"Merck’s promotion of Gardasil, its vaccine against the human papilloma virus (HPV), has a complicated history. First there was the exuberant claim about its reputedly great effectiveness in preventing cervical cancer. Now comes the recommendation last month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that all 11- and 12-year-old boys should be given the vaccine...Merck says that in males, the vaccine is 89 percent effective against genital warts and 75 percent effective against anal cancer. On closer inspection, some of the numbers don’t just deflate, they evaporate..."A  contrarian insight from Discover.

Despite the claims of numerous apologists, revisionists and relativists who insist the EU commission did not say what it said, the European Commission has now retracted what it said they claimed they never said - water is allowed to claim to be good for you.

It's no secret I love Acts of Kindness - a friend of mine first told me about it because he is an investor and I agreed the concept is terrific; encourage people to do more Acts of Kindness by having them log it. I was in LA a short while ago and met with one of the co-founders and their enthusiasm is contagious (see Acts Of Kindness, Eddie Money And Karma for the story on that).

Maki at  Sci-ənce! bringeth the wisdom about the logical fallacy used by anti-science hippies to rationalize why, if we can't prove something unproven doesn't work, maybe it works, like curing shingles with acupuncture. Sure, scientists who mostly care about politics also engage in logical funkiness, like how Evil Republicans hate science so much they boosted funding but it doesn't count because they didn't boost it enough so they still hate science, but they can make that webcomic another time.

Confirmation bias prevents academia from giving Republicans a fair shake (global warming deniers!) but more objective people will scratch their heads wondering how a majority party that supposedly dislikes science drafts spending bills that increase funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Institute of Standards (NIST) and Technology and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

We keep being told how vital it is for us to stay competitive in the 'green energy race' - Energy Secretary Steven Chu reiterated it again in his Congressional hearing last week.But a race for what? China heavily subsidizes ridiculously inefficient solar cells so heavily subsidized American companies can afford to buy them - but nobody really wants the product. It doesn't work.

In the 1960s Cold War paranoia led to the discovery of the most violent explosions in the Universe, which once again goes to show you the military accomplishes more good than academics think it does - at least those humanities people, anyway.At the height of the Cold War the U.S. was concerned about the possibility of covert Soviet nuclear tests so they sent up a series of satellites to look for tell-tale flashes of radiation. These satellites began seeing something strange; flashes, but they were signals of astronomical origin. After decades of debate, it was shown that these were caused by the explosion of the most massive stars. 

Psychology Today, which has been to psychology woo what Huffington Post is to medical woo, ironically has an astute columnist calling out the shoddy research methods we have been ridiculing in psychology for years.Dr. Karen Franklin notes that while the Diederik Stapel incident is the latest, it isn't isolated.  Racism in baseball umpires, ESP, if there has been a popular tripe study thrown out to catch headlines, someone in psychology has used lousy pseudoscience to create it.

I have said too many times to count we should not be subsidizing failed, inefficient technology like solar cells.  As with the ethanol fetish of the 2000s, solar energy has been spearheaded by a government leader who surrounded himself with scientific true believers rather than objective scientists who would look critically at claims. The billions wasted on keeping inefficient technology afloat could instead have been spent on basic research that might actually get us real solar technology.

Scientists didn't like when Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) turned his gaze on rampant spending waste at the National Science Foundation but locking in on waste - military, science funding, you name it - is what he does, in true conservative fashion.