HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
A new paper claims that the Mediterranean diet may increase "longevity" and it created its mystical conclusion using the favored magic wand of food studies, epidemiological correlation, sprinkled with biological speculation.You may be old enough to remember other claims using similar kernels of scientific truth that became popular diet fads; cigarettes, grapefruit, cabbage. the Adkins diet, Paleo.
A new paper says scientists can make their work more appealing to the public by making it more personal. I learned of it through a paid university PIO but few scientists will see the irony in that.I certainly agree with the point. I have been part of two communities, science and the military, that in defiance of public perception are filled with hilarious people who have great stories. But when the recorder comes on, it's often like talking to someone in marketing who hasn't been cleared for media by their boss. They clam up or give canned answers.
You might know blue whales are an endangered species while pandas are not. Yet there are 25,000 blue whales and only 2,000 pandas. There are 100,000 sea otters yet they are still classified as endangered. Who drew that line between endangered and not endangered? And why are there suddenly so many more endangered species? A new tiny species might be discovered and someone is immediately petitioning government to declare it endangered, even though there may be lots of them and western ecologists just don't know it.
A recent paper finds that vaccine disinformation is common on social media while a few years ago I had employees watch food documentaries on Netflix and write about their impression and the results in both cases are startling for people who don't realize the extent of the problem. Those with conspiracy theories about the modern world can now gain a worldwide audience, using social media and free markets.
If you were long concerned about Russians exploiting American media for their gain, you turned out to be right. But before they were meddling in American elections, they were meddling in American science. The Obama administration Director of National Intelligence warned that Russians were using offshore "donor advised" funds to launder dark money anonymous donations to activists opposing natural gas - Russia's top export. And they did the same thing with food, their second largest export.
A new study shows there is a reason USA Today is the most popular newspaper in America - they won't specify "laparoscopy" when "minimally invasive surgery" gets the point across to more people.While America leads the world in adult science literacy, that is still with under 30 percent of the population. To really reach the public, we need to use language that won't be a turn-off. Jargon may make us feel smarter, but it makes people who lack the vocabulary feel dumber, and that is a violation of smart journalism.
A U.C. Riverside environmentalist is sounding the alarm about your commute. Professor David Volz and colleagues hand-picked 90 commuter students who were given silicone wristbands to wear for five days. The goal was to find organophosphate esters on the wristbands, because some papers link those to harm in zebrafish and some epidemiologists will link anything to anything in humans. They found one, TDCIPP - chlorinated tris - at higher levels and speculate that it is oozing out of car seat foam and into our bodies.Just correlation, no testing
I got an email from an analytics group pitching an article about Valentine's Day movie results. It promised:"If you’re planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day by watching a romantic film you’ll probably end up watching Isn’t It Romantic, according to the latest" blah blah blah (which) "analyzed Google Trends data of IMDBs list of ‘100 romantic films for Valentine's Day’ to reveal which films were the most popular in February 2019.
A new paper by epidemiologists in Europe will overturn centuries of diet and health thinking; the thinking that eating too much makes people gain weight.Instead, the new statistical correlation argues, the weight gain is due to pregnant women who used cosmetics containing parabens, which triggered epigenetic changes in the babies, who then grew up to be fat. It is yet another thing you can blame on your mother.
When it comes to the political divide in America, the key difference in science is that academia has mostly Democrats while private sector scientists are mostly Republicans. There are big tents in a two-party system so a liberal New York cop will have nothing in common with a San Francisco progressive but they will both vote Democrat and this big tent philosophy covers science as well. Republicans are considered deniers of climate change and evolution while Democrats deny vaccines and agriculture, and the rest of the tent has to endure them.
Environmental Working Group, a litigation group devoted to food and chemical issues, is most famous for publishing its annual "Dirty Dozen" list to promote publicly available pesticide residues on food. While neglecting to mention that their organic industry clients are not tested separately.
In the early days of the environmental war on agriculture, activists claimed they were not against the science itself, they were anti-corporate. They didn't want a company in charge of the food supply.The argument resonated with a lot of people, including university scholars, so when the opportunity to solve the vitamin A deficiency issue in the developing world became available with genetic engineering, it was an independent group of scholars that developed a GMO rice with higher levels of beta-carotene. They made this Golden Rice available for free.
