Science & Society
In 2013, President Obama threatened to shut down the government if Congress did not do what he wanted. Congress replied in kind and so we got The Sequester, where government functions were halted unless they were specially exempted. NASA and the National Science Foundation were shuttered, the Smithsonian Panda Cam was turned off, science was doomed - but while scuttling science the president kept 436 personal White House staffers were kept on the payroll as "essential".
Lost in the discussion were moderates and a political science paper contends that if more women were in Congress, it wouldn'…
90 percent of the American public consider themselves spiritual so why is there a belief that 'religious' people are less likely to accept science? Environmentalism is certainly akin to its own religion, as is alternative medicine, and they are also widely considered anti-science, yet all three groups consider themselves fans of science - just not some science they happen not to like.
Contrary to oft-promoted views, it isn't dumb people who reject science, any more than it is dumb people who reject religion - instead, it is often very smart ones. The anti-vaccine movement, for example, is not…
Self-administered questionnaires sent to 364 Japanese medical journalists allowed them to describe their experiences in selecting stories, choosing angles, and performing research when creating cancer-centered news pieces.
The journalists report that they did not find pharmaceutical press releases to be helpful, preferring direct contact with physicians as their most reliable and prized sources of information. This is much different than in America, where it is assumed that the experts know the most about study results and methodology and anecdotes from doctors are less valuable.
Medical…
Every business wants to capitalize on imagination and innovation - but a corporate structure may be the wrong way to promote it. And if you really want to kill creativity, have social authoritarians in government controlling your culture.
Collectivism is bad for the imagination. It's hard to think about art when you have to think about the good of the state, according to a paper in the Journal of Business Research, which compared nearly 300 individuals from Taiwan, a collectivist society, and Canada, slightly more individualistic.
The results linked more individualism to generate a greater…
Multiculturalism was once a good thing - people learned about the world outside their own neighborhoods - but it has become bad. Instead of being a positive, multiculturalism is often invoked by people with an agenda; people who want to promote division among their constituents note that the majority will homogenize their beliefs while people against immigration complain about pockets of foreign nationals with unknown motivations inside their cities.
America has an illegal alien problem while Europe has a legal one - they are happy to let foreign people enter and do low-wage jobs and pay…
A lot of cultural angst and even more money is tied up in the notion that girls are somehow being left behind and more awareness of the issue, along with programs against sexism, have become common, even at the graduate levels of universities. But the origin of that belief in the last two decades has been a mystery. There are some differences, areas where girls achieved less than boys, and vice-versa. No Child Left Behind was a successful reform of education that led to girls achieving parity with boys in the only area they lagged, mathematics, and a new analysis finds that the concern may…
A long-running gag in film and television comedies is for an employee at a corporation who may be in trouble to invent an illness covered in the policy handbook, such as alcoholism or drug addiction. In those stories, the employee then cannot be fired and all kinds of mechanisms are invoked to show sensitivity and compassion.
What never gets played for laughs is suicide or mental health. Even in Hollywood culture, invariably inclined to faux tolerance and where all bad behavior is dismissed when a celebrity checks 'into rehab', anything related to mental illness beyond 'my therapist…
I have recently been enjoying a bit of cross-Atlantic mud-slinging with some of our most prolific writers, most recently on the subject of which is the true and authentic version of Football.
However, there are occasions where the urge to do this must be resisted. Recently, through the agency of Real Clear Science or one of its sister sites, I came across an article
Girls on the Run: When Efforts to “Empower” Girls Go Wrong
written by an assistant professor of educational foundations and affiliate of women’s studies at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. It is a complaint…
By using spatial analysis software and electronic medical records to identify clusters of under-immunization and vaccine refusal among Kaiser Permanente members in Northern California, researches don't just know where anti-vaccine sentiment is more prominent - that correlates to voting registration and has been well-documented, but now they also know how long the anti-vaccine beliefs have been evident.
The study reviewed the immunization records of more than 154,000 Kaiser Permanente Northern California members between birth and 3 years old. All the children were born between 2000 and 2011…
CohBar, Inc., a biotechnology company focused on discovering mitochondrial-derived peptides and developing them into therapeutics, completed an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of 11,250,000 units at a price of $1.00 each.
All units consist of one share of CohBar's common stock and one-half of one common stock purchase warrant.
CohBar's scientific leadership is centered around the company's founders, Dr. Pinchas Cohen, Dean of the Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California, and Dr. Nir Barzilai, Professor of Genetics and Director of the Institute for Aging…