In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
Since 2007, on too many occasions to count, I have noted that by being overwhelmingly partisan scientists in academia are putting themselves at risk.Not financially. If funding mattered, all scientists would vote Republican - when it comes to funding, Republicans have spent more than Democrats on science even in the period when science, and all academia, lurched far to the left. Republicans do not cut funding because scientists vote Democrat.
"Cash for clunkers", President Obama's 2009 Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), was hailed as a huge success by the administration and environmentalists - but it was really just another government boondoggle. Not as expensive as $72 billion wasted in pet energy projects but still a high-profile case of an administration engaged in the Scientization of Politics - prettying up a world view by pretending it is reality-based.
In the New York Times, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman
When people talk about sustainable food in 2013, they really mean something with an 'organic' label that they can attribute all kinds of other ethical and environmental traits to - sustainable food the way those people mean it is not sustainable at all, there is no way organic food can feed anyone except the rich 1% (the economically rich and the food gentry lucky enough to be born into agriculturally rich lands) but if food enthusiasts mired in such first world guilt really want to try sustainable food there is a new solution published in PLoS One.
The anti-biology community that has created the Big Organic $29 billion corporate juggernaut is not as creepy as the anti-vaccine community who distrust medical science - anti-vaccine people want your kids to be experimented on so theirs can stay safe from the evil 'toxins' in vaccines, after all - but they can still be pretty heavy-handed.
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in the mid-1990s that a genetically-modified potato damaged the immune system of an animal, because the results were unpublished and unverified, UK media of the scare journalism kind and British activists took off with it and the "Frankenfood" movement was born.Here is what Lynas writes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.
