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.
I'll tell you a secret a chef told me. That secret is...butter.There is a reason restaurants that seek to charge the same for 'healthy' fare end up being big flops; people feel cheated eating bean sprouts they can make at their house. No one cares about how much butter is in a dish when they go to a restaurant because it is a night out, a special occasion. Calories are basically unimportant and taste remains supreme. We want to eat something prepared by someone who only cares what we think about its flavor.Obviously the human body was not designed to eat at a restaurant every evening. If you do that, and you don't exercise, you are going to get fat.
A cap and trade system for carbon dioxide has been a terrific flop; even proponents are leery that it is just another layer of bureaucracy and the only economic benefits have been of the economic voodoo kind, similar to a federal stimulus package that went primarily to state and municipal union employees were called 'jobs saved' in a brilliant bit of marketing.Why would anyone want to export that fiasco to another environmental issue? It's academic. Sometimes academic is obviously a good thing; basic research, for example. And sometimes 'academic' connotes 'out of touch with reality', like people in the humanities who try and argue that communism really works, it's just that no one has really tried it.
Garra rufa - "doctor fish' - are now trendy in some fish pedicure places. The pedicuree dips their feet (see? I don't specify a gender or make any judgments, I am not Manny Pacquiao) into water containing the fish and the little critters exfoliate you by basically eating the dead skin from your toes.
Females like the bad boys when they are young, we all know that colloquially - and even more so when they are ovulating, say a group of social and evolutionary psychologists.
A short while ago we carried a strange claim from a group of ethicists at Oxford. Not only should abortion be okay, actual children should be aborted even after they are born.They're ethicists so they can be dismissed rather quickly. Tomorrow they are just as likely to be arguing there should be no abortion at all if you can't abort newborns. Yet there is growing concern that the government doing more things for more people in the best interests of overall society is leading to a resurgence in the social authoritarian rationalizations that gripped the country (and really, the world) the last time progressives held any power.
Andrea Kuszewski is not a fan of a critique of some concepts in Chris Mooney's latest book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality.
It's been said that science fiction can sometimes turn into science fact.In that same vein, it may be that stories from The Onion (More U.S. Children Being Diagnosed With Youthful Tendency Disorder) may one day become part of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
We carry some press releases on Science 2.0 and of course that is what Science Codex in our sidebar is. It's been an intentional effort since the communications arm of Science 2.0 began in 2006. The first, and most important reason, for that is because we think the audience is smart and don't need journalists putting context to most stories. Our audience just wants to know first so if something looks interesting, it will hit this page on the minute the embargo lifts. Everything else is written by scientists or at least (mostly) knowledgeable people(1).
The National Academies Press will roll out some new national science standards for K-12 educators and for the first time, those standards will include guidelines on teaching climate change.Good luck with that. As No Child Left Behind showed, positive results and the welfare of kids will not matter in a political fight - any attempts to create an education standard and accountability are going to flop unless education unions buy into it and any attempts to create a science standard for climate education will flop unless teachers do. And a lot of them don't.
In an open science community like Science 2.0, people will feel like they can just sign up and babble about anything and if you protest that what they are doing is not really science (wormholes, brand new theory of everything, social psychology, etc.), they will object with a few predictable responses certain to make everyone chuckle. They go something like; Galileo was oppressed too, Einstein did his best work as a patent clerk, etc.
Let's be honest - in the 21st century the wussification of men has been in full force. Being a man is out if that means not being a politically correct, hyper-sensitive, asexual, homogenized follower of all that is cool and popular among the cultural intelligentsia.But testosterone levels are dropping and that could mean any number of consequences for the future of our species. Now you have one more science excuse to sack up and stop identifying as a metrosexual; a group of researchers concluded in 2010 that modest males endure social backlash because they are not 'macho' enough. We may not like arrogant people but meek people are annoying too.
Evolution has various mechanisms and one of them is natural selection. While most religious people have no disagreement with science overall, Biblical literalists contend man cannot have changed or evolved. Some confusion about evolution is understandable - evolution is darn complex - and the disagreement with evolution does not fall strongly into any demographic except the religious. In America, we hear more about 'the religious right' but primarily we hear about them from the secular left - while noting that 39% of Republicans don't accept evolution they fail to mention 30% of Democrats don't either.
