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Why didn't I see that before? (World Cup edition)

I've always liked soccer balls -- and not just because you can play soccer with them. The arrangement of pentagons and hexagons to form a surfaces that's reasonable spherical always seemed outstandingly clever. Who was the genius who first realized you could do that? Well, my world has been rocked. I still think the soccer ball is clever, but in and entirely different kind of way. Tonight I was flipping through the copy of American Scientist that arrived with today's mail, looking at the pictures*, and I came across this article on the topology (and combinatorics) of soccer balls. (The…

Mind Hacks

Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan has generously allowed me to answer a few of his excellent questions. Check it out. Q: You seem to mostly focus on past artists but jokingly mentioned in a recent interview that maybe your next book will be called 'Kanye West was a neuroscientist'. Are there contemporary artists that you value as potentially inspiring progress in the brain sciences? A: There are some obvious candidates, like Richard Powers and Ian McEwan, who have written wonderful novels about modern neuroscience. (See, for example, Galatea 2.2 or Saturday or The Echo Maker.) But I don't think it…

An Atypical Night of Poker

Went to Soaring Eagle last night to play some poker for the first time since they reopened the poker room. I arrived about 4, but there were already fairly substantial lists going for most of the games. I put myself on the lists for 3/6 and 6/12 holdem and went to the buffet for some dinner. Came back in perfect time to get called for a 3/6 game, but was still well down the list for 6/12. I buy a rack of chips and as I'm walking to the table I hear my name. I turn around to see an old friend of mine that I haven't seen in probably a decade sitting in a 10/20 game. I've known Will since he was…

Modeling antiviral resistance, II: a modeling paper

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] In this post we start to dig into a mathematical model of antiviral resistance in influenza. The modern era of mathematical modeling started early in the last century with attempts to understand malaria spread, almost exactly 100 years ago. For the first 50 of those years scientists used pure…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Julie Kelsey

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Julie Kelsey to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? My name is Julie Bloss Kelsey. I am a full-time stay-at-home mom and a part-time freelance writer with a…

New DOT policy promises better health and safety protections for flight attendants

[Updated 1/5/2013] [Updated 8/25/2013] The world's largest labor organization for airline flight attendants--- the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) ---says it took four decades of work, but now its members working in airplane cabins will finally have rights and protections provided by federal OSHA.   In an on-line letter to members, the AFA-CWA calls the victory: "OSHA extended to our cabins." For decades AFA has pursued legal and regulatory solutions to extend OSHA safety and health protections to workers in the airline industry.  The roadblocks have been enormous, but our union…

Announcing the Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction

A few years back, I became aware of Mike Brotherton's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and said "somebody should do this for quantum physics." At the time, I wasn't in a position to do that, but in the interim, the APS Outreach program launched the Public Outreach and Informing the Public Grant program, providing smallish grants for new public outreach efforts. So, because I apparently don't have enough on my plate as it is, I floated the idea with Steve Rolston at Maryland (my immediate supervisor when I was a grad student), who liked it, and we put together a proposal with their Director of…

Editorializing Mike S. Adams

Well, I thought I was done with Mike S. Adams, but I keep getting sucked back in. I was asked by the University Register, our weekly campus newspaper, to submit an editorial on Adams' talk last week. "Sure," I said, and whipped out eleven hundred words. You can read them in situ in the online edition of the Register, or you can look below the fold. Talk by Mike S. Adams lacked that certain je ne sais quois I attended part of Mike S. Adams' talk last Thursday. I have to say that I was very disappointed. He spent on hour telling us about his victimhood—that he has been continually oppressed by…

Using our powers for good - how web security software can help to transcribe old books

What would you do if someone asked you to help transcribe an old book onto a website? Chances are, you'd say no on the basis that you have other things to do, or simply that it just doesn't sound very interesting. And yet, millions of people every day are helping with precisely this task, and most are completely unaware that they're helping out. It's all thanks to a computer program developing by Luis von Ahn and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University. Their goal was to slightly alter a simple task that all web users encounter and convert it from wasted time into something productive. That…

Is the Man Flu a Reality?

We all get sick. Young or old, male or female, everyone gets sick at some point in their lives. But only some are susceptible to a specialized disease known as the "Man Flu," which somehow causes men to think they have the flu when, in fact, they have only a little cold. Where did the idea of a Man Flu come from? It's origins are uncertain. In general, a lot of people tend to think they're worse off than they really are when they're sick - a poll by Panadol Cold and Flu, for example, found that 61% of people who went to pharmacists claiming to have the flu didn't. Somewhere along the line,…

Browsing through the Philosophical Transactions on species and generation

One of the major events in the history of science was the foundation of a number of published communications, so that the results of observation and research could be relatively quickly shared amongst scholars, and one of the first of these was the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, which institution was founded in part by my illustrious namesake, Bp John Wilkins. Although the actual publications are online only in JStor, to which a subscription is required, the Philosophical Transactions were republished by the Royal Society in the early 1800s, and they are online…

Periodic Table of the ScienceBlogs, Part 6: Blogs G-I

Gene Expression Categories: Biology, Philosophy of Science Razib has a degree in the life sciences and works in information technology, but he also nurses a strong interest in evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology. Gene Expression deals primarily with the intersection between new developments in molecular and evolutionary biology, and older established fields such as systematics and paleoanthropology. In person, Razib is an 'adult kid' who doesn't plan on growing up any time soon, and his non-science interests span from ancient Chinese history to science fiction. Good Math, Bad Math…

Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Gregorio Zara

Gregorio Zara -- Filipino physicist and aeronautical engineer Creator of the first videophone ( a forerunner of such video telecommunication applications as Skype, Webcam and videoconferencing) and discoverer of the physical law known as the "Zara Effect." PLEASE SHARE IF YOU ARE INSPIRED BY THIS STORY! Back in the 1950's, the videophone -- a telephone device that allows you to see the individual you are speaking with in real (or near-real) time -- was a mere dream of science fiction.  But physicist and aeronautical engineer Gregorio Zara, one of the Philippines' most celebrated inventors,…

90 days and counting for Labor Department rule to prevent black lung disease

This week will mark the 90-day point of the Labor Department submitting for White House review one of its top priority regulations to protect coal miners' health. It's a rule to prevent black lung disease. The director of the office that conducts those reviews, Howard Shelanski, promised earlier this year during his confirmation hearing that timely review of agencies' regulations would be a top priority. Mr. Shelanski said: “I absolutely share the concern you just raised about timeliness. ...I recognized that EO 12866 establishes the initial 90 day review process, and it would be one of my…

Fall Gardening Class Starting Up!

Just to let you know, I'm starting another class this week - this one helping people get started with fall gardening and season extension. If you are like most folks, you probably start out enthusiastic about your garden, but around the middle of the summer, you get focused on harvesting, or overwhelmed by the heat and the weeds and let the cool season garden peter out. That's a mistake, because with very simple and cheap methods of season extension and a little attention right about now (for those as northerly as me, a bit later for folks south of me in this hemisphere), you can be…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Bird Song Discoveries May Lead To Refinement Of Darwinian Theory: For Williams College biology professor Heather Williams, the songs birds sing are more than a pleasant part of a spring day. They are a window into how communication works in the natural world. A birdsong is more than just an encapsulated package of information, it is "a behavior frozen in time." One of her projects is to record and map out the songs of Savannah sparrows that spend the warmer months on a small Canadian island, Kent Island, in the Bay of Fundy. With the help of microphones, binoculars, and a well-documented set…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Secret Of The Sweet-Sounding Stradivarius: Wood Density Explains Sound Quality Of Great Master Violins: The advantage of using medical equipment to study classical musical instruments has been proven by a Dutch researcher from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). In collaboration with a renowned luthier, Dr. Berend Stoel put classical violins, including several made by Stradivarius, in a CT scanner. The homogeneity in the densities of the wood from which the classical violins are made, in marked contrast to the modern violins studied, may very well explain their superior sound…

"Unlicensed Acupuncturist intentionally infects patients with HIV" Wait, what?

This story has been making the rounds online-- Unlicensed Acupuncturist intentionally infects patients with HIV Unlicensed Acupuncturist Charged In 16 HIV Infections In Switzerland Swiss acupuncturist charged in 16 HIV infections Swiss "healer" accused of intentionally infecting 16 people with HIV using acupuncture needles -- I only have the details you all can see there. Im not exactly sure what to make of this. Long-time readers of ERV might expect me to do a post on how a psychotic woo-meister used his powers of woo to kill people, the trust people put into woo-ers who are uneducated…

Homework for Parents

The New York Times has a story on a novel approach to teaching high-school English: assigning homework to parents: So far, Mr. [Damion] Frye, an English teacher at Montclair High School, has asked the parents to read and comment on a Franz Kafka story, Section 1 of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" and a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Their newest assignment is a poem by Saul Williams, a poet, musician and rapper who lives in Los Angeles. The ninth graders complete their assignments during class; the parents are supposed to write their responses on a blog Mr. Frye started online.…

Light in Moon's Permanently Dark Craters

I have friend who has been trapped in a mostly underground research facility at the South Pole since early winter. She recently broke her foot, which is just tough luck because nobody gets out of there until spring, which is, I think, in October. This will remind you of the stroy of Dr. Jerri Nielsen, who was at an Antarctic research station and diagnosed herself of having breast cancer, and was rescued rather dramatically back in 1999. Nielsen died, by the way, Tuesday. (Of breast cancer.) Well, my friend at the South Pole is not going to die of a broken foot. (Though perhaps other…

PNAS: Sandra Ulbrich Almazan, Enzyme Scientist

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Sandra Ulbrich Almazan, who works as a scientist in the food industry.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I am an assistant scientist for an enzyme company. I work in the R&D department; I focus on finding…

Changes to NIH Peer Review

NIH has agreed to some suggestions from advisory panels about how to change the grant peer review process: One year ago, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni asked external and internal advisory panels for advice on how to cope with a record number of applications, a flat NIH budget, and a shortage of quality reviewers. The two panels issued recommendations this winter (Science, 29 February, p. 1169). NIH's response was presented today to the Advisory Committee to the Director by National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research Director Lawrence Tabak. NIH agreed with the panels on the need to…

Why Nicholas Wade Didn't Cover the Amniotic Stem Cell Study, And How He Sees "Wild Overpromise" on Both Sides of the Debate

In the days before the House vote to fund embryonic stem cell research, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times ran page one stories heralding a Nature Biotech study that indicated stem cells extracted from amniotic fluid might have "near pluripotent" like properties. Yet, despite the heavy attention from its competitive rivals, the New York Times was silent on the study. (For a full roundup.) Not soon after the front page headlines appeared, as I predicted, the White House and various anti-abortion groups jumped on the study to claimed that it offered an important "middle way." Given the…

A new method for imaging whole-brain structural networks

The higher-order brain functions underlying complex patterns of human behaviour are poorly understood, not least because of the enormous number of neural computations involved. Complex behaviours require the parallel  and integrated activity of hundreds (or even thousands) of discrete brain modules, each consisting of thousands of neurons. For a real understanding of how the brain generates complex behaviours, we need detailed knowledge of the large-scale architecture of the neural networks involved. Visualizing this global architecture is possible with simple organisms.  For example, the…

Nature News article on conference blogging

Geoff Brumfiel has done a great job in this article for Nature News on the promise and perils of conference blogging. On the promise side there is discussion of the wildly successful FriendFeed coverage of last year's ISMB meeting, which ended up being aggregated into a journal article; in the perilous direction, I get a mention for my mildly disastrous foray into conference blogging at the recent Cold Spring Harbor Biology of Genomes meeting. Brumfiel does a good job of conveying the currently chaotic state of conference policies towards the use of social media by participants:…

Good to the bone; adducing honesty via imaging

Update: See Ed Yong. Randall Parker points me to a new paper from Joshua Greene which describes the neurological responses of individuals when do, or don't, lie, when lying might be in their self-interest. From EurekaAlert: The research was designed to test two theories about the nature of honesty - the "Will" theory, in which honesty results from the active resistance of temptation, and the "Grace" theory in which honesty is a product of lack of temptation. The results of this study suggest that the "Grace" theory is true, because the honest participants did not show any additional neural…

Atheists - the last U.S. minority that can be openly maligned without consequence

I am sure that you have already heard about the despicable TV ad that Elizabeth Dole aired against Kay Hagan. You probably heard about it online, perhaps on Twitter or FriendFeed or blogs. Here's a quick selection: My godless money. Take it or leave it. The Worst Insult of All? Thou shalt not bear false witness NC: Hagan responds to 'Godless' ad; Dole's immigrant bashing Elizabeth Dole ad falsely suggests opponent Kay Hagan is 'Godless.' North Carolina Senate Race Degenerates Into Shouting Match About Atheists GODLESS AMERICANS. Sen. Liddy Dole (R-NC) attacks Sunday school teacher: 'There is…

Framing Science Talk and Seminar at Cal Tech

Next week, I will be teaming up with Chris Mooney at Cal Tech for an evening lecture followed by a day long science communication seminar for the university's graduate students and post-docs. Details are below along with the suggested reading list. Speaking Science Boot Camp Matthew C. Nisbet & Chris Mooney Over the past several years, the seemingly never-ending controversies over evolution, embryonic stem cell research, global climate change, and many other topics have led to a troubling revelation. Scientific knowledge, alone, does not always suffice when it comes to winning political…

Is reprinting a figure "fair use"?

When Shelley Batts wrote up a report on an article about antioxidants in fruits, she never expected to get contacted by the copyright police, but that's exactly what happened. She had reproduced a table and a figure from the article, and got this notice from an editorial assistant at the publisher: The above article contains copyrighted material in the form of a table and graphs taken from a recently published paper in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. If these figures are not removed immediately, lawyers from John Wiley & Sons will contact you with further action. She…

Birds in the News 171

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Australia's Superb Parrot, Polytelis swainsonii, is listed as a vulnerable species. Image: Julian Robinson (Canberra ornithologists group) [larger view]. Birds in Science and Technology "In the past, people thought birds were stupid," laments the aptly named scientist Christopher Bird. But in fact, some of our feathered friends are far cleverer than we might think. And one group in particular -- the corvids -- has astonished scientists with extraordinary feats of memory, an ability to employ complex social reasoning…

Birds in the News 170

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter BirdLife's newest flyways project will help to make one of the world's most important bird migration flyways safer for soaring birds. Image: Desert Vu. Birds in Science and Technology Zebra finches, which normally learn their complex courtship songs from their fathers, spontaneously developed the same songs all on their own after only a few generations. "We found that in this case, the culture was pretty much encoded in the genome," said Partha Mitra of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, co-author of the…

From "Kelly Girls" to hotel housekeepers: Women in the contingent workforce

In a New York Times Opinionator column, SUNY Buffalo sociology professor Erin Hatton traces the development of the US temporary-worker industry, which added more jobs than any other over the past three years. Temporary workers generally earn low wages and face job insecurity, and often lack benefits like employer-sponsored health insurance and paid sick leave. Hatton explains that temp agencies offering such disappointing wage and benefits packages emerged in the years following World War II -- and did so despite the growing union power that characterized that era. They managed it, Hatton…

Why not just castrate them? (Part 2): The mainstream media finally notices the Geiers' Lupron protocol

I originally joined this wild and woolly collective known as ScienceBlogs back in February 2006. I was not part of the very first wave of bloggers who made up ScienceBlogs when it launched, although I potentially could have, mainly because I had to work out policies about outside employment with my university before I could join up. In any case, one of the very first posts that I did back then that made a bit of a splash was a little ditty I called in my usual inimitable and restrained fashion, Why not just castrate them? It was the dark saga of an even darker father-and-son tag team of…

Preventing breast cancer: the cancer free economy

By Polly Hoppin, Dick Clapp, Molly Jacobs, Margaret Quinn and David Kriebel We all know a woman who has been diagnosed with breast cancer, whether she’s our mother, sister, close friend or neighbor.  It’s the most common invasive cancer in women in this country, and we need to get more serious about preventing it. Last month a respected group released a report on breast cancer prevention with a clear and urgent message: “identifying and mitigating the environmental causes of breast cancer is the key to reducing the number of new cases.” The report of the Interagency Breast Cancer and…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Buying Years to Extinction: Is Compensatory Mitigation for Marine Bycatch a Sufficient Conservation Measure for Long-Lived Seabirds?: Along the lines of the 'polluter pays principle', it has recently been proposed…

UK Rock Hall of Fame Ceremony

Last night they showed the induction ceremony for the UK Music Hall of Fame on VH1. I didn't see the first part of the show, only the last part where they inducted Pink Floyd, but that was well worth it. Pete Townsend did the induction, which is appropriate given his friendship with the band and his past collaborations with them (if you've never heard it, go find Townsend's 1985 album White City. Gilmour lends his unmistakeable sound to Give Blood, the best song on the album). Roger Waters wasn't there, but was connected by video, and Gilmour and Nick Mason were there in person to accept the…

Slutty voles & generous humans

Variation in neural V1aR predicts sexual fidelity and space use among male prairie voles in semi-natural settings: Although prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are socially monogamous, males vary in both sexual and spatial fidelity. Most males form pairbonds, cohabit with one female, and defend territories. Wandering males, in contrast, have expansive home ranges that overlap many males and females. In the laboratory, pairing is regulated by arginine vasopressin and its predominant CNS receptor, vasopressin 1a receptor (V1aR). We investigated individual differences in forebrain V1aR…

ScienceOnline 2011 Debrief Part 1: ebooks, blogs and stealthy librarians

Yeah, I'm talking about you, #scio11. The conference that still has significant twitter traffic three days after it's over. I've been to conferences that don't have that kind of traffic while they're happening. In fact, that would be pretty well every other conference. Every edition of ScienceOnline seems to have a different virtual theme for me and this one seemed to somehow circle back to the blogging focus on earlier editions of the conference. Of course, the program is so diverse and the company so stimulating, that different people will follow different conference paths and perhaps…

Talking To The Public

So, Anton Zuiker and I went yesterday to the Talking To The Public panel discussion at Duke, organized by Sigma Xi, The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and The Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. There is nothing yet on their websites about it (the 20th century school of thought!), but the entire panel discussion was taped and I'll let you know once the video is available online (in a week or so?). Once everything is online, it will also be easier for me to write in great detail (links help!) about the event. It was nice to see David Jarmul and Rosalind Reid…

PZ is a Gentleman and a Scholar

tags: PZ Myers, Pharyngula trailer I have noticed with dismay that certain people around here have been bashing PZ Myers (not naming any names, but you know who you are), and I find that upsetting. For the past few years, I have considered PZ and his wife to be good friends of mine, although we do not communicate as frequently as we have in the past (but we're all busy, whatever). But, as with all good friends, I know that they are there for me whenever I might call on them, and I would absolutely do whatever is in my power to help them out as well. What cemented this friendship? I had long…

A Worthy Cause Indeed: Journal Club and Looking Out For The Duck

Well, I'm on vacation as of today and thought now was as good a time as any to show off my primary online love affair. That is, the Science Creative Quarterly of which I am the editor. For the next week or so, I've chosen a piece on the SCQ that I think fits well with a particular blog on the scienceblog consortium. Overall, that means 43 pieces for 43 different blogs presented over the next seven days. Look out for the duck. In the meantime, here is a general description of the Science Creative Quarterly. - - - - A WORTHY CAUSE INDEED - Dear Reader, On most mornings, somewhere in the…

Modeling antiviral resistance, XIV: Discussion

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] We conclude our section by section examination of the mathematical modeling paper by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. We have finally arrived at the final section, Discussion (starting on page 8 of the .pdf version). In the second post we said many scientists read only the Abstract,…

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: a Legitimate Excuse for Missing Work

Student guest post by Jay Watson Tired again? Perhaps it's the crappy weather, because you're sure that you've been getting enough sleep. After all, you can't remember the last time you spent less than ten hours in bed per night. Hopefully it's not mono; one of your friends had it a few months ago and it's all but knocked her out. However, you soon realize that you've only talked to her on the phone since she got engaged, so there's no way that's it. It's strange, even everyday activities like running errands has turned into something utterly exhausting. As you consider the reasons as…

Message to Conventional Media: Ur doin it rong!

I was really mad this morning. I glanced at my new issue of Discover, and noticed yet another article glorifying HIV Deniers. Its not online yet, but its a seven page spread on Peter Duesberg. So I brought it to work with me so everyone had to vomit as much as I did. They changed my perspective a bit. First, Im still mad, but Im not as mad. I dont think they are glorifying him-- I think theyre playing to the 'fair and balanced all sides' game that 'journalists' think is so clever these days, which is still pathetic. On the one hand, Jeanne Lenzer plays off of EXPELLEDs theme. You could…

This Is My Hobby

Eugene Wallingford had a post last week about blogging, and popular misconceptions: When I first started writing this blog, several colleagues rolled their eyes. Another blog no one will read; another blogger wasting his time. They probably equated all blogging with the confessional, "what I ate for breakfast" diary-like journal that takes up most of the blogspace. I'm not sure exactly what I expected Knowing and Doing to be like back then, but I never intended to write that sort of blog and made great effort to write only something that seemed worth my time to think about -- and any…

Books: "Collapse" by Jared Diamond

First reviewed on June 18, 2005: Guns, Germs and Steel is an excellent book. Collapse is better. When "Guns, Germs and Steel" first came out, I was fortunate to take part in a graduate seminar that was built around it. Along with reading a chapter each week, we also read a number of additional readings, some of which were technical papers. Careful reading of "Guns, Germs and Steel" reveals that, contrary to some opinion, it is not a work of "environmental determinism". Much of history is microhistory. There is also quite a lot of history studying how quirks and idiosincrasies of important…

Parkinson's Disease in the News

A couple of href="http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec16/ch221/ch221g.html" rel="tag">Parkinson's Disease related items came across the news wires, briefly.  There are lessons in both of them, but both leave me with unresolved questions.   The first one I noticed was a report based upon a journal article, rev="review" href="http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/69/2/187">Risk factors for somnolence, edema, and hallucinations in early Parkinson disease.  The second was based on a different article (in the same journal), href="http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/01.wnl…

It's news that a teenager is skeptical?

I heard a piece by David Kestenbaum on NPR's "Morning Edition" that hasn't been sitting right with me. You, dear readers, get to help me figure out what's bugging me about the story, a profile of 16-year-old climate skeptic Kristen Byrnes. Here are some details about Kristen Byrnes from the story: "I don't remember how old I was when I started getting into global warming," Kristen says. "In middle school I remember everyone was like: 'Global warming! The world is going to end!' Stuff like that ... so I never really believed in it." ... [S]he has a quality scientists try to cultivate: she is…

Another irresponsible breast cancer alternative cure testimonial

It just occurred to me that Breast Cancer Awareness Month is fast approaching, not the least of which because I did a Komen event last night as one of the breast cancer experts. I sometimes wonder if I suffer from a bit of the imposter syndrome, because sixteen years on I still sometimes can't believe that I'm considered some sort of "expert" in breast cancer, much less anything else. It's not that different than when, as a freshly minted faculty member, I was sent out to our cancer center's affiliates to attend their tumor boards as the "expert" from the mother ship. In any case, in my…

The Australian's War on Science XXIII

The Australian has a daily column called Cut and Paste which is usually a collection of quotes from recent opinion columns in other papers. But like every other part of the paper, it has been used in their unending war on science. Look at the November 12 edition of "Cut and Paste": ABC Radio's Peter Cave reports the IPCC claim the island nation is in imminent danger of climate-induced flooding Mohamed Nasheed (the new Maldives President) has named battling the effects of rising sea levels as a key priority. He's hatched an audacious plan to buy his people a new homeland and one of the…