Technology

The anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements are products of the digital age. While there were always vaccine deniers, they were a tiny religious fringe until the 2000s, when it took England and the coasts of the U.S. by storm. Similarly, odd beliefs about food always existed but they were relegated to obscure stores.  Social media changed all that. Facebook and Twitter became hotbeds of misinformation because anti-science activists mastered creating 'buzz' by getting cabals of individuals, sympathetic journalists, and groups who capitalized on it to swarm around bombastic claims. Now those…

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, Berkeley psychologist Joel Moskowitz, and other anti-science conspiracy theorists use the language of science against it to advance their beliefs that we're all being harmed by the modern world. So when they see a scientific statement like "very low risk" of harm from any cell phone service, including 5G, they have a ready retort to mobilize the coastal Karens and Darrens who make up their ranks; that's not no risk. There is no such thing as no risk in the language of science, but in common parlance there is, and 5G cell…

Video of police in riot gear clashing with unarmed protesters in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has filled social media feeds. Meanwhile, police surveillance of protesters has remained largely out of sight. Local, state and federal law enforcement organizations use an array of surveillance technologies to identify and track protesters, from facial recognition to military-grade drones. Police use of these national security-style surveillance techniques – justified as cost-effective techniques that avoid human bias and error – has grown…

2020 started out being a weird and devastating way to end the decade yet we naively thought those Australian wildfires were as bad as it could get. Now people outside that country barely remember they happened. Because then we got coronavirus. Luckily, we dodged the murder hornets but then went right to race wars. New York, the city, county, and state, has had the worst of both COVID-19(1) and the looting, but fear not Manhattan, June is probably as bad as it gets for 2020.  Well, maybe, unless July really has a surprise in store. Screenshot: the 1996 "Independence Day" film, where…

Right?? The first half of my career was using tetrahedrons, basically 3-D triangles, to solve physics problems, and none of this could have been done on a supercomputer then. I look at it, and see they are generating this stuff rather than using images for distances and such and think, "Now you are just showing off" but this is really breathtaking.

A year-long Genetic Literacy Project investigation culminating in the rollout of the Anti-GMO Funding Tracker has found that despite claims that the agro-chemical industry, led by Monsanto, is a financial and political juggernaut flooding the media with propaganda and pulling political levers to maintain support for GMOs despite public skepticism, the opposite true. Our exhaustive review of close to a decade of foundation and environmental NGO tax records indicates that anti-biotech advocates spend far more on GMO activism than companies or trade associations linked to the biotechnology…

If you are an artist, you will need a much different bionic arm than a soldier and a new waypoint on the road to interchangeable bionics has been developed.  In July 2019, the Clinical Laboratory for Bionic Limb Reconstruction at MedUni Vienna's Department of Surgery implanted sensors in three male patients following nerve transfers, to transmit biosignals for wireless control of bionic prostheses.  During the surgical procedure, a titanium implant was placed in the bones on the upper arm of male patients who had upper-arm amputationsand the nerves were wired with a novel system so…

COVID-19 has brought high levels of attention to coronavirus, which few outside the microbiology community had heard of even after two pandemics in 17 years, SARS and MERS. Terms like ventilators, respirators, and N95 masks were also less commonly thrown about. While it's difficult to trust corporate journalism doomsday narratives one thing is sure; coronavirus has already killed more many people in three months as flu does in its average six-month season. COVID-19 hasn't reached 2018 flu season levels yet but it likely will.(1) There is a lot of talk about ventilators but articles leave out…

Diagnostics company Cepheid has received emergency authorization from FDA for the first point-of-care SARS-CoV-2 test. Unlike existing tests, it can provide results in about 45 minutes, which means we have a better chance of reducing the spread of the virus which leads to COVID-19, which has killed nearly 14,000 across the world. After debacles at both CDC and FDA, the public has been demanding that government bureaucracy stop holding back innovation so FDA loosened the approval cycle for new labs to be able to conduct coronavirus tests, loosened bizarre restrictions on the ability of new…

If the kids are out of school and missing homework, or you're tired of them playing Fortnite, here are seven fun projects they can get involved with courtesy of the National Science Foundation. 1. Use on-the-go science tools to explore the world around you (all ages) Foldscopes are paper microscopes that give you a deeper look at the world around you. Peer at the cell structure in an onion's skin, examine a human hair or look at the busy microbial world of pond scum. 2. Become a citizen scientist and help collect and analyze data for scientific research (all ages). Find a project near you or…