scientificactivist

When my girlfriend told me that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had suggested that Barack Obama choose Chet Edwards--my former (and George W. Bush's current) congressman--as his running mate, I thought she was pulling my leg. But, she was serious, and--as usual--she was right. Here's the video…

Apparently, the Bush Administration has adopted a sophisticated new strategy for not dealing with global warming. From The New York Times: White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency's conclusion that greenhouse…

On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a case regarding the Navy conducting sonar training exercises in the proximity of marine mammals--some of which are threatened or endangered species. A large body of evidence indicates that these sorts of…

I've been pretty open here about my support of Barack Obama's bid for the presidency, but one issue I certainly disagree with him on is his support of corn ethanol subsidies. Unfortunately, it looks like that this is one issue he's unlikely to improve on, as The New York Times reports today that…

This evening, I was watching The Colbert Report--a show that, along with The Daily Show, I've been enjoying much more frequently lately since they began posting full (free and internationally-available) episodes online--and I stumbled across this interview from last night's show with Jonathan…

Just a bit of self-promotion here, but on Friday I got a nice mention by Curtis Brainard in the Columbia Journalism Review blog The Kicker: Yesterday, The Scientific Activist blog (part of the ScienceBlogs.com community) carried a keen-eyed piece of media criticism, turning the rating scheme of The…

A report by the NASA inspector general released earlier this week acknowledged that political appointees in the NASA press office censored climate scientists from 2004 to 2006. That would have been interesting news... about two years ago. Yawn. What caught my eye, though, were these claims in an…

Yesterday, I blogged about a recent article correlating a nation's research output related to human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) with its policies on hESC research. There was one particular source of uncertainty, though: As Levine points out, he didn't actually count papers that published results…

The conclusion stated in the title of this post may seem painfully obvious, but a new study published in Cell Stem Cell by Aaron Levine (assistant professor at Georgia Tech and author of Cloning: A Beginner's Guide) backs it up with some hard data. To come to this conclusion, Levine compared a…

Last night was a historic night, with Barack Obama finally effectively clinching the Democratic nomination by surpassing the "magic number" of required delegates. Barring any last-minute fight over delegate rules from Hillary Clinton's campaign (something that I think is not likely to happen),…

After a rapid media outcry, the US and Israel have come together to reinstate the Fulbright Scholarships initially revoked from several students from Gaza due to Israel-imposed travel restrictions. From The New York Times: JERUSALEM -- The American State Department has reinstated seven Fulbright…

Something very unfortunate happened this week. The US had to revoke eight Fulbright Scholarships for students from Gaza to study in the US due to Israeli-imposed travel restrictions. From CNN: The U.S. government has taken Fulbright scholarships away from eight students in the Palestinian…

From today's New York Times: WASHINGTON -- A special three-judge court ruled Friday that Congress acted constitutionally when it extended the law requiring sections of the country with a history of racial discrimination to get federal approval for any changes in voting procedures. The unanimous…

Oh, the things we do in the name of "the global war on terror." And, not just in the US. Here's an example from the UK. From The Guardian: A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related…

When I was a student at Texas A&M University and active in politics there, I spent a lot of time on voter registration. Much of this effort was devoted to the community outside of the university, but my primary focus was on students at the university. And, although some people would contend…

On Monday, I attended an interesting lecture sponsored by the 21st Century School here in Oxford entitled "What Is Science For?". You can see a discussion on the event here and read a pdf summary of it here. The lecture was co-presented by scientist John Sulston and philosopher John Harris, and…

This just in: John Edwards has officially endorsed Barack Obama for president. It's a little late (since Obama has had the nomination all but wrapped up for a couple of months now), and I'm not sure what kind of an impact this will have, but I still find this exciting. Although I've been an Obama…

Tom Holder--one of the founders of Pro-Test and now the head of a new organization Speaking of Research--has a released a five-and-a-half-minute video primer on animal research. It's short, but it still manages to touch on most of the basics, so it's definitely worth a few minutes of your time:

You can file this one under "should have been done about twenty years ago." From the Mail & Guardian: Lawmakers on Tuesday debated legislation to remove former South African president Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) from an apartheid-era United States terrorist blacklist…

As the media circus over Jeremiah Wright continues, it should give us pause that the media hasn't decided to focus on John McCain and his embrace of a wide range of religious bigots. Although McCain once called these men "agents of intolerance" in 2000, he has since done a total flip-flop and…

A week after a major report found widespread Bush Administration political interference with science in the EPA, the Chicago Tribune reported late this week that the Administration has forced the resignation of Mary Gade, head of the EPA's Midwest office: SAGINAW, Mich. - The battle over dioxin…

This morning, I had to wake up to another article about John McCain's and Hillary Clinton's proposal to temporarily waive the gas tax this summer. That's it. I'm just going to have to come out and say it: this is a really, really, really stupid idea. Period. I'm not an economist--far from it--…

When the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) last week released a report detailing widespread political interference in science at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), I almost didn't blog about it, since the fact that political interference runs rampant in the Bush Administration shouldn't…

Earlier this week, I wrote about the Chinese ship carrying arms bound for Zimbabwe that was turned away thanks primarily to the actions of the South African dockworkers' union. A news story from the Mail & Guardian today gives a pretty good indication of just how those weapons might have been…

Last Thursday (April 24), the Senate unanimously passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA, H.R. 493) in a landmark vote. The goal of this bill is "to prohibit discrimination on the basis of genetic information with respect to health insurance and employment," and it…

Now that the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang--which was delivering arms from China to Zimbabwe--has been turned away for good, there are two significant aspects of this story upon which we should reflect. The first is that the true heroes of this tale are the unionized dockworkers, who catalyzed this…

Molecule of the Day has a post up about isotopically-enriched food that caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the idea is wildly outrageous, and, secondly, this is something that actually gets joked about quite a bit in an NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) lab. Any given element can come…

When someone asks the question "why are veins blue?" a likely response is that they're blue because the blood in veins is deoxygenated. While it's true that venous blood vessels carry a lower concentration of oxygen than their arterial counterparts, this isn't the reason for their blue appearance…

The arguably wacky premise behind a New York Times article this Saturday is that the Large Hadron Collider (LHR)--slated to be the world's most impressive particle accelerator when it's up and running later this year--could inadvertently produce an Earth-destroying black hole. Or, that's at least…

Via Americans for Medical Progress comes news that Tom Holder of Pro-Test has started his own pro-animal research organization in the US, Speaking of Research. Here's the full press release: The tide could be turning against animal rights activists who demonstrate on campuses around the nation.…