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.
For as long as I can remember, academic scientists have said that applied research is great - for someone else. But for themselves, they want to do basic research and be creative and not have to worry about any applied / societal benefit.(1)But another election season is here and, despite $140 billion of taxpayer money being spent on research, no one in either party really gives a hoot about science topics and scientists are concerned neither candidate cares.(2)
See? America did not need any stinking Kyoto agreement, we just needed for three areas to work in tandem to get greenhouse gas emissions back close to the magic number picked by the Germans and French a decade and a half ago.(1)The Department of Energy released carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of the energy sector for Q1 of 2012 and they were the lowest since 1992. American energy is positively green again, just like people wanted. We can thank right-wing energy companies for that, because it has primarily happened due to natural gas.
If the legend is true, Aesop lived during the sixth century B.C. He was born a slave but was given his freedom as a reward for his wit and intelligence. He never wrote anything down but the stories people remembered were so intriguing virtually every moralistic fable before him (and after) got attributed to him. Now Aesop's Fables number in the 600s. One of them, "The Crow and the Pitcher", highlights the 'necessity is the mother of invention' concept. A thirsty crow can't get his beak far enough down into a pitcher of water to drink, so he drops stones in until the water level rises.
Do you work in genetics? If so, you are out to ruin the brains of children, according to a claim at Alternet.org.
Crotchety old men seem to have won this argument.Modern pop music is too loud and does sound all the same, just like angry old types have been saying for 70 years. A team from Spain analyzed music from a 55 year period, using an archive known as the Million Song Dataset, and found that songs have indeed become both louder and more homogenized in terms of chords and melodies.
If only there were a field that examines the spiritual, therapeutic and psychological aspects of human-nature relationships, I'd abandon my graduate studies in Theoretical Phys Ed and embrace this new discipline instead.Luckily, there is. For those of you dumb enough to have spent $80,000 for a two-year program in Environmental Journalism at Columbia but now can't (they closed it - even unlimited student loans reached a gullible student limit), Ecopsychology is here.
Null results are important in science, but that doesn't mean scientists want other people to see theirs. The reason is obvious: competition. If one group has a null result and another group is working on something similar, they potentially give the competitor a shortcut by publishing a negative result.So it goes in just about every field. The food industry has its own null results, but they can be a lot more expensive. The failure rate of new product launches is a shocking (to outsiders) 50%. It seems shocking because these are experts, armed with expensive demographic analyses and psychological information on the marketplace. They should know what people want.
How will the Universe end? And when? It's been speculation in religion and philosophy since man realized he was special. Can physics offer anything new?Let's go to the Dark Energy hypotheses and see. 1998 really messed us up, theoretically. Until then, we knew the Universe had to slow down - well, theoretically. But then the Hubble showed us truly distant supernovae and we got the uncomfortable reality that the Universe was actually expanding more slowly in the past than it is now. That meant gravity has not been slowing Universal expansion, it has been accelerating.
No one is asking the Department of Energy to play venture capitalist with taxpayer money again, but basic research in dye-sensitized solar cells may bring the cost of solar down enough to allow for mainstream acceptance - primarily because dye-sensitized solar cells (also known as DSCs) are less fragile than panels that use crystalline silicon, also a benefit of thin-film panels, and don't require a clean room.
Have you noticed a huge increase in the price of pork chops or bacon or hot dogs?Neither have I, despite the fact that sow gestation stalls, or crates or whatever you may call them in your neighborhood, are disappearing. The stalls are basically where pregnant sows are kept. Anti-science hippies who are always looking for ammunition in their war on human food contend big business uses these crates because they are, you know, eeeevil, but that isn't true. Long before Big Pork even existed farmers kept sows apart because they fight. And during pregnancy, if you screw with a female pig, you are asking to roll in the mud. The American Veterinary Medical Association says stalls are safer and therefore better than pens(1).
We just had Snowmageddon and then heat a heat wave in parts of the US. Local, short-term weather events are suddenly proof of long-term climate change once again, according to journalists and biased bloggers who claim to care about science."Generation X", as marketing people call the generation after the Baby Boomers, aren't buying it, despite the fact that awareness campaigns about global warming have gone on for most of their lives.
Is psychology a science? Increasingly, the respect of science (and scientists) by the public has been dropping and a part of that reason is because the line of what science is has become fuzzy. If economics calls itself science, well, the public knows they don't know what they are talking about, so maybe it applies to climate science too. Is sociology science? What about parapsychology?If the definition of science becomes relative, then so does acceptance of science, in a slippery slope world, so we can't expect people will accept FDA findings as science if political science is funded by the National Science Foundation and the public knows that isn't scientific at all.
