HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
Despite claims by some of the more aggressive groups who attack science academia, women do not face a 'hostile' work environment because in some fields they are less than 50 percent or some other scientists are rude. Instead, they face a tough personal choice.Getting tenure is hard. The work load is tremendous. More women than men tend to think it is not worth the effort and, if they have kids, that feeling becomes more so. They are not rejecting science but they are opting for a higher quality of life. Studies show that male scientists often wish they had made the same choice.
Americans of a particular cultural and political persuasion like to regard Europeans as 'more' scientific because surveys reveal that they say 'yes' to the appropriate buzzwords. Not so, even to European scientists. Europeans are instead far more distrustful and dismissive of science than most Americans; they are precautionary principle-obsessed.Scottish microbiologist Anne Glover would like to change that. She just took office in Brussels as the first European chief scientific adviser and her first goal is to get people information in the hopes that they will stop listening to advocacy groups and accept science overall the same way they do politically charged topics like climate change.
What's the one thing that could make anti-science progressives dislike genetic modifications and medicine even more than they do now? Putting them both together.
If someone in 2012 wants to criticize Henry Ford because he didn't know everything about automobiles a century ago, it's a little silly. He knew what he knew given the science and the technology of his day - he revolutionized his field. Freud got a lot wrong about psychology but he created the only unified theory of psychology recognized by people today. Criticizing him is as quaint and pointless and irrelevant as someone criticizing a 19th century analysis of Coleridge - any researcher doing it is likely to get a "someone paid for them to write this?" response.
Efforts at obfuscation and fomenting false concerns by kooky anti-science food activists aren't working. They spent the better part of the last decade blocking science advancements in food security insisting 'the science isn't settled' and muttering Frankenfood denialist jingoisms, but it seems to be failing. Farmland devoted to improved crops went up over eight percent last year, to 395 million acres. Agriculture strongholds like Brazil, India and Canada join the U.S. in picking science over advocacy.
"Sex education is failing to reduce adolescent birthrates in conservative states, according to a new study" begins a somber Livescience piece. Oooh, that's juicy. We all want to talk about how dumb conservatives are. And if it's a study - and it is, the writer says it right there - they are not injecting any personal bias.
Changes to the diagnostic definition of autism will be published in the fifth edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" - DSM V - but exactly what those changes will be is a key point of discussion. There are still a lot of qualifying issues in a lot of areas for a publication that has already been a long time in the making.At stake? Apparently a lot of money. Autism was once rare enough that a definition was not rigorous but it also was not crucial - some leeway was allowed. As a result, recent increased instances, either to more occurrences or more accurate diagnoses or even mis-diagnosis, have made the new definition for DSM-V a hot topic.
Tom Chivers, Telegraph's assistant comment editor, may think he is being all edgy and cool by claiming Republicans - 50% of America - are anti-science. In reality, he is like an Emo-haircut wearing kid dressed in black insisting he is an outsider while he dresses like all the rest of them.
Is the entire country of Mexico anti-science?
A previously unnamed species of horse fly has been named in honor of American pop singer Beyoncé Knowles. Beyoncé just had a baby but this horse fly business is probably the best gift of all. Well, maybe not, the baby might be more important to her, since she and husband Jay-Z had bulletproof glass and bodyguards put in place at the Upper East Side Lenox Hill hospital where the delivery occurred and I bet the fly doesn't have any bodyguards at all.
It's often the case that when something claims to cure everything, a little skepticism is warranted. We have dozens of articles here on Resveratrol but over time the titles began to reflect growing disbelief it could be that perfect. By the time it received gushing endorsements from Dr. Oz. and the other Four Horsemen of the Alternative (Gupta, etc.) we were crafting titles like Resveratrol - 2009's Miracle Compound Du Jour.
A new study has used an interesting metric to highlight their concern about a disconnect between government funding of biomedical research and young investigators; Nobel Prizes. As has been noted here numerous times, and by me at various talks, the average age of biomedical researchers getting their first grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 was 42, a substantial change from even the decade previous. Over the past 30 years, the article notes, the average age of Nobel winners when they performed their research was 41. That's a concern, says Kirstin Matthews, a fellow in science and technology policy at the Baker Institute and first author of the paper in PLoS One.
