Science & Society
There is nothing even remotely resembling collapse of civilization in the IPBES or IPCC reports. So why do so many people say that’s what they are about?
I think it may be at least partly a misunderstanding of what the IPCC mean by “transformative change”, a misunderstanding which sadly is promoted in many articles in the mainstream media. If anyone says this, they haven't read the reports themselves, or at least not carefully.
The IPCC’s “transformative change” is not a collapse. Nor is it austerity. It’s positive, it’s growth in everything we value.
I know of only one major thorough high…
Hank |
In 1958, shortly after passage of a misguided law related to chemicals and food - a problem that haunts trust in science like vaccines even today - America got its first government-created chemophobia craze. In cranberries.
The poorly worded Delaney Clause specified that any trace of an artificial chemical that had been linked to cancer - even if it was just epidemiological correlation or in a mouse and regardless of dose - had to be pulled from shelves. It was bizarre because the actual chemical did not matter, a natural version of the same chemical at 100X the dose was considered okay, it…
What do Taylor Swift, the Jonas brothers, and Miley Cyrus share in common? They're all great musicians and nice people. They were also home schooled.
A new study examining how homeschooling affected adolescents’ character, health and well-being found that adolescents who are homeschooled are more likely to report greater character strengths and fewer risky health behaviors later in life, but are less likely to attain a college degree.
In the new study, researchers used data from 12,288 adolescent children of nurses enrolled in the Growing Up Today Study (GUTS). In 1999, baseline…
Hank |
Writing in The Daily Beast, William Bredderman notes that the self-proclaimed whistleblower organization US Right To Know has a seedy undercurrent of malevolence; its relationship to the anti-vaccine movement.
Welcome to the party. Get ready for your readers to be told you must have been bought off by Monsanto or Pfizer. While USRTK will claim its own funding has no impact at all on their content.
How USRTK navigates being on The A-Team of the anti-vax movement while maintaining a veneer of credibility for outlets like the New York Times and Guardian could be taught as a master…
According to the 2020 Decadal survey published by the National Academies of science the US Large telescope program including the Thirty Meter Telescope are the number one priorities for ground based astronomy in the US. For many good reasons. However, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Native Hawaiian situation, which seeks to identify the indigenous stakeholder(s). That misunderstanding is that there exists some sort of duly constituted, or even constituted but not state or federally recognized indigenous Hawaiian only government that might not be being listened to. This is…
Corporate journalists and other pundits have argued that the 2020 election was a referendum on how the administration handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Is that true?
There was confusion to be sure. Early in the pandemic, the CDC refused to send UC Davis a COVID-19 testing kit and said they would only send it when the school proved the patient had COVD-19. Then, when CDC did finally cut through its own bureaucracy they sent faulty reagents. But those were not Trump appointees, those were career employees, and career Washington, DC employees are 80 percent Democrats. It's not a paradox that…
Hank |
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, 28 states experienced higher gun deaths, including suicides. New York, Minnesota, and Michigan saw numbers go up more than 100 percent, according to a recent paper. Only Alaska, which often leads the US, had significantly lower rates of gun deaths during that period.
The reasons must remain speculation but based on surveys about mental health it seems problems aggravated by any combination of government lockdowns and political infighting and cultural dogmatism caused a surge. Stress and lack of positive social interactions plus access to…
Generating energy from solar power satellites in space is the long-term final solution to the energy needs of humanity. Cheap easy access to space is crucial for this. In fact, we live at an important time where if we do not use the energy, we have wisely we may squander this chance. If we used all the energy resources available on Earth alone we could only put into orbit a mass equal to that of Mt Everest. After that we are trapped here. Environmentalist claim, as always, that a big project will poison the water and make an animal endangered. They claim this though multiple…
Multiple studies have shown that to be transgender is not simply a matter of choice, or a sense of identity like religion. An aspect of a person which our laws rightly protect. Indeed, a sincerely held belief religious or not should be as protected as worship or speech in a free country. However, we live in a time of science and the science on transgender identity is clear. Being trans is in fact much more like being born with a certain skin, hair, or eye color than a choice or belief. In this brief report we will look at the results from published meta-analyses of the literature on the…
Hank |
Recent survey results by SciDev.Net/CABI reveal that the majority of science journalists (633 respondents from 77 countries) believe that the field is not consolidating the way some other mainstream/legacy journalism specialties are.
Only 27 percent believe that ‘science journalism is a dying profession’ though 67 percent believe that ‘science journalism is in crisis.' Crisis is not defined (1) but it can't be too much of a crisis because 81 percent believe that they will ‘certainly or probably’ still be working in the field in the next five years while 46 percent say they are happy with…