Fake Banner
Marijuana For ADHD?

Cannabis and THC, its main psychoactive compound, have been endorsed by people suffering from anxiety...

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...

User picture.
picture for Robert H Olleypicture for Hontas Farmerpicture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for Ilias Tyrovolaspicture for Fred Phillipspicture for
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 »

Blogroll
Can complex traits lost during evolution recur later?   It was an academic argument but now it has some more data.  Writing in Evolution, a study analyzes Gastrotheca guentheri , a tree frog with teeth in its lower jaw, separating if from every other frog.
Fantasy baseball as fans understand it today began in the 1980s but actual fantasy baseball, beyond kids trading baseball cards, began 50 years ago.   Hal Rickman, an accountant in New York City, started finalizing  work on something he had begun when he was much younger.   It was Strat-O-Matic Baseball.

Rickman told USA Today's Mike James that as a young boy he rolled dice 5,000 times to make a table of probabilities and looked at baseball statistics in the newspaper to match probability to performance and see what would happen.   In 1961 he started producing the game and later the year Roger Maris would eclipse the ghost of Babe Ruth for the single season home run record.
When it comes to pet positions, the more fundamentalist leftwing bloggers in science love to note how anti-science Republicans are, despite Pres. Bush doubling the NIH budget and increasing the NASA budget 15% after a decline of 5% during the 8 years Pres. Clinton was in office.

They have to be anti-science because, you know, they are Republicans.   So if right wing people put the brakes on human embryonic stem cell research because, at the time the technology was really created in the late 1990s no one was sure about its implications, they are stupid and hate science.   If left wing people continue to regard genetically modified organisms as a concern, that's just the precautionary principle.  
In the 'gay sex is bad unless it's women' cultural milieu, a survey by a University of Texas at Austin psychologist determined that men are more than twice as likely to continue dating a girlfriend who has cheated on them with another woman than if she cheated with another man.

The survey used 700 college students so calibrate accordingly - men may not like their girlfriends sleeping with another guy but a girlfriend sleeping with another girl is a porn movie.
In the quarterly lamentation about the need for science outreach in the U.S., what often gets lost is that not everyone will be good at science.   Lack of science knowledge is regarded as some sort of defect, but it is never an issue with the child, instead it is society or schools.   We need more funding for cartoon characters and flashy animation to explain science because that is what today's kids 'need', we are told.   If you are in that camp, the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress will make you happy.   
Without question, a booming worldwide population and the need to feed them have resulted in greater greenhouse gas emissions.   The goal of any civilized society has always been to make food affordable to everyone regardless of income and we are converging on that rapidly.   If anything, the rising obesity problem is because we are reaching a Utopian ideal of enough food for everyone in richer countries.