In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
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.
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.
