I will tell you a secret. The loudest partisan progressives, some even in the science community, can find a way to hate anything if a Republican is involved. So George Bush doubled NIH funding? He still hated biology, we were told. No Child Left Behind improved scores for minorities every year it was in effect and girls achieved math parity with boys for the first time in history. Who gets credit for that achievement? Well, the bill was bipartisan, both Ted Kennedy And John Boehner signed off on it, but Bush was president so it sucked, according to partisans.
The Olympics are coming to a close and now the British get to reflect on what, if anything, has changed in the world due to a gaming event designed to make the world a smaller and better place.
The US Food and Drug Administration says requiring special labels for foods that contain ingredients from genetically modified crops would be "inherently misleading" to consumers - that is exactly what proponents of GM food labeling are hoping for. People inherently side with the precautionary principle and there is no requirement that ballot initiatives be written clearly or well; the assumption is the public will figure it out.
The American Medical Association agrees with the USDA and wrote two months ago, "There is no scientific justification for special labeling of bioengineered foods."
And yet we are going to get it, and the cost, because spin doctors are calling it 'awareness'.
It's easy to get depressed reading the criticisms of self-loathing types who demand a zero-defects culture. If some weirdo neuroscience PhD student shoots up a movie theater, well, that is reason for a whole bunch of people to want to run out and ban neuroscience.
And if you read anti-science people, the world is a scarier place than it was when we were huddled in caves, starving. We have to ban Big Gulps and goldfish and golf and genetically modified food and vaccines; everything but triclosan, which actually may be bad for you. In their world, everyone in science is out to kill us, despite the fact that they have allowed more of us to live better and longer than ever.
Researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden recently set out to test the unwritten rule of the sea that, during maritime disasters, women and children are first in the lifeboats.
What they found was that, factoring out a big disaster like the Titanic, sailors don't much care about gender these days. Women are no more likely than men to survive any wreck where at least 100 people were on board. And they don't care about anyone else; the Captain and crew generally survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers.
The landing of a cute robot on Mars really resonated with American popular culture this past weekend; and so the first few images Curiosity snapped have caught fire as well, including a blotch that was no longer there in later pictures.
Curiosity landed at 10:32 p.m. Aug. 5 PDT near the foot of a mountain three miles tall inside Gale Crater, which is 96 miles in diameter. Curiosity is the largest mission ever sent to another planet. Its 9 month, 350 million mile journey ended with 'seven minutes of terror' and no one knew precisely where it would end up or when it would get down to business.
200 milliseconds after the HazCam shutter opened it caught a hazy shimmer in the distance.
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