Science & Society

Smarter Farming Would Equal A 20 Percent Reduction In Global Temperature Increase During Summer Months

By carefully selecting which varieties of food crops to cultivate, much of Europe and North America could be cooled by up to 1°C during the summer growing season, say researchers from the University of Bristol, UK. This is equivalent to an annual global co ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 15 2009 - 3:04pm

Wellness: a balance of mind, body, spirit in peaceful vitality

I am a living, breathing, trudging onward authority on the quest for wellness. I'm not an athlete, my body is imperfect, and sometimes I choose unhealthy indulgence. Yet, no one has worked harder to achieve optimal health. The most important lesson I ...

Blog Post - Diana Deregnier - Jan 16 2009 - 2:19am

Commonwealth Fund Says Mandatory Insurance Plus Government Subsidies Make The Best Health Policy

A new Commonwealth Fund study says that the United States should adopt the policies of Switzerland and the Netherlands.    Those countries have near-universal coverage, though they have to subsidize up to 40 percent of families since individual health cov ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 16 2009 - 2:06am

Signs of the bubble popping

Previously I wrote about "the S cience Bubble ".  Since then, there has been good news, and bad. The good news is that apparently Speaker Pelosi has been recorded as noting that Science will be emphasized in the stimulus package.  I do hope that ...

Blog Post - Morgan Giddings - Jan 16 2009 - 10:33am

How to go from Physicist to Crackpot

At Cosmic Variance, find out how the once active physicist Frank Tipler now registers high on John Baez's crackpot index: In science, we tend to valorize (to the point of fetishizing) a certain kind of ability to abstractly manipulate symbols and conc ...

Blog Post - Michael White - Jan 17 2009 - 4:48pm

Scientific Heroes and Genius Cults

OK, here's more commentary on some of the interesting stuff over at Cosmic Variance, this time on the cult of genius: During high school or college, many aspiring physicists latch onto Feynman or Einstein or Hawking as representing all they hope to b ...

Blog Post - Michael White - Jan 17 2009 - 5:09pm

Climate Scientist Consensus- Global Warming Is Real (Other Scientists, Not So Much)

Peter Doran, Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wasn't all that happy that his Nature paper(1) was widely used  by detractors of early 2000s global warming theory so he set out recently to ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 19 2009 - 8:18pm

Back to the Future and scientific plausibility

It is Back to the Future week at Overthinkingit.com, a fellow awesome science geeks blog. Over the past week, the Overthinking It team has subjected the Back to the Future trilogy to a level of scrutiny it certainly deserves, pointing out a wide variety of ...

Blog Post - Becky Jungbauer - Jan 19 2009 - 11:02pm

Trust The Media And You'll Live Longer- Study

Not a fan of the mass media?  You just might not live as long,  according to a BMC Medicine study of people from 29 Asian countries which says that individuals with high levels of trust in the mass media tend to be healthier. Unless we are your mass media. ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 21 2009 - 9:44pm

Maths and the City

I have watched two so far of a BBC2 TV series The City Uncovered with Evan Davis, of which the three parts are: Banks and How to Break Them: Evan returns to first principles, and explains exactly how a bank is supposed to work. (R) Tricks with Risk: In the ...

Blog Post - Robert H Olley - Jan 22 2009 - 7:59am