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.
In team sports it is often difficult to determine the value of an individual. Some sports can do it easily enough, like baseball(1) or basketball, but during the World Cup, casual fans who hear commentators talk about the quality 'form' of a player are lost when the game is 0-0.Jordi Duch, Joshua S. Waitzman and Luís A. Nunes Amaral of Northwestern University say they may have an answer.
People who have been around a long time know the somewhat convoluted history of Science 2.0 in general and Scientific Blogging in specific but the top question I get after people say, "Oh, you're that guy!" is "Why did you call it Scientific Blogging?"Why not Science 2.0? Well, there's a practical reason and a philosophical one. The practical reason is that the way domain names work it isn't really possible. In order to make Science2.0.com I would have to make Science2 a subdomain of 0.com and that has been in existence since 1985. Yes, 1985, well before Tim Berners-Lee blessed us with an elegant way to make a World Wide Web. VeriSign owns it and they are unlikely to give it to me.
Extinction is nothing new; more than 99% of all species that have ever lived we will never know about. Extinction is entirely natural and, if you've ever watched someone's car weaving on the highway while they talk on the phone and drink a coffee, you have probably hoped it will remain a fundamental process of evolution.But survival of the fitter(1) can be a fickle mistress. Why, after 800,000 years of successful survival did the Hundsheim rhino (Stephanorhinus hundsheimensis) suddenly and irrecoverably disappear?
It's no secret social media is big - every marketing group latches on to the latest fad (even us - we gots the Tweetypages, we gots the Faceyspaceys) and people are using it more and more. But in the recent past, for many the Internet was just another way to get 'traditional' news, preferably for free.
Advocates of good science breathed a sigh of relief when Andrew Wakefield was finally lambasted for questionable methods and shoddy science, basically eliminating the validity of the fundamental text of the 'anti-vaccination' movement outside science circles.What about another fundamental text inside science circles? Namely Nepotism and sexism in peer-review, by Christine Wennerås&Agnes Wold (Nature 387, 341-343, 22 May 1997, doi:10.1038/387341a0 ), who claimed they did not receive Swedish postdoctoral fellowships because of male chauvinism.
Is David Beckham a keen physicist? Though he wouldn't know how to do the equations on a chalkboard, he certainly does it in his head and then with his feet - so perhaps he is an experimental physicist at heart.I've often used baseball to talk about concepts such as drag, the Bernoulli principle, Reynolds number and the Magnus effect but Beckham's ability to curve the football so much can teach the same things.The Bernoulli effect tells us faster moving air reduces pressure and a pressure difference is on either side of the ball creates a net force called the Magnus effect: Velocity Drag
Daniel Klein, a professor of economics at George Mason University, says in Econ Journal Watch that progressives do not understand how money works; basically they would flunk Economics 101.
3 Quarks Daily is a 'filter blog' that compiles stuff from around the web on a daily basis, in science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else they deem inherently fascinating.They say the name derives from that moment in 1964 when Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig postulated the existence of three new subatomic particles and Gell-Mann decided to name them "quarks", an unusual word meaning "croak" or "caw" which James Joyce had used in Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"
Joanne Chu, community moderator at Ranker.com, did such a terrific list of cutest animals impacted by the BP oil spill that rather than put up a link, which might only get a relatively small number of readers, I asked if we could print it here and get it out to perhaps a lot. That is, if this Internet thing is working properly.
"The Year Of (insert your favorite cause here)" is usually driven by marketing departments and often to correspond to some sort of milestone. 2009 was "The Year of..." both Galileo and Darwin, for example, though no one seemed to find a way to bring either to mainstream popularity and make a buck. What about 2010? Sure, the UN declared 2010 the 'International Year of Biodiversity' but, like most things the UN is involved in, it cost a lot of money and doesn't actually do anything. Outside science, 2010 is the Year of the Nurse. Everyone likes nurses.
Cooks want to tell you grilling is an art or a craft. We know better. Grilling, like anything worth doing, is a science. Anything that has been around for a million years is a science and fire has been considered by millenia as the thing that put humans on the map so nothing is more fundamental to anthropology, evolution and archeology than man, meat and fire.
Conservatives have long lamented the politicization of science. And why wouldn't they? Scientists as a bloc haven't voted Republican in decades and when Republicans limit science, there is an outcry (and even whole books!) but when a Democrat limits science the outcry is pretty much limited to ... me. Conservatives have not, for example, lamented the politicization of talk radio because they do much better there.
