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.
2012 is coming and, with it, kooky end-of-the-world fables. If the Asgardian calendar and its earthquakes doesn't get us, maybe the Mayans will. Some people even like to combine Doomsday prophecies - the LHC might bring the end of the world by opening a black hole and out pop Mayans armed with strangelet-powered weapons.
Far be it from me to consider anything designated by Oprah Winfrey as, perhaps, maybe, not always evidence-based, but I had always hoped some skepticism was in order yet consistently instead found Oprah viewers were not only ready to believe, they were willing to migrate to other shows and believe there also.
A giant crococile versus a giant snake in a Colombian coal mine? It sounds even more awesome than "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus", except the real life version does not have Debbie Gibson.An ancient crocodile relative, a dyrosaurid now named Acherontisuchus guajiraensis, likely gave the world's largest snake a tussle or two. In Palaeontology, University of Florida researchers describe the new 20-foot extinct species which was discovered in the same Colombian coal mine as Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the world's largest snake.
The highest paid player in baseball has the last name "Rodriguez" and 3 of the top 10 highest paid players in major league baseball are black - but major league umpires are racist, argues Johan Sulaeman, a financial economist at Southern Methodist University.They looked at 3.5 million pitches from 2004 to 2008 and found that minority pitchers are so convinced white MLB umpires call strikes more often for white pitchers than for minority pitchers that they throw 'safe' pitches and therefore hurt their own performance.
One long-standing myth is that any law claiming to be good for the environment is actually good for the environment. Anyone living along levees in the South who watched environmental lawsuits block improvements in the 1990s and then heard the Army Corps of Engineers criticized after Hurricane Katrina for not previously making improvements had to wonder why the media didn't cover one obvious source of blame for the entire region not being more resistant to floods.No, instead we got treated to Sean Penn carrying a shotgun, apparently to mow down the zombies the media claimed were floating in New Orleans and everyone blamed Pres. George Bush because the tropical storm turned into a hurricane.
Can professional teachers in a crowded classroom hobbled by arcane government policies teach kids well? Probably, in most cases, but institutionalized education and their unions have gone to war against any changes to the status quo, even when the status quo is clearly broken. The only acceptable change is more money.Home schooling can do a great job, if it is structured and has a formal
curriculum. It may even be an advantage, according to a new study in Canada.
Unfortunate subsets of some militant environmental groups believe that anyone who uses the land, including quite responsibly, is an enemy.
The Lacey Act is one of few government regulations I have praised for its effectiveness. Few government regulations are actually designed to help anyone, they are either designed to hobble someone in order to artificially level the playing field or they are designed to boost a special interest. This act levels the playing field, but for the benefit of companies that are ethical.
Haute couture through history? It is when St. Pölten takes the Catwalk!If your only knowledge of Stone Age fashion is stricly limited to old Flintstones cartoons, you are in luck. On September 23rd the University of Applied Sciences (UAS) in St. Pölten, Austria
will be parading clothing from over ten millennia, a journey through time and
the world of fashion. Wilma Flintstone - fashion maven from the Stone Age. © Hanna-Barbera.
Have a telescope? Heck, do you have a pair of binoculars?If so, head outside the city and take a look at a Type 1A supernova. It's 21 million light-years away, which sounds like a lot, but to astronomers and modern optics that's actually pretty close. So close that over the next few weeks you can even spy it with a pair of good binoculars (25x100), a short while after sunset.
When I saw some preliminary results in Nature about CERN's CLOUD experiment a while ago, I didn't regard it as interesting enough to write about. Seriously, does anyone not think the Sun impacts the climate by now?I know, I know, in the 1990s it was all carbon dioxide, but it's no longer 2006 - anyone gullible enough to believe the French and the Germans insisted on a 1990 date in the Kyoto protocol based on science, rather than the fact that Germany simply had to close a few post-unification Soviet-era factories from World War II and France had already brought more nuclear plants online to more easily meet their goals, well, they were too stupid to keep their money anyway.
If you're one of those cultural mullahs who thinks smoking causes lung cancer - even a cigar or a pipe - you can stop reading. This article is not for you. I have never smoked a cigarette in my life but gradual efforts by the modern temperance movement to ban smoking everywhere(1) should be resisted by anyone claiming they care about independence, tolerance and diversity.(2)
