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.
Ahhhh, Valentine's Day. Bad food, shoddy restaurant service - and you have no choice about it. The Soviet Union had toilet paper lines but they didn't force Valentine's Day on its people. Really, anyone who is unsure what mandates accomplish only needs to look at ethanol for a modern comparison of why things suffer when you force a solution on people.
But all is not lost. There's science in love, you know, and that means there's science in Valentine's Day. Science on Valentine's Day is like cold fusion instead of ethanol. Completely wonderful. And we have it all right here.
We're creating a page just for Darwin Day posts and links so if you have written something, leave a comment or download the button and we'll include a paragraph and a link.
If you've written it here, it's linked automatically. Happy writing!
Also, just in time for Valentine's Day, Garth Sundem has an article in the BBC News on making the right decisions and will demonstrate his equations in Horizon on BBC Two at 2100GMT on Tuesday 12 February.
Honestly, did you even known there was a Department of Pedagogy anywhere? Well, there is. They teach about the science of teaching. And apparently cartoons.
Pilar Casares García is a teacher in the Department of Pedagogy at the University of Granada but instead of teaching about teaching, she researches male chauvinism. In cartoons.
This was apparently once a real problem once but she says it's better now; women are as intelligent, agile, attractive, strong, and heroic as their male counterparts ... or more.
A new report by the Arizona Arts, Sciences, and Technology Academy (AASTA) found that research in astronomy, planetary sciences, and space sciences (APSS) pumped over $250 million into Arizona’s economy in 2006 alone.
That's real money but it's not all balloons and ponies for Arizona. There are threats to that economic engine and it's what you can probably guess - the instability of federal funding and competition from other locations - but it's also things you might not guess, like light pollution from residential and commercial development and lingering memories of environmental and political activism.
Yes, you read that right. I said Blu-ray. Ever since the defection of Warner Bros. from HD-DVD to Blu-ray a few days before the Consumer Electronics Show(CES), every expert who knows anything at all about this industry has predicted the demise of HD-DVD. And they're wrong.
The most important reason is that no one is an expert on the high-definition marketplace. The industry barely even exists so people making projections based on expert knowledge of laser disc or DVD figures are only slightly more accurate than Voodoo shamen sorting chicken bones. You just can't rely on recent sales in a nascent industry and extrapolate a projection from it. Projections about what people will or will not do at this stage are even less accurate than political exit polls.
My thoughts are not based on any secret knowledge of the DVD marketplace but I have a pretty good knowledge of business. Absent an overwhelming leap in technology from Blu-ray some time soon, here are my reasons HD-DVD will win:
Loneliness is commonly regarded as a social phenomenon in which individual personality differences contribute to its severity. Some people enjoy solitude, for example, because they never feel lonely, while people with high degrees of loneliness have shorter life expectancies than people who never feel lonely.
There may be more to it than that. Recent research shows that the gene expression in the immune cells of people with chronically high levels of loneliness is different than people who do not feel lonely. Even more telling, some genes were underexpressed in the same subjects, including those in antibody production.
When people in a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study were told that anorexia nervosa had a biological or genetics-based cause they were less likely to put any personal accountability on anorexics than when they were told it was personal or cultural.
That makes sense. A disease that is egalitarian and exculpatory like a genetics or biological mutation is different than a syndrome. We can't blame kids with Autism for having Autism, though we do teach them to moderate their behavior - and that's a key point.
Anorexia nervosa is characterized by an obsessive desire to be thin and results in self-starvation and related medical complications.
Is marketing a bad thing? How much money does Coca-Cola spend on Research & Development of its premier soft drink? Nothing. When something works, you go with it. New Coke taught them that. But they market it like crazy.
Yet whether pharmaceutical companies are primarily interested in research and development or marketing is central to the cultural debate about medicine.
Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin, writing in PLoS Medicine, state that information on promotional expenditures from IMS, the most widely quoted authority that surveys pharmaceutical firms, isn't reliable.
2007 was a big year for science, though it may be that we just noticed it more because it was our first year too. If you're reading this article, you're probably already a fan of our "just science" concept and it seems to be catching on everywhere.
We wanted to create a site where the best science writers, regardless of popularly or politics or ideology, could get together in one place and write about science, whenever they want on whatever topics they want. We went to top people in their fields; well-known authors, post-docs and professors in our various categories, and explained what we wanted to accomplish and the response, from writers and from the audience, has been fantastic.
In the 19th century, leaders like Bismarck understood that the politics of nation-states and warfare were going to be implemented by countries having the most effective transportation. Railroads required fuel and the notion of a 'strategic resource' - a resource essential for a modern country to be successful - was born.
The 20th century and the rise of tanks, planes and automobiles meant that oil was a strategic resource. If you didn't have it, you had to buy it and if you couldn't buy it, you had to fight to get it.
Nothing is stranger than telling someone you play guitar and having them respond that you would therefore really enjoy playing "Guitar Hero" on a television.
Wouldn't the time they spent learning an interface and practicing a game have been better spent practicing on an actual guitar?
It would seem. There are some things that are fun to do virtually because obviously we can't do them in real life. In real life a British shoemaker got to put an end to Napoleon's dreams of conquest but I can't go back in time 200 years and learn to make shoes and go to war. Likewise I can't defeat alien Nazis in World War II but ... bowling? I can do that.
It's hard to say when scientists realized that policy makers were not always going to make the best decisions regarding science funding but a safe bet would be somewhere before 3,000 BC.
In the intervening 5,000 years, not a lot has changed in how well scientists, politicians and the public really understand each other. A week doesn't go by when there isn't an article lamenting that one project or another doesn't get funding or that one government bureau is over-zealous or too conservative.
Scientists learned early that the best way to get the message across to the people who can truly influence policy makers was to consult them directly. In past ages it was advisors to kings.
