scientists are being bought off. What was wrong when opposition groups did it to climate scientists, according to supporters of anti-science agendas like Union of Concerned Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council, is suddenly just fine when it is being used against every other evidence-based position, but especially when it comes to helping their…

The open access, open post publication peer review journal, The Winnower will issue DOI's to all past and future Reddit r/Science AMA's.  The people who write on reddit, sometimes called "redditors", are known for having a large impact on the discourse on the internet.  Millions of people use redit as a place to find human filtered relevant information.    This step is intended to provide a way to cite these discussions.  Often important points about research papers are made on Reddit and nowhere else.  (Full disclosure:  I was one of the authors who beta…

The American Council on Science and Health has been single-minded about promoting evidence-based decision-making since 1978.  The Council was formed in response to groups doing just the opposite of science, they instead perpetuated and sometimes even created the opposite of what would inform the public. We call such tripe "junk science." Over the past two years, the Council has published major peer-reviewed studies on three important topics: agricultural biotechnology (genetically modified organisms used for agriculture, commonly referred to as "GMOs"); harm reduction related to our…

From "free range" and "grass fed" to "all natural" and "pasture raised", if there is a label that can appeal to consumers, someone will print a label. And it works. Profit margins are good in the organic/pick-a-process market, and meat is a large chunk of their $100 billion business. It's among the fastest growing components of the overall organic food market over the last decade, according to market research publisher Packaged Facts in the report Branded Refrigerated Meats and Meals: U.S. Market Trends. Packaged Facts online survey of 2,000 U.S. adults conducted in April and May 2014 found…

Until the early 1900s, scholars took it for granted that they could draw on any area of knowledge to inform their thinking on the major questions of the day. Medieval polymaths such as Hildegard of Bingen (medicine, linguistics, botany, art, philosophy and music) opened the door to Victorian scholars such as Temple Chevallier (astronomy, theology and maths) and Thomas Young (medicine, physics, music and Egyptology). In the last century, however, the emergence of multiple disciplines and the exponential development of specialist knowledge, has discouraged such carefree grazing across academic…

 Research on alcohol-use disorders consistently shows problem drinking decreases as we age. Basically, we mature in young adulthood. Psychologists believe they have found evidence that marriage can cause dramatic drinking reductions even among people with severe drinking problems and is not just another aspect of maturity. “A key conceptual framework psychologists use to explain maturing out and the ‘marriage effect’ is role-incompatibility theory,” said Matthew Lee, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Missouri . “The theory suggests that if a person’s existing…

What if I told you that half of the studies published in scientific journals today – the ones upon which news coverage of medical advances is often based – won’t hold up under scrutiny? You might say I had gone mad. No one would ever tolerate that kind of waste in a field as important – and expensive, to the tune of roughly US$30 billion in federal spending per year – as biomedical research, right? After all, this is the crucial work that hunts for explanations for diseases so they can better be treated or even cured. Wrong. The rate of what is referred to as “irreproducible research” – more…