Science & Society

Mercola And Fisher: Anti-vaccine Rhetoric And Fearmongering

Holy crap on a cracker. Here's propaganda and bull handed to us on a platter. You can't dress this up, make it pretty, pretend it to be anything other than an assault on reason and reality. Mercola and Fisher are a nightmare team: fearmongering r ...

Article - Kim Wombles - Nov 8 2010 - 5:52pm

The conservative case for doing something about global warming

"Far from being conservative, the Republican stance on global warming shows a stunning appetite for risk", writes Bracken Hendricks in the Washington Post.    ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Nov 8 2010 - 1:41am

Liberal College Students More Likely Than Conservatives To Vote- So Where Were They?

Voter turnout was huge in 2008- some of that was due to advertising; since Sen. Obama did not limit adhere to campaign finance reform rules the way Sen. McCain did, Obama was able to raise and spend more money than Bush and Kerry did in 2004 combined, spen ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 8 2010 - 1:19pm

Science Is Not Baseball- Almost Everyone's A Winner, Sort Of

I like Nicholas Wade, and think that his latest NY Times piece on basic research is worth reading. However, I take issue with his overly simplistic characterization of how research works: Basic research, the attempt to understand the fundamental principles ...

Article - Michael White - Nov 9 2010 - 2:22pm

Just Another Enemy Of Science: Now Against GMO Food

I posted an article critical of microwave ovens and nanotechnology. This adds to many posts critical of science and scientists. Am I another enemy of science? That last post told lay persons not to heat Ramen noodles in the microwave oven. She cannot under ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Feb 23 2012 - 11:39pm

Science for dummies- now with more poop

What is science? Science is application of the scientific method to problems or questions, and then submitting the story to the scrutiny of others. It’s simple. It’s elegant. It’s self-correcting.It’s LOGIC. BUT. What if your audience was never taught wha ...

Blog Post - Jenny Morber - Nov 13 2010 - 12:15pm

Apocalypse 1955: Growing Up Telepathic

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” The much-revered writers of the Golden Age of science fiction can be quite rough around the edges, even downright embarrassing on occasion. The writing is hurried, the plots of plot-driven books are distu ...

Article - Michael White - Nov 12 2010 - 3:39pm

Lessons from plants for happiness

Metabolism = anabolism-catabolism In plant science metabolism is sum total of anabolic processes i.e. photosynthesis which make complex substances from simple molecules to catabolism i.e. respiration which utilizes complex molecules synthesised during anab ...

Blog Post - Ashwani Kumar - Nov 14 2010 - 11:35am

What Science 2.0 Means to Me

I liken cognition to a hill-climbing search on the landscape of theories/models/maps that explain/predict reality.  It’s easy to get stuck on peaks of  local maximality.  Injecting randomness creates a sort of  Boltzmann machine  of the mind and increases ...

Blog Post - Rafe Furst - Nov 15 2010 - 1:19pm

Geeks, Tweaks And Innovation

There's a neat piece on tweaking versus invention, written by two law professors (Kal Raustiala of UCLA and Chris Sprigman at UVA) over as a Freakonomics guest blog.  Their bit on Geeks, Tweeks and Innovation talks about how Tweaking is good, but the ...

Article - Project Calliope - Nov 16 2010 - 5:16pm