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Misinformation Common Among Women With Breast Cancer

Vaccines are getting American media attention now that Republicans are engaging in misinformation...

Even With Universal Health Care, Mothers Don't Go To Postnatal Check-Ups

For decades, health care costs have been a political topic in America. Advocates argue it is the...

Happy Twelfth Night - Or Divorce Day, Depending On How Your 2026 Is Going

Today is, in Christian observance, Twelfth Night, the end of The 12 Days of Christmas in that song...

Blood Pressure Medication Adherence May Not Be Cost, It May Be Annoyance At Defensive Medicine

High blood pressure is an important risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease and premature...

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 »

Dr. John Holdren Reconciles The 1970s Ice Age With Today's Global Warming

Jan 13 2015 | comment(s)

In late 2008, the euphoria over electing a man who specifically said he wanted to put science back in its rightful place began to fade. The president-elect, it seemed, preferred the company of UFO believers, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and a guy who thought girls couldn't do math.

FDA Label Might Unnecessarily Prevent Metformin Use In A Million Diabetics

Jan 06 2015 | comment(s)

Groups like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration set the gold standard worldwide for science - but they are still soundly criticized. Every time the EPA clears a pesticide it is blasted because the studies it mandates are "industry-funded", which is required by law. As are trials for drugs.

For many people, the disclaimers about side effects of drugs at the end of television drug commercials (along with the omnipresent 'see our ad in Golf magazine' small print) are somewhat laughable - like with Proposition 65 'cancer-causing chemicals' here in California, when everything is a problem, nothing is - but they have a serious societal impact when the FDA says it.

By 2014, If West Wing Science And Medicine Were Real Life...

Dec 30 2014 | comment(s)

A solid 12 years after most of its audience stopped watching "The West Wing", I decided to start - all 154 episodes. In the interest of transparency, I disclose I skipped two - one was a retrospective and one was nothing but a debate between two characters that no one could care much about who were running for president to succeed the sitting president played by Martin Sheen. Real debates are boring enough but a fictional one written by one political side is really tedious.

Science Academia Is Out Of The Political Mainstream - But Social Science Is Out There Like Pluto

Dec 20 2014 | comment(s)

It's no secret that universities are left-wing - conservatives have complained about that since the early 1950s, but back then it was mostly in the humanities so only those conservatives who came from the humanities and invariably ended up in Washington, D.C. - think tanks or whereever - cared. To the public, the concern was...academic.

It is only recently that science academia followed suit and has become far out of the American mainstream politically. As that shift to the left happened, and science policies issues became part of mainstream discourse, concerns rose that academic science was politically or financially motivated rather than being in the public interest.

Is 2014 The End Of Framing? Only 15 Percent Of Americans Believe In Creationism

Dec 18 2014 | comment(s)

A decade ago, gas was cheap, the American economy was booming and so was partisan rhetoric about a disconnect on science related to politics. One side was good, one was bad.

President George W. Bush, who had boosted NASA funding after declines in the Clinton years, had doubled the budget for the NIH, and funded human embryonic stem cells, was anti-science. And so was the entire Republican party, we were assured.

A Rubber Duck's Journey

Dec 12 2014 | comment(s)

In 1992, some shipping containers got washed overboard on a trip from Hong Kong to Tacoma. Among the losses was one containing 28,800 plastic bath toys known as Friendly Floatees - frogs, turtles, ducks, that kind of thing. It's not an uncommon event, storms cause, on average, about one container per day to get lost at sea, a minor amount when we consider how much shipping is done annually.