Science & Society
Hank |
A group of academics have channeled their inner Bernie Sanders and written a wonderfully naïve op-ed about how to lower drug prices: Destroy the industry that made America the world leader in biotechnology.
It's simple. Let government control drug prices and then corporations will just do what they always do, but it will be a lot cheaper. It is so simplistic it could have been written by Paul Krugman in the New York Times. It is also in defiance of how science, creativity and medical advancement works, and would lead to a mass exodus of science jobs from America.
Writing about the piece in…
Someone forgot to tell James Beck that Oceanographers are supposed to work near an ocean.
Beck, the CEO of Missoula, Montana-based Sunburst Sensors, LLC, took home both first prizes at this week's Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE.The award is named after Wendy Schmidt, the President of The Schmidt Family Foundation and the competition received entries from all across the world, challenging teams to develop instrumentation that could measure the ocean pH in both shallow and deep waters. A $2 million purse was split into two categories (1 million apiece; $750k for first and 250K for…
China and Taiwan have enhanced government ability to be more effective in ensuring food safety and guarding against food fraud, according to a July 13th panel discussion atthe Institute of Food Technologists meeting in Chicago.
Historical instances of food fraud in China from adulterated liquor made by industrial methanol to starch-based infant formulas to fox meat being identified as mutton. Some of China's recent strategies to guard against these frauds were identified in a presentation created by Dr. Junshi Chen of the China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment which included…
Hank |
When you can be arrested for letting your children go to the park alone, we might be a little hyper-vigilant, yet on the other side multiple times per week there is indignation that child protective services failed to stop some idiot parents who were harming a child. It may be the precautionary principle run amok but doctors and government workers are the people who will be sued if they are not going overboard looking for problems.
At Free-Range Kids, Lenore Skenazy critiques a New York Times article discussing what has been termed medical child abuse - looking for a doctor until a…
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is making $100 million per year scaring people about food and other science. It isn't helping the public be any safer, it is just making people enjoy food less, according to a new study.
With consumer fears escalating about potentially harmful ingredients in food and personal care products, a new survey from Daymon Worldwide reveals that 40 percent of consumers have lost enjoyment of the foods they eat due to safety and quality concerns, and many are actively seeking stores that offer claims of product alternatives. Nearly twice as many parents as…
Hank |
They don't directly talk about us, they talk about a guy at a think tank who used to be a staffer for the Council a decade ago, which would be a logical fallacy but I don't want to use big words and confuse journalists at The Intercept.
Here is the funny part: The Intercept has more editors on its About page than the American Council on Science and Health has in the entire office. Natural Resources Defense Council makes more money on interest in one day than ACSH operates on for an entire year. Yet somehow ACSH is "industry-funded" and "dark money" while NRDC does not get mentioned for giving…
Globalized data shows hardliners on all sides losing, and points
to emergence of open-minded pro-science, pro-spiritual outlook
*
THE WORLD IS TURNING ATHEIST, the media tells us. Europe is
already dominated by non-believers and plummeting church attendance figures
elsewhere indicate that religion itself could disappear within a generation.
Christianity is shrinking fast, extremism has soured Islam, and the fastest
growing belief-system is to have no beliefs, which could lead to the world
becoming a peaceful, atheist utopia. So says conventional wisdom.1
Are there figures to back this…
Though women outnumber men in all but tenured positions, there is concern that the numbers are still not high enough. If that is true, you wouldn't know it by filing patents with the U.S. Patent and Trade Office over the past 40 years.
Filings by women have risen fastest within academia, according to an analysis which examined 4.6 million utility patents issued from 1976 to 2013. The role of patenting at academic institutions has grown in significance since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which transferred intellectual property revenue based on federally funded research…
More than 34 million children's lives have been saved since 2000 because of investments in child health programs at a cost of as little as $4,205 per child, according to a new analysis in The Lancet.
This analysis builds off the work of an international collaboration of researchers and, for the first time, creates a scorecard that allows governments, policymakers, and donors to track investments in child health and to link those investments to child deaths averted across countries in a comparable manner.
The leaders of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the…
Hank |
Think the 'chocolate as miracle food' hoax was something new?
In 2007 we carried an article spoofing how ridiculous the chocolate science hype was - AAAS had just carried a whole panel on the miracle of chocolate, and all but one of the participants was funded by a chocolate company, so they clearly were writing checks because they liked what those researchers had already done. But if we focus too much on one thing, like exploiting gullible media with cosmic claims about a miracle food, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that there are a number of health recommendations, and even science…