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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

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 »

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Americans like to fix things.  We like to improve and we are convinced the future will be better, a subset of people who want to retreat into the world of the past aside(1), but nothing has changed little despite a century of being criticized like university lectures.
If you are anything like me, and you had a chance to sit around with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, you wouldn't ask fanboy questions like 'will we ever understand the soul?' or 'how much should I make fun of evolutionary psychology surveys about sex?' you would instead lean in conspiratorially and ask, 'what's the best way to get out of a speeding ticket?'
If if you're in media and tired old swine flu sounds too hammy to generate page views and bird flu does not make your audience cry fowl any more, there is good disease news - scientists may have found flu in bats. If bats can get a virus, why can't humans, in an anthropogenic, anthropocentric world?  

Well, it isn't necessarily the flu in bats but it is genetic fragments of a flu virus. The precautionary principle says we'd better start vaccinating right now - if it's a slow news week because no singers have died and no white kids have been kidnapped, that is.
It's always good to have a back-up plan and I may have found mine if Science 2.0 doesn't get bought by some rich media conglomerate in Germany; people gullible enough to believe their organic food is structurally or nutritionally superior and are willing to overpay for it are also likely to overpay for pet food.
In a modern culture that promotes releasing the Id to do as it pleases (but then over-regulating what it can have access too, so no cigarettes, video games or trans-fats) fasting is out of place.  Yet people still do it, to the frustration of neo-rationalists and atheist zealots, who note with condescension that it has as little impact on behavior as wearing a football jersey has on the outcome of the Super Bowl.

They're right. About the Super Bowl anyway. 
Being in science media for any length of time, you will discover what Martin Robbins, a self-proclaimed liberal, called The Big White Elephant In The Room - partisan framing of science issues through a cultural and political world view.  He referred to it as liberal bias, and he is a liberal, but not a self-loathing kind.  He doesn't recognize it is not liberal bias that is the problem, it is progressives.  Liberals can write articles talking about The Big White Elephant In The Room and worry that the lack of diversity in science media and science academia is harmful to those endeavors.