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When religion goes berserk!

I guess it is unlikely you have not already heard about the big brouhaha that erupted when Bill Donohue targeted PZ Myers for showing disrespect towards a belief that made some religious nuts go crazy and violent against a child (yes, Eucharist is just a cracker, sorry, but that is just a factual statement about the world). If not, the entire story, and it is still evolving, can be found on PZ's blog so check out the numerous comments here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Also see what Greg Laden and Tristero say. [Update: see also John Wilkins and Mike Dunford for some good clear…

Abortion and breast cancer: The Chicago Tribune feeds the myth

I approach this topic with a bit of trepidation. I say this not because I'm unsure that I'm correct in my assessment of the article that I'm about to apply some Respectful Insolence⢠to. Rather, it's because the last time I brought up anything having to do with abortion, it got ugly. The topic is such a polarized one that virtually anything one says is sure to attract vitriol. Regardless, though, this article by Dennis Byrne, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and the "study" to which it refers, are so appallingly idiotic that even fear of touching the third rail of American politics will…

Fear mongering over cell phones and cancer by Dr. Oz

These days, Dr. Oz seems to stand for everything I oppose in medicine: Fear mongering, quackery, making claims that he can't back up with science, and, of course, filthy lucre. On second thought, I'm not against filthy lucre per se. In fact, I wouldn't mind having some of it myself. However, I also want to keep my integrity, and if getting a piece of that filthy lucre involves compromising myself, my scientific credibility, and my overall credibility as much as Dr. Mehmet Oz has done over the last several years, I'll have to settle for my comfortable upper middle class existence. It's not so…

The annals of "I'm not antivaccine," part 24: Antivaxers threaten to dox Boston Herald employees over the newspaper's use of imagery much less offensive than what antivaxers use on a daily basis

Over the last few years, I've been doing a recurring series that I like to refer to as The Annals of "I'm not antivaccine." Amazingly, it's already up to part 23. It's a series based on an oft-repeated antivaccine claim that is either a like or a delusion (sometimes both), namely the claim made by antivaccine activists ranging from Jenny McCarthy to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the latter of whom is best known for making such claims after likening "vaccine-induced autism" to the Holocaust. (Indeed, RFK, Jr. takes denial to a ridiculous extreme by proclaiming himself not just "pro-vaccine" but "…

Congratulations, America! You've just elected a conspiracy-mongering scientific ignoramus as President!

Well, I’m back. Yes, late last night, I re-entered returned home from vacation in Mexico before our new President-Elect has a chance to build his wall. I was so exhausted that I had no time to write anything and remain so. At least I wasn’t stupid enough to go back to work today and instead took the whole week off. Like most of you, I’m still processing he cluster—oh, wait, no major profanity here—that was the US election, whose results definitely put a damper on the trip home. In particular, I fear for what the new administration will do to science in this country, and might write about that…

Well Done on FISA, Congressman Reyes

I've criticized Democratic Congressman Reyes before, so it's worth noting when he gets something right. Here's a letter Reyes wrote to Little Lord Pontchartrain: Dear Mr. President: The Preamble to our Constitution states that one of our highest duties as public officials is to "provide for the common defence." As an elected Member of Congress, a senior Member of the House Armed Services Committee, and Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, I work everyday to ensure that our defense and intelligence capabilities remain strong in the face of serious threats to our…

Being Imprecise About the Details of Catastrophe...

...doesn't invalidate the person making the prediction. Nouriel Roubini, who correctly predicted that the housing market would crater in 2007 has decided to make his critics eat crow (yes, there's some dense economics here, but wait until the end--there's a point to this madness): Indeed a year ago when this scholar - and a few other experts such as Bob Shiller and others - argued that the biggest housing bubble in US history would end up in the worst housing bust and recession in 50 years and that home prices would fall by 20% those views were considered as coming from the moon. When…

MRSA and 'Search and Destroy'

I have discussed the "search and destroy" strategy for controlling and reducing methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) before. Search-and-destroy involves the screening of every patient and hospital worker for MRSA. Patients with MRSA are isolated to prevent spread to other patients. In the Netherlands, hospital workers with MRSA are sent home with pay, and are treated with muriopicin nasal drops (MRSA usually lives up your nose). In addition, the workers' family is screened along with any pets, and those that have MRSA are also treated. Because of this program, the…

Transposition Ciphers

The second major family of encryption techniques is called transposition ciphers. I find transposition ciphers to be rather dull; in their pure form, they're very simple, and not very difficult to crack, even without computers. But some of the most sophisticated modern ciphers can be looked at as a sort of strange combination of substitution and transposition, so it's worth looking at. A transposition cipher doesn't change the characters in the plain-text when it generates the cipher-text - it just re-arranges them. It applies some kind of permutation function to the text to produce a re-…

Some Suggestions for Improving Biology Textbooks

Well, they're not my suggestions, they're David Hillis' But they are still pretty good.... In the June 2007 issue of Evolution, Hillis writes about how to make general biology textbooks discuss evolution better. He has a list of ten suggestions, and I thought it would be interesting to go through them (italics original; boldface mine; I cut a great deal of text*): 1) Demonstrate that evolutionary research is current and ongoing.... Post-Darwinian findings also present an excellent opportunity to teach about the process of science, and to show that the methods of evolutionary biology are…

Are Shiga-Toxin Phages E. coli Diseases? (File Under Speculative Hypotheses)

Or maybe wild-ass speculation. As the data continue to come in about the E. coli outbreak in Germany caused by E. coli O104:H4 HUSEC041 (well, everything but the public health and epidemiological data which are a contradictory, incoherent mess), it appears that one of the things that has made this strain so dangerous is its ability to make Shiga-like toxin--a compound that stops cells from making proteins cells--the mechanism is similar to that of the biowarfare agent ricin (Note: there are several different Shiga-like toxins; for clarity, since it's not germane to this post, I'll lump…

It Can Be Expensive to Use Money If...

...you're poor. Previously, I discussed the effects of the de facto privatization of money: But most of the discussion is over how large the fees should be. That's important, but ignores the larger issue: the de facto privatization of our monetary system. While it doesn't seem obvious, when you use cash there are 'fees' involved--the cost of supporting the U.S. Treasury operations (printing the money, shipping the money, preventing counterfeiting, and so on). To put this another way, the U.S. government could decide to abolish all paper and metal currency, and make all of our accounts…

Out of Africa & archaeology

Dienekes points me to a new paper in Science which purports to add an archaeological layer of data to the "Out of Africa" paradigm which initially burst onto to the scene in the 1980s due to the molecular clock & mtDNA (though Chris Stringer and others long argued for a form of "Out of Africa" based purely on fossil morphology). The Independent has a good summary of the major points. The short of it is that this paper seems to suggest a) One major Out of Africa event via the "Southern Route" (i.e., along the coast of southern Eurasia out of East Africa) b) Subsequent radiations from…

Harun Yahya - big fat joke (OK, not fat)

Most of you could probably guess that my first post on Harun Yahya was meant to highlight what a joke the whole affair was. You see, making fun of Harun Yahya and his fellow travelers is a guiltless pleasure: you get to be snobby and elitist toward those idiotic moronic knuckle-draggers, and, you feel righteous about it because you're on the side of the angels!. How much of a hilarious incident was this? The first segment of Bloggingheads.tv was devoted to it, and the two pundits, neither of whom had a science background, thought it was pretty sneer and smirk worthy. That's what I told…

Using Phylogenetics to Understand Medical Microbial Ecology

One of the things I didn't get a chance to talk about at the Boston Skeptics meeting is how we use evolutionary biology to understand the human microbiome--those microorganisms that live on and in us. Here's an example from a paper about Crohn's disease (italics mine): It is hypothesized that IBD [inflammatory bowel disease] results from an aberrant immune response against intestinal bacteria that results in inflammatory damage to intestinal tissues. Many clinical and experimental observations strongly implicate intestinal bacteria in the pathogenesis of IBD. However... neither the…

Economics: Does It All Come Down to Those Stupid F-cking Natural History Facts?

A dissertation committee member who will remain nameless once told me, "Mike, in the end, it all comes down to those stupid fucking natural history facts." This might have been the only worthwhile thing said committee member ever told me. More about this in a bit. Anyway, I bring this up because I think much of the commentary on Paul Krugman's recent NY Times piece about the problems with the current state of macroeconomics is missing the real problem. The problem wasn't with the theory. Well, alright, the theory was bad. But the real problem is that there was no de facto mechanism to…

Will Cloud Computing Help Genomics Handle Post-Moore's Law Data Loads?

Genome Biology recently published a review, "The Case for Cloud Computing in Genome Informatics." What is cloud computing? Well: This is a general term for computation-as-a-service. There are various different types of cloud computing, but the one that is closest to the way that computational biologists currently work depends on the concept of a 'virtual machine'. In the traditional economic model of computation, customers purchase server, storage and networking hardware, configure it the way they need, and run software on it. In computation-as-a-service, customers essentially rent the…

Saving the `Alalâ

tags: 'Alala, Hawaiian Crow, Hawaiian Raven, Corvus hawaiiensis, endangered species, conservation One of the last wild-born `Alalâ to ever be photographed in the wild. Image: The Honolulu Advertiser. One of the rarest forest birds in the world, the critically endangered `Alalâ, or Hawaiian Crow, Corvus hawaiiensis, was awarded $14.3 million in conservation funding over the next five years, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). This funding package will focus on expanding captive propagation, establishing new populations in managed habitat, protecting…

Birdbooker Report 88

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…

Cytokine storm

A helpful reader (hat tip to easy hiker) sent along a story from New Scientist concerning a new report in The New England Journal of Medicine. The NEJM paper is a case series of six subjects who almost died as a result of a clinical trial of a monoclonal antibody being tested as a drug for rheumatoid arthritis. Within an hour of receiving the drug, TGN1412, all six suddenly developed a cytokine storm syndrome, with severe pain rapidly developing to multiorgan failure and respiratory distress. This result was unexpected as nothing like it had occurred in the animal trials and the dose given…

Substance abuse programs and pandemic preparedness

I noticed that Governor Mitt Romney, Republican presidential hopeful and much despised Governor of Massachusetts, just vetoed $8.15 million in funding for addiction treatment and prevention in his state. I'm not an expert on substance abuse issues, but I know it is an area of public health where we are in real trouble because of budget cuts. I have written quite a lot about bird flu here and the need to address it by strenghtening the public health infrastructure. Substance abuse is part of that infrastructure. But what, if anything, does cutting these programs have to do with bird flu? I…

Reading Diary: Graphic novel catchup: Laika, Neurocomic, In Real Life and The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change

Here's a bunch of graphic novels I've read in the last while that are well worth your time reading and acquiring for your library! Abadzis, Nick. Laika. New York: First Second, 2007. 208pp. ISBN-13: 978-1596431010 Laika by Nick Abadzis in a fantastic graphic novel recounting the life of the first dog in space, the Russian dog Laika. The book goes into quite a bit of social and political history of the Soviet union in the 1950s, giving a good sense of how totalitarian states sometimes make decisions. We also get an illuminating look into the lives of people around Laika as her fateful one-way…

On Science and Politics

The ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency, the selection of his cabinet and senior advisers, and the actions of the GOP-dominated legislative branch have all raised new serious questions and concerns about the role of science, research, and analysis in national law and policy. These concerns have been worsened by elements of the new administration’s proposed budget that severely cut or eliminate core federal science efforts, Congressional hearings and actions that have been perceived to promote ideological viewpoints over scientific findings, presidential executive orders that attempt…

Accuracy, precision, and significance: The misery of cholera

We’re bombarded with numbers every day. But seeing a number and understanding it are two different things. Far too often, the true “significance” of a figure is hidden, unknown, or misjudged. I will be returning to that theme often in these blog posts in the context of water, climate change, energy, and more. In particular, there is an important distinction between accuracy and precision. Here is one example – reported cases of cholera worldwide. Cholera is perhaps the most widespread and serious water-related disease, directly associated with the failure to provide safe drinking water and…

What to do with the climate denial zombies

My first reaction to the papier du jour among climate communications activists was "meh." It's not that Chris Mooney's latest ruminations on the gap between what the public thinks about scientific issues and what scientists have to say isn't worth reading. It's just that we've been down this road so many times now, the standards of what passes for new and remarkable are getting rather high. That didn't stop Andy Revkin, Joe Romm, and Evil Monkey from posting lengthy and hard-hitting responses, though. So I gave it a second look, and I've now concluded that "Do Scientists Understand the Public…

Just in Time for Valentine's Day: The Science Behind the Kiss

By Larry Bock Founder and organizer, USA Science & Engineering Festival It's both funny and remarkable how some of the most simple and natural acts we do each day are teeming in science. Take for example, the kiss. A kiss, especially a passionate one, sets off a cascade of emotions and chemical reactions in our brain and body that would surprise most of us if we knew the whole story. Well, just in time for Valentine's Day, Sheril Kirshenbaum, science writer and author of the recent book, The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us, sheds light on exactly what goes on…

Anathem

Neal Stephenson writes ambitious books. I got hooked with Snow Crash(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), an amazingly imaginative book about near-future virtual worlds; Zodiac(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) is required reading for anyone interested in chemistry and the environment; I had mixed feelings about Cryptonomicon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), but only because it was two books in one, and only one of those books was excellent; The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was a fabulously weird exploration of a New Victorian culture with nanotechnology; and I ate up his big…

Could you repeat that please?

Previously, I introduced the idea that the $1000 genome has not been achieved because it is defined in simplistic terms that ignore many aspects of data completeness and verification. In that analysis, I cited a recent perspective by Robasky, Lewis, and Church [1] to present concepts related to the need to verify results and the general ways in which this is done. In this and the next few posts I will dig deeper into the elements of sequence data uncertainty and discuss how results are verified. Agarose gel of DNA stained with ethidium bromide. By Mnolf, wikipedia. First, we need to…

More trouble at NIEHS

A political pundit recently likened the Bush administration to the refrigerator that was never cleaned under the Republican rubber stamp congress. Now that new housekeepers have moved in they are finding lots of gross and moldy half eaten meals in the back. The latest to stink the place up is Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the most public health oriented of all the NIH institutes. Or it used to be, as we noted in an earlier post. Under Director David Schwartz it was on its way to being the kind of harmless agency most congenial to the Bush…

Clock Tutorial #8: Circadian Organization In Non-Mammalian Vertebrates

This post was originally written on February 11, 2005. Moving from relatively simple mammalian model to more complex systems. I have previously described the basic properties of the circadian organization in mammals. Non-mammalian vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds) have more complex circadian systems than mammals. While the suprachiasmatic area remains a site of circadian pacemakers, it is, unlike in mammals, not the only such site. The pineal organ, which in mammals is a purely secretory organ, is directly photosensitive in other vertebrates (with the exception of snakes)…

Mandatory swine flu vaccination for health care workers: I change my mind

In an earlier post I said I opposed mandatory vaccination for adults (but not for children), the one exception being for health care workers because they come in contact with people at high risk. My view then was that if you work in a health care institution and won't get vaccinated against flu, then you shouldn't come to work. Now I am re-evaluating my position as a result of some cogent and pragmatic comments from lawyer-bioethicist George Annas, professor of health law, bioethics and human rights at Boston University School of Public Health, and author of "The Rights of Patients." I know…

Taking the measure of the swine flu pandemic

Crafting a message on swine flu is not easy, and it's easy to make missteps. I think CDC has gotten it pretty much right over the last two months, but not everyone has. We've written here since the beginning (some examples here and here) that describing any flu outbreak as "mild" is inapt. Flu always has the potential to be a serious disease and kill people, even in flu seasons termed "mild" by comparing them to flu seasons that are "bad." Even with virulent flu viruses many people have minimal illness -- in comparison to those who don't. But flu, even in its most common form of a self-…

Swine flu comes home

There is no reason why a flu blogger-epidemiologist-physician's family should be immune to flu in the community. And it appears my family is not. My daughter has had a cough for the last few days and Friday night was suddenly seized by nausea, vomiting and fever. Her HMO's urgent care directed her to the Emergency Room of the local hospital where a rapid flu test was positive. While waiting to be seen at the ER, her 10 month old, who had a croupy cough, also started vomiting and was warm to the touch. His (slightly) older brother (2 years) was also coughing. Her husband has a cough, too, and…

A death from rabies [clarified 5/11/08]

Last October (2007) a 46 year old Minnesota man died of rabies, the only known victim in the US last year. Rabies is a rare disease in the US because we have good veterinary services. Most animals in routine and regular contact with humans are vaccinated against the disease. But bats have become a significant wild animal reservoir and the Minnesota case was a bat case: Once rabies was suspected, the patient's family was interviewed on October 16 for a history of potential exposure. According to his family, the patient had handled a bat with his bare hands in a semi-open cabin porch in north-…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 23 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, Mendeley, 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: Biomechanics of Running Indicates Endothermy in Bipedal Dinosaurs: One of the great unresolved controversies in paleobiology is whether extinct dinosaurs were endothermic, ectothermic, or some combination…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 19 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, Mendeley, 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: Extreme Cranial Ontogeny in the Upper Cretaceous Dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus: Extended neoteny and late stage allometric growth increase morphological disparity between growth stages in at least some…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: an Enlightening summary

One of my guilty pleasures used to be indulging in End-of-the-Year wrap-ups on network news. I'm not exactly sure why and it's been decades since I've enjoyed what has become a sterile exercise in hindsight spin doctoring. There are still specialized areas, though, where the judgments of the cognoscenti are still interesting to me. One of them is religion. What do religion journalists consider the big stories of the past year? A comparison of the "Top Ten Stories" in 2005, 2006 and 2007 according to Christianity Today presents a picture that is, dare I say it, Enlightening. (NB: The Top Ten…

Darwin is already dead, and we know it

I strongly disagree with the arguments of this essay by Carl Safina, "Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live", even while I think there is a germ of truth to its premise. It reads more like a contrarian backlash to all the attention being given to Darwin in this bicentennial of his birth. The author makes three general claims that he thinks justify his call to "kill Darwin". The first is a reasonable concern, that "equating evolution with Darwin" is misleading and can lead to public misunderstanding…but then Safina charges off into ridiculous hyperbole, that scientists are making…

A new front line drug for flu in the offing?

This week the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a paper about a new antiviral drug that fully protected mice against virulent bird flu virus (H5N1). I don't usually pay a lot of attention to papers announcing new flu antivirals that work in animals. It's a long way from there to use in humans. But this drug, called T-705 (also known as favipiravir) seems different in several respects. The work was mainly supported by the Japanese government (with some support from the US NIH) and was led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, one of the world's leading flu scientists (University…

New report: More action needed to protect salon workers’ health

Decreased lung function, breast cancer, miscarriage, depression and neurological disease. These are just a few of the health and disease risks that salon workers disproportionately face while on the job, according to a new report on the impact of toxic chemicals within the beauty and personal care industry. Yesterday, Women’s Voices for the Earth, a nonprofit working to eliminate toxic chemicals from workplaces, homes and communities, released “Beauty and Its Beast: Unmasking the Impact of Toxic Chemicals on Salon Workers,” which highlights decades of research on beauty care workers and…

Occupational Health News Roundup

The experience of Pennsylvania nurse Jessica Wheeler starts off Esther Kaplan’s piece on workplace speedups in The Nation. The article begins: Wheeler recalls one night when she had a patient who couldn’t breathe and several others under her care. “I called the supervisor to ask for anybody—a nursing assistant, anybody! And I didn’t get it, and my patient ended up coding.” Another night, Wheeler had a post-op patient who required constant attention; the patient was confused and sick, and she soon escaped her restraints and pulled out her drains, spraying fecal matter all over the wall. Early…

Study: More action needed to confront millions of preventable child deaths

Worldwide, the numbers of children who die before their fifth birthdays is on the decline. Still, millions of children are being lost to diseases and complications that are completely preventable. In a study published earlier this week in the Lancet, researchers examined the reasons behind the 6.3 million deaths among children younger than 5 in 2013 — a number that’s significantly less than the 9.9 million such deaths that occurred worldwide in 2000. Nearly 2 million of the 2013 child deaths were due to complications from preterm birth and pneumonia, both of which were leading causes in 2000…

“Decide to be safe” is not an answer to workplace hazards

Motivational speaker Kina Repp shares a dramatic story when she addresses audiences at occupational health and safety conferences. In 1990, Repp lost her arm in a piece of machinery when she was working at a seafood canning plant in Alaska. She was a college student trying to earn money for college tuition. It was Repp’s first day on the job----only 40 minutes into her shift----when the machine caught her arm. Repp not only lost her arm, her shoulder blade was torn off, she had a broken collarbone, a severe neck injury and a collapsed lung. Repp was the keynote speaker at a recent conference…

Get the F*** Off Fossil Fuels

Almost all conversations with every other parent of late includes "Have you read Go the Fuck to Sleep yet? Have you heard Samuel Jackson read it?...." It is safe to say that the book touches a nerve. And it is extraordinarily funny, and it does evoke precisely the reactions that most of us have trouble acknowledging publically. We all have to ruefully acknowledge that we see some part of ourselves in this - the book is about those parenting failures that are hard to speak about but part of our lives. It is, all in all, an awesome book, and precisely the sort of thing I wish (and I suspect…

When the Cows Come Home and Other Signs of Summer

I came home last Monday night after three days spent in Washington working on business for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, and it was one of the most glorious homecomings I could imagine. Not only was there the joy of coming home to my boys and Eric, but also my home is more like paradise in June than at any moment. (Mac the Marshmallow waiting to welcome me home) We're headed into the transition point from spring to summer, and you can feel it. The spring bulbs are behind us, the peonies are in bloom, the animals are fat and happy on lush growth, and there are jars of…

The Realistic Farm Tour

One of the projects we're working on is ways to bring more people to our farm. A lot of folks want to see what we're doing, and we've been contemplating open farm days, and possible ideas for classes we might teach. Well, while Eric and I were discussing it the other night, we came up with the idea of the "realistic farm tour" that gives people a real sense of what actually goes on on a farm - we could market ourselves a unlike all those other agritourism ventures that sell the dream - we sell the reality! Here are some of the activities we are sure people would pay us to do! "Explore the…

Copenhagen Failed, Mexico is Already Doomed - What's Next?

An unsurprising but still deeply depressing article from the Guardian observes that not only was Copenhagen, billed as "the last, best hope for change" a dismal failure (duh) but that Mexico City is already a dismal failure. Dozens of politicians, diplomats, economists, scientists and campaigners contacted by the Guardian agreed that while a global, legally binding treaty remains by far the best way to prevent global warming wreaking havoc on our civilisation, the chances of that treaty being achieved in 2010 are almost nil. The energy has gone out of the negotiations, said some, with the…

Ms. IPCC and the Climate Scandals - Why the Real Shockers Aren't the Ones in the Press

There's yet another kerfuffle about climatology going on. First, of course, there was climategate, whose total revealed knowledge is "if you hack into people's private emails you might find out that some people, even climate scientists, are jerks sometimes." Now there's another one - in the IPCC report, there's an error. That is, scientists took a non-peer reviewed source and transposed it into the report, and didn't back check that source. This was stupid, of course, and should be criticized and corrected. That said, since the material in the IPCC is overwhelmingly peer-reviewed science…

Connecting the dots: 'compliance assistance' to 'destined to fail'

Tom Bethell of The Mountain Eagle urges us (and policymakers) to read the independent investigation of MSHA and the Crandall Canyon disaster, by two former MSHA District Managers, to understand how the Secretary of Labor's demand for 'compliance assistance' programs set the groundwork for the deadly workplace conditions for our nation's mine workers.  Posted with permission from The Mountain Eagle (Whitesburg, KY), "Destined to Fail" by Tom Bethell Exactly a year ago â on August 6, 2007 â the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah caved in, trapping six coal miners. Here in eastern Kentucky weâre…

US vs EU on Chemical Laws and Litigation

Todayâs Washington Post includes a great article by Lyndsey Layton that contrasts European Union and U.S. chemical laws and explores how EU actions might affect products on U.S. shelves. Hereâs Laytonâs explanation of EU law and the philosophy that guides it: From its crackdown on antitrust practices in the computer industry to its rigorous protection of consumer privacy, the European Union has adopted a regulatory philosophy that emphasizes the consumer. Its approach to managing chemical risks, which started with a trickle of individual bans and has swelled into a wave, is part of a European…