Science & Society

Celebrating 50 Years Of Weapons Grade Junk Science

To people who are brand new to the culture wars, California's Proposition 37 might be scary. It has demonstrated that the world is a very small place, lies and hysteria can travel around the world and be perpetuated by the blogosphere, the Tweety page ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Oct 17 2012 - 11:29am

Anti-Darwinism Dominating Progressive Science Outreach

As pointed out recently, a new type of creationism has entered popular discourse through the backdoor. That was mostly about computer geeks and physicists trying to outperform "old atheists" in fashionable, gadgety ways, thus unwittingly bringin ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jul 21 2013 - 10:25pm

Why We Love Outing Internet Trolls

Michael Brutsch appeared to be an upstanding citizen. He is the father of a teenage son who joined the Marines, loves cats, and lives with his disabled wife in Arlington, TX. As a programmer for a financial services company, he punched the clock daily and ...

Article - Michael W. Taft - Oct 24 2012 - 2:08am

Fear Is Not Enough: Climate Negotiations Relying On “Dangerous” Thresholds Won't Succeed

Giving a hard number as a critical threshold for dangerous climate change-  temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius- has not helped climate negotiations.  The USA, for example, has led the developed world in reducing emissions from energy, though to be fa ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 17 2012 - 10:21am

Why Government Appears Inefficient

Three reasons why government can look less efficient than it really is: 1. Cherry-picking in privatization. Let’s suppose we could rank government agencies or services in descending order of productivity: 1, 2, 3, and so on, with agency 1 being the most e ...

Article - Fred Phillips - Oct 21 2012 - 12:25am

L'Oréal-UNESCO Announces Women In Science Laureates

The L'Oréal Foundation and UNESCO has announced the five women scientists who will be honored as the 15th L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Laureates. On March 28th, 2013, the five Laureates will be honored at an Awards ceremony in Paris and w ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 19 2012 - 10:57am

Jonah Lehrer, Proust, And The Tyranny Of Salami

In the scientific community, researchers call it salami slicing. Appropriately, the act consists of shaving down a collected dataset until a scientist reaches the smallest scrap of result that still constitutes an original idea. This decontextualized whis ...

Article - Clayton Aldern - Oct 21 2012 - 12:23am

How Much Initiative Should People Who Care About The Climate Take?

An iron dumping experiment was recently conducted by an environmentally concerned group who believe controlled geo-engineering may be the solution to impending science issues. It was conducted without involvement from the scientific community and without p ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Oct 22 2012 - 1:19am

Face-ism: Paper Says Mainstream Media Is Sexist- And Less Discriminatory Cultures Are Moreso

Psychology of Women Quarterly, the scientific, peer-reviewed journal of feminism, contends that there are gender stereotypes in the media- photographs of men focus on male faces while photographs of women are focused on female bodies. Such "face-ism& ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 22 2012 - 5:00am

6 Years To Scientists Guilty Of Not Predicting Earthquakes

Italy is a beautiful, crazy country. Take today's verdict, which condemns seven scientists (Franco Barberi, Enzo Boschi, Mauro Dolce, Bernardo De Bernardinis, Giulio Selvaggi, Claudio Eva, and Gianmichele Calvi) to six years of prison, plus a huge fin ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 23 2012 - 4:01am