Dr. Heidi Ledford at Nature says physicists enjoy more generous funding, more commercial interest and more popular support than biologists.
Thousands of physicists in the United States stopped reading right there.
While biology has an entire National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Johns Hopkins alone gets a $1 billion in research funding for the life sciences, physicists get...what again? Even the Tevatron is closed. Brookhaven may be older than me.
Could the big split among anti-science hippies occur over a cute little cat?
PETA loves animals. Greenpeace hates genetic modification and science in general because changes are only 'natural' if high-energy cosmic rays mutate things at random. What about when scientists use unnatural science to help save an endangered species?
An African Black-footed Cat was born February 6, 2012, at the Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans. The cool science aspect, or the creepy FrankenKitten aspect if you are a progressive, is that it was born to an ordinary domestic cat - the first of its kind to be born from inter-species embryo transfer.
Do you use sunscreen? If not, you aren't as crazy as those anti-science hippies who are trying to give their kids smallpox or starve poor nations, but you are not exactly up on the literature of the last 30 years either.
However, you may be no worse off, especially if you are a woman who might like to keep her uterus working. The uterus - that special place where a baby grows(1) when a woman gets pregnant - can sometimes have its tissue misplaced. That's called endometriosis and it is when the tissue that normally lines the uterus is instead growing somewhere else. It can lead to heavy periods and even infertility. While researchers know what it is, they don't really know why it happens.
Wait, a study claims drinking alcohol makes you less likely to throw cultural caution to the wind and spend stupidly? Does. Not. Compute.
Unless it's social psychology, but even then no one is believing it unless they are one of the people writing about how screwed up Republicans are, i.e., need some new framework for the confirmation bias of their audience.
The
Being Human conference was held yesterday, March 24th, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Part of its description is "
insights from science and philosophy shed new light on the processes of human experience – the how of feeling, thinking, and believing – and invite us to redefine who we are as human beings."
Here is a precautionary principle two-for-one special.