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 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.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) mass-market polycrystalline panels are typically about 15% efficiency. Pretty terrible, right? Maybe, maybe not. Cars - both gasoline and electric vehicles, despite what the electric car hype machine claims - are only slightly more efficient at 15-25%, as is eating, and biology had all of existence to perfect that process. Ethanol and other biofuels, which were the darling of anti-science environmentalists in the Anything-But-Oil camp before electric cars because they are the ultimate solar-powered device, are a dismal 2% efficiency.
It's not correlation/causation (though less and less is, since science has learned that causation is now teaching us less and less about how to actually fix things) but some in the social fields are claiming there are biological truths to stereotypes about the left and right, like that progressives are self-indulgent and clueless on national issues while conservatives are fear-mongers with a fetish for exaggerated dangers.
Science for the win!
