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.
This weekend is the first episode in a three-part "Brain Games" series on the National Geographic channel. Since National Geographic does not have a show on the 'science' of ghost hunting, and since statistics show 97% of Internet readers never finish an article, if you are not a regular Science 2.0 reader I am okay endorsing this and telling you in the first paragraph you will enjoy it, so you can set your DVR and move on to reading about the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor.
I'll lay out something a lot of people won't like to hear; science is about understanding the world according to natural laws and that means sometimes breaking the laws of nature. How far that goes is a policy matter and it's for civilian leadership to decide.Researchers won't like being compared to the military but it's a lot like that; there is a job to do, a mission to accomplish, and the scope and limitations of that mission are determined by the public through their politicians but once that framework is established, it is up to the soldiers on the ground to decide how to get there.
The world's most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) on on the Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile, has officially opened for astronomers.A lack of light pollution and anti-science hippies filing lawsuits has made Chile a new favorite spot for space science and the first image we got after ALMA opened its eyes is darn spectacular. What we can't see with visible-light or infrared telescopes, ALMA can see just fine. And the image below is with only 12 of its final 66 radio antennas. It's fitting that the first image was of the Antenna Galaxies.
Is your cell phone a known carcinogen? Do cell phones give you cancer? Well, the precautionary principle contends unless you can prove cell phones can't give you cancer, then they are a concern. Fortunately, the precautionary principle isn't overused by everyone (though when it is, the politically like-minded dismiss it as policy disagreement and not being anti-science) but any time you have an anti-science hotbed, it will get trotted out.
It makes environmental activists crazy, in that 'believe scientists when science agrees with us but scientists are out to kill us when science doesn't agree' kind of way, but a large study of U.S. adults found that the more science they knew and the more independent they were, the less they were worried about climate change.
Being in media, it's easy to get inundated with convincing opposing data and so it's easy to understand why it can be confusing for the public who don't have hours each day to sift through it all. Over a decade ago, for example, people were concerned that American students tested poorly against students in Asia. No Child Left Behind, which established education performance standards for states, therefore had terrific bipartisan support when it was instituted - it passed 384–45 in the House and 91-8 in the Senate. Educators were that convincing in their concerns that students were losing ground worldwide.
Question: Quick, what is the fastest way to make the term "false equivalence" appear?Answer: Contend that whatever side of the political spectrum the person you are talking to is on is more anti-science than the other side. Or even equal.The Left is More Anti-Science than the Right
Imagine if a journalist sent their story to former Republican Vice-President Dick Cheney to 'check the facts' - what would the outcry sound like from other journalists and the public?
Cornelius McGillicuddy, Sr., better known as Connie Mack, once said that pitching is 75 percent of baseball. He was speaking from experience, not data, and looks can be deceiving, as people who think a curve ball move two feet can attest, but science is about understanding the world according to data, and that includes baseball. The data say he is wrong, according to a new analysis by a University of Delaware professor. Pitching is just 25 percent of a team's success.
The least convincing argument for government-run schooling is that it provides a 'social' experience for children. Anyone who attended school has horror stories about the behavior kids learn from the social environment at schools and, if you are a parent with a school age child, you might even worry about it more than be relieved.Single-sex schools would seem to relieve some of that pressure, just like some women or some men feel better at a single-sex exercise facility. Advocates of single-sex schools contend that there may be brain differences between girls and boys that benefit from different teaching styles, though neuroscientists have found no brain differences linked to different learning styles.
A poll on Mashable, unscientific but a talking point anyway, found nearly 75-percent saying they "hate" the Facebook news feed changes.
It isn't often I will agree with Club Sierra...I mean Sierra Club - if you have ever been to their offices you will know how easy it is to confuse the terms.They spend so much time latching onto whatever cause will generate donations it's hard to know if they believe in anything, much less science, and it can make you nuts. Like Greenpeace, their baffling 'trust scientists when it comes to global warming but scientists are out to kill you with GMOs' stance is, in a nutshell, why progressives (not liberals, not Democrats, progressives) are so goofy in their anti-science beliefs.
