Cool Links

Some physicists are looking to do for elections what they have done for economics - try and prove that people can behave rationally.  Here is hoping it goes better this time.

Unfortunately, the biggest believers in the idea that humans might, on occasion, obey rules that yield predictable collective patterns, have been non-scientists, like political philosopher John Stuart Mill and social scientists Auguste Comte and Adolphe Quetelet.
Recently, scientists in New Zealand welcomed a terrific new genetically modified organism (GMO) into the world: A cute, tailless cow named "Daisy" that produces hypoallergenic milk. Scientists engineered the animal to address the problem of infant allergies to cow milk, which affects up to 3% of children in the developed world.
Gilles-Eric Séralini, the University of Caen biologist and anti-GMO activist, is under intense pressure to report the full data behind his team’s claim that rats fed for two years with Monsanto’s glyphosate-resistant NK603 maize (corn) developed many more tumors and died earlier than controls.
 Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  As frequently happens in modern times, they are not chemists.  

Lefkowitz is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina while Kobilka is a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.  They received their award for their discoveries related to G-protein-coupled receptors. The human body has about 1,000 kinds of such receptors, structures on the surface of cells, which let the body respond to a wide variety of chemical signals, like adrenaline. Some receptors are in the nose, tongue and eyes, and let us sense smells, tastes and light.
Sometimes when I add a cool link, I want to make it funnier, or more prescient.  Sometimes the weird vibe of a writer straining for edgy legitimacy just stands on its own.  So, Science 2.0 audience, I present to you a sample of a site you may never need to bother with again, OpEdNews - because even its name is in conflict with itself and insecure, kind of like calling a site Belt And Suspenders:
Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman - a laureate in economics but a psychologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, has thrown the gauntlet down to one group of psychologists to restore the credibility of their field - by creating a replication ring to check each others’ results. Kahneman is a pioneer in behavioral economics, the irrational ways we make decisions about risk. If you like "Freakanomics", thank Kahneman.
Russian feminist punk-rock (and, if we are being honest with each other, not very good) band Pussy Riot's 15 minutes of anti-religion fame may be about up.  Russia has turned its social authoritarianism on something new; PepsiCo.
In the mid-1980s something odd occurred in Scandinavia that would be mirrored throughout the western world. Pediatricians in Sweden started reporting an increase in babies and toddlers with celiac disease.

Better diagnosis, right?  Maybe.  Or maybe, says new research, it was how babies were fed.  Not mote gluten as a problem, less.  In 1996, gluten diagnoses began to drop again, after quadrupling from 1984 to 1996.
There is an obvious demographic thread that connects anti-science groups in food, in medicine, in research and pharmacy too, but most science media pundits are incapable of seeing it or flat out deny it.

Yet it is hard to deny.  Meanwhile, every science media outlet publishes articles claiming the entire Republican party must be anti-science because more of them deny global warming and slightly more Republicans than Democrats deny evolution.

The anti-biology movement among the left, Jon Entine notes, is "enabled by advocacy NGOs and campaigning journalists who, ironically, took the lead in debunking the pseudo-science of the right."
Unlike mainstream journalism, science journalism is under no expectation, feigned or real, to be objective.  Because no one reads science journalism any more. 
How do you turn political science, economics or surveys of college undergraduates into science?  You claim scientists are mean to people and not liberal and tolerant at all unless they agree with what you say next and then set out to redefine science so that just about anything can qualify.

Anyone thinking on this for a moment can deduce there are going to get two reasons to do so, and they apply to almost anything: money and politics.

Writing in USA Today, Dr. Alex Berezow and I dissect the recent efforts to insist the social sciences and the humanities are part of the science continuum, and therefore should have the same legitimacy conferred on them, despite the fact that we all know society is not a laboratory,
A contest co-organized by the European Science Foundation has a cash prize sponsored by Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt (Physics, 2011) - the goal, make a better video than the EU's "It's a girl thing" video.

Now, I didn't see the big deal about the original but then again I am not the target market - American white guys approaching middle age tend to let things slide, all outreach is good outreach, etc.  That doesn't mean a whole lot of women didn't have a reason to be irked by it, but rather than just blowing up the blogosphere with indignant rage about the efforts someone else made and doing nothing, people are making a positive alternative and that is always a good thing.
A parasite that caused bees to lurch around like, well, zombies, and fly at night until they die has been found in Washington State.
 
Colony Collapse Disorder, in which all the adult honey bees in a colony suddenly die, has already been causing bee populations to drop. Such zombies were first discovered in California in 2008 by San Francisco State University biologist John Hafernik who now runs a website ZombeeWatch.org that is aided by a network of citizen scientists to help determine how widespread the parasite is and whether it is contributing to the demise of bee colonies across the country.
September 28th. Burger King marks its fifth anniversary back in Japan with an "irrationality" themed burger - because hamburgers with black buns ARE CRAZY.

The buns are made with bamboo charcoal and the burger is slathered in "black ketchup", which is made from squid ink and garlic.

Price at ¥480 (6 bucks or so), the Premium Kuro Burger will be available for a limited time only.


Burger King Is Launching Squid Ink Ketchup and a Black Hamburger by Brian Ashcraft, Kotaku.com

The XM25 Counter-Defilade Target Engagement System is not new. The 1970s myth of military contractors throwing rubbish out there for high costs (well, mostly myth - just like the myth that NASA put a man on the moon, when military contractors did) is just a myth. The military is exceedingly slow to approve anything these days and so XM25 "Punisher" has been looked at for 10 years. 
Here's an ethics doozy, hot on the heels of some ethicists in England contending that not only is late-term abortion an ethical right, post-delivery abortion is an ethical right.

This isn't quite so controversial, but still taking a contrarian position to the knee-jerk reaction that gender selection is bad.  Virtually everyone says it is bad and yet virtually every country has people doing it. Isn't this just modern eugenics, the 21st century equivalent of that 20th century tool of progressives out to create a Utopia where there was no promiscuity and no mental retardation and no disease- the only price was forced sterilization, forced abortion and selective breeding?
Farmers and activists from all over the continent converged on European Union headquarters in Brusssels to push for a food policy that is fairer to family farmers and kinder to the environment and developing nations.

Meanwhile, the deny what has gotten them all to this point; science. 

At the European Parliament in Brussels, a reform of the costly pan-EU farm system is being discussed. And everyone has their hand in the pie, people selling stuff in the Slow Food movement to the Friends of the Earth environmental group.
Think sodas and other drinks are too sweet? You are not alone.

Barry Nalebuff, professor of economics and strategy at Yale School of Management, thought that too and so 14 years ago he started Honest Tea Inc. with one of his students. They make tea that tastes like tea and it has fewer than 100 calories each. They will have sold 100 million bottles this year.

But not in New York City.  Because Honest Tea comes in 500 milliliter bottles, it will be banned. 500 milliliters is 16.9 ounces and, because New York City wants to mimic the social authoritarian, anti-science quackery of San Francisco, it will be outlawed to cure obesity.
The date for solving 'cold cases', those unsolved murders from the past, has just been pushed back a little farther.  72-year-old Jack McCullough has been found guilty <edit after a DNA breakthrough placed him at the scene of the abduction of seven-year-old Maria Ridulph in 1957.

McCullough, 18 at the time, was initially considered a suspect but was out thanks to an alibi, which turns out to have been fabricated. Maria's remains were exhumed from her grave in July 2011 so that modern-day forensic scientists could try to find DNA evidence to implicate McCullough that could not be detected in 1958. 
Despite all science showing it is unjustified and a French court overturning a moratorium that had no legal or scientific basis, the Prime Minister of France, Jean-Marc Ayrault, has declared that France will continue to ban any genetically modified food despite objections from its own scientists and those across the EU and the world.