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.
If you do not have your 11-year-old child in a car seat while driving and in a bicycle helmet while playing, you are putting them at severe risk. We have to protect them. Or not. While we expose kids to all kinds of harmful cultural stuff at earlier and earlier ages (sex, violence, political debates) we don't trust their physical competence or their judgment.Heck, the people behind the government health care plan think 25 should be the earliest age for adulthood.
If you're an anti-science hippie obsessed with the notion that 'natural' is always superior to whatever 'inorganic' means to people who know nothing about science or medicine or food or generally what carbon-based life means, I have good news for you; you may soon be able to determine if that caffeine in your Organic, Free-Range Red Bull is really natural.What? Organic, Free-Range Red Bull doesn't exist? Well, it should. Farmer's Market shoppers will dutifully line up for that, I can just feel it.
One of our popular topics last year was earthquakes. That makes sense, with the earthquake in Japan. It's not like there was some greater instance of earthquakes but if you are a Doomsday fearmonger, any event is a good event; that means anti-science activists determined to send us back to the 13th century looked for ways to make earthquakes result from fracking.If you dispute that, you get meaningless gibberish responses like 'you can't prove the earthquakes did not come from fracking', which is true, in the same way you can't prove I am not the disembodied brain of Adolf Hitler writing this piece from my Antarctic Fortress where I am plotting the Fourth Reich - but it's sort of silly to live your life believing it.
In 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik, it began a new era in the Cold War. The Race to Space. Senator Lyndon Johnson worried the commies could rain nuclear bombs down on us from the high ground, making him the perfect guy to run NASA and because it was a military concern it got funded. Only later it became a human exploration issue and much later became a science one.
Americans like to fix things. We like to improve and we are convinced the future will be better, a subset of people who want to retreat into the world of the past aside(1), but nothing has changed little despite a century of being criticized like university lectures.
If you are anything like me, and you had a chance to sit around with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, you wouldn't ask fanboy questions like 'will we ever understand the soul?' or 'how much should I make fun of evolutionary psychology surveys about sex?' you would instead lean in conspiratorially and ask, 'what's the best way to get out of a speeding ticket?'
It's always good to have a back-up plan and I may have found mine if Science 2.0 doesn't get bought by some rich media conglomerate in Germany; people gullible enough to believe their organic food is structurally or nutritionally superior and are willing to overpay for it are also likely to overpay for pet food.
Being in science media for any length of time, you will discover what Martin Robbins, a self-proclaimed liberal, called The Big White Elephant In The Room - partisan framing of science issues through a cultural and political world view. He referred to it as liberal bias, and he is a liberal, but not a self-loathing kind. He doesn't recognize it is not liberal bias that is the problem, it is progressives. Liberals can write articles talking about The Big White Elephant In The Room and worry that the lack of diversity in science media and science academia is harmful to those endeavors.
In the midst of CNN's non-stop coverage of a deceased singer whose biggest career hit was a cover of a Dolly Parton song, there may be a ray of rational sunlight shining down on a person worthy of our time; an accomplished military veteran, test pilot, Mercury astronaut and Senator named John Glenn. 50 years ago the 40-year-old Marine lieutenant sat atop a building-sized rocket stuffed with solid propellant and left the confines of Earth - backwards.
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.
