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Some People's Children

tags: presidential primaries, racism, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Democratic primaries Image: NYTimes. It isn't news any longer that Barack Obama has apparently won enough electoral votes to be nominated as this nation's democratic candidate for the presidency. However, what is news is the fact that a fair percentage of Hillary's supporters are, by their own assertions, a bunch of whiney, bigoted pigs because they claim they will either vote for Rethuglican John McCain instead of fellow Democrat, Barack Obama, or they will refuse to vote at all. So, while a lot of people are overjoyed…

Public Health Classic: Developing protocols for the treatment of acute respiratory infections in children

This post is part of The Pump Handle’s new “Public Health Classics” series exploring some of the classic studies and reports that have shaped the field of public health. Links to past posts in the series are available here. If you have a favorite Public Health Classic to recommend, let us know in the comments. And if you’re interested in contributing a post to the series, email us at thepumphandle@gmail.com (send us a link to the report or study along with a sentence or two about what you find most interesting or important about it). By Sara Gorman In the late 1970s and early 1980s, acute…

New study sheds light on the health effects of job insecurity

by Kim Krisberg It's not news that unemployment is bad for a person's health. But it turns out that just the threat of unemployment is bad as well. A recent study, published in the September issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, found that perceived job insecurity is also linked to poor health outcomes, even among those who had jobs during the recession. Researchers found that perceived job insecurity was linked with "significantly higher odds" of fair or poor self-reported health as well as recent symptoms suggesting depression and anxiety attacks. The findings…

How meaningful is FDA's latest move on antibiotics in livestock?

Yesterday, the FDA announced a new program that has the potential to slash the routine use of antibiotics by livestock producers. The routine administration of antibiotics to livestock with no signs of sickness helps animals grow more quickly, but it's also a significant contributor to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. An estimated 70% of the antibiotics sold in the US are given to non-human animals, and most of them are the same drugs that humans rely on to treat our illnesses. Gardiner Harris's New York Times article about FDA's announcement bears the exciting (to me, anyway)…

White House vs. FDA: Plan B decision still reverberates

In the New York Times last week, Gardiner Harris reported on tensions between FDA and the White House over FDA decisions that White House officials fear will be politically problematic for President Obama. Harris reminds readers that "The Bush administration repeatedly stopped the agency from issuing rules to prevent contamination of eggs, produce and other foods ... Much of the agency's staff assumed that the Obama administration would restore the agency's independence." This assumption of the Obama administration restoring agency independence wasn't unfounded -- less than two months after…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At BuzzFeed, Kate Moore tells the story of the “radium girls,” the hundreds of women during WWI who worked painting watch dials with luminous radium paint — a substance that would eventually poison and kill them even though they were told it was perfectly safe. What followed was years of employers covering up and denying evidence that radium was killing workers, while berating the women for attempting to get help with their mounting medical bills. Eventually, Moore writes, their fight for justice led to one of the first cases in which an employer was held responsible for the health of workers…

Study: Flavoring chemicals linked to occupational illness found in electronic cigarettes

In a recent study, Harvard public health researchers decided to test a few dozen types of electronic cigarettes for diacetyl, a flavoring chemical associated with a severe respiratory disease known as “popcorn lung.” The researchers found diacetyl in a majority of the e-cigarettes they tested. News outlets jumped on the findings, with some announcing that e-cigarettes could cause the often-debilitating respiratory disease. But scientist Joseph Allen wants to be clear: His study doesn’t make a definitive statement about the effect of diacetyl in e-cigarettes. Instead, Allen said his goal was…

Years after Superstorm Sandy, residents still struggle with stress, recovery efforts

Superstorm Sandy came ashore nearly three years ago, pummeling the New England and Mid-Atlantic coast and becoming one of the deadliest and costliest storms to ever hit the U.S. This week, the Sandy Child and Family Health Study released two new reports finding that the health impacts of Sandy continue to linger, illustrating the deep mental footprint left by catastrophic disasters and the challenges of long-term recovery. Led by researchers at Rutgers University and New York University, the Sandy Child and Family Health Study is based on 1,000 face-to-face interviews with adults in the nine…

‘Statistics can’t tell stories’: Houston domestic workers release personal anthology

While we take a breather during this holiday season, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on May 6, 2014. by Kim Krisberg Two years ago, domestic workers in Houston, Texas, took part in the first national survey documenting the conditions they face on the job. The experience — a process of shedding light on the often isolating and invisible world of domestic work — was so moving that Houston workers decided they didn’t want to stop there. Instead, they decided it was time to put their personal stories to paper. The result is “We Women, One…

My morning at Mensa

Yesterday, I blitzed through a tiny slice of the Mensa meeting in Denver. My time was really tight, so after arriving on Thursday for a fabulous Pharyngufest, I only got to sit through two talks in the morning session before mine, and then whoosh, I was off to the airport and hurtling through the sky at 475mph to get back home. I had time to look through the program at least, and I hate to say it, but Mensa meetings are better organized than the big meetings of most atheist groups I've been to (this is a peeve of mine — atheists give bad meetings, although I'm sure Margaret Downey will prove…

Dickens on Evolution

During those rare moments when I am not doing mathematics or blogging, I am usually reading. I read a lot of nonfiction, mostly books related in some way to science or mathematics. I also read a lot of fiction, and here I generally stick to a steady diet of mysteries, horror, science fiction and political thrillers. But every once in a while I get the urge to read something good. A Les Miserables or a Moby Dick. That sort of thing. Recently I got it into my head that I really ought to read some Dickens. I've never read any of his novels. Theoretically I read Great Expectations in high…

Weekend Diversion: Is this an amazing chorus of slowed-down crickets?

"Haters are like crickets; they make a lot of noise you can hear but you never see them, then you walk right by them and they're quiet." -Unknown The sound of crickets adds an unavoidable hum to the evenings and nights in many places throughout the world, a familiar sound -- I'm sure -- to a great many of you. Each male cricket has a large, serrated (sawtooth) vein running along the bottom of each wing, and by rubbing the top of one wing against the bottom of the other, while simultaneously holding the wings up-and-open, the wing membranes vibrate, and create that familiar chirping sound…

The Polar Vortex Is Dead. But that does not mean it isn't cold out

The term "Polar Vortex" was thrown around a lot last year, in reference to the persistent mass of very cold air that enveloped much of southern Canada and the US. As you will remember, Rush Limbaugh accused climate scientists and librul meteorologists of making up the polar vortex to scare everyone into thinking climate change is real. You may also remember Al Roker pointing out on national TV and on Twitter that the term "polar vortex" has been in meteorology textbooks for decades. This year, with a new wave of cold air arriving unseasonably in the upper middle part of the US, the term is…

Who Wants to Be A Planet?

"I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet. But I have been careful not to advance this supposition to the public." -Giuseppe Piazzi When we think of the planets, most of you think of either eight or nine, depending on whether you count Pluto or not. But you all know Pluto's story. Eighty-one years ago, a lone astronomer looking at the same few patches of sky, night-after-night, would look for any…

Fare thee well, Allan Sandage

"I came at exactly the right time... I was 26 years old, and all the monks and priests down here were ready to retire. So I overlapped enough that I got to know them all." -Allan Sandage As many of you have heard, Allan Sandage passed away last Saturday. Let me tell you a little bit about this man, why he stands as such a towering figure in modern cosmology, and why he should be held in even higher esteem than he normally is. Allan Sandage was a coworker of Edwin Hubble's, and he took up one of the most pressing questions of the day after Hubble's death in 1953: What is the Age of the…

The Russians are Hacking Us Again

I remember like it was yesterday, the anti Hillary rhetoric flying around during those final weeks of the election. People were making statements that seemed to be based on actual sources, though the sources themselves were not crossing my path. The attitude of those repeating the stories was very similar across the board. Breathless, gut-punch angry, visceral, mean. They were talking almost as though Hillary Clinton had stepped on their baby's heads. That kind of thing. And it turns out that this was the Russians. The people doing this were not the Russians. Rather, the Russians, either…

Arduino Project Handbook

Huxley and I like to make Arduino projects. If you know what that means, your geek cred is good. If not, I'll explain briefly. Arduino is an Italian based project that produces circuit boards that are controllers. A controller is a small highly specialized computer thingie that can be programmed to have various inputs and outputs. You can connect devices (sensors) to the inputs and other devices (actuators of some kind, or lights or whatever) to the outputs. The programming can be fairly sophisticated. If you hook up enough of the right stuff to an Arduino board (of which there are…

We aim to misbehave

Larry Moran raised an interesting comparison over at Laden's place. In response to this constant whining that loud-and-proud atheism 'hurts the cause', he brought up a historical parallel: Here's just one example. Do you realize that women used to march in the streets with placards demanding that they be allowed to vote? At the time the suffragettes were criticized for hurting the cause. Their radical stance was driving off the men who might have been sympathetic to women's right to vote if only those women had stayed in their proper place. This prompted the usual cry of the…

NSA Claims That Linux Journal Is A Forum for Radical Extremists? THIS MAY BE FAKE (Updated)

When I first became a regular user of Linux, several years ago, I tried out different text editors and quickly discovered that emacs was my best choice. By coincidence, about that time I ran into an old emacs manual written by Richard Stallman in the dollar section of a used booksore. In that edition, near the end of the book, was a section on “Mail Amusements.” This documented the command “M-x spook” which adds “a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that suggest you are discussing something subversive.” (I note that the…

Pearl Harbor and the War on Christmas

Yes, there is a connection ... The Imperial Japanese of World War II and the Nazi Germans of the same era held one thing in common: You were with them or you were nothing. Non-Japanese prisoners were treated very poorly. The lives of non Japanese who did not swear allegiance to the emperor were not valued at all. For instance, when the Japanese exited Manila near the end of the war, they killed hundreds of thousands of Philippine people. The Nazi's slaughtered millions of Russian prisoners, those they considered "unfit" or otherwise different from them, and of course, attempted to…

The afternoon session at the Oregon evo-devo symposium

I'm going to get off a quick summary of this afternoon's talks, then I have to run down to the poster session to find out what the grad students have been doing. Are we having fun yet? I'm going to collapse in bed tonight, and then unfortunately I have to catch an early flight back home, so I'm going to miss a lot of cool stuff tomorrow. First up after lunch was Deneen Wellik, who summarized her work with Hox genes and patterning the vertebrate axial skeleton. I'm spared some effort here — I already wrote up her paper, so read that for the whole story. In short, one of the confounding things…

The Discovery Institute lies to educators

The Discovery Institute is spreading misinformation again. They have a document that implies that it would be OK for schools in at least some states to "teach the controversy", by which they mean that it is alright for teachers to promote Intelligent Design creationism in their classes. I wonder if the DI would also consider themselves liable if any teacher followed their advice, and discovered that they were costing their district an awful lot of money, as in Dover? Somehow, I doubt it. On the front page of their screed, they quote Charles Darwin: "A fair result can be obtained only by fully…

Why the wingnuts hate Plan B

There has been an oddly evasive struggle going on in Washington DC for the last several years. We have a safe, easy method of emergency contraception that has been turned into a political football, with Republicans playing their usual role of criminally stupid thugs, trying to crush a simple idea: Plan B contraception. It illustrates exactly how the Religious Right is trying to intrude on your private life, and in particular, how they want to control women. I'll explain how Plan B works, but to do so I'm going to have to explain some basics of the hormonal control of the menstrual cycle. This…

Ruse's Atheism Book

I've started reading Michael Ruse's book Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University Press earlier this year. Ruse is a philosopher at Florida State University, but he has turned himself into something of a crackpot over the last ten years. He's edited two books with ID proponent Bill Dembski, has picked foolish fights with his colleagues, and has engaged in laughably over-the-top rhetoric towards the New Atheists. Most memorably, he once said in an interview: “And this is why I think the New Atheists are a disaster, a danger to the wellbeing of America comparable…

Hitchens on Thomas Paine

A few weeks ago, Christopher Hitchens delivered a lecture on the subject of Thomas Paine, the "unacknowledged founding father" who was "the greatest Englishman and the greatest American", as he put it. It is well worth reading. There is no more fascinating man than Thomas Paine, in my view. He was an integral part of two of the three most famous revolutions in the history of the world (American and French, with the Russian revolution being the third), and in many ways was the conscience of both. It was Paine who agitated most strongly for a revolution against the British King George III, even…

Alan Keyes Too Liberal?

Reading the writings of Christian reconstructionists can be an unsettling activity. Try this on for scary. Would you believe, someone who thinks that Alan Keyes, of all people, doesn't want to impose his religious faith on people enough? Yep, I found one - Andrew Sandlin, director of the National Reform Association, the Center for Cultural Leadership, and sometimes columnist for the Worldnutdaily. I've written about Sandlin before, as he is quite an interesting case. The man is capable, on the one hand, of writing a column saying that John Kerry should be ashamed of himself for his "…

The Unintentional Irony of William Dembski

Fresh off his electrifying performance on the Daily Show, the intrepid Dr. Dembski is still, it seems, attempting to do comedy. Witness the extraordinary chutzpah it took to write this post about the speaking schedule of NCSE staffers. He writes: Have a look at http://www.ncseweb.org/meeting.asp. One of my colleagues describes reading this page as "watching a car wreck." I'm just sorry we can't get a percentage cut from all the speaking engagements they are getting as a result of attacking us. Life is so unfair. Well Bill, we'd love to have a cut of your speaking fees, and of the fees you…

A Case Study in Religious Right Hypocrisy

It seems that Tamara Wilhite and Jen Shroder are in good company over at bushcountry.org. Let's take a look at another columnist there, Joseph Grant Swank. He writes not only for bushcountry.org but also for the amusingly named intellectualconservative.com that allows the uber-idiot Bob Meyer to write for them, for the Chalcedon Report, the absolutely frightening Christian Reconstructionist journal, and for the entirely appropriate thevillageidiot.com. On August 2nd, Swank wrote this column, throwing a fit because an atheist was allowed to deliver an opening invocation at the start of a Tampa…

There But For the Grace of God

I went to school with a crazy person. Well, OK, that in and of itself is not surprising, given the amount of schooling I have, and the subject I majored in. I almost certainly went to school with a lot of crazy people, and I can easily come up with several people who probably count as crazy in one way or another. I can only think of one guy who was crazy in the manner that's on everybody's mind this week, though. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school, back in the mid-80's. For a little while in seventh and eight grade, there was a group of kids in my school who used to regularly get…

Athletes and Academia, part II

I got a bunch of really good comments to yesterday's post about athletes and attitudes toward education. Unfortunately, yesterday was also a stay-at-home-with-SteelyKid day, and she spent a lot of time demanding to be held or otherwise catered to, so I didn't have a chance to respond. I'd like to correct that today by responding to the main threads of argument in those comments. Taking these in no particular order, Moshe writes: Not sure there is a serious argument here, athletes are different in so many ways, but I'll bite - here is another difference. Some students and athletes have their…

Bachmann: another Republican against poor children

I wouldn't normally just publish a press release here, but in this case, 1) it's an important issue, the Republican squashing of the SCHIP bill to reauthorize a health insurance program for poor children, 2) it's about Michele Bachmann, a truly contemptible creature of the far right wing, and 3) my son Alaric has been working with Americans Against Escalation in Iraq on turning out the opposition to Bachmann — so it's a good cause, a wretched villain, and a little family connection. The story is that Cruella deVille Michele Bachmann was one of the conservative drones who voted to let poor…

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll by Elijah Wald [Library of Babel]

Lest you think that the previous couple of posts indicate that I'm just a cranky curmudgeon who doesn't like anything he reads, let me put in a plug for Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll. I read about half of this piecemeal over a couple of months, then finished it on the plane to the March Meeting. Subtitled "An Alternative History of American Popular Music," it meticulously documents the fads and changes of American music over the first two-thirds or so of the 20th Century, and in the process tells a very different story than what you may think you know. The origin of…

The Time Traveler's Wife: Book Review

With the recent news about this book being made into a movie, I'm reposting my review of it. The Time Traveler's Wife This is an easy decision, and not only because I read about five pieces of fiction this year and most of them were pulp. Well, OK, that is a factor. But this book is good enough for me to blog about it and you know I only blog about important things that you need to know about. The book is The Time Traveler's Wife and it is by Audrey Niffenegger. Have you heard of it? Apparently they are making this into a movie, which I suppose is a good thing. But it is the detail…

Best Published Fiction I've Read All Year

The Time Traveler's Wife This is an easy decision, and not only because I read about five pieces of fiction this year and most of them were pulp. Well, OK, that is a factor. But this book is good enough for me to blog about it and you know I only blog about important things that you need to know about. The book is The Time Traveler's Wife and it is by Audrey Niffenegger. Have you heard of it? Apparently they are making this into a movie, which I suppose is a good thing. But it is the detail and complexity that makes this an exceptional story, and this will not come through in the…

Liveblogging the inspection of 600 ballots in the Franken-Coleman recount.

It is very interesting to watch the Canvasing board ... the Minnesota Secretary of State, a Supreme Court Justice or two, and so on, going over every single one of the challenged ballots. The way they seem to be doing this is this: They are going through all of the Franken Challenges first. The Coleman challenges have to wait because Coleman's people fucked up their removal of some of the challenged ballots so their ballots will not be ready until tomorrow. So, they go to each ballot, and it seems that Ritchie makes a move to reject the challenge each and every time, and then the other…

Does lead exposure cause decreased brain size?

A recently published study seems to indicate that adult brain volume is reduced in individuals with significant lead exposure during childhood. While this study may lead to important findings linking lead to reduced cognitive function, it is important to note that observed effect is very small, very hard to link to specific outcomes, and may not exist. But it is worth a further look. The study in question is summarized below and, as an Open Access publication, is totally accessible for you to read. The upshot is that individuals who were part of a long term study (also discussed here)…

Musing About the Burden of Proof

I see that Barry Arrington is blogging up a storm lately over at Uncommon Descent. It's all his usual silliness--bad arguments coupled with denunciations of anyone who dares disagree with him--but this post was eyebrow-raising even for him. The set-up is this: Arrington is in the habit of making big bold claims about what is possible and what is not. Sometimes his readers challenge him to back up those claims. These challenges are met with insults and condemnations. In the present instance the claim is that the brain cannot be a fully naturalistic organ because mere chemicals cannot be the…

Comments on O'Reilly

If you're curious, in an interview lasting just over four and a half minutes, Bill O'Reilly uttered 609 words, while Dawkins uttered a mere 342. Considering the way O'Reilly usually treats his guests, that's a pretty good ratio. At the start of every show, O'Reilly gives the headlines of the major stories he will be discussing. But there was no teaser for his interview with Dawkins. Likewise, when he goes to a commercial break he tells you what is coming up later in the show. But there was no mention of Dawkins until the commercial break right before that segment (which came roughly half…

Clocks, Microwaves, and the Limits of Fermi Problems

I don't have anything all that new to say about last night's Cosmos reboot, and I'm leaving for scenic Madison, WI today to attend DAMOP, so I don't have a great deal of time. Kate did mention something over dinner last night, though, that's a good topic for a quick blog post. Kate's a big listener of audiobooks and podcasts, including The Naked Scientists podcast, and she mentioned something they said in responding to a question about charging phones and the cost of electricity: I think my favourite one is a microwave oven. So, the clock on a microwave oven uses more electricity over the…

The Sagan Thing

I am crushingly busy right now-- massive book rewrites needed, papers to grade, etc.-- so I've actually been fairly happy with the general lack of topics that inspire a deep desire to blog. which of course, was promptly upset this morning, when a brief outburst of hating on Carl Sagan erupted on Twitter just as I was about to head to the gym. The catalyst was the hoopla surrounding the donation of Sagan's papers to the Library of Congress, which though it isn't specifically cited was the cause of a flurry of Twitter discussion that I think led to Erin Podolak's anti-Sagan manifesto, which in…

How to Choose a College

It's that time of year again, when the US News rankings come out (confirming my undergrad alma mater as the Best in All the Land) and everybody in academia gets all worked up about What It All Means. There are always a few gems in there with all the pointless hand-wringing, though, and Timothy Burke of Swarthmore has some of the best advice you'll ever read on choosing a college: I sometimes join a faculty panel to talk to prospective Swarthmore applicants, and one of the first things that I say is that a college applicant and family can only have strong control over a few really basic…

The Problem With Innate Differences

In yesterday's post about the experience of science, I mentioned that I had both a specific complaint about the article by Alexandra Jellicoe (which I explained in the post) and a general complaint about the class in which the article falls. I want to attempt to explain the latter problem, partly because I think it will be useful, but mostly because it's stuck in my head, and I need to at least type out the explanation before I can move on to other things. The article in question doesn't contain all of the elements I'll mention below, but I think it clearly falls into a class of articles that…

More Is Difficult

I've remarked several times that I think condensed matter physics gets slighted in public discussions of the field, especially relative to its usefulness. Particle physics gets all sorts of press, but in practical terms, it is essentially useless-- whether CERN or Fermilab locate the Higgs boson or not will make absolutely no difference in the lives of the average person. Condensed matter physics, on the other hand gets basically no press, despite the fact that modern technological civilization would be impossible without an understanding of condensed matter physics. (I should note here that…

Time Dilates When You're Chasing Bunnies

We're just starting out on a walk, and no sooner do I open the gate from the back yard than the dog takes off at a run, hitting the end of the leash and nearly pulling my arm out of the socket. "Whoa, there," I say. "Take it easy." "Come on," she says, "We need to go fast! Let's go, let's go, letsgo!" "What's the hurry? It's a nice day, there's no rush." "We need to go fast. If we go fast, I'll be younger than that annoying dog out back." "You know, I'm all in favor of exercise, but I think you're overstating the benefits." "No, silly, it's not about exercise. It's physics. When I go fast,…

Is It Psychological Or Biological

About 15 years ago, I was giving a lecture on psychiatric medication to a group of MSW students.  One student asked a question that was intended to be provocative.  She asked, "how can you justify giving medication to treat a problem that is obviously psychological in origin, like posttraumatic stress disorder?" What she was referring to, was a paradigm that was commonly held at the time.  Specifically, there was this notion that some problems were psychological, and others were biological, in origin.  It was thought, by some, that there was a clear distinction between the two kinds of…

Moreau's Pheidole Phylogeny

Pheidole creightoni major worker, California After reading a couple times through Corrie Moreau's hot-off-the-press Pheidole evolution paper, I am pleased to give it a thumbs-up. The paper is behind a subscription barrier, so I have distilled the results into an informal summary: Pheidole is one of the most important groups of ants. They are distinctive in always having at least two sharply-defined types of worker ants in the nest: minor workers that just sort of look like normal little ants, and the very front-heavy major workers with an enormous head and powerful jaws. Pheidole is…

Exposing quackery and abuse in the addictions treatment industry

The 75th anniversary of Alcoholics Anonymous has brought out a spate of legacy media articles about the organization, most singing the praises of an unscientific movement begun during The Great Depression that still forms the basis of many clinical drug and alcohol addiction treatment programs. My post Thursday on Brendan Koerner's Wired article brought out a very thoughtful commenter and sharp writer, friendthegirl. I learned that ftg writes the blog, Stinkin' Thinkin': Muckraking the 12-Step Industry. Stinkin' Thinkin' was started with the intention highlighting the quackery and abuse that…

Discriminating butterflies show how one species could split into two

Walk through the rainforests of Ecuador and you might encounter a beautiful butterfly called Heliconius cydno. It's extremely varied in its colours. Even among one subspecies, H.cydno alithea, you can find individuals with white wingbands and those with yellow. Despite their different hues, they are still the same species... but probably not for much longer. Even though the two forms are genetically similar and live in the same area, Nicola Chamberlain from Harvard University has found that one of them - the yellow version - has developed a preference for mating with butterflies of its own…

Being an Absentee President

Of late president Obama has taken a little bit of heat for his frequent (and mostly male) golf outings. Before him, president Bush took the same sort of heat for his golf and vacations. If you were willing to dig a bit through the news archives, I'd bet you could find similar tut-tutting about previous presidents taking time off. It's a common theme for criticism of just about any important federal officeholder - it's no coincidence that so many congressional "fact-finding" missions are to tropical paradises or European vacation spots. In that case it's a criticism I vigorously share, as…

Should scientists be policy advocates?

On one side we have a long list of scientists who are known, and respected, by the wider public primarily because they have chosen to venture beyond the confines of the laboratory or the classroom into the realm of policy advocacy. Think Carl Sagan (nuclear winter), Sylvia Earle (marine conservation) or Albert Einstein (atomic warfare). On the other are a comparable list of lesser-known but accomplished academics who insist scientists should keep to the facts for fear of tarnishing the reputation of science itself as a neutral arbiter. An almost-recent paper in Conservation Biology (…