Rutgers Study - Forcing DEI Programs On People Increases Hostility

If you have done nothing wrong, do you want to be treated like a criminal? That was always the...

Minnesota Trial Lawyers Want To Ban Neonics - Here Is Why That Is A Mistake

Minnesota is having a challenging year, so challenging they are approaching California as the wackiest...

The Toxic Masculinity Of Disney Movies

Once upon a time, stories were just stories. They were fantasies that took people to a new world...

AI And The Poetry Problem

Artificial Intelligence is artificial, but it is not intelligence. That could change some day but...

Hank Campbell

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

Antioxidants Don't Work But No One Wants To Hear It

Aug 03 2011 | comment(s)

I wrote an article talking about the spate of "X is awesome" and "Y is bad for you" articles that came out every year and even had a little quiz asking people if they could identify what superfood and/or remedy was popular in years I had edited out for brevity.

So if you were on a sugar diet, or a red wine diet or an acai berry diet, I know what year you read health magazines.

Some skepticism is warranted - you will find any number of studies here correlating antioxidants to health benefits.(1) There's just one problem - there isn't any actual evidence antioxidants help you at all.

How To Make A Rainbow

Aug 03 2011 | comment(s)

My wife and I once saw a rainbow and we discussed how it happened. She listened somewhat patiently for the first few sentences and then told me I was spoiling the magic of the rainbow, like it was somehow less romantic if she knew how it happened.(1)

Men, you are with me on this; she has a man who can make a rainbow for her any time she wants - and will. That's a higher order of romantic, I think you will agree. Plus, I have to defend all rainbow-making men and note that because my rainbow is a special distribution of colors whose reference point is her eyes, no one else will ever see it. Is it literally for her eyes only.

Women In Science - You Are Oppressed, Even If You Are Not

Aug 01 2011 | comment(s)

Some stereotypes are self-reinforcing. If someone tells you over and over that you are oppressed, if you hit an obstacle and fail, like all of us do at some point in our lives, a convenient excuse is that you are discriminated against.(1)

There is zero data showing women are discriminated against in science, math or engineering - none. But because there used to be far more men and those men were not lined up against the wall and shot to make room for women in faculty, the claim is that science academia is still prejudiced against women.

Beast Machines: The "War And Peace" Of The Transformers Milieu

Jul 31 2011 | comment(s)

I am told "Transformers: Dark Side Of The Moon" is a good film. I enjoyed the first movie well enough, even if it was noisy in all of the wrong ways. The sequel hurt both my eyes and my sensibilities but at least the pain in my eyes had an easy explanation: Michael Bay, or perhaps his cinematographer, read some science and discovered that flesh tones, which exist in the orange range, have a complement on the color scale in teal. Two complementary colors next to each other give an image 'pop' visually, shows neuroscience and therefore color theory. So if you want to highlight something, orange and teal around it will work.

Canceling The James Webb Space Telescope Redux

Jul 31 2011 | comment(s)

Science 2.0 favorite Lawrence Krauss of ASU tackled the James Webb Space Telescope issue on the Richard Dawkins website and a commenter there linked to my rationalization that canceling it might be okay, with the hasty disclaimer that he does not agree with what I write - the Dawkins site moderators, and perhaps Dawkins himself, have made their distaste for anyone outside the echo chamber well known so perhaps his rapid disavowal was necessary, though it seems odd Krauss would have the same conce

Singing The Dolphin Through

Jul 30 2011 | comment(s)

I have always liked dolphins but I can't pinpoint why - maybe it was "Flipper" when I was a kid, it can't be "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" because a whale was saving the Earth in that one.

It could certainly be Manfred Mann's Earth Band. If you aren't familiar with Manfred Mann, he was a keyboard player from South Africa who made it big in England in the 1960s and then quit to simultaneously be more cynical than the pop hit factory his band had become and more pure at the same time; by doing jingles to pay the bills while he made the music he wanted on the side.