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.
British environmentalist Mark Lynas was an early advocate against GMOs and, as he tells it, that meant he was an early advocate for demonizing scientists. While most actual scientists did not give much credence to an offhand claim by researcher Árpád Pusztai in the mid-1990s that a genetically-modified potato damaged the immune system of an animal, because the results were unpublished and unverified, UK media of the scare journalism kind and British activists took off with it and the "Frankenfood" movement was born.Here is what Lynas writes about his early efforts (bold mine):
Czech researchers have hypothesized that carp in large tubs at Christmas markets possess a capacity to sense geomagnetic fields.
Science 2.0 is not like most other science sites. Aside from not being a part of a billion-dollar conglomerate, our audience is also a little off kilter. By off kilter, I mean ahead of everyone else.
When does a business that has carefully positioned itself as more natural and wholesome and healthy and not at all like Big Ag suddenly look a lot like Big Ag?When the FDA tells them they can only make people sick in their own state. Then the corporate lawyers come out in force.Organic Pastures, America’s largest raw milk dairy and cause of numerous recalls just in the last year, would like to be able to make children ill across state lines and so they have filed suit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to force a change in the current law - which bans sales of raw milk across state lines but otherwise leaves it to states to allow businesses to poison its citizens or not.
Nuclear power is not mired in regulatory uncertainty because the science is unsettled, the overwhelming majority of scientists accept physics and the really overwhelming consensus of nuclear physicists accept the safety of nuclear power.
2009 was sure a long time ago. Back then, President Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for nothing more than his inauguration speech. Exuberant voters ignored his vaccine-causes-autism believer, the many UFO-believers and the guy who thought girls couldn't do math on his transition team. Even naming a Doomsday Prophet as Science Czar was cheered.
In what is believed to be a historical first, someone named Dr. Rongxiang Xu has filed a lawsuit against the Nobel Assembly, citing libel and unfair competition.
I've often joked that residents of New York City have little knowledge of the culture and lifestyle of people beyond the Hudson River. Some seem to think the "Fallout" games are actually happening in all that land they fly over between Manhattan and San Francisco.
For decades, solar power has been touted as a way to partly solve the energy problem. Solar energy offers opportunities for use in developing countries and solar cells can sometimes conveniently be installed on surfaces with no other useful purpose.
Within ten to fifteen years the price of electricity generated by solar cells is expected to be comparable to that of ‘conventional’ electricity from fossil fuels.
Where do they get that number?
The efficiency improvement is achieved by the use of an ultra-thin aluminum oxide layer at the front of the cell, and it brings a breakthrough in the use of solar energy a step closer.
Which esteemed body does not like any attribution of hurricanes to global warming?
One of the silliest tropes in the hyped-up 'controversy' over evolution is that all religious people should be conflated with 'Young Earth Creationists'.
Hot on the heels of the election, geoscientists are recommending what should be an obvious change of direction for our energy policy; instead of wasting another $72 billion on subsidies for corporations building legacy ineffective green energy technology, the Obama administration should be funding basic research with that money instead.
