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.
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.
What would the world look like with 7 billion people and no way to scientifically have created better ways of producing food? A lot of poor vegetarians, that's what. And only rich people eating meat.Organic food corporations love to claim that their process is 'sustainable'. Vegetarians love to claim that meat is both unethical and bad for the planet. It makes them happy partners ... as long as science is ignored.
Sometimes you put things in the platform of a political party because it's a lot of drama to exclude them even if you don't really believe. So we get hilarity like last week, with Republican candidate Mitt Romney disavowing some of his own platform (he doesn't believe it all personally, he said) and then this week the Democrats had the same problem; The official platform of the Democratic National Convention decided Jerusalem was no longer the capitol of Israel and they removed any mention of God.
If you've been in science media for any length of time, there are two arguments you will hear invoked to support almost any questionable position; that Einstein did his best work while he was a patent clerk and that Galileo was oppressed by the Catholic Church.One of those is wrong; Galileo was not actually oppressed by a Church, he was really oppressed by fellow scientists(1) , the Pope was actually quite supportive of Galileo but fellow scientists were looking for ways to torpedo him. Yet colloquially, Galileo is held up as this sort of 'religion against science' example in a way that shows many people believe it was some sort of unscientific Dark Age prior to his arrival. Not true at all.
Since the early 1970s, all aspects of academia have skewed left. With that political shift, the confidence that scientists are neutral arbiters for the public good has also declined on both sides.More Republicans than Democrats think the fix is in regarding a green 'agenda' and global warming whereas more Democrats than Republicans think scientists are shills for Big Ag, Big Pharm, etc. regarding food and vaccines. Basically, science can't win but there was a time when being an academic, and certainly a scientist, was impressive and not a presumption about a political world view. Getting into the political muck - and plenty of advocates for science recommend doing more of it, not less - has been a bad thing for credibility.
Obesity is not just happening in New York City 7-Elevens(1), it is also happening in aging bones.Bone marrow stem cells, which are adult stem cells, are in their fifth decade of uncontroversial new discovery. But they can still surprise us. Our bones may be getting fatter as we age, and it could lead to osteoporosis, the condition where bone mineral density is 2.5 standard deviations below the mean (62%). The NIH estimates that up to 50% of women and 25% of men over the age of 50 will break a bone due to osteoporosis.
I'm not much of a drinker, never have been. I have always assumed it was because I did competitive athletics until I was about 25, which means I was outside the age where you 'learn' to like the taste of alcohol, so I never picked it up.Older now, I can drink a beer socially and I sometimes drink a glass of red wine because the consensus says it is good for you in moderation, but I am still not really a drinker.
Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died last Saturday in Ohio at age 82 and his funeral service is tomorrow. Like most everything else about him, the service is private.Yet the cosmos has decided to ignore the wishes of his family and so Armstrong is getting a special event for the occasion: a blue moon. Either that, or his family is being clever.
Politicians make a lot of promises when they are trying to get elected. So many they probably can't keep track of them of them. That's understandable. Believing candidates is one of the 'sweet little lies' we tell ourselves.(1)
