Science 2.0

Decades ago there was a cultural debate about who could best handle recycling, the private sector or government. Though environmental groups today are commonly associated with more government regulations and bureaucracy, decades ago groups like PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) instead lobbied for expansion of efforts like a 'bottle bill' where a refundable fee paid by the user encouraged recycling.  Everyone knows the container is the expensive part of a soda.

http://www.cirm.ca.gov/StemCellBasics_Questionshttp://sdrmi.org/wordpre… California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) was established by California voters in 2004 to defy US President George W. Bush who, we were told, 'banned' human embryonic stem stem cell research.(1) Voters were willing to do it with $3 billion of borrowed money, that is how important science was to California, because stem cell research was going to both make us immortal and cure Alzheimer's, if only Republicans would get out of the way.

2 percent of America has celiac disease but over 20 percent of Americans say they are concerned about buying gluten-free foods - and marketing departments are happy to charge 230 percent more to make them feel better.
Across the spectrum, the price gap between "healthy" and less healthy foods has grown since 1992. Organic food is, unsurprisingly, the store of choice for wealthy elites, and prices have grown far more than they have for regular supermarket fare, where margins remain razor thin.

In the United Kingdom's National Health Service, 50 percent of health care workers do not get flu vaccines. Obviously they are not anti-vaccine, they work in health care, so what explains their behavior? It isn't as simple as science denial.In the United States, vaccine denial is easier to predict: Go to a political map of California or Oregon and find the counties that voted overwhelmingly for President Obama and you are going to find an anti-vaccine hotbed.  Still, though that tells us where it does not tell us why and we need to know why in order to know how to solve the problem. It isn't as simplistic as 'Democrats are anti-science', though it is reasonable that it's been framed that way.

The European Union, chided by scientists for wacky science like declaring that cell phones cause cancer, water does not alleviate thirst and you can go to jail if you don't predict an earthquake, is starting to inch back toward science.By loosening the noose they have had around agriculture. Ironically, this is right after environmentalists got Dr. Anne Glover, the first Chief Scientific Adviser to the President of the European Commission, fired over her advocacy of science-based agriculture.

In the early days of food labeling and regulations, it was just about mandating honesty. If you go to buy mayonnaise, you shouldn’t have to wonder if it is mayonnaise, the government reasoned, so they passed a law in 1938 requiring honesty about ingredients. The charlatans went out of the business and the free market that remained embraced “better” ingredients as a marketing distinction. It worked well.

Campbell Soup Co., which makes a variety of foods including the namesake soups and Prego pasta sauce, has declared their intention to put labels on their foods noting they are “partially produced with genetic engineering.”Some are lamenting this will be a slippery slope to process labels being used as warnings, and undermining confidence in modern agriculture, while anti-science groups are hailing it as a victory. US Right To Know, an outreach group funded by organic food corporations and aided by the partisan attack site SourceWatch, is certainly declaring this a big win for their clients.

President Barack Obama has used an executive order to bypass Congress and tighten control and enforcement over firearms in the United States, in response to concerns about gun violence and gun safety. If it survives the inevitable court challenges, it will mean more background checks, expanded registration and $500 million for mental health initiatives. President Obama believes these measures will keep firearms from criminals - and they should - but he also claims that it will reduce suicides. That is not so simple to believe. As is well-known, 60 percent of deaths due to firearms are suicides and the lack of gun ownership in Japan did not prevent any of those, they simply use rope.

In choosing the top articles of any year, there are always a few knobs to turn. A top article traffic-wise, for example, could be one from a prior year, since we have articles with millions of readers, and since we carry some press release stuff it could be one of those, and one person may have two.And since Science 2.0 is all member-driven, no employees or corporate or government overlord, the people who might pick the candidates would most likely be the most active, and therefore one of the candidates. So instead we take it out of anyone's hands and just went by number of readers (not number of pageviews, since a controversial article can generate a lot more of those). And only one per author. And only 5 since, really, no one is reading 10 articles on a list.

http://theconversation.com/rise-and-shine-new-horizons-awakes-ahead-of-… the Mars Rovers and the Rosetta spacecraft will continue to make headlines in 2015, the stage is set for the solar system’s next great mission – the Pluto-bound New Horizons.Discovered in 1930, it was assumed that Pluto was a planet, with a mass comparable to that of the Earth. This was partially based on its brightness, along with the mistaken assumption that it was perturbing the orbits of Neptune and Uranus.

It's the time of the year when there are jokes about politically correct people demanding equal time for a Festivus pole on the steps of City Hall and pundits on the other side are scourging culture for the fact that we have any religious events at all.

An old legal joke goes that a man accused of lifting wallets is arrested brought into court. The judge asked if he wants a trial by judge or a jury of his peers. The accused replies, "You judge, I don't want 12 pickpockets deciding what happens to me."It is a common psychological tendency to assume most people are 'like' us, that is why rationalization about behavior occurs so easily - everyone else is doing it. So what do we make of it when a journalist repeatedly claims that everyone else is a shill for corporate interests?The obvious: That the journalist sees it everywhere because she assumes people are like her. I prefer to talk about individuals rather than issues but sometimes the journalist is the issue, because they make themselves into one.