Science 2.0

Science 'consensus' is a dirty word to the environmental community - some of the time.  When it comes to global warming, the science consensus is accurate but when it comes to food, biologists are in the control of Big Business and government lobbyists and the science consensus is out to kill us.

Urban legend says that alcohol is a social icebreaker - and we want to believe, given our preference for commercials where impossibly attractive young people converge on some beach and all have a fantastic time, which is in contrast to actual beer gatherings where a lot of fights and arrests occur.(1)Want to look like this?  Drink alcohol. Credit: Shutterstock

Whenever 'the poor' and 'minorities' are invoked in the same headline, it's good to set your skepticism filter extra low or you will likely never get through the first paragraph of an article (umm, including this one) because the issue is rarely science or even policy, it is instead advocacy.(1)

Funny how you can go from darling of the intelligentsia to pariah in a short amount of time.  As I have mentioned before, when he was at Scienceblogs.com and then Wired.com, a few of us used to joke that whatever we wrote was going to end up in a Jonah Lehrer column next week.  Now its August of 2012 and even the rumor that Lehrer (who resigned from The New Yorker last month) was back at another Conde Nast publication, Wired, got a hasty disclaimer from them.That's a legendary, Jayson Blair kind of plummet.

This paper seeks to address hypermasculinity and the settled heteronormative value system embodied in public-policy actors, primarily the White-centered hegemonic masculinity that has created negative performative aspects of cultural identity constructions in this multicultural and globalized era.

I will tell you a secret. The loudest partisan progressives, some even in the science community, can find a way to hate anything if a Republican is involved.  So George Bush doubled NIH funding?  He still hated biology, we were told. No Child Left Behind improved scores for minorities every year it was in effect and girls achieved math parity with boys for the first time in history.  Who gets credit for that achievement?  Well, the bill was bipartisan, both Ted Kennedy And John Boehner signed off on it, but Bush was president so it sucked, according to partisans.

The US Food and Drug Administration says requiring special labels for foods that contain ingredients from genetically modified crops would be "inherently misleading" to consumers - that is exactly what proponents of GM food labeling are hoping for. People inherently side with the precautionary principle and there is no requirement that ballot initiatives be written clearly or well; the assumption is the public will figure it out.The American Medical Association agrees with the USDA and wrote two months ago, "There is no scientific justification for special labeling of bioengineered foods."And yet we are going to get it, and the cost, because spin doctors are calling it 'awareness'.

The landing of a cute robot on Mars really resonated with American popular culture this past weekend; and so the first few images Curiosity snapped have caught fire as well, including a blotch that was no longer there in later pictures.Curiosity landed at 10:32 p.m. Aug. 5 PDT near the foot of a mountain three miles tall inside Gale Crater, which is 96 miles in diameter. Curiosity is the largest mission ever sent to another planet. Its 9 month, 350 million mile journey ended with 'seven minutes of terror' and no one knew precisely where it would end up or when it would get down to business.200 milliseconds after the HazCam shutter opened it caught a hazy shimmer in the distance.

Researchers all claim Impact Factor is meaningless - for other researchers, anyway.  The blockade put up by corporate publishing hinges on Impact Factor alone so if it were truly unimportant, convincing government funding agencies would be trivial and all studies would be freely available for taxpayers to read.

Medieval clerics did not like the prospect of giving up sex - heck, every man getting getting married dreads the part about giving up sex  - so even when they had to do so by Papal decree there was resistance to it. You think changing from a Latin to local language Mass was controversial? Genitalia are a lot more personal. Priests, of course, used to be married but that changed hundreds of years later after the foundation of Christianity. The justifications were that a priest should imitate Christ, who was celibate (unmarried), and still later there was an argument and decree that priests who were handling the sacraments had to also be unpolluted by sexual activity - chaste.

If you love the appearance of getting hammered and are too classy to hold 'near' beer - or, oddly, you enjoy the taste of whisky but don't like getting hammered - there is good news;  the world's first alcohol-free, whisky-flavored drink.ArKay has the appearance, smell and taste of traditional whisky they say, but no alcohol, no calories and no sugar - they claim you will enjoy it straight or on the rocks or in a cocktail.Now, they did not send this whisky to the Science 2.0 office for proper scientific testing, but they should if they want that 'they claim' disclaimer removed. It's a good idea to be skeptical of a 'no alcohol, no calories, tastes great' marketing blurb. 

Like people who approach geopolitics with the attitude of "If people would just talk to each other, we would all along", there are a lot of naïve assumptions about just dumping gasoline.We know it causes emissions, and emissions are bad, we know a lot of the money paid for oil goes to fund Middle Eastern terrorism, and that is bad - those things should cause both the left and the right in America to want gasoline gone. And yet it is not gone.  The reason is simple: gasoline is a lot more efficient than alternative energy proponents want to believe.