Science 2.0

Fusion is the super-clean energy we would be thinking about if government-controlled energy science were about the best long-term solutions and not political pet projects - alas, its share of the $72 billion spent on alternate energy the last three years is negligible. But something is better than nothing and some recent research revealed at the International Atomic Energy Association's Fusion Energy Conference in San Diego may be worth getting excited about. 

The biggest feel-good fallacy perpetuated by some in science media today is that "the right", whoever they are, is anti-science, while "the left", whoever they are, is pro-science. It's exactly the opposite.  The right historically has been more pro-science than anyone since World War II, they just recently adopted more positions labeled anti-science as science academia skewed left. 40 years ago conservatives were the most pro-science of any group and 40 years ago there was also political parity in science academia; science was a politically agnostic endeavor for the common good, only the humanities had been hijacked by partisans.

Are you a probiotic manufacturer who has become annoyed you are not allowed to market microbes that can help cultivate “intestinal flora” for consumers? Did the European Food Safety Authority tell you to stop claiming your magic potion reduces the chances of people developing diarrhea or respiratory tract infections? Did the U.S.A. force you to stop advertising that Activia yogurt and DanActive dairywhatever helps avoid colds or flu and force you to pay $21 million as part of a class-action settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and 39 states?

A 45-year meta-analysis of 240 science studies found that 'organic' processed food is the same in pesticides, the same in nutrition and a whole lot more expensive."...there isn’t much difference between organic and conventional foods, if you’re an adult and making a decision based solely on your health,” said Dena Bravata, senior author of the paper and a physician at Stanford’s Center for Health Policy.

Here is a head scratcher; when confronted about the vague, conflicting language in Proposition 37 - even the real name, the California Right to Know Genetically Modified Food Act, is weird and disjointed - Attorney James Wheaton, who made his fortune in nuisance lawsuits under the Proposition 65 labeling act he championed, told the Sacramento Bee's Dan Moran he put so little thought into the verbage of Proposition 37 that he he hadn't given any thought to whether he might litigate over the new measure, if it passes.

It used to be you had to rely on human science journalists to get concepts properly framed for you and enjoy the shot of dopamine confirmation bias provides.  It still happens, just a lot less. Popular Science just went on an anti-religion rant - and you know it is bad when your own subscribers ask you to stop trolling them - and Scientific American has long been basically an unregistered PAC. But people are jaded by that approach and it is a big part of the reason why science has basically disappeared from mainstream media companies even though the science audience has grown substantially. 

The American College Of Obstetricians And Gynecologists (ACOG) has issued new guidelines to endorse IUDs and implants as first-line birth control options for teens. Despite widespread availability of condoms and birth control for women at very low cost (31-year-old Georgetown law students disagree, of course, they think the government should pay for it so they can instead spend $50,000 a year becoming lawyers), over 80 percent of teen pregnancies are unintended, they note, and so something more permanent should be used.

If sloppy, agenda-based science is all that is needed for activists to latch on to a belief and never let go, then the anti-GMO contingent may have found its Andrew Wakefield in French biologist Gilles-Eric Séralini. It won't matter that the methods in his latest study are causing biologists all over the world to facepalm, they will insist it must be true and Big Science is the squelching the results.

In "Science Left Behind", the oft-regurgitated 'it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef' nonsensical metric is revealed for what it always was; a claim put into a book that was derived from an advocacy press release in the 1980s that had no scientific merit.  Still, saying what advocates want is enough to make it into UN reports under 'gray literature' and so a UN report dutifully included it and a whole bunch of hysterical statistics was derived from it. That is the magic of agenda-based scientization of politics.

Anti-science people with a 'natural' fetish don't understand that the random and unpredictable nature of...nature...is a bad thing.  All of the funding campaigns and Internet rants of environmentalists are only possible because scientists and engineers harnessed the power of dangerous, unpredictable nature at one point in time - we don't try to power our homes and business with all-natural lightning bolts, we instead generate electricity synthetically and we do so as safely as possible. It can still hurt you but no one is waging a campaign against electricity today.

The Gallic War showed Julius Caesar as a great military leader, proof that even 2070 years ago politicians who get stuff done got farther ahead than politicians people simply liked. It is also the first instance of a military commander documenting a campaign, so we know quite a bit. 

In a recent ScienceDebate questionnaire response, speechwriters for Candidate Mitt Romney tried to distinguish themselves from speechwriters for President Obama on education(1), and then proceeded to say the exact same thing Candidate Obama said in 2008 about education - that the union system of protecting the teachers who have been around the longest rather than rewarding the ones who are the best is a big mistake.