Search Content

Displaying results 11201 - 11250 of 87950

The Friday Fermentable Live!!! - ScienceOnline'09

Arikia Millikan, then-Intern at ScienceBlogs.com (now gainfully employed Ex-Intern), demonstrates her facility in liveblogging the comparison between two pinot noirs. So why has it taken me exactly 11 weeks to write this post? I think it's because once we post it, I have to let go of how awesome this event was. But, this post has been sitting in my queue for way too long. So, now, I must finally tell all regular readers about our proposed live winetasting on 16 January at ScienceOnline'09. As you may know, about 240 science bloggers and associated miscreants gathered in Research…

Myth 7: Darwin thought that Australian aborigines were closer to apes than to Europeans

Actually, this one is better called "Darwin was a racist", but as the text concerned is from the same source as those claims, I thought it might be easier to evaluate a single claim and generalise from that. Our gospel for today is chapters V and VI of The Descent of Man, published in 1871. If you read Darwin sloppily, or to find evidence that he really was a Very Bad Man for rhetorical - usually religious - purposes, you soon come across this statement. In fact, you can find paraphrases of it in literally hundreds of creationist documents and sites. Here is the offending passage, from…

Another Week of GW News, September 30, 2012

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 of Climate Instability News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdom September 30, 2012 Chuckles, Rio+20, UNGA, DARA, Attitudes, Maldives, Too Conservative?, Reichler Bottom Line, Global Legal Framework, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, GMO…

Holtz and Rey 2007, the prophecy revealed

It's my birthday this week (the 26th), so how timely that that most long-awaited of books - Tom Holtz and Luis Rey's Dinosaurs should arrive this morning (Holtz 2007). This huge, lavishly illustrated work - it's one of those volumes that will get called 'the ultimate dinosaur book' a lot - has been in the pipeline for, I dunno, months and months and months, and I'm very pleased to see the final finished version. After visiting Luis and seeing some of the artwork he was preparing for the volume (see his thoughts here), I previously blogged about it (at ver 1) here and here. The official…

Climate Matters Video Contest

Via an unsolicited email, I have learned of a video contest I thought I would share with Science Blogs readers. The contest "gives Americans an opportunity to inspire our next president to take bold climate action." I will quote the press release below, you can participate by producing a video or just by watching and sharing your favorites. The 10 most watched will win. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact Leah Borkin Fenton Communications 212 584 5000 Lborkin@fenton.com Climate Matters Video Contest Launched Brighter Planet and 1Sky Joined By Maggie Gyllenhaal and Others to Bring Americans'…

These numbers don't really mean much, but they're all we've got to estimate the cost of Waxman-Markey

The Congressional Budget Office is the probably the closest thing to a non-partisan source of economic analyses. On Friday it released its best guess on how much the ACES bill, a.k.a. Waxman-Markey, will cost the U.S. economy by 2020. the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion--or about $175 per household. That figure includes the cost of restructuring the production and use of energy and of payments made to foreign entities under the program, but it does not include the economic benefits and other benefits of the reduction in GHG emissions and…

I Have a Paper in Science (And No, This is Not an April Fools Joke)

As a journalist who reports frequently on science, I never expected to be publishing in the literature. But tomorrow I will actually have a paper in the Policy Forum section of the latest issue of Science (April 6). To be sure, this wouldn't have come about if I hadn't had a co-author who's a real (social) scientist--our fellow Scienceblogger Matthew Nisbet, author of "Framing Science." And indeed, that's what the article is about: Nisbet and I are advising scientists to start to actively "frame" their knowledge, especially on hot-button issues like evolution, global warming, embryonic stem…

Neuronal Plasticity as Evidenced by Reversal of Amblyopia

The work of Li-Huei Tsai on the partial restoration of memory was in the news a few days ago.   Although the experiments were done on mice, it was hoped that the results could indicate a reason to hope that humans with dementia could be helped. The study showed that an environment enriched with varied stimuli could help organisms regain long-term memories.   This recovery of long-term memory was really the most remarkable finding. It suggests that memories are not really erased in such disorders as Alzheimer’s, but that they are rendered inaccessible and can be recovered... ...The…

The Zombie Courtier's reply

After having pontificated a bit longer than perhaps I should have about why Richard Dawkins' treatment of the execution of Saddam Hussein as a missed opportunity for psychological or historical research was so misguided, I thought it might be time to take a more pro-Dawkins tilt. After all, even though the majority of my posts about Richard Dawkins have been critical, on balance I do admire the man; it's just that he has a maddening penchant for using historical analogies that make me want to tear my hair out. A while back, PZ posted something that he called The Courtier's Reply. In essence…

Lindgren on Lott

James Lindgren makes some interesting points in the comment section to this Jane Galt post. First, he comments on this Lott claim about his tax returns: As to deducting these costs on my income taxes, my 1997 tax form, which I have shared with many others, shows that $8,750 was deducted for research assistants (the heading was under "legal and professional services"). We do not keep the supporting documents past the three years required by the IRS and the $8,750 does include the expenses for other projects. On the other hand, I am sure that I did not keep track of all of my…

Accountability in Science Journalism: two recent examples of failures in the NYT and Forbes

Ed Yong demands higher accountability in science journalism and has made me think of how in the last two days I've run across two examples of shoddy reporting. These two articles I think encompass a large part of the problem, the first from the NYT, represents the common failure of science reporters to be critical of correlative results. While lacking egregious factual errors, in accepting the authors' conclusions without vetting the results of the actual paper, the journalist has created a misleading article. The second, from Forbes, represents the worst kind of corporate news hackery,…

Deconstructing another Stanislaw Burzynski cancer "success story"

A key pillar of the Stanislaw Burzynski antineoplaston marketing machine, a component of the marketing strategy without which his clinic would not be able to attract nearly as many desperate cancer patients to Houston for either his antineoplaston therapy (now under a temporary shutdown by the FDA that, if science were to reign, will become permanent) or his "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy," which Burzynski represents as a discovery of his that large NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers like M.D. Anderson or Memorial Sloan-Kettering are only now starting to copy, is the…

Confirmation Bias and Political Groupthink

Michael Shermer writes of a fascinating experiment on how the brain processes statements and claims about which one has a powerful attachment to the truth being a certain way. It may well illuminate the sort of irrational thinking driven by political partisanship. I'll post his description of the experiment below the fold: This surety is called the confirmation bias, whereby we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence. Now a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows where in the brain the…

Live blogging the debate

2100 hrs This is a bit of an experiment for me. First, I haven't done a lot of live blogging. Second, I don't know whether science will play any part in tonight's debate. 2102 Lehrer is introducing. Looks like McCain showed up... Lehrer: quoting Eisenhower, re military and econ strength. Obama: poised, confident. Acknowledges poor economy and personalizes it for average American. Wants oversight of bailout. Wants return on investment. Wants to help homeowners. States "final verdict on 8 years of Bush/McCain deregulation." Calls out to middle class. McCain: distracts to Ted Kennedy.…

Chris Patil (ouroboros) on the Campisi lab's new PLoS Biology paper: cellular senescence, protein secretion, and the aging/cancer paradox

[Point of clarification: I was delighted to use this post to congratulate my friend and blogging colleague, Dr Chris Patil, on his contributions to this paper from the laboratory of Dr Judith Campisi discussed below. As the formal press release notes, "[c]o-authoring the paper with Campisi were Jean-Philippe Coppé and Christopher Patil, members of Campisi's research group in Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division, Joshua Goldstein, now with the Novartis Research Foundation; Francis Rodier and Denise Muñoz of the Buck Institute; and Peter Nelson and Yu Sun from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer…

Hobbits: Happy, Healthy, Human?

It's been twenty months now since scientists reported discovering fossils on the Indonesian island of Flores belonging to a three-foot-tall hominid with a brain the size of a chimp that lived recently as 12,000 years ago. Homo floresiensis, as this hominid was dubbed, has inspired two clashing interpretations. Its discoverers declared it a separate species descended from another branch of hominids. In others words, the most recent common ancestor we share with Homo floresiensis lived two or even three million years ago. Skeptics argued that the fossils belonged to human pygmies. The one…

The Hellinga Retractions (part 1): when replication fails, what should happen next?

Because Abi asked me to, I'm going to discuss the fascinating case of the Hellinga retractions. Since this is another case where there is a lot to talk about, I'm going to take it in two parts. In the first part, working from the Chemical & Engineering News article by Celia Henry Arnaud (May 5, 2008) [1], I'll focus on the common scientific activity of trying to build on a piece of published work. What happens when the real results seem not to fit with the published results? What should happen? In part 2, drawing from the Nature news feature by Erika Check Hayden (May 15, 2008) [2], I…

Databases are hammers; MapReduce is a screwdriver.

A bunch of people have sent me links to an article about MapReduce. I've hesitated to write about it, because the currently hyped MapReduce stuff was developed, and extensively used by Google, my employer. But the article is really annoying, and deserves a response. So I'm going to be absolutely clear. I am not commenting on this in my capacity as a Google employee. (In fact, I've never actually used MapReduce at work!) This is strictly on my own time, and it's purely my own opinion. If it's the dumbest thing you've ever read, that's my fault, not Google's. If it's the most brilliant thing…

Eating Poor

I was out of town when Zuska posted this piece about trying to feed a family on a food stamp budget, and I've been meaning to respond to her suggestion that I might have something to add for a while. The article she builds on is one in which chefs try and come up with food stamp budget menus that are also healthy and appealing. Zuska comments on the difficulty of this, and challenges me to come up with something too: A few problems with any of these solutions: as noted in the article, cooking from fresh ingredients takes more time than buying processed food, so although you get more, and…

Killing The Namibian Black Rhino for $350,000 UPDATED

UPDATE (March 27 2015): US gives Texan rhino hunter an import permit A Texan who won an auction to shoot an endangered black rhino in Namibia has been given a US permit to import the trophy if he kills one. The US Fish and Wildlife Service said hunting an old rhino bull helps to increase the population. There was an outcry when Corey Knowlton won the auction last year, with animal rights activists decrying it. It's not yet clear when the hunt will happen. Namibia is home to some 1,500 black rhino, a third of the world's total. The US agency issuing the permit said that importing the carcass…

GAPS in a doctor's reasoning about vaccines and autism

As hard as it is to believe, I've been blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense and autism quackery since early 2005. Before that, I had been a regular on the misc.health.alternative newsgroup, where I had also encountered anti-vaccine pseudoscience, but the topic had not been a top priority for me. In fact, when I started this blog back in late 2004, I did not imagine at that time that I would somehow end up becoming one of the "go-to" bloggers for taking on anti-vaccine nonsense. Yet somehow I did, and dealing with the misinformation, lies, and pseudoscience of the anti-vaccine movement has…

Bad science and bad arguments for "integrative pediatrics"

There's a website out there that calls itself Opposing Views. I haven't visited it in a while, but its very reason for existence and philosophy seems to be built on the "tell both sides" fallacy that so irritates me. In other words, Opposing Views appears to be built from the ground up to provide "balance" in all things. Sometimes, as in areas of politics, balance is not a bad thing. When it comes to science, not so much. The reason is that the "balance" in science shown by Opposing views is the sort that thinks there are two equally valid views in manufactroversies like the "debate" over…

I am Iowan. I am barn.

I've known very few real Iowans. I know people who live there now but are from the Twin Cities, but I've only met a handful of native Iowans. One of them is a dear friend, most are only vague acquaintances. Six of them were landlubbing pirates of no value to humanity whatsoever.1 But I'm sure Iowans are mostly wonderful people who are well intentioned, hard working, intelligent, and are just as good as anyone else. Nonetheless, states have personalities and personalities have reputations, and people who live in states contribute to making those personalities and reputations. And for…

Wearing two hats, part 1

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…

Stanislaw Burzynski and "clarity" from the FDA

I've been writing about Stanislaw Burzynski again, just yesterday having mentioned a warning letter that the Burzynski Clinic received from the FDA last month. Given Dr. Burzynski's history of promoting a highly dubious cancer therapy that he calls antineoplastons and administering them to patients under the guise of clinical trials for which he charges patients huge sums of money and of also selling an equally dubious form of "personalized gene targeted cancer therapy" that I've referred to as "personalized cancer therapy for dummies," I took a very dim view of his having received yet…

Gwyneth Paltrow shows that the Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface was ahead of its time, as NASA slaps down Goop

Long time readers (and I do mean really long time readers) know that I used to do a regular Friday feature called Your Friday Dose of Woo. In the feature, I used to look for the silliest, woo-iest bits of quackery and pseudoscience that I could find, like quantum homeopathy, SCIO, Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface, or Magickal psychic amplification a-go-go. Over time, it got harder and harder to do that on a weekly basis, but I still think that, barring some new, deep, serious story, there's value to ending the week with something on a lighter note. Yes, I know, this is a rule or…

On interfaith outreach and atheists

Shepherd Book â Serenity: Why when I talk about belief, why do you always assume I'm talking about God? Interfaith prayer meetings face opposition; some religious leaders fear pluralism: Interfaith dialogues and worship services spread across the nation following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, ⦠But now, some Christian leaders are reacting publicly against acceptance of Muslims and even other Christian faith traditions. Dwayne Mercer, the newly elected president of the Florida Baptist Convention, ⦠would not attend an interfaith meeting. Mercer ⦠feared that his church members might…

Medicine and evolution, Part 2: Applying evolutionary principles to cancer

Last week, I inaugurated a new series on this blog entitled Medicine and Evolution. I even wrote what was to be the second post in the series, a post that (I hoped) would illustrate the utility of applying approaches used to study evolution to human disease. That post is essentially complete, other than requiring the addition of some links. That's what I was going to do last night, until Stranger Fruit turned me on to this study: In a study published online today in Nature Genetics, Carlo Maley, Ph.D., a researcher at The Wistar Institute, and his colleagues report that precancerous tumors…

Audio and Highlights of the Harvard Kennedy School Panel w/ Andrew Revkin on Climate Change, Skeptics, and the Media

On Thursday, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, I served as one of the panelists at the event "The Public Divide over Climate Change: Science, Skeptics and the Media." The two hour session drew roughly 100 attendees, was organized and moderated by Belfer Center fellow Cristine Russell, and featured Andrew Revkin of the New York Times' Dot Earth blog and Thomas Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Kennedy School. Audio of the panel is available at the Kennedy School web site and the event was covered in detail by the Columbia Journalism Review and the…

The Yeast All Around Us

With people confined to their homes, there is more interest in home-baked bread than ever before. And that means a lot of people are making friends with yeast for the first time. I am a professor of hospitality management and a former chef, and I teach in my university’s fermentation science program. As friends and colleagues struggle for success in using yeast in their baking – and occasionally brewing – I’m getting bombarded with questions about this interesting little microorganism. A little cell with a lot of power Yeasts are single-celled organisms in the fungus family. There are more…

Birds in the News 149

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter A pair of European Bee-eaters, Merops apiaster. Before a bee-eater shares his catch with his mate, he woos her by conspicuously preparing his offering -- tossing around a may bug before knocking it out. Image: Jözsef L. Szentpéteri/National Geographic online [larger view]. People Hurting Birds One of Australia's rarest and fastest birds, the swift parrot, seems to be plummeting in number, and logging has been blamed. Sightings of the flashy red and green parrot have declined sharply in its winter home of flowering…

You'll Have No Idea How Fast I'm Moving

The preliminary Boskone program has been posted, and I'll soon be adding another tag with a "Participant" ribbon to my Wall of Name. (I have a big collection of nametags from various meetings hanging on a wall in my office.) Excerpts of the schedule will appear below the fold, with scattered commentary, for those who would like to know exactly where I'll be next weekend. Friday Friday 5:00 pm Gardner: Five Things You Should Never Say to Your Favorite Authors When You Meet Them People blurt out the most amazing things when tongue-tied. Here's a chance to think about what to say before you meet…

The Grad School Application Process

I'm teaching our senior major seminar this term, which means that once a week, I'm giving hour-long talks on topics of interest to senior physics majors. This week's was "How to Pick and Apply to a Graduate School." I've probably written this basic stuff up about three times already, but I'm too lazy to look for it, and this particular presentation was slightly different than anything I may have put on the web in the past. And I might as well wring another post out of the topic, while it's fresh in my mind... There are several steps to the grad school application process, but the most…

Clint Is Dead, Long Live Clint

Clint, the chimpanzee in this picture, died several months ago at a relatively young age of 24. But part of him lives on. Scientists chose him--or rather, his DNA--as the subject of their first attempt to sequence a complete chimpanzee genome. In the new issue of Nature, they've unveiled their first complete draft, and already Clint's legacy has offered some awesome insights into our own evolution. The editors of Nature have dedicated a sprawling space in the journal to this scientific milestone. The main paper is 18 pages long, not to mention the supplementary information kept on Nature's…

Acupuncture tropes on parade

I sometimes catch flak for repeating this, but there was a time when I thought there might be something to acupuncture. I don't care, because, as a blogger, when I write a post I assume that a significant fraction of people reading it have never seen this blog before and therefore aren't even the least bit familiar with what I've written before on the subject. That makes them a blank slate, as far as this blog is concerned, and obliges me to explain everything. That time was about nine or ten years ago, and my rationale was, not surprisingly, that, unlike many other alternative medicine…

Birds in the News 73 (v2n24)

Atlantic Puffin numbers on two islands off the coast of Scotland crashed from 28,000 pairs in 1999 to only a few thousand when an invasive plant called tree mallow established itself. The Scottish Sea Bird Centre has received £250,000 to remove the plant and encourage the birds to return to their nests. Image: J. Cunningham/BBC News. People Hurting Birds Scientists in eastern China say they have succeeded in controlling the flight of pigeons with micro-electrodes planted in their brains, state media reported recently. Scientists at the Robot Engineering Technology Research Centre at…

Real Science and Health News: From a Truth Vigilante

"If people decide they're going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there's not much you can do with them. For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education." -Harrison Schmitt Last year, I asked a simple question with no easy answer: Whom Do You Trust For Your Science, Health, and Education? Because unless you yourself are the expert in a given field, it's often very, very difficult to tell what's trustworthy from what's not. Images credit: Dr. Roy Spencer (top) and American Meteorological Society (bottom). This is especially true when…

Amy Wallace in Wired on Dr Paul Offit and the Anti-Vaccination Movement: Superb, Engaging Science Journalism

One of the most engaging and clearly-written pieces of science journalism over the last year or so was published in Wired magazine last week. Amy Wallace's, "An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All," is part interview with rotavirus vaccine developer, pediatric infectious disease physician, Dr Paul Offit, and description of the anti-vaccination movement in the United States. Wallace's work is the centerpiece of a collection of smaller articles providing science-based information about vaccination that also refutes common anti-vaccination myths including "…

English Crime Trends

Joyce Lee Malcolm has an article in Reason online entitled Gun Control's Twisted Outcome. In that article she claims "And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime [in England] more than doubled." and asserts that this increase was caused by British gun control. However if you look at the official English crime statistics: Crime in England and Wales 2001/2002 and go to the section on violent crime you will find the following: "Estimates from the BCS reveal large and consistent falls in violent crime overall since 1995." "Longer-term trends in violence…

Aquatic proto-people and the theory hypothesis of initial bipedalism

Regular readers will know that I am an unashamed fan of non-standard theories, aka fringe theories or whacky theories, and of course we looked just recently at the haematotherm theory. Doubtless you've all heard of the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH): that strangely popular notion which promotes the idea that modern humans owe their distinctive features to a marine phase. While it still seems conceivable that at least some fossil hominins foraged on shores and in mangroves, all of the evidence so far put forward to document our aquatic heritage is demonstrably incorrect and fails to fit the…

Comments of the Week #96: from the living Universe to star-forming terror

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” -Zig Ziglar What a week it's been here at Starts With A Bang, where we've been proud to bring a number of stories to light for you. This past week, in case you missed anything, we've tackled: Is the Universe itself alive? (for Ask Ethan), How does space become transparent? The Orion Nebula answers (for Mostly Mute Monday), The tragedy of Apollo 1 and the lessons that brought us to the Moon, The future of astronomy: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (the start of a new series), and…

Anti-GMO writers show profound ignorance of basic biology and now Jane Goodall has joined their ranks

It's a sad day for the reality-based community, within the critiques of Jane Goodall's new book 'Seeds of Hope' we find that in addition to plagiarism and sloppiness with facts, she's fallen for anti-GMO crank Jeffrey Smith's nonsense. When asked by The Guardian whom she most despised, Goodall responded, “The agricultural company Monsanto, because I know too much about GM organisms and crops.” She might know too much, but what if what she knows is completely wrong? Many of the claims in Seeds of Hope can also be found in Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered…

Cristina Eisenberg's The Wolf's Tooth: Keystone Predators, Trophic Cascades and Biodiversity

The interconnectedness of ecosystems and their components is, today, a familiar concept. Top predators eat herbivores, herbivores eat plants, and top predators keep so-called meso-predators in check too. But perhaps it isn't appreciated enough just how interconnected things can be. Cristina Eisenberg's excellent 2010 book The Wolf's Tooth: Keystone Predators, Trophic Cascades and Biodiversity draws on decades of ecological research to paint a complex picture of ecosystem interactions and cascades, of the crucial role of top predators, and of human impact on communities in the natural world.…

Thrust

For my sins, I decided to listen to Murray "I have a theory" Salby talking about his ideas about why the recent rise in CO2 isn't human-caused (note that isn't his most recent UK tour; that's back in April). By all means read my notes below if you're interested in the various ways that he is wrong; but if you're interested in how we know the increase really is human-caused, then try RealClimate from 2004, a somewhat pithier response from me, point 5, in 2005, or the ever-popular Skeptical Science version; and Eric Wolff is excellent. Or, if you belong to the Dark Side, then perhaps…

EMAIL! Pulse-->Chase

Edited 8-22-08 to contain MORE win Its going to be a slow blag week. Im trying to cram as many experiments as possible into this last week before school starts again. The last major experiment I want to finish (have to finish) this summer is a 'pulse-->chase' to watch how fast each of my chimeras process gp160 into gp120 and gp41. I do this by 1-- transfecting cells with my clones, 2-- starving the cells of cystine and methionine, 3-- giving the cells radioactive food (sulfur-35), 4-- waiting a set period of time, and blowing up the cells. While blowing up radioactive things is one of…

Open Lab 2007 - all the entries for you to see!

The deadline for submission of blog posts for the 2nd Science Blogging Anthology is over. We have received 468 entries (after deleting spam and duplicates - the total was 501) and a jury of 30+ judges has already started reading and grading the entries. We truly believe that we will have the book ready and printed by the time the 2nd Science Blogging Conference starts, on January 18th-19th, so both the participants and you at home will be able to order your copy at that time. Here are all the entries for you to enjoy and comment on - let me know if something is missing or I got a link wrong…

How cute. Naturopathic oncologists are pretending that theirs is a real medical specialty.

With the Christmas holiday over, I thought it would be a good time to revisit a topic that I've discussed before from time to time over the last several years. Part of the reason is that I saw something that irritated me before the holidays. Another part of the reason is that Christmas was so busy that some of you might recognize parts of this post. Fear not, more original Insolence will be forthcoming, likely tomorrow. In any event, given that I’m not a fan of naturopathy, it probably comes as no surprise to our readers that I’m even less of a fan of the emerging “specialty” of naturopathic…

Will Sciam's Response to DN Lee's post deletion mean anything if it happens Monday? UPDATED

UPDATED: Happy to announce that @Dnlee5 post is now back up: http://t.co/XVentvp35T #SciAmBlogs — Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ) October 14, 2013 This is a very interesting and important question, and it probably requires more context than I have the ability or time to give, but I think it is worth putting on the table. If you look at the twitter hashtags #standingwithDNLee and #IstandwithDNLee (which, interestingly, have distinctly different groups of people using them, which itself is worthy of study ... perhaps an example of Tweet Drift?) you'll be able to catch up if Twitter does not drive you…

The IPCC report is out, let the misrepresentation begin

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is out today, and I was shocked to discover that it is already being misreported. It was being mis-reported before, but that was just leaks. You can lie with leaks. They are easily selective. Now the mis-reportage is being done with the actually report out, so I have a piece of advice for everyone. Just read the thing. It isn't that complicated. Read it for yourself because every time I read a news article about it I notice some new crock of hooey. Take this for instance: The panel predicted temperature rises of 2-11.5 degrees…

Paleontologists behaving badly.

A recent news item by Rex Dalton in Nature [1] caught my attention. From the title ("Fossil reptiles mired in controversy") you might think that the aetosaurs were misbehaving. Rather, the issue at hand is whether senior scientists at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science were taking advantage of an in-house publishing organ (the NMMNHS Bulletin) to beat other paleontologists to the punch in announcing research findings -- and whether they did so with knowledge of the other researchers' efforts and findings. From the article: The disputed articles name and describe different…