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.
A Democratic president banned the use of federal money for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research, a Republican president restricted federal hESC funding to existing lines and a Democratic president continues to limit federal money for hESC research. Who is regarded as anti-science on this issue? Republicans.I know, I know, Democrats are anti-science on plenty of other things - animal research, agriculture, vaccines and a whole list of others - but this is just about hESC research and there it is clearly just a Republican issue. The mainstream media and science bloggers say so.
It's rare that you will find me arguing for gender quotas. Obviously I am not for discrimination but, at least in science, mandating representation - which is discrimination against the qualified in the interests of sex organs - does not lead to better science, it leads to equality at the expense of excellence.Economics, however, is not science and some mandated equality might help. Science says so.
Quantum entanglement was strange when it was conceptualized. It violated Einstein's famous speed limit in his Theory of Relativity and he called it spukhafte Fernwirkung - “spooky action at a distance” and sought to note the flaws in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the Copenhagen interpretation. The result was the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox.
Writing at the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog, Jason Samenow advocates an idea he recently saw pitched by atmospheric scientist Alan Betts, namely that science studies be accompanied by layperson explanations.
You've seen the advertisements on television; schools that market heavily with dubious promises of how wonderful the job market is, but then students who incur student loan debt to get those degrees - loans which are unlimited since the government in the early 1990s said higher education meant more money - find that in a market where everyone has some sort of degree or another, it doesn't mean much.
The National Toxicology Program has released its latest warning on things that 'give' you cancer and they include two things people come into contact with every day.If you have walked into a new house and smelled that 'new house' smell, you are now ingesting a carcinogen, according to the report. Let the lawsuits begin. The issue is formaldehyde and they say, as they also said about carcinogens in their previous 11 reports, that the science is clear, but it turned out that the science in second-hand smoke was more cultural politics than data and the risk from tanning beds in cancer is the same as in cell phones and drinking coffee.
People still believe in secret societies because there are secret societies - some groups just don't want attention, even if they do anonymous charity work - but secret cabals that control a nation or the world are irrational, yet belief in them persists.Go ahead, ask some left wing kook about George Bush and they will trail off into gibberish about the Skull&Crossbones and list all all these other people that were in it, as if being in a dinner group made them successful as opposed to being smart enough to get into an Ivy League school. Really, if I am believing some secret Yale cabal is controlling America, I am going with The Whiffenpoofs. Nothing else explains the popularity of "Glee".
"Physicists seek simplicity in universal laws. Ecologists revel in complex interdependencies. Together, these two approaches may help solve the problems of global warming," wrote John Harte, professor at Berkeley, in Physics Today.Republicans are more skeptical of global warming than Democrats yet about the same when it comes to acknowledging climate change. And global warming skeptics conserve energy just as much as believers.
Government work is usually a thankless job - yes, thanks to guaranteed pay raises and a union that can shut down the government, government employees make more money than the private sector and have better benefits and retirement, so it is not exactly thankless, but there are few instances where we can say 'government gets it right'.
What's ailing biology?Wilson da Silva, Editor-in-Chief of COSMOS, a science publication in Australia, was attending a lecture by Freeman Dyson lecture at the Perimeter Institute in Canada when Dyson said, "It's sad but true that most discoveries in biology are made by physicists."
In 1956, science-fiction author Philip K. Dick wrote a short story for Fantastic Universe called "Minority Report", about a futuristic world where precognitive mutants can predict crimes before they can happen. The ethical concerns about encroachment of big government and the possibility of a police state are obvious in a time of the USSR and increasing government regulation in the period - how can you be guilty of a crime you did not yet commit? The argument was also whether free will existed. Tom Cruise starred in a movie based on the story in 2002.
I suppose the recent Egypt-centric focus on food consumption had to end eventually. The 'food pyramid' you have seen for decades, craftily negotiated by food lobbyists, is being replaced by...a pie. First Lady Michelle Obama is on a war against obesity and she will fight over food. Pres. Obama warned us, "You do not want to be between Michelle and a tamale" and the new dietary guideline shape is the latest weapon.
