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.
One of the stranger claims of anti-science hippies is that there is not only a difference between 'organic' food (and apparently 'inorganic' food, whatever that could be) in structure - and if you believe that, go read Huffington Post, I won't take it personally - but also in nutrition.
Journalism as an occupation with ethical standards was a 20th century invention. For a brief, shining moment in time, journalists were interested in truth and newspapers flourished. Truth is subjective, of course, and so are editors who set the tone of newspapers and during the time when the press had power across all society, editors were on the left and the right. Newspapers reached everyone, multiple times each day.Today, the 'fourth estate', as Edmund Burke termed it in the 18th century, still has considerable power - it makes presidents and brings down companies - but it is less trusted than it was two generations ago.
Why would Mohamed Atta graciously let a car rental agent know the check oil light was on in the car he returned and then help crash a plane full of people and fuel into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, an act of simple religious hatred?It's a puzzle of psychology. The ability to deal kindly with people on an individual level and then demonize them when they are in a group has been a longstanding mystery. Group behavior, being social, obviously had benefits for early man; trying to live without a group was practically a death sentence even when an 'individual' victory in ways large and small was absolutely necessary for survival.
There's long been a maddening belief by a subset of psychologists who have never actually been to the Eastern part of the world that Asia is some collectivist Utopia.When it comes to inflated self-importance - hubris, even - some research contends, there is more of it in the west because Western culture prides itself on independence, personal success and uniqueness while in the East where harmony and belonging are supposedly valued, people are more modest.
Complexity theorists have some bad news for people who insist that unless it carries an organic label, food is evil; a group from the New England Complex Systems Institute says they've discovered what will trigger riots around the world in under two years. It's the price of food and when it rises above the threshold they list for instability, social unrest will sweep the planet.
Cooking is not a modern invention, concludes new research. It likely originated 1.9 million years ago, according to results they determined using statistical analysis and evolutionary trees.How so? They estimated, in their analysis, how long we should spend feeding every day, based on our body sizes throughout evolutionary history. Sure, it might seem at first glance like cooking would add more time than directly eating but their results say we would need to spend almost half of our time in the 'feeding' process given our current sizes - cooking basically made food easier to chew and digest and as a result we got more caloric benefit and a smaller digestive tract.
What constitutes racism? If you have a pool of applicants for a research grant and applications with good scores were likely to be funded, regardless of race or ethnicity, can there be racism? A recent survey of NIH R01 applications found that applications from black investigators were 13.2 % less likely to be awarded than whites while Asian investigators were 3.9 % less likely to have their work funded. This correlates to the number of applicants as well; blacks are only 1.4% of total applications while Asians are 16.2% and whites are almost 70%.
Look, we all know smoking is bad for you by now. We don't need to spend billions of dollars telling people that but an entire industry has been built around getting people to stop, and it is primarily funded by penalties on tobacco companies and taxes. It's a truly parasitic relationship but it isn't going anywhere and anti-smoking groups need smokers to stay in business. Apparently so do some researchers.
Five years into the Science 2.0 experiment I can tell you down to the eyeball how many people are involved in the communication pillar of it - but in the collaboration realm, it's not so easy.Science 2.0 fave Heather A. Piwowar from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Pitt recently gave it a shot, and the answer was...it's unknown.
If you're a fan of "Big Trouble In Little China" (and if you are not, either go rent it and then come back or go read "People" like you should be doing instead of visiting Science 2.0)(1) next to "Chinese people got a lotta Hells"(2) this famous exchange likely sticks in your mind. As they descend into a metaphorical netherworld on their quest (see: anything by Joseph Campbell or Bulfinch's Mythology, if you are more conservative in your reading) the following exchange takes place:Jack Burton: That is not water. Egg Shen: Black blood of the earth. Jack Burton: Do you mean oil? Egg Shen: I mean black blood of the earth.
Greater virtual realism is always shown in television shows like "Star Trek: The Next Generation" as people who act out an alternate life as a farmer or solve mysteries in the 1800s, and that may happen, but long before that any technology like that will be used by young people to shoot each other.
Science 2.0 is all about making a difference in a positive way, bringing lots of people in the world together to talk with each other about science. We're the only open science site of decent size, meaning you don't have to be famous or bring a large audience to get invited, you just sign up and write science, so participation and communication are key to the Science 2.0 concept.
