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.
Here is a precautionary principle two-for-one special.
You've heard of Egypt; they were in the news last year for riots and for making Twitter relevant. But dictatorships, oppression of women, sexual discrimination and religious intolerance are apparently not the most important cultural fight they face, in the eyes of ultra-conscious New Yorkers - getting people to smoke less is.
LONDON, March 22, 2012 - Two new surveys conducted among 2,500 adults and 400 teachers show what is really on the minds of those concerned about education; the need to teach about pets in schools.
89% of adults, 78% of primary teachers and 70% of secondary teachers believed it is important to teach responsibility using pets and most adults thought it was more important to teach younger children how to care for pets than it was to teach them about sex education or money management. Isn't that going to cause a fight with the 'teach kids to have sex at younger ages' lobby, though? It's Big Pet versus Big Condom for the mindshare of 8-year-olds.
Climate change is a polarizing science policy debate the likes of which humankind has never witnessed before. Even President Obama's science advisor John Holdren never dreamed up this kind of doomsday scenario when he was writing books with the king of doomsday predictions, Paul Ehrlich. Women in the workforce, CFCs, acid rain, islands of garbage - nothing from past cultural debates compares to the scariness of rolling drought and melting glaciers. What to do? On one side we have people who insist a world where elites have energy and others do not must be implemented right now.
Time is relative, of course, but we still hate to be late for appointments. So there has always been research on making our keeping of time a little more accurate.A new clock tied to the orbiting of a neutron around an atomic nucleus could have such unprecedented accuracy that it neither gains nor loses 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years - basically, you wouldn't have needed to reset your watch yet even if you had been around at the beginning of the Universe.
A study by Indiana University researchers on "coregasm" says it has confirmed anecdotal evidence that exercise can lead to female orgasms.Good news for health clubs everywhere? Maybe. But it's been darn hard to pin down reliable data on it. It makes the media rounds - and of course, this site - every few years.
Food stamps are not food stamps now, they are the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits - and record numbers of Americans are receiving them.
In our modern culture, we have both the politicization of science and the scientization of politics. They sound similar but the goals are different - the first obviously seeks to inject political agendas into science while the second seeks to make a political objective seem more rational by mapping it to a science topology.
People on the left - to international readers they go under the umbrella of 'liberals' in America, but run the gamut from social authoritarian progressives to activists to freedom-loving liberals in the traditional sense - are a lot less concerned about tolerance and diversity when it comes to differing viewpoints.
Like vaccines and autism or genetically modified potatoes and immune systems or DDT causing cancer, some myths stick around so long they become truth despite any evidence - and cell phone radiation may be on that same track.Yale School of Medicine researchers are not immune to jumping on the pop culture bandwagon. It's easy if you just want to find something vague like Attention Deficit Disorder. In an experiment, they exposed pregnant mice to radiation from a cell phone placed on an active phone call for the duration of the trial. The control group of mice was kept under the same conditions but with the phone deactivated.
The old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, a picture is worth millions. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide that could be saved if we stopped throwing food into landfills, that is.Food waste is a pet peeve of mine. Yes, we do it at my house, probably way too much, but there is only so much nagging one can do. I don't have the yard space to do composting - yes, I know, smelly hippies will insist I do it anyway but it isn't always practical. However, there is a 100% chance is it better to put it in the garbage disposal than in the garbage, so I do that whenever practical (so, not bones).Check out the graphic below. Some of it we can all easily do, some of it is not so easy.
Let's be honest, if you are a Republican, you don't care about the environment because you received your own oil well when you registered to vote. And you like vampire babies. So you do not care about the emissions of your yacht.But if you are a rich Democrat, things are a little dicier. Buying pretend carbon offsets for a 29,000 square foot house can only get you so far. If you want to own a superyacht too, that's a lot of liberal guilt to agonize over. What to do?
