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.
Are you worried that genetically modified corn will imperil the earth and ruin your organic sticker status if the air blows toward your fields?
Horticulturalists have a solution; let science grow transgenic crops that can feed billions and create high-value medicinal antibodies. Organic believes can put their corn in caves.
Vermont is still milking the slavery thing.Yes, yes, you were first to ban it. It's easy to ban something you never had in the first place. That does not mean you are right in everything you ban and, let's face it, comparing GMOs to slavery is a little weird, even for Vermont.Nonetheless, “We’re first again,” gushes organic farmer Will Allen in The Economist, which makes the rest of the country wonder if it is the organic farming or the Vermont air that makes people goofy.
Richard Somerville and Susan Hassol have some recommendations for how to improve science communication.
I'll tell you up front, I am not a big fan of chemicals.It's not that I have chemophobia, or any science-phobia, I instead have that special sort of elitism that is available to people who have just been lucky enough to not need chemicals. I don't even like to take aspirin and I have that luxury because I haven't needed to take any drugs for a recurring condition, so it's really easy for me to embrace such naturalistic posturing.
If you want to find a hotbed of anti-science sentiment, sure, you could go to a cigar bar full of Republicans and mention that the temperature outside must be up because of global warming - and you would get lots of predictable responses, but you would not get someone claiming you were on the IPCC because they remembered reading your name somewhere this one time.If you want to see true cluelessness coupled with denial of science, even the Republican National Convention won't do it - you have go to sites about food that are run by anti-science groups.
He's not alone. An earnest young progressive named Ryan Cooper, who has dutifully written for all of the left-wing sites proclaiming to be more science-y, put his partisan cards on the table with This is a perfect example of why scientists don't vote Republican : When it comes to climate change, the intellectual bankruptcy of the conservative movement is stunning.That makes no sense at all: Academia stopped voting Republican generations ago, when Ronald Reagan was president. He was the most pro-science president in history, basic research was one of the very few things he felt government should do.
In 2009, President Barack Obama slightly eased restrictions on the human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research that was first funded by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, but limited to specific lines. Using an executive order, Pres. Obama allowed for a few more lines to be created while still obeying President Clinton's Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which limited research on embryos.
Food is interesting to me. It's essential, of course, but it's also a lot of cutting-edge science that people don't see. It's hard to imagine now that when I was a kid, Prof. Paul Ehrlich (and then later our current science czar, Dr. John holdren) were projecting that we would be having worldwide riots and mass starvation by now.Instead, while I was living on a small subsistence farm, American agricultural science ignored that apocalyptic memo, and they began producing far more food on far less land.
I can be lazy. I was famous for it as a child. I didn't bother to walk, I didn't bother to talk. When I got older, if I had to do a chore, I found a way to be a screw-up and break something. I had unlimited time for D&D and art and sports, though, and I did well enough in school to get a scholarship to college. Because those things weren't work.If only I had Alicia Silverstone as a mom, who knows how much more brain power I could have devoted to higher pursuits? Because Silverstone has figured out how to optimize everything.
In American politics there is a comfortable détente about which science craziness to allow under the big tents - Republicans are okay if their members won't accept evidence of climate science or evolution while Democrats are fine if their voters don't accept the science behind food, energy and medicine.
In the latest episode of Cosmos we got some history regarding how science has tried to converge on the age of the Earth. With that, we also got another jab at religion. Why use yet another religious contrast from hundreds of years ago to show the awesome power of science now? Is there so little actual imagination in their Ship Of The Imagination?(1)Just like with the age of the Earth, it's hard to know for sure, we only know there is a range of choices and can narrow it down as we get more data.
20 years ago, your parents knew there were two things you did not discuss with dinner guests. Your grandparents knew it, your great-grandparents knew it. 2,000 years ago people knew it.
In 2014, we are so much smarter we no longer know it.
Maybe some surveys will help. And so to help us out, two papers address the most pressing topic in popular culture - how people feel about being un-friended on Facebook. Ironically, they found this out by surveying people on Twitter.
