Science & Society

Fear Is Not Enough: Climate Negotiations Relying On “Dangerous” Thresholds Won't Succeed

Giving a hard number as a critical threshold for dangerous climate change-  temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius- has not helped climate negotiations.  The USA, for example, has led the developed world in reducing emissions from energy, though to be fa ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 17 2012 - 10:21am

Why Government Appears Inefficient

Three reasons why government can look less efficient than it really is: 1. Cherry-picking in privatization. Let’s suppose we could rank government agencies or services in descending order of productivity: 1, 2, 3, and so on, with agency 1 being the most e ...

Article - Fred Phillips - Oct 21 2012 - 12:25am

L'Oréal-UNESCO Announces Women In Science Laureates

The L'Oréal Foundation and UNESCO has announced the five women scientists who will be honored as the 15th L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Laureates. On March 28th, 2013, the five Laureates will be honored at an Awards ceremony in Paris and w ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 19 2012 - 10:57am

Jonah Lehrer, Proust, And The Tyranny Of Salami

In the scientific community, researchers call it salami slicing. Appropriately, the act consists of shaving down a collected dataset until a scientist reaches the smallest scrap of result that still constitutes an original idea. This decontextualized whis ...

Article - Clayton Aldern - Oct 21 2012 - 12:23am

How Much Initiative Should People Who Care About The Climate Take?

An iron dumping experiment was recently conducted by an environmentally concerned group who believe controlled geo-engineering may be the solution to impending science issues. It was conducted without involvement from the scientific community and without p ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Oct 22 2012 - 1:19am

Face-ism: Paper Says Mainstream Media Is Sexist- And Less Discriminatory Cultures Are Moreso

Psychology of Women Quarterly, the scientific, peer-reviewed journal of feminism, contends that there are gender stereotypes in the media- photographs of men focus on male faces while photographs of women are focused on female bodies. Such "face-ism& ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 22 2012 - 5:00am

6 Years To Scientists Guilty Of Not Predicting Earthquakes

Italy is a beautiful, crazy country. Take today's verdict, which condemns seven scientists (Franco Barberi, Enzo Boschi, Mauro Dolce, Bernardo De Bernardinis, Giulio Selvaggi, Claudio Eva, and Gianmichele Calvi) to six years of prison, plus a huge fin ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 23 2012 - 4:01am

Manslaughter Sentence For Scientists Who Misinformed Public On Deadly Aquila Quake

A court in L'Aquila, Italy, handed six-year-prison sentences to members of a national "Great Risks Commission". Residents noticed increased seismic activity. They were used to tremors, because L’Aquila sits on a major fault line, and they c ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jul 7 2014 - 1:28am

700 Researchers Call On Gilles-Eric Seralini To Release GMO Test Data

700 scientists and academicians have signed petitions calling on French researcher Gilles-Eric Seralini to release research data he claims is evidence for  health problems associated with biotech crops. The petitioners are from every continent and represen ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 18 2013 - 12:01pm

Wealthy ‘Big Tobacco’ Lawyer Excited About Prospects For Food Industry

If you get rich suing people, your days going after Big Tobacco are basically over. The tobacco companies have been sued for everything by now and the people who still smoke know what they are doing, and the risks, and they are willing to pay an ever-incre ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Nov 1 2012 - 7:00pm