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Environmentalists, What Are You Asking From Dedmoroz Lenin For Earth Day This Year?

Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is also Lenin's birthday. That's not coincidence. The leader of...

How Ancel Keys Went From MAHA Hero To MAHA Villain

If a lot of the food and health claims you read and hear today seem like things left over from...

Are Baseball Pitchers Faster Today?

On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became...

Ground-Nesting Bee Populations Don't Get Publicity But They're Everywhere

Honeybees get attention in environmental fundraising campaigns because people don't understand...

Hank Campbell

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

The Science Of Romantic Comedy Behavior: A Love Ode To Weak Observational Studies

Mar 12 2014 | comment(s)

Robin Thicke may have sung "Blurred Lines" and appeared in a teenage fantasy video with a lot of naked women, but when a photo was revealed of him in a suggestive situation with another woman, he found that the line was actually not all that blurry to his wife.(1)

What changed? She had been fine with his canoodling before. He has no idea and men meeting women across the nation are just as confused about where their blurred lines are.

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey - The Review

Mar 07 2014 | comment(s)

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality - Carl Sagan

I missed the big Carl Sagan thing when it happened. I was in high school when Cosmos came out, we lived in the country and if you wanted to watch a different television network, you had to go up into the attic and turn a giant antenna with a pipe wrench. Sports and girls and D&D were more of a priority than television.

Yet even though I didn't watch it when it came out, shortly afterward I could still tell you who said "billions and billions" with that special emphasis. That and riffs on "Who Shot J.R.?" were big that year.

Iron Deficiency Does Not Cause People To Become Vegans

Mar 06 2014 | comment(s)

Statisticians have a rule of thumb for calibrating claims made in humanities and science papers alike. Andrew Gelman, for example, talks about statistical significance filter - "If an estimate is statistically significant, it’s probably an overestimate."

A good thing to remember when you read weak observational studies, psychology surveys and, in modern times, a shocking number of epidemiology papers.

For health, you can use a different rule of thumb: Does Joe Mercola sell it?

If he does, it is probably suspect.

Pro-Vaccination PSAs May Do More Harm Than Good

Mar 05 2014 | comment(s)

When I have done workshops for aspiring science journalists/writers, I have three pieces of advice. The first is: Don't defend science. It doesn't need defending.

But it's easier said then done. If you spend some time in science media culture, you will invariably find a person saying something pithy like "Science: It works, bitches" but then raging about some attack on science and defending it with shrill verbage and name-calling and conspiracy theories.

If science works, you don't need to defend it with claims that Big Oil is funding climate denial or that homeopaths and Big Organic fund vaccine and GMO denial.

Is Wind Turbine Syndrome A Real Thing?

Mar 04 2014 | comment(s)

Here's an intellectual puzzle; which is more real, the viability of wind power as anything more than a sustainable gimmick or Wind Turbine Syndrome?

Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz Is Climate Friendly - Because He Supports Energy Science Activists Don't

Mar 04 2014 | comment(s)

While former Energy Secretary Stephen Chu is a fine scholar, he seemed to be lost when it came to drafting a federal energy policy that was evidence-based.

It's easy for an academic to postulate that $9 a gallon gas will be 'good' for us but when it comes to managing a national constituency, including a lot of people who will be ruined by expensive gasoline, there has to be some real thought before actions are taken. Government is not a sandbox.