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.
Research can often be a thankless job for the researcher - logically even more so if you make your data available to the community at large. Someone in the peer community will challenge it, bloggers will pick it apart, newspapers will misinterpret it and someone, somewhere, will find a way to use it to bolster their favorite political argument.
The benefits of open science to the science community receiving the data are obvious. They get results without effort or money or time. Is there any benefit to the researcher and, if not, why would anyone do it?
Called by some the Blue Eye of Siberia and by others the Sacred Sea, Lake Baikal, at more than 5,000 feet ( 1,620 meters ), is the world’s deepest lake. The lake has many other interesting features also. For example, more than 330 rivers flow in but only the Angara flows out.
Even the potential for oil-related environmental disaster along the Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean pipeline was enough to get that project moved farther away from one one of UNESCO's world heritage objects.
What do you do when Mother Nature herself starts leaking the oil?
Image by geology.com using NASA Landsat data
Is something better than nothing while society adjusts to the impact of pollution and climate change? Or is a "band-aid" approach just making people feel better and wasting time? It depends on which environmental group you ask.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds issued a withering attack on the British government, calling its policy on tackling climate change too myopic to be effective after the publication of another Westminster report detailing additional restrictions that should be in place.
The report, by the Joint Scrutiny Committee, said aviation must be included in climate change planning.
Every 62 million years there is a mass extinction on Earth. No one is sure why but, since the solar motion through the Milky Way has been computed for the past 600 million years, we know it is too long a cycle for it to be a product of our solar system. A new paper theorizes this is because the earth begins to ... wobble ... due to solar oscillations and that wobbling happens on a predictable timetable.
They call it galactic shock due to cosmic ray modulation and its presence at those times impacts biological diversity - that means extinction and origination. The physicists, Mikhail V. Medvedev and Adrian L. Melott of the University of Kansas, say this has happened for the last half billion years. How much impact? As much as 10% of life on earth.
Why a wobble?
A recent UN study, Livestock's Long Shadow, basically says you can help the environment more by driving than walking.
A long-held belief in theories of human behavior is that people want to feel good and avoid feeling bad.
Nothing in that principle explains why people enjoy horror movies or, additionally, why they pay for the privilege of being scared.
Investigators generally use one of two theories to explain why people like horror movies:
1. It's excitement, not fear. People aren't actually afraid, they get a surge from the action and suspense.
2. Terror now brings euphoria later. Think you had a bad day at the office? Imagine being chased by zombies. It always feels better to know someone else is being chased by zombies.
It's fun to be scared, as long as there's a TV between you and him.
You don't need a big brain, or a high IQ, to have a comfortable life and a good family.
Witness the case of this French civil servant, written about by Dr. Lionel Fuillet in The Lancet. At age six months he was treated for hydrocephalus (water on the brain) with a shunt in his head to drain away the fluid. At age 14 he complained of unsteadiness and left leg weakness, which cleared up after the shunt was adjusted. Beyond that his neurological development and medical history were normal.
At age 44 the leg weakness returned and he was treated by Dr. Feuillet and colleagues of the Hôpital de la Timone and Faculté de Médecine, Université de la Méditerranée, Marseille, France.
It used to be the advice on tanning was simply 'don't do it' but tanning may be a way to protect yourself - if you leave out the UV rays.
If you've never heard of Lake Agassiz, it's no surprise. It disappeared over 8,000 years ago. Yet it may have been the global warming trigger that ended the last Ice Age.
Using remains from lakes, bogs and channels, a multi-disciplinary group of scientists recently tackled the secrets of glacial Lake Agassiz and Big Stone Moraine.
Knowing the chronology of glacier retreat, and when glacial lakes formed, is important in linking physical events on the landscape with paleoclimate records. At the close of the last ice age, glacial ice in the upper Midwest of the United States retreated very quickly, likely in response to the warming climate.
I wrote about this briefly in our nifty new 'quick blog' feature but I thought it merited more consideration so I wrote down some thoughts and you can tell me if I'm off base.
When white Americans were asked in a new study to pick a dollar amount they would have to be paid to live the rest of their lives as a black person, most requested less than $10,000. A minor thing.
In contrast, study participants said they would have to be paid about $1 million to give up television for the rest of their lives.
This would seem to state that white people don't think being black is such a big deal in 2007. Not the case at all, says Philip Mazzocco, co-author of a new study study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University's Mansfield campus. Instead, he says the results suggest most white Americans don't truly comprehend the persisting racial disparities in our country.
ScientificBlogging.com Featured Columnist Jane Poynter has written a book, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 , discussing her experiences inside the legendary long-term science experiment.
