A litany on Science 2.0 is that when something comes up that might be about fish, call Neil Shubin - because he can make anything about fish.That's because we can make almost anything about fish. He has told the story before, and recounts in his new television show, that students in an anatomy class he taught likely wanted a refund when he explained he was a fish biologist, until he showed them what we all had in common.Tiktaalik roseae, a 375-million-year-old Devonian period specimen, is one of the great examples of multi-disciplinary science collaboration; biology predicted it, geology predicted how to find it and paleontology predicted where to look. Then they found it.
Like with a perfectly safe genetically modified salmon, Keystone XL, Yucca Mountain and most other inconvenient science, if the government doesn't want to go on record overturning scientists, it just ignores them.It's a safe move. Scientists rely on politicians for funding, so they are not going to become a voting bloc. Sometimes they aren't ignored, they are just never asked.
A non-peer reviewed claim published in something called the Central European Journal of Urology is all that's needed for American environmentalists to declare that cell phones are causing men to be unable to get it up.What was the evidence? Surveys they matched to the International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF) and then answering questions about cell phone habits.This goofiness is being perpetuated by Natural News, which is basically the Weekly World News of health coverage. Look for them to claim pesticides are creating Bat Boys next:
In a modern government culture where Freedom of Information Act requests are ignored when they are made by political opposition, some political groups can't get 501C status if they are a different party than people at the IRS and the NSA is spying on everyone, it is no surprise sometimes favoritism also happens.
We all know how important article graphics are in science studies. Without the right graphics, no one is going to believe the results. And that goes for images of the authors also. Toward the goal of taking science back to its roots, PeerJ is now requiring selfies of scientists. They also intend to be able to datamine the results and determine which scientists get the most citations correlated to their selfies.While most scientists look like this:
University of North Carolina has loose academic standards for athletes. Obviously lots of schools do that. But UNC takes it to a whole new level. Some of the classes never met and only required a paper. And even terrible papers earn an A.This paper, uncovered by ESPN, was a paragraph long, chock full of spelling and grammatical errors and didn't say much of anything.I was on the competitive shooting team in college. We had to go to class.
Unless it's a child of Jenny McCarthy or the anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, anti-science demographic that listens to her, kids of today who are reading classic fiction may not understand the world characters of the past lived in. Cholera? Scarlet Fever? Jungle Fever? A lot of great books written today simply lack a plot, unless the emotional anchors for The Velveteen Rabbit and Little Women could be transformed into worries about global warming and how much water should be in a toilet flush.At Discover, Elizabeth Preston outlines a whole bunch of great books that kids read and that revolved around medical facts of the day. Want to know what Tiny Tim had and how he was likely cured? You have to go read the article.
Someone asked me one time if I had an easy explanation for evolution and I told them I have a three-word one: "hair and milk".Nothing shows how much we have in common (descent) with other mammals than those three words. When a baby is hungry the baby knows what to do.Or not. Apparently the mechanism of suckling is up for debate. It sounds funny but I like that science is out to understand the mysteries of obvious, common-sense things about nature, like how a baby extracts milk.Alex Berezow at Real Clear Science has all of the juicy details.
Cosmologically speaking, 'near' does not mean what it means colloquially. After last week's "Cosmos" show, astronomers were chuckling at the representation that space was some sort of asteroid-laced minefield. In reality, you are less likely to get hit by an asteroid in space than you are on Earth - because space is that big.So when astronomers stated scientifically that Asteroid 2003 QQ47 would pass 'near' us, they were speaking the language of science but the language of doomsday prognosticators is another thing entirely.12 million miles is 'near' to astronomers but to you and me that is 50 times farther away than the Moon...and therefore nothing to fear.
Jonathan Eisen and Darlene Cavalier get a nice shout-out in the Sacramento Bee today, for their work gathering microbes for an experiment in space.
