sheril | November 4, 2008Nate's got the final anticipated scorecard up:
Now hold on tight as election day unfolds...
sheril | November 3, 2008
Today marks our inaugural post on our newest blog over at Talking Science; a very cool non-profit founded by NPR's Ira Flatow and dedicated to creating media projects which make science 'user friendly'. We'll be contributing to the biweekly 'Intersection Edition' where we'll blog about some of our favorite topics from climate change to storms and science policy.
The Intersection at ScienceBlogs will also return in full force now that we're nearing completion of our forthcoming book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future about the growing disconnect between…
sheril | November 3, 2008Ill Doctrine is a hip-hop video blog hosted by Jay Smooth, the founder of my home town's longest running hip-hop radio show, WBAI's Underground Railroad. Watch, share, spread the word, and VOTE. You matter.
sheril | November 1, 2008Not surprisingly, the winner of yesterday's Halloween poll asking what scares you most was b) Sarah Palin as President. More unexpected was the number of emails in my inbox by this morning requesting photos of my Sarah Palin costume--inspired by the reader who sent these umm, lovely images in August. So without further ado:
[caption suggestions encouraged in comments]
sheril | October 31, 2008Halloween 2008 and I'm dressed as GOP vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin. I tried to find a stuffed animal fruit fly to carry around as means to distinguish myself from the other Sarah Palins wandering 9th St in Durham, but to no avail. So it goes. And now for the second annual HALLOWEEN reader poll on this 31st day of October...
Which of the following do you find scariest and why? (answer in comments)
a) Bush's last stand against the environment
b) Sarah Palin as President
c) The current state of our economy
d) John McCain on SNL
e) Global climate change
* Alternative frightening…
sheril | October 31, 2008Following our first talk at Beyond Belief 3, we participated in this discussion with Tony Haymet, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Naomi Oreskes was also in our session, but unable to stay for the panel. Watch for interesting comments from Jonathan Haidt, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Sam Harris, Leon Lederman, and more:
sheril | October 30, 2008..she releases the most ridiculous negative campaign ad in history:
The commercial comparing Kay Hagan to a dog was pretty bad, but now Elizabeth Dole is accusing a Sunday school teacher of being 'godless' with a fake voice over at the end. This is not politics. It surpasses bad judgment and I'm embarrassed for my state.
sheril | October 30, 2008Despite the economy, it appears some businesses continue booming. In July, we reported that Exxon Mobil posted a net income of $11.68 billion. Well, record broken. According to CNN, its third-quarter profit was $14.83 billion:
The latest quarter's net income equaled $1,865.69 per second, nearly $400 a second more than the prior mark.
So new quarter, same question: How about reinvesting some of the profits tax toward alternative energy research?
cmooney | October 29, 2008My latest Science Progress column just went up...it's about the decline of science reporting in newspapers, and what we can do to fight back against this trend.
I start out with the story of Peter Calamai, until recently the staff science writer of the Toronto Star:
Peter Calamai describes himself--and only half jokingly--as a "grizzled veteran" of the newspaper industry. Over the course of his forty-year career, he has covered a wide range of subjects, but for the past decade Calamai served as the dedicated science reporter for Canada's most widely read newspaper, the Toronto Star. That's…
sheril | October 29, 2008I contribute to another Seed blog called 'A Vote For Science' where we recently launched our 'YouTube Challenge':
Scientists and Engineers for America Action Fund and ScienceBlogs have teamed up to bring you "A Vote For Science." Here we will feature videos of scientists explaining who they are voting for and why.
Jennifer, Lawrence, and many others have already submitted videos, and I finally recorded mine from the road, taking a slightly different approach:
Readers are encouraged to upload your own YouTube videos and make sure you tag them with 'avoteforscience.'
sheril | October 29, 2008Yes, we've heard all about it. I've been receiving a good deal of email and indeed, would have blogged Drosophila melanogaster earlier, but it's difficult to post while traveling. As Christopher Hitchens explained, curiously it's true:
last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."
But rather than wax poetic on everything wrong with this, I give the floor--err, screen--to…
sheril | October 28, 2008Earlier this month, we participated in Beyond Belief 3 at The Salk Institute hosted by The Science Network. It was a great chance to air some of the arguments that are developing for our new book--which, as Chad Orzel just mentioned, will be entitled Unscientific America. Here is the first of our sessions, where we lay out how the experience of being involved in Science Debate 2008 led us to think hard about the frayed relationship between science and mainstream American culture:
sheril | October 27, 2008Research highlighted recently in New Scientist suggests that for the fellas, 'braininess boosts likelihood of sex':
To many women, a smart man will appeal because he is likely to be clever enough to keep his family afloat. But he may also pass on "good" genes to his children, say Prokosch and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis.
Surprised?
I'm not. I've long been a sucker for intelligence... Further, while a different cocktail of motivations, hormones, and uh, physical qualities influence male preference, I suspect long-term mate selection favors the same trait in women…
sheril | October 26, 2008Orcas are one of my favorite species. Extremely intelligent and exhibiting many complex behaviors, they're simply beautiful marine mammals.
Seven orcas are now feared dead in Puget Sound. If true, it could be the biggest decline among the sound's population in almost a decade. Possible causes: Low numbers of their main food--chinook salmon, pollution, and stress from whale-watching tour boats and Navy sonar.
The number of 'southern resident' orcas is estimated to be 83.
sheril | October 24, 2008Check out this TalkingScience video Ira Flatow featured during his keynote at Innovation 2008 about CERN's Large Hadron Collider:
sheril | October 24, 2008A highlight of Innovation 2008 was the keynote address by Ira Flatow, the host and Executive Producer of Talk of the Nation: Science Friday on NPR. His weekly show features interesting and lively discussions on science, technology, health, space, and the environment and he also founded TalkingScience, a non-profit dedicated to creating media projects which make science 'user friendly'.
Ira spoke after Tuesday's lunch about science in the media with a focus on what makes it onto television. Given yesterday's post highlighted an example of the ever-blurring line between news and entertainment…