In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
Bisphenol S (BPS) and bisphenol F (BPF) are chemicals used in the lining of aluminum-canned food and drinks (to prevent spoilage). They were rolled out as a replacement for bisphenol A (BPA), a compound targeted by activists under claims it might statistically be an "endocrine-disrupting chemical." Exhaustive studies later found overwhelming scientific evidence that was not so.
A new paper has statistically linked depression and anxiety during pregnancy (and link preterm births due to those) to the radius of natural gas hydraulic fracturing wells in Pennsylvania. Should you be worried? The short answer is "no", this is not a very good paper.Just like "only in mice" has become a common complaint of biologists, chemists, and toxicologists about provocative claims designed to get media attention, "it's just correlation" is invoked nearly as often by the science community.
With air pollution a distant memory outside some pockets in the United States (or during wildfires), the U.S. EPA oddly embraced one paper, which they had not seen any data for(1), claiming that particles so small they could only be detected with an electron microscope, 2.5 microns in size, were killing people.Data didn't show it, but it doesn't matter and that is the great thing about modern epidemiology. In this decade, epidemiologists only need to show a statistical correlation and then they get media coverage and hand it off to scientists and tell them to prove it. It's sort of like theoretical physicists claiming they can show time travel or a multiverse and the incompetent noobs in experimental physics need to drop everything and prove them right.
If I have a choice between an emissions-belching factory near my home or clean, high-paying jobs from a diverse group of educated people 13,000 feet above where citizens live, I am siding with science.This is why while I was a successful environmental fundraiser, many of their positions made no sense to me, even when I was young and naïve. Many of the positions I was supposed to believe in weren't about the environment, they were about manufacturing hype to raise money. Hawaiʻi's Thirty Meter Telescope is another example where it is not about the environment - 13 observatories and telescopes have been there for over 40 years - and it is also not about the next tactic after the environmental argument failed - religion.
The most disgusting thing about cigarette smoking for most isn't the smoke, nor is it the prospect of toxic carcinogens causing cancer in smokers the rest of us will end up subsidizing, it is that smokers often throw their garbage on the ground afterward and expect someone else to pick it up.(1)
The number one killer of honeybees is not pesticides, despite expensive marketing campaigns by environmental groups trying to claim that is the case (1), and it isn't even the very lucrative industry of trucking bees around to engage in artificial pollination for crops like almonds, which leads to shock from being in new places.
A study has taken a look at the radii of homes with measured data near natural gas wells and statistically linked that to higher radon.While some in media will use that to sound this week's 'science is killing us' alarm, the reality is that something that is not a concern is being linked to something else not a concern.
A recent review of meta-analyses and 277 randomized controlled trials--in which nearly 1 million adults participated--to find out how various nutritional supplements and diets influenced mortality rates and cardiovascular outcomes found...not much.
Sometimes pop culture becomes fact for the public. When the climate disaster film "The Day After Tomorrow" came out, journalists bizarrely started referencing it as a real climate change scenario, and now that Netflix, the home of anti-science sentiment among streaming services(1), has "Chernobyl" available, people think that is creating mutants.(2)
Population level metrics such as Body Mass Index (BMI) or statistical correlation using epidemiology don't do much to inform individual experience, and psychology faces the same issue. Surveys can tell us whatever surveys can tell us about what a particular group of people taking surveys think, but there is a reason that no polling group does well with Congressional districts that are contentious. It simply doesn't work. As we learned when we first believed the anti-vaccine problem was a fringe religious issue, what people claim on surveys is not their behavior.(1)
Implicit bias, a flawed heuristic designed to show you that you are prejudiced even if you don't feel or behave that way (that is what makes it implicit) is now being used to undermine confidence in health care. In this case the authors conclude that health care professionals are implicitly biased against women in health care, associating men more with career and family, and surgeons also associated men more with surgery.Their evidence; other implicit bias association claims, which is actual explicit bias. The data was literally taken from the Gender-Career Implicit Association Test hosted by Project Implicit, which exists for no other reason than to show everyone they are prejudiced.
In modern American culture, two exploratory fields in science compete to scare the public or suggest the promise of miracle cures; epidemiology and studies in mice.
