General Science
Category archives for General Science
Have a dog? Want to help science?
Posted by ERV on December 13, 2012 Record yourself playing with your puppies for 30-60 seconds and upload the vid to the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab website! Dog-dog play has been, relatively, well studied. The signs/signals/noises pups play, the repercussions for not playing by the rules, the benefits of play to an adult pup, its a very interesting fusion of evolution and…
Bad Idea of the Day: Halal Pharmaceuticals
Posted by ERV on November 9, 2012 One of the more amusing aspects of ‘You are only criticizing Islam because you are RACIST AGAINST MIDDLE-EASTERNERS!!!!’ is the fact that most Muslims do not live in the Middle-East. They live in Asia. Case in point: Indonesia, where about >87% of the population is Muslim. 12.7% of all Muslims live in Indonesia (Iraq? 1.2%).…
*squint* Not sure if revolutionary way to store vaccines and antibiotics, or total BS. *squint*
Posted by ERV on July 25, 2012 Briefly, a lot of our vaccines and antibiotics need to be refrigerated, if not frozen, for them to maintain their usefulness. This makes it problematic to get vaccines and antibiotics to places that need them, but lack proper refrigeration (or electricity, for that matter)– Its called the Cold Chain. Some folks at Tufts think they…
Alovasudden, SCIENCE!!!
Posted by ERV on June 10, 2012 I was just derping around at Cycle Gear this afternoon, when alovasudden, SCIENCE!!! Couple: *debating about what color helmet to buy – its summer, should they get the white/yellow one instead of black/blue* Cycle Gear Dude: “The material that makes helmets work as helmets insulates you from the ‘heat’ of the sun. We did an…
Food woo bites the dust
Posted by ERV on February 22, 2012 I am not a ‘fan’ of dietary sensationalism. A can of Mountain Dew made with high fructose corn syrup once a week is not going to kill you. Megadoses of various vitamins and minerals is not going to ‘cure’ you. People who demonize or canonize food annoy me. Funny enough, we have examples of both…
Oklahoma senator concerned about dead babies in his Mountain Dew
Posted by ERV on January 26, 2012 Just, turn off your brain before you read this post, folks. If you try to to think about this, Im pretty sure your entire brain will hemorrhage, and I dont want to be responsible for that. You think I am joking. I am not. I actually heard rumors about what Im going to type here…
‘Sense About Science’ slaughters celebrity silliness
Posted by ERV on January 2, 2012 Oh my gawd this is so fun! You know how we are always screaming online about some stupid thing Jenny McCarthy or Bill O’Reilly has said/done? A group of folks at Sense About Science have gotten together some of the stupid, if not outright dangerous ‘potentially misleading’ things celebrities have said about earth science/heath/diet/etc and…
24 hours of absurdity in virology
Posted by ERV on December 21, 2011 The strangest things have happened in the past 24 hours. 1– New FDA approved clinical trial of anti-HIV vaccine YAY, right? Except I have no idea what the hell they are proposing to do in this clinical trial, other than what was mentioned in press releases– Its some kind of killed virus. Why the hell…
Realistic depiction of the scientific process
Posted by ERV on November 17, 2011 My favorite ‘artistic rendition’ of the scientific process, the only realistic depiction of what science is/how it is done on TV, is this montage from Big Bang Theory. This flow-chart is pretty damn accurate too: See more on Know Your Meme This is what you are getting into if you want to be a scientist–…
Blatantly inappropriate data analysis still counts as lying
Posted by ERV on November 11, 2011 BlogBrother Ethan Siegel just caught (yet another) scientist manipulating data to generate the conclusion they want… not the conclusion the data actually supports. Exposing a Climate Science Fraud Yeah, thats how we roll on SciBlogs. But in my example, the scientists actively hid relevant data from other scientists they were speaking to/the journals they were…