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 all the hype surrounding the Large Hadron Collider during the last few years, it was easy to miss the fact that low energy physics was still accomplishing a lot - and that no one was sure what the LHC could really do because we didn't know what needed discovering. What we think it will do is based on the success of the indirect approach in science. Darwin's evolution by natural selection, for example, gained early acceptance because without it nothing much in biology made sense. Later discoveries including genetics and a detailed fossil record reaffirmed that what makes the most sense can often be true.
The Brits are always thinking ahead and we could learn a thing or two from them on this side of the pond. Those cheeky blokes are ditching pricey baubles in favor of if-we-keep-printing-money-we-will-be-Zimbabwe type ways of romancing loved ones this Valentine's Day - that is to say, without throwing out a lot of dough.
Research from a voice-to-text company over there called SpinVox claims almost two thirds of men (65%) have made huge cuts in spending this Valentines day. 1.6 million even claim they are following in the footsteps of Byron, Keats, and Shakespeare; not just by being poor, struggling lotharios getting by on charm but also by penning their own love poems this February 14th.
Coming up on Darwin's birthday, a lot is written about natural selection by non-biologists because opponents of evolution prefer to believe that biology stopped in 1859. Criticizing Darwin and Natural Selection is a lot easier if you ignore the 20th and 21st centuries.And that's okay, if the goal is a culture war rather than a science discussion, because even in Darwin's time it wasn't all balloons and ponies for Natural Selection. It was years later that evolutionary biology got help from an understanding of genetics and Natural Selection became accepted after rigorous scientific investigation. \
There's no question younger scientists who have only really known the Bush presidency believe that Bush was a problem in science, despite the budget increases and the fact that a lot of really terrific science got done in the last 8 years - so they may not see that a stimulus package in science under a president everyone has enthusiasm for could be setting us up for the very same funding bubble (and collapse) that occurred under Bush.
I should be able to get this Hollywood movie made in two paragraphs. *****A likable rogue-ish historian ( Hank Campbell, only in tweed, we might describe him, Harrison Ford being a little long in the tooth for action films these days) is poring over antique tomes, including an original draft copy of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life when he notices a very faint trace of eraser markings on the title page. He does some kind of magic chemical stuff (whatever - it's a movie) and discovers it is a number.
In 2004 a University of Chicago researcher discovered something every evolutionary biologist knew had to exist - a missing link between land animals and fishes.
Dumping tires in the water to create an artificial reef sounds either inspired or crazy. It turned out to be crazy but there was a scientific hypothesis to it. You just had to buy into their chain of logic.There was also a lesson. Not everything needs to be done in a large experimental setting but the justification to go ahead and do it is always cost and the protecting the environment right now. 'You care about the environment, right?' I can't think of a single time a question has been phrased that way that someone hasn't tried to sell me something. And the cost savings are always framed to be immediately practical, though in the case of the artificial reef made of tires, the cost to clean up was 5000 times as much as it was supposed to save.
Morale has plummeted at the National Science Foundation, it seems, due to governmental oversight and interference from above. The Senate Finance Committee didn't like a report they got from the NSF and are going to do something about it.What, that sum'bitch Bush came back to haunt scientists and personally rewrite reports and ask why employees aren't doing their jobs instead of doing talk show appearances about how much he stinks?
Name it and the milk will come, say scientists at Newcastle University. It's not "Field of Dreams" it's Milk of Dreams. Or whatever analogy you want to use for a correlation-causation fantasy that leads to a conclusion that a cow with a name produces more milk than one without.Drs Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson say they have shown in their study in Anthrozoos ("A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals"!!) that by giving a cow a name and treating her as an individual farmers can increase their annual milk yield - by over 60 gallons.
Do you know the name of the first computer game? I confess I didn't and I learned programming on a Univac 1100/62 so I am a lot closer to the origination date of computer games than most people who will read this.I assumed it was a kind of punchcard-loaded word game, like a 1960s Leather Goddesses of Phobos only without the divine genius of Dostoevsky that game possessed, but the history of video games is much more elaborate than that.
If you're a reader of geography or a student of eastern philosophy, you may have seen the name K'un Lun. It is the name of a mountain range in western China and borders the northern edge of Tibet (1) and is also a name for 'paradise' in Taoism. Whoever can climb to the top of K'un Lun gains access to the heavens, the ancients said. There's a city there now and if you visit K'un Lun City and drink the yellow water in the lakes of its parks known as cinnabar (tan), they also say you will become immortal.(2)That last part is scientifically undocumented. Drinking yellow water is generally a bad idea.
There was a big development in science this year, yet most people missed it. It wasn't induced pluripotent stem cells or global warming or Barack Obama securing 99% of the scientist vote despite his belief that vaccines cause autism, which caused even heterosexual scientists to disregard Jenny McCarthy. No, it was an alarming decrease in available clichés to describe what scientists think about new discoveries.
