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.
South Carolina is suing the federal government to save the mixed oxide fuel project at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where weapons-grade plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapon stockpiles will be converted to fuel for nuclear reactors.
In mainstream media, everywhere from Fox News to Time (and here on Science 2.0, though with a little more skepticism) a
In Five Things Neil deGrasseTyson’s “Cosmos” Gets Wrong at The Federalist
Robin Thicke may have sung "Blurred Lines" and appeared in a teenage fantasy video with a lot of naked women, but when a photo was revealed of him in a suggestive situation with another woman, he found that the line was actually not all that blurry to his wife.(1)
What changed? She had been fine with his canoodling before. He has no idea and men meeting women across the nation are just as confused about where their blurred lines are.
Statisticians have a rule of thumb for calibrating claims made in humanities and science papers alike. Andrew Gelman, for example, talks about statistical significance filter - "If an estimate is statistically significant, it’s probably an overestimate." A good thing to remember when you read weak observational studies, psychology surveys and, in modern times, a shocking number of epidemiology papers.For health, you can use a different rule of thumb: Does Joe Mercola sell it?If he does, it is probably suspect.
Here's an intellectual puzzle; which is more real, the viability of wind power as anything more than a sustainable gimmick or Wind Turbine Syndrome?
While former Energy Secretary Stephen Chu is a fine scholar, he seemed to be lost when it came to drafting a federal energy policy that was evidence-based.It's easy for an academic to postulate that $9 a gallon gas will be 'good' for us but when it comes to managing a national constituency, including a lot of people who will be ruined by expensive gasoline, there has to be some real thought before actions are taken. Government is not a sandbox.
On a per capita electricity production basis, environmentalists are winning the war on energy
Electricity for all, which was once considered the goal of technological progress, is now treated like a giant step on the road to an ecological Apocalypse. As a result, we've increased regulation and decreased generation and the price per kilowatt-hour has gone up and supply per capita has gone down. We can thank a confluence of bad ideas, chiefly subsidies for inefficient and expensive green alternatives, penalties for coal and natural gas, and a war on nuclear science.
Human exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) has recently been linked to negative health claims, like a decline in reproductive function in adults and stunted neurodevelopment in children, and so people consumed with the 'natural' fallacy have been up in arms about it. It hasn't quite become 'BPA causes autism' hysteria, like they did with vaccines, but it is getting close.
Naturally, companies have listened to the nocebo worries of the natural-obsessed and dutifully created BPA-free products and charged more money for them.
Do you think pharmaceutical companies are creating problems that don't exist in order to keep selling drugs to an increasingly over-medicated population? Do you think scientists are unethical if they work at a corporation like DuPont or in nuclear science, rather than being funded by the government?
Such beliefs have become so increasingly mainstream among a particular political and cultural demographic that we can quite easily make lots of accurate determinations about them, the same way we can infer things about someone if they don't buy into global warming.
A cookbook editor in the New York Times says I am wrong on the gluten-free fad and that, if it makes people feel better to buy gluten-free, to leave them alone. Well, well, well, look at the New York Times embracing libertarianism and food choice when it comes to fads their demographic happens to embrace. Like with sugar and GMOs, they want science and reason to stay out of it, because those are weird fetishes of a large chunk of their readership, while we are constantly told how stupid people are if they don't accept global warming. Right?
David Perlmutter, MD, became well-known last year as the best-selling author of Grain Brain, which demonizes wheat (and, of course, gluten) and he recently claimed that simple dietary changes would prevent half of Alzheimer's cases.
