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.
Meg Urry was on the senior scientific staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which runs the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. That's no surprise to people outside the government-funded research world, women have been doing quality science work forever - heck, Marie Curie got two Nobel prizes and she was living in France at the beginning of the 20th century, you don't get more misogynistic and biased than what she had to endure. Yet it may be a surprise for you to learn that in 2001 Urry became the first tenured female faculty member ever in Yale's physics department, and then in 2007 she was elected the first woman Chair of the Department of Physics at Yale, 104 years after Curie became a Nobel laureate.
If you are a long-time Thor comic book reader, you know Thor's hammer used to be really, really heavy. That means Thor used to be really, really strong. Somewhere along the way Big Hulk lobbyists decided that the green guy should be the strongest character in Marvel comics,so writers gave him both virtually unlimited strength and decided that Thor's hammer, the creatively-named Mjolnir (doesn't it just sound like Norse should sound?) was magic, and that is why only he could lift it. He wasn't the strongest guy around any more, which left it with being supernatural, kind of a cop-out even to me as a kid.
You can bet that if I don't have my Double Black Diamond Extra Bold tomorrow morning, I am writing me a letter to Congress. Guatemalans take their coffee just as seriously and have already gone to Def-Con 1 over coffee rust, which is affecting 70% of the country's crop.Roya is a fungus that grows on the leaves of the coffee plant and that starves the beans. It's caused by too much rain, which is a recurring problem and always has been but coffee is big business now. In 1982, the world used 2.6 billion pounds of coffee beans but in 2011, that number was 17.6 billion pounds, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. Meanwhile, a growing human population and heavy rains there have caused Colombian output to drop 36% in the last seven years.
As most of the entire world knows by now, Mother Nature gave us a bit of a surprise this week - a meteor exploded in the atmosphere and shattered windows and injured hundreds of people in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia.With just the concussive force of the meteorite explosion shattering things, you can imagine what would have happened if a meteorite hit a building - one meteorite did land, thankfully in a lake near Chebarkul rather than on a house.
Some controversial modern psychologists claim that conservatives and liberals don't just differ in political ideology, correlation and causation is inferred in actual personality templates and even genetics - yes, that would mean Americans are evolving into two distinct species separate from the rest of the planet. So in that odd framework they have decided American liberals are conscientious, conservatives are reactionary, conservatives are afraid of uncertainty, liberals are open to new experiences, etc.
Here's a good way to standardize education across the states without enraging powerful education unions and the US Department of Education: get rid of real standards.In a bit of pedagogical brilliance, California has decided to forgo algebra I, even for 8th graders, if they are not 'ready'. And it will work, because with President Obama's killing of No Child Left Behind, despite its proven benefits in minority education and bringing parity to female math students for the first time in history, test scores (which determine money) will be based on an 'alternative' test that doesn't use algebra.
"GMO Inside" is demanding that America's largest candy sellers, Hershey's and Mars, put GMO warning labels on their Valentine's Day candy or remove these 'risky' ingredients completely.Wait, they make GMO chocolate now? No, of course not, though there is nothing natural about chocolate anyway. A lot of corn and soy is genetically modified and those are in chocolate products. Science has made wonderful progress in bringing safe food at reasonable cost to billions more people than was once thought possible and cheap Valentine's Day candy when chocolate was once reserved for nobility is testament to that.
There is a good reason I was not a fan of Energy Secretary Steven Chu's nationalistic claim that we are in a 'race' to beat China in creating cheap solar panels.
Does naming every large storm something new and distinct help?When all those media companies in midtown Manhattan wanted to put on their election push and remind America global warming would only happen if they voted for the wrong guy, they were disappointed that Hurricane Sandy was not actually a hurricane any more - so they called it Superstorm Sandy. It was good marketing.A few days ago, I got an email from the Weather Channel outlining all of their coverage for winter storm Nemo and where they would have meteorologists, etc.
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that Asteroid 2012 DA14 is not going to hit Earth. The bad news is, even if it were going to hit Earth, it wouldn't happen until February 15th so you will still have to buy a Valentine's Day gift.Asteroid 2012 DA14 was discovered last year, on February 22nd by astronomers at La Sagra Sky Survey observatory near Granada, Spain. Because it is small in size it was only noticed after it had flown past us, but astronomers knew then it would be back, this time much closer.How close? 24,000 KM close. As in the distance of some satellites. That means you will be able to see it with binoculars.
It's the weekend, which means it is time for scientists, science journalists, book authors and intellectually curious readers to think about microbiology. And that means beer. Beer is actually safer to drink than water. You didn't know that? Let's talk some biology.
The master ingredient in beer is yeast. That's a microbe! So if you do experiments with beer this weekend, you are advancing the world of science. If you make beer, you are a microbiologist. If you drink beer, you are a microbiologist. Microbiologists understand beer and bacteria and stuff, which is why they drink beer more than water.
President Obama recently got some ridicule for hastily claiming he loved skeet shooting and therefore was not against sportsmen when he wanted to tell Americans they couldn't be trusted to decide how many bullets to buy for their guns.
That he was simultaneously offering bombs and fighter jets to terrorists in Egypt while he didn't trust his own citizens with small arms ammunition was not lost on his critics.
