During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
If you read politics on Twitter, you would have recently seen that Republicans in the U.S. Congress are going to impeach President Obama if they get enough seats in November, so it is vital that Democrats win elections.
DDT, the first modern pesticide, has been banned in the United States since 1972 but it is still commonly used in places where malaria is prevalent. The United Nations recommends it because it is far less harmful to people than malaria is and remains superior to replacements. Malaria drugs have become less effective over time so it's better kill pests before they infect people.
Revolutions are messy business, they require participation by a type of personality that is not very savory; militant, bombastic, a little crazy.
There is a little miracle of science happening in your body right now. As you read this, a minuscule 5 grams of a high-energy molecule called adenosine triphosphate - ATP - is causing all kinds of reactions in order to give you the energy to sit at your computer. In total, 8 ounces of ATP is being recycled hundreds of times each day, so many times that a human can use their body weight - 200 pounds of ATP in my case – every 24 hours.
George Dyson. Credit: edge.orgIf you read about Big Data for very long, a quote from science historian George Dyson is sure to come up: "Big data is what happened when the cost of keeping information became less than the cost of throwing it away." That will be a platform to talk about the challenges, etc.But there is a bigger problem that shows the challenges of Big Data - that isn't what Dyson said. But like with Einstein quotes about bees, in a Google world, where accuracy is measured by how often you are repeated and thus make it to the top of search engines, the Big Data problem is accuracy, not volume.
In today's Wall Street Journal, I have an article discussing recent problems in peer review.
A recent review in the British Journal of Nutrition concluded that the nutritional quality and safety of organic food was higher than conventional food. Fruits, vegetables, and grains, organic versions were better in all ways than conventional farming, they determined.
Organic food had fewer pesticides, a much different result than other studies, and also had more important nutrients, also a much different result than other studies.
Not the JVC peer review ring, an actual gambling ring. Credit: China Daily
It's something of a mild joke in science circles - you can figure out who is peer-reviewing your paper by looking for the common author in the citations you 'missed' in your submission.It was only a matter of time before peer review cabals became an actual strategy somewhere.
IBM takes data seriously, as seriously as they took Business Machines back in their early days. They want to be the resource for the blanket concept of The Internet Of Things. Someone will have to do it, because the amount of information available today is overwhelming. When you can produce 250 gigabytes of data an hour, you have too much data. Or you are onto something big.
If you haven't yet read that mothers who lived near farms have more kids with autism, you will. The reason, it is said, is because farms use pesticides. You're not off the hook, organic farmers. The results are from California and there are lots and lots of organic pesticides in use in the study area.
The United States of America hasn't been interested in building big new physics collaborations, such as the Large Hadron Collider, in the last 20 years, since the Clinton administration canceled the Superconducting Super Collider. The James Webb Space Telescope overruns and President Obama canceling NASA's Constellation program confirm why America has a crisis of confidence about building big and there is a belief that maybe we should stick to small experiments like cute robots on Mars.
If the world will have 9 billion people or more by 2050, we'll probably be okay.The scare stories of food riots and mass famine once promoted by 1960s Doomsday Prophet Paul Ehrlich are today only promoted by, well, Paul Ehrlich. Even organic farmers say they can feed the world now.In the last 30 years, America has led the world in science and nowhere has that been more evident than in food. American farmers have successfully dematerialized in a world of materialism - they grow more food on less land using fewer pesticides than ever thought possible. And the future looks even brighter.
