HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
Can you imagine how difficult it is to juggle peer review for 10,000 published studies per year? That's 40 every single working day, without the time it took to look at the ones that got rejected.
Imagine a world where the tedious moments of life, cleaning or driving a car or whatever, could be spent visiting the Louvre or meeting new people or learning history. The whole universe of information is at your fingertips. The only evidence of intelligence is how well you utilize the system, multitasking and parsing information while chatting and even letting someone ride shotgun in your experiences. Genius itself would be redefined.Then imagine it all disappeared. Could you remember what people told you without a digital archive of the conversation? How they look? Could you find your way home?
In 2007, after a marketing blitz for climate change during much of 2006 and the release of a new UN IPCC report, mentioning that methane had 23X the global warming effect of CO2 would get you shouted down and sternly reminded that CO2 lasts far longer.
That is absolutely correct. Yet recently, twice in the same week, two papers warned us that methane will cause global warming regardless of CO2.
Imagine this as a business model: You own a large potato farm. You have workers who grow and process the potatoes, you hire people to pay them, you have a sales force to sell them and then you pay trucks to ship them and have people to collect the money. You have fixed and variable costs and you charge enough money to pay those and make a profit. You have created jobs.The government decides that it wants to encourage everyone to grow potatoes. So they pass a law saying that if people will grow their own potatoes, they will subsidize it using tax dollars generated by other companies and workers. Then they mandate that in order to make growing potatoes appealing to more people, you will have to buy potatoes from individuals at the same price you sell them.
How dare biologists create something not found in nature!Well, mankind has a lot of experience in trying to keep nature from killing us - the war between man and nature is a grudge match whose history and resentments run deep. When scientists stop trying to keep nature from killing us is when we should worry.
***Professor Frederick L. Crane started his career as a botanist. He got a BS in Chemistry from the University of Michigan, Ann arbor in 1950 and received his PhD in 1953. Like many scientists of today, his next job was as a post-doctoral fellow and he went to work at at the Enzyme Institute of the University of Wisconsin, where he became an associate professor on his way to becoming a full professor at Purdue, where he now has Emeritus status.He has received the American Chemical Society Eli Lilly Medal for Biochemistry, he has worked for NATO, he even has an honorary medical degree from Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Yet he is most famous not for plants or chemistry, but rather for a beef heart.
The Deadliest Catch details the work travails of Bering Sea crab fishermen, but African wives of fishermen may be having adventures of their own.The authors of a recent paper estimated that up to 60% of men and 50% of women report extra-marital partnerships in their lifetime - and they believe those numbers are under-reported, especially among women, due to cultural constraints. In reality, range estimates are so broad as to be almost meaningless but even if it's 20% it's a lot.
Friends of the Earth, most famous for being against nuclear energy and every other bit of modern science and technology, now thinks most scientists are unethical - unless they are hand-picked by Friends Of The Earth.
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Writing instruction in U.S. classrooms is "abysmal" and the Common Core State Standards don't go far enough to address glaring gaps for students and teachers, a Michigan State University education scholar argues.
In a new study, Gary Troia calls for a fresh approach to professional development for teachers who must help students meet the new writing standards. His research, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, appears in the journal School Psychology Review.
The advent of science blogging in the early- and mid-2000s meant people needed things to write about - and people generally want to live in important times. That meant exaggeration, hysteria and hyperbole.
http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2013/01/08/science_has_always_… mythology of the super-rational, completely impartial scientist is promoted by scientists - but it has probably done more harm than good. Good science requires passion, it requires arguments and it requires a desire to beat out other people. The notion that scientists are instead modern-day versions of Spock from "Star Trek", dispassionately analyzing data and uncovering the secrets of nature, is in defiance of what we know about actual scientists who do breakthrough work.
Science scores are up among students and two-thirds of students have a decent grasp of science. That sounds pretty good, right?If you are in the 'education stinks so let's give it more money' business, though, higher scores are cause for alarm. “This is dreadful,” Gerry Wheeler, interim executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, told the Washington Post.
