Science & Society

When a sustainability advocate leaves the intellectual playground of academia and starts trying to really get things done related to climate and energy, it is easy to become disillusioned. Not because of corporations, they actually did what was expected and got sustainable because it was 'good business', as they were supposed to do. Instead, it is easy to become jaded by environmentalists. In discussing last week's An Ecomodernist Manifesto, Ben Heard, a de-carbonization advocate in South Australia, has the kind of insight that would make him unwelcome in American environmentalism, of both…

A new analysis of the "sub-workforces" population in the National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 report shows that the National Science Foundation, and likely the dozen other federal agencies evangelizing STEM careers, are starting to figure out what the private sector already knew - a degree is not skill. And skill is going to matter most. A generation ago, there were income statistics showing that people with college degrees earned more money than those without, so the federal government decided everyone should have a college degree. It didn't help with…

Dr. Oz has recently had the kind of difficulty that popularity brings - he got criticized on the floor of Congress and then got some political theater in the form of a letter to Columbia University asking that he be removed because of his promotion of suspect alternative medicine and even homeopathy treatments. Science advocates have long been worried that a well-respected doctor and television personality - America's Doctor® - is actually against the thing that separates real medicine from the alternative kind, like double-blind clinical trials instead of anecdotes. They can rest easy.…

A healthy and active old age is a reality for many Europeans and is a genuine possibility for many more, despite the 2008 economic crash and years of austerity measures, according to a new United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and European Commission (EC) report, produced at the University of Southampton. However, countries such as Greece and Latvia have declined in active ageing capacity during the four years from 2008 to 2012. The Active Ageing Index (AAI) Analytical Report was presented last week at a UNECE/EC conference in Brussels. It details the extent to which 28…

There is concern about e-cigarettes that they may cause addiction rather than cure it - California advocates are spending millions claiming Big Tobacco is marketing them to children - but like nicotine patches and chewing gum, teens may try them but unless they already smoke, they don't embrace them. Writing in BMJ Open, the researchers base their findings on the results of two nationally representative surveys of primary and secondary schoolchildren (CHETS Wales 2 and the Welsh Health Behaviour in School aged Children) from more than 150 schools in Wales carried out in 2013 and 2014. In all…

So what methods and professional standards are applied to the review of scientific evidence long after the original work was completed? Very few. This morning's Washington Post article titled FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000 doesn't answer the question. Instead, it simply cites the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers as the sources of data indicating that FBI experts "overstated" the significance of hair comparisons on a wide scale. According to the Post, "Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair…

Uninsured cancer patients are asked to pay anywhere from 2 to 43 times what Medicare would pay for chemotherapy drugs, according to a new paper. Uninsured patients who did not negotiate the billed amounts could expect to pay $6,711 for an infusion of the colorectal cancer drug oxaliplatin. However, Medicare and private health plans only pay $3,090 and $3,616 for the same drug, respectively. Although uninsured cancer patients were asked to pay on average two times more than Medicare paid for expensive chemotherapy drugs, very high payment differences were seen for drugs that were quite…

A survey of California doctors found that a majority of the 525 who responded believe the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, also called Obamacare) will steer the country's health care in the right direction, but California has only 28 percent Republicans so that isn't a huge surprise. Doctors were on the side of their political affiliations but were also distinctly divided by medical specialties. Private practices are on the decline and independent business owners are strongly Republicans. In California, more doctors work for institutions but even with that partisan divide 39…

In 2014, there were almost 200 health awareness days, weeks or months on the 2014 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' National Health Observances calendar.   Since there are only 250 days in a working year, that means one day each week was not given over to some kind of health awareness effort. H.H.S. says their mission is to advocate for "evidence-based" interventions for health problems, so what evidence did they use that 200 health "awareness" campaigns were making a difference? Are they really helping anyone, or is it just less-successful attempts to get people to…

While a debate was raging between scientists and government regulators on how best to explain to patients the risks of participating in clinical research studies that compare standardized treatments, a team of bioethicists boldly went where no experts had gone before -- to the public. The response? Keep it simple, but always ask permission, even when the research only involves gathering data from anonymized medical records.  "We didn't anticipate that people would want to grant permission for medical record searches, a research method that involves much less risk than most randomized…