Halloween Horror Science: Are Chickens That Learn A Bigger Threat To Us Than AI?

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) vegetarian advocacy group ...

Ignore Critics, Gen Z, We Weren't Smarter In 1984

It's commonplace for older generations to criticize the young. In my early career, an older fellow...

Taking The Book Of The Dead To Heart

In ancient Egypt, the heart was the key to a happy afterlife. It lived on after death, they believed...

American CO2 Is Below War War II Levels But We Keep Emissions High In Poor Countries

In politics, one way to make your belief in alternative energy seem feasible is to make its competitors...

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 »

Attractive Girls Don't Have It So Easy

May 22 2008 | comment(s)

There's victimization and then there's, apparently, indirect victimization. Even the most popular girl in school can be a victim of indirect victimization, according to University of Alberta Educational Psychology PhD student Lindsey Leenaars and colleagues, especially if indirect victimization includes receiving anonymous notes that make fun of them, being socially excluded by some group or having rumors spread about them. In other words, indirect victimization happens to everyone in high school. Leenaars took data from questionnaires filled out in 2003 by some 2,300 students (ages 12–18) in Ontario. The anonymous questionnaire included questions about their attractiveness, their sexual activity, their friendships and school social problems. Leenaars found that females who viewed themselves as attractive had a 35 percent increased chance of considering themselves indirectly victimized.

Carbon Capture And Storage: Hope Or Hype In The Global Warming Debate?

May 10 2008 | comment(s)

One consistent feature of human progress throughout history has been that science will come up with creative answers to current problems. When ancient people living in small tribes were running out of game to hunt, some leaders thought rationing and mitigation were the answers. They would have created a culture of despair. Domesticated livestock was the answer instead and then efficient agriculture and even terraforming.

Based on that confidence, a lot of people, me included, assume that global warming can be solved by some 'future technology' as yet undeveloped. Killing our economy by 25% now (yes, imagine it 25% worse) to stave off a .5 degree warming problem in 50 years is positively un-scientific.

But hope is not how things get done. People point to Y2K and say 'it was all hype, nothing happened' but they forget that's because we spent billions prior to that fixing problems. Likewise, acid rain was a huge concern in the 1980s and is not now because problems were addressed squarely.

Capturing and storing carbon dioxide is a solution the anti-global warming contingent (read, political pundits and bloggers using science to attack Democrats) say can keep us in an SUV Promised Land today. Then future technology can deal with it permanently.

To those people (in this case, Republicans) I say, 'Pretend a Democrat is saying Social Security will take care of itself in the future. Would you be skeptical?' Well, that's how I feel when they insist nothing needs to change and it will all be okay.

In New York May 7th And Wanting To Meet A Scientific Blogging Author?

May 05 2008 | comment(s)

Bottlerocket in New York City, the coolest wine store on the planet, is having a book signing with the coolest futurist on the planet (and Scientific Blogging fave) David Houle. Meanwhile, Howard Bloom has been holed up in a cave working on his latest magnum opus - I am sworn to secrecy but it somehow ties together Osama Bin Laden, Michael Jackson and a unified theory of pretty much everything. So there's a sweet SB coffee mug on the line for anyone who can get him out of Brooklyn and into a picture with both of them wearing their Scientific Blogging shirts.

Should NSU Biology Professor Steven Aird Lose His Job For Having Standards?

May 04 2008 | comment(s)

"No Child Left Behind" is controversial because it pointed out something everyone knows but the people being blamed didn't actually like hearing - education in the US was not all that great at the lower levels.

No Child Left Behind doesn't work as well as we want and never will, as long as the people being blamed are the ones it's supposed to motivate into doing better. At the university level, where America does quite well, it's a different system.

The Odd Maze Of Doing Clean Science Journalism

May 02 2008 | comment(s)

It's not easy understanding all the nuances of particular disciplines in science even if you are in the field - science has gotten pretty precise. I have a good grasp of Maxwell's equations, for example, but I am not going to understand interplane capacitance and noise in the same way that a simulation guy at Intel will. That's why journalism is something of a thankless job. If you're a journalist you have multiple people triangulating on your defects. People with a political bent will find a political motivation (1), scientists in the field will find it either too simple or too exaggerated and people reading are likely to tune it out if it's too complex. We had an interesting example of how difficult a task it is to do clean stories that get the point across today.

Is Race An Issue In Death Penalty Cases?

May 01 2008 | comment(s)

Why would a professor in Denver examine one county in Texas and conclude there is a race issue in death penalty cases? It's hard to say. There is extrapolation and then there is just a question of methodology. Scott Phillips, associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver says that the District Attorney (DA) in Harris County, TX pursued the death penalty when the defendant was African American more often than when the victim was African American. Harris County, TX, is the capital of capital punishment, executing more people than every state - except Texas itself.