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.
Omics slapped at the end of words is the latest rage. It makes just about anything sound scientific. If someone says they read an astrology journal, for example, I might roll my eyes a little, but if they call their journal Astrolomics, well ... okay, I would still roll my eyes a little, but if they say they are attending a Beeronomics conference, they are making their way into my blog.
Soylent is getting ready to feed people - I will spare you a joke about the 1973 dystopian film "Soylent Green", inspired by Harry Harrison's "Make Room! Make Room!", since you already made it in your head.(1)
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), is always in conflict with itself. While it claims to care about animals, it also kills about 90% of the animals it takes in. While they advocate less meat consumption, the people they rally around that flag abuse animals with dietary quackery and forced ideology, like the recent case of a dying kitten who was non-responsive when brought to a veterinarian by its vegan owners - who told them a diet of potatoes, rice milk and pasta was killing their cat.(1) The posturing of PETA members overall is cloying, but nothing like most vegans.
Ann Finkbeiner, author of 2007's The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite (among other things) and contributor to The Last Word On Nothing, recently had a fascinating exchange with one of my favorite journalists, USA Today's Dan Vergano.
It didn't take long before the Netflix dramedy hit "Orange Is The New Black" made its way into Psychology of Women Quarterly, a publication devoted to peer-reviewing the feminist science.
With all that humor and girl kissing and talk of beatdowns, you know an editor was excited about the chance to link a paper to the show in a press release - things have been rather tame, culturally, for readers and contributors there since "The L Word" went off the air. The American Psychological Association is, as always, happy to ride a cultural wave.(1)
What do anti-science groups do that science never seems to do?Trot out naked women. PETA - constantly, Greenpeace - sure, using cheescake to raise money for their corporate agenda is nothing new for groups that have neither data nor reason nor ethics.But Babes Against Biotech is not even hiding behind a pretense of caring about a naturalistic fallacy. It is so ridiculous and goofy I at first assumed that some evil corporation had created it to make anti-science hippies look sexist.
There are two ways to influence the public - basically carrots and sticks. A stick is, of course, taxes and fees and regulations and armed federal agents at your house should you choose not to obey the law.A carrot is to create a Behavioral Insights project, similar to one that exists in the United Kingdom, tasked with using the awesome power of social science to create the behavior they want - it's like framing on steroids.
How would editors at National Review regard the credibility of a controlled market publication that had its economic policy articles written by astrologers using the stars as their evidence?They might not like it but so what? Can they prove astrologers can't make economic policy? No, it's just flawed logic, sort of like me challenging someone to prove I am not an alien from space. That is the problem with National Review paying someone from the Discovery Institute to spout anti-science nonsense about 35-year-old science under the guise of 'ethics'. Because misunderstanding and logical head-faking is the strategy the Discovery Institute uses to promote doubt about biology in general and evolution in specific.
Researchers writing in Cell Regeneration report that they used induced pluripotent stem cells from urine to create a human tooth structure.The integration-free human urine induced pluripotent stem cells were differentiated to epithelial sheets ( from the Greek meaning 'upon breast', since it was first considered the skin on the breast), one of the four types of tissue (others are nervous, muscle and collective tissue) and after 3 weeks they were able to get tooth-like structures using 8 different lines with a success rate of up to 30%.
Though Oregon voters gave a thumbs down to a 2010 ballot measure to create state-certified marijuana dispensaries, the Legislature bucked that tyranny of the majority and made them legal this month.Now the real work starts: how to certify them.
If you talk to someone who knows food but not science, it won't be long before some jab at Monsanto issues forth. And if you persist in discussing biology, it really won't be long before you get called a shill for Monsanto.You don't have to use biology, you could also do the same social experiment using energy or medicine, if your test is for left-wing people, or global warming, if you want to see the right go into a tirade about science.
You know what happens to women when they watch Katherine Heigl movies or episodes of "The Bachelor"? Well, it happens to men also - when they think there might be beer nearby.Really, it is almost Pavlovian, except the saliva is mental too. A PET scan study found that even when no alcohol was involved, the flavor of beer caused striatal dopamine release in men.(1) The striatum in men (and women - and all primates - but this particular study is about men, so, let's stay on message) consists of the caudate nucleus and the putamen and it gets input from the cerebral cortex and structures like the amygdala and hippocampus.
