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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

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 »

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The Wall Street Journal posted a letter from 16 scientists who are critical of climate science in general and anthropogenic warming in specific. There were numerous flaws in the letter (see Robert Cooper's Denialiasm 101 piece An Excellent Study On Denialism for the takedown) but it's an opinion piece so I took it for what it is worth; the New York Times lets Paul Krugman write on economics and that's also completely made up so opinion pieces are common and always have been.
Who has more credibility to the NPR audience, a scientist or someone who runs an organic yogurt company?  It depends on the issue, of course.  When it comes to global warming, science is awesome but when it comes to food security for poor people, science is evil corporations out to kill us all. So they accept the facts of the yogurt maker.
Klaudia Brix of Jacobs University has resigned from the board of the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology,  the official publication of the Italian Society of Anatomy and Histology, because a paper by prominent 'HIV does not cause AIDS' researcher Peter Duesberg of U.C. Berkeley was published.
Changes to the diagnostic definition of autism will be published in the fifth edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" - DSM V - but exactly what those changes will be is a key point of discussion. There are still a lot of qualifying issues in a lot of areas for a publication that has already been a long time in the making.

At stake? Apparently a lot of money.  Autism was once rare enough that a definition was not rigorous but it also was not crucial - some leeway was allowed.  As a result, recent increased instances, either to more occurrences or more accurate diagnoses or even mis-diagnosis, have made the new definition for DSM-V a hot topic.
Adult science literary has tripled since I was a kid, despite the shrill claims that teachers are incompetent, people are stupid and science education is "dismal" that we seen thrown around in consumer media and the advocacy-based segment of science blogging.  In reality, people are pretty smart about science, but it can be humbling and people are less confident about things that are difficult.

Nothing shows that more than asking parents themselves what questions from their kids they find tough to explain.  Kids are curious and it may take two or three levels of explanation to get the point across - and that isn't easy for anyone to do.
Tom Chivers, Telegraph's assistant comment editor, may think he is being all edgy and cool by claiming Republicans - 50% of America - are anti-science. In reality, he is like an Emo-haircut wearing kid dressed in black insisting he is an outsider while he dresses like all the rest of them.