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Science Majors Follow-Up

I meant to follow up on some of the comments to my post calling for more science majors last week, but we had some Issues Thursday night, and I didn't get to it on Friday. There were a number of people making negative comments about things that weren't quite what I was saying, though, and I do still want to respond. Happily, Johan Larson gets it: [I]t seems to me that for a large portion of undergrads what they study doesn't seem very important, for several reasons: they don't know what they want to do with their lives, their preferred employers require a college degree but don't much care…

What the science cited by the Cato Institute really says about global warming

I was going to ignore the open letter-to-the-president advertisement placed in major papers recently by the Cato Institute. You've probably heard of it -- the one that says Obama should ignore global warming alarmism because the science says it isn't happening. The one signed by "over 100 scientists." But the response elsewhere has been interesting. It focuses almost exclusively on the expertise of those who signed the letter, not the merits of the argument it makes. I find myself agreeing -- ever so slightly, with the Cato Institutes' Jerry Taylor, who defended the letter last week in the…

Open Access and Costs

An interesting comment about open access has been left over at Bora's place. The commenter is clearly not in favor of open access, and provides a number of reasons for her opposition. I'm going to break the comment into a couple of parts, and address all of the objections separately. OPEN ACCESS isn't FREE. That's what any first year econ student will tell you. I don't know why scientists can't get that. Open access is free to the reader. It still costs money to publish. Open access shifts that cost to the author. That means the author has to: a) pull money out of his grant to pay…

Minnesota AGW Denialist Jungbauer Disembowled by Respected News Anchor Don Shelby

I woke up this morning and the world was slightly different than it was the night before. Well, it probably always is a little different each day, but there are certain times when you notice this. I'm not talking about the bits of siding, roofing, and trees scattered about the landscape because of the very severe thunderstorm we had last night, although I suppose this is indirectly related. If you are not a Minnesotan this will take some explanation: Don Shelby newscaster, was the Walter Cronkite of the Twin Cities. Stately in appearance, white-haired (since birth, presumably), deep…

"John Smith" responds to Orac's post on his Lava Lamp pareidolia

This was so good that I just couldn't resist. Yesterday, I did a quick post about an amusing bit of pareidolia, in which the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus were seen in a Lava Lamp. Apparently, an Australian man going by the pseudonym of John Smith noticed the shape in the wax as he fired up a brand spanking new Lava Lamp, recognized it for the Holy Miracle that it was, and shut off the lamp before Satan's heat could melt the apparition. He then stayed quiet for over a year and then announced his discovery to all the world. Naturally, I and other skeptics, particularly you, my readers, were not…

The promise and challenges of Big Genetics

Olivia Judson's blog has a guest post by Aaron Hirsh that got me thinking about a topic that will be familiar to most scientists: the transition of research towards Big Science. Big Science basically includes any project involving a large consortium of research groups working together on a tightly-defined problem, usually with a very specific goal in mind (e.g. sequence and analyse a genome, or build a big machine to smash particles together at high speed). Hirsh only mentions genetics in passing, but this field - and particularly human genetics - is an area where the trend towards Big…

On Mimicking Phosphotyrosine

When doing science, there's generally one totally optimal way of performing an experiment. But, there may also be several other less optimal means of gathering similar data, and one of those may be much more feasible than the totally optimal method. As a scientist, you have to determine whether this other method is sufficient, or whether it's necessary to expend the extra effort and/or resources on the more difficult method. Sometimes it's totally fine to take the simpler approach (and this will spare some of your precious time and your lab's precious funding), but this post is about a case…

Varmus Screws the Pooch

Harold Varmus is one of the most high profile advocates of open access to biomedical research. As one of the cofounders of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), he has played an important role in making published results freely available to all. And he's a Nobel Laureate, which ain't too shaby either. Varmus was interviewed by Ira Flatow for NPR's Science Friday program about the NIH's new policy requiring that research publications presenting results funded by the NIH be deposited in PubMed Central (the NIH's free online archive of biomedical journal articles) within a year of publication.…

America's quack Dr. Oz asks people to ask him questions on Twitter. Hilariously, the results aren't quite what he expected.

Getting old sucks. I had a relatively long and busy day in the operating room yesterday, the kind of day that not so long ago I’d handle with no problem. This time around, though, it wiped me out, to the point where not long after dinner I crashed. Hard. Then I woke up around midnight long enough to drag my sorry posterior upstairs to my bed. It happens. It’s just that it seems to be happening more often these days. So it was that I missed one of the most amusing Twitter happenings that I’ve seen in a long time; that is; until I woke up again early this AM. Dr. Oz just got pwned on Twitter…

Another Week of GW News, October 30, 2011

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week in the Ecological Crisis Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsOctober 30, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Rogelj, Maplecroft, BEST, OWS, WCRP, Monnett The Cree Prophecy, Bottom Line, Subsidies, Planet 3.0, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Agro-Corps, Food Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon…

Day 3 of flu virus sharing summit: participant account

The critical summit on sharing influenza viruses entered its third day (previous coverage here and links therein). The big media outlets covered the opening but not since. Fortunately, you can read about developments here (Day 2, here). Ed Hammond is there and is keeping us abreast of developments. A participant's view at the start of Day 3 (5:30 am, Thursday, Geneva time): Halfway Through and No New Ideas from the US and EU To be sure, Indonesia has not been the most effective leader for its cause. Its multiple failures at this meeting (if not previous ones) to put forward clear language…

Belated March Meeting Wrap-Up

I did one sketchy update from Portland last Tuesday, but never wrote up my impressions of the rest of the March Meeting-- when I got back, I was buried in grading, and then trying to put together Monday's presentation. And, for reasons that will become apparent, I was unable to write anything up before I left Portland Anyway, for those who care, here are my impressions from the rest of the meeting: Tuesday In the 8am session, I went to the polymer physics prize talk by Michael Rubinstein, which was a sort of career retrospective, talking about how he wandered into the disreputable field of…

SciBlogs caves to hysterics

All I ask from people... All I fucking ask from people, is intellectual consistency. And this seemingly simple request is apparently, impossible. I dont believe a fucking word, of anyone, who has FREAKED THE FUCK OUT over the fucking Pepsi Blog. And heres why. JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY/CONFLICTS OF INTEREST/POLITICAL BIAS OBSTRUCTING SCIENCE In 2008-2009, we had a sponsored blog here by Invitrogen. As far as I know, Invitrogen had no apparent editorial control over what got posted there. As a result, the blog turned into an EPIC TRAIN WRECK, when several SciBloggers took it upon themselves to…

Teaching the Holocaust: The "right" not to be offended interferes

One of the consistent themes of this blog has been combating Holocaust denial and, as a subtext, another consistent theme has been that passing laws to criminalize Holocaust denial (or, as has been attempted recently, criminalize "genocide denial") or throwing Holocaust deniers like David Irving into jail is about as ill-advised an approach to fighting this particularly odious form of racism and anti-Semitism as I can imagine. It makes Holocaust denial the "forbidden fruit" and at the same time facilitates the truly disgusting spectacle of Holocaust deniers donning the mantle of free speech…

Down the toilet with Miranda Devine

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine likes to import the ideas for her anti-environmentalist screeds from America. (For example, DDT ban kills millions, and hockey stick is broken.) Her latest import is the claim that low-flush toilets don't work. Here it is in a 1998 column from a Competitive Enterprise Instituter: Included in the numerous provisions of the massive 1992 Energy Policy Act was a requirement that, by 1994, all new toilets sold in the United States must use no more than 1.6 gallons per flush (gpf in Washingtonspeak), well below the 3.5 gpf models most Americans are…

If private firms fund research at universities, who do you think will control access to the knowledge?

Just one more follow up on the matter of how research universities will make do as federal funds for research dry up. Some have suggested that the answer will come from more collaboration between university labs and researchers in private industry. Perhaps it will. But, a recent article in the Boston Globe about conflicts within the Broad Institute is suggestive of the kinds of clashes of philosophy that might make university-industry collaborations challenging. From the article: Just over a year ago, Cambridge's prestigious Broad Institute started an idealistic medical-research project,…

Is the Holocaust "revisionism" movement no more?

This blog is primarily about medicine, the scientific basis of medicine, and general skepticism and critical thinking. As part of my interest in skepticism, a particular form of pseudoscience and pseudohistory that I first took an interest in about a decade ago, namely Holocaust "revisionism," which is, of course, in reality Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is the denial or minimization of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime, in particular the industrialized genocide of European Jewry. The reasons, as I've discussed time and time again, virtually always boil down to a combination of…

Stanislaw Burzynski’s counteroffensive against the FDA and Texas Medical Board continues, part 2

Believe it or not, I'm about to say the one and only good thing I will say about Stanislaw Burzynski in this post. After all, I was always taught to find the good in my opponents, no matter how vile I find them. Burzynski, for instance, has been peddling a cure for brain cancer (and other cancers) that he claims to have discovered in the blood and urine in the 1970s. Despite there being no convincing evidence of antitumor activity due to these peptides, which he dubbed antineoplastons, he has managed to win battle after battle with the FDA and the Texas Medical Board and to continue to prey…

Finding disease mutations in a sea of noise

Jones et al. (2009). Exomic Sequencing Identifies PALB2 as a Pancreatic Cancer Susceptibility Gene. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1171202 A paper published online today in Science illustrates both the potential and the challenges of using large-scale DNA sequencing to identify rare genetic variants underlying disease risk. Traditionally, geneticists have pinned down such variants using large family studies. By using these families to track which parts of the genome tend to be co-inherited with the disease, it's possible to zoom in on the region of DNA that harbours the disease-causing mutation…

America's Next Religion!!!

On Sunday, I was stuck on a long boring drive — there is no scenery between Winnipeg and Morris, only a pale gray void with wisps of snow blowing through it — and was thinking about some of the conversations I'd had the night before. I was a bit envious. My own upbringing in religion was rather tepid, an exposure to bland liberal Lutheranism of the Scandinavian Phlegmatic sect, and had no drama at all to it, and was more like a Unitarian Universalist church with a historical creed attached to it that no one cared much about. Yet here I'd been talking with ex-fundamentalist ex-Mennonites,…

Serious Things Day II: Why I'm Not Bright Green

A reader of mine named Aaron emailed me to ask if I'd respond to Alex Steffen's latest piece at Worldchanging. Aaron writes: I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about Alex Steffen's recent post over at worldchanging.com. I think that it is a well considered and well informed post that addresses many of the things that make me uncomfortable in your writing. I'm really not interested in criticizing your work, or anything of that sort; I believe that the sustainability movement as a whole needs to have a strong and well reasoned message if it is to take root with the public at large…

On Heffernan: For Me, ScienceBlogs Isn't Supposed to Be a Newspaper's Science Section

I had been considering, over the weekend to write a navel gazing post about The State of ScienceBlogs and Its Relationship to the Mad Biologist. And then Virginia Heffernan of the NY Times wrote a quote picking article about ScienceBlogs, thereby screwing up my weekend blogging (so much stupid, so little Mad Biologist). At the end of the post, I'll describe how I see ScienceBlogs, but, first, let's talk about Heffernan's arrogance. From Heffernan: I was nonplussed by the high dudgeon of the so-called SciBlings. The bloggers evidently write often enough for ad-free academic journals that…

A Coast-to-Coast Festival Infused with Innovation

Shout out to ieee-usa today's engineer for their post on the Festival!! By Robin Peress What happens when you combine the best minds in STEM education with best practices in entrepreneurship? One striking result is the forthcoming USA Science & Engineering Festival, whose special events will blanket the country in October and culminate in a two-day exhibition bash on Washington, D.C.'s National Mall. The human comet behind this tour-de-force is Lawrence A. Bock, a San Diego-based serial entrepreneur (by his own description), who said he took many of the rules for launching a successful…

Modeling antiviral resistance, X: ready to run the model

[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.] Now we are almost ready to run the model described in the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. If you have been following up to this point, you will know the model described in the Methods section is a homogeneous…

Flu biology: receptors, I

The need for better information about the science of avian influenza is urgent. But science is a slow process, or at least slow relative to an urgent time scale, even in times of rapid advances in technology. Even so, while we are waiting for the other shoe to drop, we continue to learn and unlearn about the influenza virus. One major gap has been understanding where humans have cells with receptors for bird flu viruses. A new paper published online last week in The FASEB Journal is finally providing some information. As usual, it is both informative and confusing. To understand what it is…

Sci-Fi And Building Blogging Communities

Some musings from February 13, 2005... At the Triangle Blogger Conference yesterday, somebody mentioned Vernon Vinge's Fire Upon The Deep, as an example of a sci-fi novel describing future consequences of Usenet (at the time) or blog communities. Someone else suggested another book, Bloom. Another blogger (sorry, can't find it again right now, so many people blogged their impressions of the conference afterwards) thought of Terry Pratchett's The Truth as a parable of the way journalism works. I have not yet read "Fire Upon The Deep" (surprisingly, as I own a copy and generally like Vinge a…

Safe haven laws, hidden pregnancies, and the tragedy of Ashley Truitt

My office in the epidemiology department is located within the hospital. Therefore, every day when I walk into work, I pass by a sign like the one on the left. Like most states, Iowa has a safe haven law--a law that allows parents to leave a newborn infant at a designated site, no questions asked, without any threat of prosecution. These sorts of laws were developed in response to cases where babies had been left on doorsteps, or thrown in trash dumpsters, etc. Safe Haven laws, in theory, should prevent those kinds of abuses--the parents abdicate responsibility for the infant, who can…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Center for Public Integrity, Jim Morris reports on working conditions at the nation’s oil refineries, writing that more than 500 refinery incidents have been reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1994, calling into question the adequacy of EPA and federal labor rules designed to protect workers as well as the public. Morris begins the story with John Moore, who in 2010 was working at a Tesoro Corporation oil refinery north of Seattle — he writes: Up the hill from Moore, in the Naphtha Hydrotreater unit, seven workers were restoring to service a bank of heat…

800 Years Of Human Sacrifice In Kent

British Archaeology #131 (July/August) has a feature by Pippa Bradley that caught my interest. It's about a Wessex Archaeology dig in 2004-05 at Cliffs End farm in Thanet, a piece of north-east Kent that was an island up until the 16th century when silting finished connecting it to mainland England. What we're dealing with here is ritual murder, some pretty strange disposal of the dead and ancient Scandinavian migrants. Use of the site begins in earnest with six ring-ditch barrows during the Early Bronze Age (2200-1500 cal BC). These were poorly preserved and yielded few interesting finds.…

Blog Table Discussion with Puff the Mutant Dragon (Part I)

My post post Faster Than a Speeding Photon, doing a Q&A explainer of the OPERA fast-neutrino measurement was picked for inclusion in The Best Science Writing Online 2012 (confusingly published in late 2012, featuring blog posts from 2011...). As promotion for the book, it was suggested that pairs of authors from the collection "interview" each other about their posts, blogging, and whatever else, and I was paired with Puff the Mutant Dragon. We exchanged several emails over a week or so, and thought about cutting them up into typical Q&A type "interview" posts. That seemed like it…

A Lot of Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing

I was looking at some polling about science over the weekend, and discovered that they helpfully provide an online quiz consisting of the factual questions asked of the general public as part of the survey. Amusingly, one of them is actually more difficult to answer correctly if you know a lot about the field than if you only know a little. I'll reproduce it here first, if you would like to take a crack at it, and then I'll explain why it's tricky below the fold. The global positioning system, or GPS, relies on which of these to work?(answers) Choose only one answer-- this is being recorded…

Comparative Effectiveness Research: Priorities for Mental Health

Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) has been controversial, as href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/16/AR2009031602913.html">noted in the Washington Post.  Admittedly, most of the controversy has been contrived.  Fortunately, the process is moving forward; there is no meaningful opposition at this point. A good summary of the objections of this was posted by Hilzoy at href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_05/018133.php">Political Animal.  I'll deal with the objections simply by posting the link, as refuting them is not the…

When Scientists Go All Bloggy

It's getting harder and harder to remember what it was like to write about science in the pre-Web 2.0 days. Back then (i.e., 2004), I'd come across an intriguing paper, I'd interview the authors, I'd get comments--supportive or nasty--from other experts in the field, and then publish an article distilling everything I'd learned. It would take months or years for the authors to follow up on their work or for other scientists to publish their own papers attacking or supporting the original research. How quaint. Let's take a look at an experience I had yesterday. I was reading a blog called The…

Will Google censor its digital library?

I promised you some updates on the Google Books Settlement, so here you go. Things are definitely getting interesting. First, I mentioned earlier that I was going to attend a panel on the Google Book Search Settlement here in DC, featuring representatives of Google, the publishers, and the Internet Archive. ITIF, which organized the panel, has made the entire thing available online; I've linked to it at the bottom of the post, because it's over an hour long. Anyway, it was interesting to hear the (very civil) differences of opinion between Dan Clancy, the Engineering Director for Google Book…

DVD review: Ethics in Biomedical Research

On this blog I occasionally note a major motion picture that is (tangentially) related to ethics in science, not to mention seeking your advice on my movie-viewing decisions (the votes are running 2 to 1 in favor of my watching Flash Gordon; if I do, I may have to live-blog it). Today, I'm going to give you an actual review* of a DVD whose subject is ethical scientific research. Because you ought to have options when planning your weekend! A member of the Adventures in Ethics and Science Field Team brought me a DVD to review, "Ethics in Biomedical Research". This is a DVD produced by the…

Curtsinger on creationism

Kristine Harley attended James Curtsinger's lecture at UMTC last night, and passed along an abbreviated copy of her notes. I wish I could have gone—it sounds like it was an informative evening—but living out here in the wilderness, I have to plan those long drives into the Big City with some care. Curtsinger's talk was only very loosely organized around the theme of "ten things," and was mostly a comprehensive overview of the various forms of creationism from Archbishop Ussher (1581-1656) to Michael Behe's embarrassing performance at the Dover trial. I would say that there were around 20-25…

On Promoting Science Bloggers Who Happen To Be Female

If you're plugged into the science blogtwitosphere, then you surely know that the topic of women science bloggers has been written about extensively. Rather than re-hash what many others have said, I'll direct you to these posts by Kate Clancy and Daniel Lende. Then, late last night, Ed Yong wrote a post highlighting a handful of blogs he reads that happen to be penned (typed?) by science writers who happen to possess two X chromosomes. I also noticed that of all the names and blogs that Ed listed, only one was new to me. Perhaps this is because I'm well-plugged-in to the sciblogtwitosphere,…

290-299/366: Offbeat Rome

Kate and I spent last week in Rome, to attend the wedding of a friend of mine from college, who was marrying an Italian woman. I've always wanted to see Rome, so this was a great excuse, and of course I took a lot of pictures-- over 1,600 all told. This happens in part because when I'm visiting a major tourist site with a camera, I'm trying to do two things at the same time. One, of course, is to get good photos of the big attractions, to supplement my memories of the actual sites. But this is always constrained a bit by the knowledge that, you know, major tourist destinations have plenty of…

Digital Assets Librarian, York University Libraries

A terrific new opportunity at my institution. I'm not in the reporting department or on the search committee, but I'd be happy to answer general questions about York and the environment. My email is jdupuis at yorku dot ca. The online job posting is here. Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant Librarian Discipline/Field: Digital Assets Librarian Home Faculty: Libraries Home Department/Area/Division: Scott Library Affiliation/Union: YUFA Position Start Date: June 1, 2012 Digital Assets Librarian - York University Libraries York University Libraries are seeking an innovative and…

The impact of HIV on Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis

Second of five student guest posts by Nai-Chung N. Chang Tuberculosis (TB) is a major disease burden in many areas of the world. As such, it was declared a global public health emergency in 1993 by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is a bacterial disease that is transmitted through the air when an infected individual coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings. However, not all individuals who contract the disease will display symptoms. This separates the infected into two categories, latent and active. Latent individuals are non-infectious and will not transmit the disease, whereas active…

Global cooling awareness in the 60's?

I apologise for the brief intrusion of something vaguely related to climate science on this rowing-n-wiki blog; we'll return you to your usual programming shortly. Maurizio Morabito attempts to establish that there was a consensus for global cooling in the 1960's (this is all part of a rather dull campaign to discredit the mighty number one climate paper "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus"; generally he appears to have failed to understand what we said, so I won't bore you by attacking it further). Evidence is apparently found in a 1961 UNESCO / WMO conference…

April Pieces Of My Mind #3

Happy archaeo-dad pastime: Jrette helped me enter the humongous tables of stats on rock art from Mats Malmer's 1981 book into a computer spreadsheet, and we checked his sums, finding them all to be correct. Funny how common it is even for educated people to believe that the Vikings would send their dead out to sea in a (sometimes burning) boat. Have they never considered what would happen two hours later when the boat landed on the other side of the fjord? I'm measuring stuff on my computer screen with a ruler to get the relative scales right on two shots of an ard tip. Trying to convince…

Magnetic manipulation of the sense of morality

WHEN making moral judgements, we rely on our ability to make inferences about the beliefs and intentions of others. With this so-called "theory of mind", we can meaningfully interpret their behaviour, and decide whether it is right or wrong. The legal system also places great emphasis on one's intentions: a "guilty act" only produces criminal liability when it is proven to have been performed in combination with a "guilty mind", and this, too, depends on the ability to make reasoned moral judgements. MIT researchers now show that this moral compass can be very easily skewed. In a new study…

Court Upholds Rights of Scientists and Patients to Challenge Gene Patents

Some interesting news about the breast cancer patent lawsuit I wrote about for Slate's Double X Magazine a few months ago:  A federal district court has just agreed to hear the case. When the lawsuit was first filed, many legal experts I talked to said they were sure the case would get thrown out of court for it's unusual approach, namely that it claims that the practice of patenting genes is unconstitutional See my story about the case here. Filings and other documents related to the case available here.  And see below for the full press release about today's news: Court Upholds Right…

Rebooting (and Funding) Science Journalism

At the ScienceOnline 2010 conference next month, I'm going to be on a panel about "Rebooting Science Journaiism," in which I'll join Carl Zimmer, Ed Yong, and John Timmer in pondering the future of science journalism. God knows what will come of it, as none of us have the sure answers. But that session, as well as the entanglement of my own future with that of science journalism, has me focused on the subject. And two recent online discussions about it have piqued my interest. One was the reaction, on a science writer's email-list I'm on, to a recent Poynter interview with Times science…

How to stop arrogant egotists from getting violent

We've written a lot about video games and aggression here on CogDaily, and typically there has been heated discussion about the results. Why, commenters ask, aren't you talking about aggression in football players, or road rage, or in any of a thousand other situations? The most important reason is simply that we have a teenage son who loves video games, so we want to know if there's a negative impact of playing these games all the time. But our commenters do have a point: a larger understanding of aggressive behavior and violence clearly goes beyond simply playing video games. There was…

ScienceOnline09: Gender'n'science'n'blogging'n'allies, down to the wire and needing your stories!

So, we may have mentioned we're going to ScienceOnline 2009, which starts on Friday; ScienceWoman and I have our respective sessions on Saturday with our respective co-facilitators. I've been snowed under with the start of classes, some papers due, some abstracts due, a meeting last week, and, of course, this upcoming event. But I'm getting a little caught up (even if this is a scrambled post), and saw discussion of being a blogging ally at a couple of places of note: In particular, Samia blogged about how others could be good allies within her post about race and science blogging (before…

A reckless proposal, or "Scientists are people too, and it's time we started treating them that way."

After my experiences a few weeks ago, and the ensuing discussion, I haven't been able to get the topic of childcare and professional travel out of my head. So here's a reckless proposal on the topic. For everybody: 1) We need to recognize that to be successful, scientists, engineers, or academics need to engage in some amount of overnight travel to professional conferences, workshops, short courses, etc. Sure you might be able to go a year or two or even three without leaving your hometown, but at some point, in order to be successful at your current job or to advance professionally, you…

The Other Causes of Obesity

The most commonly cited causes of the obesity epidemic over the last 30 years are decreases in physical activity and increased consumption of unhealthy foods: the Big Two. For these as causes, we have what can only be described as an overwhelming quantity of evidence. However, many other causes of increased obesity have been suggested such as environmental endocrine disruptors or chronic sleep deprivation. In an editorial in the International Journal of Obesity, Keith et al. argue that for some of them the evidence is quite solid -- meriting further study and possibly public health…

Friday Sprog Blogging: revisiting Pluto.

There's been a continuing discussion, in various online venues (including this blog), of Unscientific America, a book which notes the "demotion" of Pluto as an instance where the lessons the American public drew from the scientists' decisions may have diverged widely from the lessons the scientists would want the public to draw -- if they even thought about the possibility that the public was paying attention. So, since the Free-Ride offspring were paying attention as the Pluto saga unfolded, I thought I should double back and see what their current thinking about it is. If you've forgotten…