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Declaring War On Frappuccino And Diet Soda Is Not A Valid Government Nutrition Guideline

You're not  a Frank-people because you eat Doritos, despite what people writing lifestyle/diet...

Physician Burnout Is Common - And Informal Rationing Is One Big Cause

If the government promises every home a great gardener, most people recognize they won't get a...

Cancel Culture Prevents The Best Researchers From Engaging With The Food Industry

After Chris Wild took over the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a UN-funded...

Vermont Should Stop Showing Leadership In Overruling Scientists On Farming

Despite Vermont's Agricultural  Innovation Board (AIB), created to inform regulatory recommendations...

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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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When Energy Secretary Steven Chu was appointed, it was a bit of a policy worry.  Yes, he has a Nobel prize in physics but being a scientist has never shown to be any great benefit for policy. Despite the myth that scientists are stoic and serious and unemotionally obeying the Scientific Method it isn't the case at all.  Like all other people, they have irrational fixations, and Chu's was a belief that CO2 was the only driver in climate change, which meant we might have a bunch of expensive solutions that actually solve nothing in climate change.

LONDON, March 22, 2012 - Two new surveys conducted among 2,500 adults and 400 teachers show what is really on the minds of those concerned about education; the need to teach about pets in schools.

89% of adults, 78% of primary teachers and 70% of secondary teachers believed it is important to teach responsibility using pets and most adults thought it was more important to teach younger children how to care for pets than it was to teach them about sex education or money management.  Isn't that going to cause a fight with the 'teach kids to have sex at younger ages' lobby, though? It's Big Pet versus Big Condom for the mindshare of 8-year-olds.

Climate change is a polarizing science policy debate the likes of which humankind has never witnessed before. Even President Obama's science advisor John Holdren never dreamed up this kind of doomsday scenario when he was writing books with the king of doomsday predictions, Paul Ehrlich. Women in the workforce, CFCs, acid rain, islands of garbage - nothing from past cultural debates compares to the scariness of rolling drought and melting glaciers.  What to do? On one side we have people who insist a world where elites have energy and others do not must be implemented right now.
Time is relative, of course, but we still hate to be late for appointments.  So there has always been research on making our keeping of time a little more accurate.

A new clock tied to the orbiting of a neutron around an atomic nucleus could have such unprecedented accuracy that it neither gains nor loses 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years - basically, you wouldn't have needed to reset your watch yet even if you had been around at the beginning of the Universe.
New York University cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor Allen Feldman is visiting the University of Sydney, notes the blog site of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry (SOPHI) - they named the site SOPHIstry, which may be a little too clever, since sophists in ancient times were the people real philosophers made fun of because they were trying to be too clever and prove up is down and other nonsense.
A study by Indiana University researchers on "coregasm" says it has confirmed anecdotal evidence that exercise can lead to female orgasms.

Good news for health clubs everywhere? Maybe.  But it's been darn hard to pin down reliable data on it.  It makes the media rounds - and of course, this site - every few years.