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Liquid Nitrogen on TV

This past weekend, Union played host to the New York State Association for College Admissions Counseling's Camp College program. This is a three-day summer program where students from disadvantaged backgrounds (the vast majority of this year's students were from New York City, with a handful of local students, and one group from Philly) spend a weekend on a college campus, sleeping in the dorms, eating in the dining halls, and attending simulated classes. The classes are taught by faculty memebers recruited from the host institutions-- I did a lecture for them a few years back, in the early…

Getting involved with more than your wallet: strategies for supporting science and math education.

With just over 10 hours left in our ScienceBlogs/Donors Choose Blogger Challenge 2007, it's time to think about what happens next. Supporting classroom teachers with your funds is a noble gesture, but it's just a start. To really get math and science literacy (and enthusiasm) to the levels we'd like to see, your time and personal involvement can do an awful lot. In this post you'll find ideas from ScienceBloggers about how to turn your good intentions into action. From Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority: There are a lot of children in this country who don't have much in the way of…

The Contagion of conspiracy mongering and pseudoscience

Unfortunately, I don't get to see very many movies these days. My wife and I both lead very busy lives, and with periodic spasms of grant writing, plus several new administrative responsibilities, it's just hard. Last weekend, however, a movie that I'd rather like to see came out. Unfortunately, I haven't seen it yet; so I can't give you a definitive review, but the movie caught my interest because it shows at least one thing that I don't recall ever having seen in a movie before. The movie is Contagion, and here's its trailer: It's not so much the storyline that interests me. After all,…

Comments of the Week #92: from the Universe's birth to ten decades of science

"The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you're willing to work." -Oprah And 2016 is here! So begins another great year for Starts With A Bang, and I'm so pleased you're still here as well. Yes, I know there are some frustrations with Forbes' ad policies, but at least they appear to have stopped the "Welcome to Forbes" interstitial, which is something! (And if you missed it, Medium now knows that I'm over there, too.) In any case, here's what the last week has seen: How big was the Universe when it was first born? (for Ask Ethan),…

Another week of GW News, March 28, 2010

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 Sipping from the internet firehose...March 28, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16, WWD, Upcoming Meetings, Oh Oh, Anthropocene, Mitloehner, Mclean, Earth Hour Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, Risk, UN CFG, The Race, Lewis, Pro IPCC, CRU SAP, Samanta Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes,…

Inside Nature's Giants, series 2: does Carcharodon bite?

Earlier this year (in June), Channel 4 television here in the UK broadcast series 2 of Inside Nature's Giants (ING from hereon... titled Raw Anatomy in the US, you poor, poor people). You may have heard it here first. Hopefully you're familiar with ING series 1 - it looked at the anatomy of elephants, baleen whales, crocodiles and giraffes - and, if you're not, be sure to check out the Tet Zoo articles starting here. My praise for series 1 was extreme, by which I mean that I thought it was excellent: a real triumph and a major event in both the world of broadcasting, and in bringing good…

Axis formation in spider embryos

Some of you may have never seen an arthropod embryo (or any embryo, for that matter). You're missing something: embryos are gorgeous and dynamic and just all around wonderful, so let's correct that lack. Here are two photographs of an insect and a spider embryo. The one on the left is a grasshopper, Schistocerca nitens at about a third of the way through development; the one on the right is Achaearanea tepidariorum. Both are lying on their backs, or dorsal side, with their legs wiggling up towards you. There are differences in the photographic technique — one is an SEM, the other is a DAPI-…

How to avoid "he-said-she-said" science journalism

This post is written by a special guest - Ivan Oransky, executive editor at Reuters Health, who I had the pleasure of meeting in person at Science Online 2010. I was delighted when Ivan accepted my invitation to follow up a recent Twitter exchange with a guest-post, and shocked that he even turned down my generous honorarium of some magic beans. Here, he expounds on the tricky issues of journalistic balance and how journalists can choose their sources to avoid "he-said-she-said" journalism. Over to him: The other day, a tweet by Maggie Koerth-Baker, a freelance science journalist in…

Emasculating Men: Women's Access to Science

This is the first of several discussion posts for Week 3 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on Joy of Science in the Category section. This post deals with the readings by Margolis, Fisher, & Miller (MFM), and Ginorio, Marshall, & Breckinridge (GMB). (Summaries are available here.) "Feminism is not a unitary concept", Ginorio, Marshall, & Breckinridge (GMB) tell us. There have been many efforts to categorize different types of feminism. GMB refer to one of the most well-known, Alison Jaggar…

#scio10 Conferencing

Science Online 2010 is coming up in a few days. There is a post at A Blog Around the Clock that is a veritable clearing house for all of the blogospheric information on this conference, including ways for you to participate in the conference even if you do not attend in physical form. I'm sure I'll be blogging from the conference. For now, I just want to talk about conferences in general, as part of my mental preparation for the impending event. There was a time, for several years, that I went to three or more full blown conferences a year, plus a couple more smaller less formal…

Déjà vu all over again: "Natural medicine" wikis

Regular readers will know that über-quack Mike Adams got himself into a bit of a pickle last week. Basically, he wrote a now-infamous post in which he likened scientists working on GMOs to Nazi scientists and pro-science bloggers refuting the sort of nonsensical fear mongering (from a scientific perspective) Adams and other anti-GMO activists like to use to demonize GMOs, calling for a list of “Monsanto Collaborators.” And, lo and behold! Such a list appeared a couple of days later in a website called MonsantoCollaborators.org! (Note that the website now only returns a message, “Bandwidth…

How Not to Write an Essay on Oil, With Guidance from the New York Times

I hope my readers will forgive me today for lapsing back into my prior profession rather than my present one as an energy and environmental writer. You see, before I gained fame and fortune writing about our ecological situation, I was a mild-mannered college teacher, whose favorite and most important job was teaching rhetoric to undergraduates. I am perhaps odd in observing that I thought that teaching writing was the most important thing I did. Most academics believe their primary subject matter is the central portion of their work, but I came to see that the place that I had the greatest…

Giant fossil matamata turtles (matamatas part V)

The Matamata is an incredible animal. A morphologically bizarre, highly cryptic, aquatic South American turtle, it's equipped with a super-specialised wide, flattened skull and a host of peculiar features that allow it to engulf fish and other prey in deft acts of rapid suction. Surprisingly large (up to 1 m long), it has a very long, thick neck, and a proboscis that it uses as a snorkel. But of course you already know all of this because I covered it in depth in a series of articles published here during 2010 (if you need a refresher, see the links given below). My aim in this fifth and…

Comments of the Week #139: From Escaping Gravitational Waves To The Universe's 2016 Changes

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” -Andy Warhol Any week that passes by that leaves you knowing more than when you started is a good one here at Starts With A Bang! I hope this past week didn't disappoint, as many of you became acquainted not only with our latest podcast on parallel Universes, but with some amazing new articles on science and the Universe. Even as the year winds down, there's plenty more to explore! Here's what the past week held: How do gravitational waves escape from a black hole? (for Ask Ethan), An X-ray surprise! When…

Another Week in the Ecological Crisis - February 2, 2014

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 Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom February 2, 2014 Chuckles, COP20+, NSA at Copenhagen, Triumvirate, Potash, Warnings Seeger, Energiewende, Bottom Line, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Policies, Related Papers Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, Abrupt CC…

Another Week of GW News, April 22, 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 Anthropocene Antics Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsApril 22, 2012 Chuckles, Rio+20, Earth Day, EGU 2012, Elgin, KPMG, Brotz Maldives, Grumbine, B-Corps, Subsidies, World Bank, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, IPY Conference, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs…

The Food Babe is to food as Jenny McCarthy is to vaccines

I’ll admit it: I’m a bit of a beer snob. I make no bones about it, I like my beer, but I also like it to be good beer, and, let’s face it, beer brewed by large industrial breweries seldom fits the bill. To me, most of the beer out being sold in the U.S., particularly beer made by Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors can easily be likened to cold piss from horses with kidney disease (you need protein to get beer foam, you know), only without the taste. I have to be mighty desperate and thirsty before I will partake of such swill. I will admit that there is one exception, namely Blue Moon, which is…

On Edwards, Bloggers, and Religion

Ah, why do I have to be so busy on a news-filled day (no, not Anna Nicole Smith)? I barely saw the computer today. I'd get home, have about 5 minutes before I have to go out again and so on. NPR did not mention Edwards until 4pm or so (that I heard in the car), so when I first got home I only had time to open e-mail, scan about 50 new messages, home in to the one that had the news, open it, get the links and quickly post without more than a quick skim of the statements by Edwards and others, let alone any time to add commentary (except for what the title implied I felt at the time). And…

Another Week of GW News, December 16, 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 Anthropocene Antics Information Overload is Pattern Recognition December 16, 2012 Chuckles, COP19+, Post-Doha, Post-AGU, AR5 Leak 1990 Projections, Detectors, Retrospectives, Subsidies, WB, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,…

PZ Myers' Own Original, Cosmic, and Eccentric Analogy for How the Genome Works -OR- High Geekology

I'm teaching my developmental biology course this afternoon, and I have a slightly peculiar approach to the teaching the subject. One of the difficulties with introducing undergraduates to an immense and complicated topic like development is that there is a continual war between making sure they're introduced to the all-important details, and stepping back and giving them the big picture of the process. I do this explicitly by dividing my week; Mondays are lecture days where I stand up and talk about Molecule X interacting with Molecule Y in Tissue Z, and we go over textbook stuff. I'm…

Are Fractions Obsolete?

Via Mark Chu-Carroll I just read this article, from the USA Today, about a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania who believes that fractions have no place in the elementary and middle school mathematics curriculum: A few years ago, Dennis DeTurck, an award-winning professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, stood at an outdoor podium on campus and proclaimed, "Down with fractions!" “Fractions have had their day, being useful for by-hand calculation,” DeTurck said as part of a 60-second lecture series. “But in this digital age, they're as obsolete as Roman numerals…

Clinical trials -- or not -- of chelation therapy.

Back in July, Science ran an interesting news article about an on again, off again clinical trial of chelation therapy in the treatment of autistic children. I found the story fascinating because it highlights some of the challenges in setting up ethical research with human subjects -- not to mention some of the challenges inherent in trying to help humans to make good decisions grounded in the best available scientific knowledge. From the Science article: Believing that mercury in vaccines triggers autism, thousands of parents, often at the advice of their physicians, have given their…

Should thimerosal-containing vaccines be banned worldwide?

One of the oldest topics I've dealt with on this blog, a topic that I've been writing about on and off (unfortunately, mostly on) about the antivaccine movement. Ever since I first discovered about a decade ago that, yes, there are people ignorant enough about science and medicine that they actually think that vaccines are harmful and cause autism, as well as actually believing that it is a good idea not to vaccinate their children against even deadly diseases like the measles, polio, Haemophilus influenzae type B (HiB), and more. As a group, hiding behind the risible claim that they are "not…

"Misinformed consent" rears its ugly head in Pediatrics

I've written about the concept of "misinformed" consent with respect to the anti-vaccine movement. To summarize, "misinformed consent" is a perversion of the concept of informed consent in which cranks claim to be championing true informed consent (and, by implication, that opponents have not) when in fact they are presenting a scientifically unsupportable assessment of the risks and benefits of an intervention. In the case of vaccines, anti-vaccine activists play up the risks of vaccines far beyond what science supports, attributing to them, for instance, risks of autism, autoimmune disease…

Death by intravenous "turmeric": Why licensed naturopaths are no safer than any other naturopath

March seemed to be naturopathic quackery month. Let's face it, though, every month is naturopathic quackery month. It's just that in March there were two stories that really caught my eye. The first was the story of a naturopath in Bowling Green named Juan Sanchez, who was gunned down in his office one Friday evening, allegedly by the distraught widower of a cancer patient whom he had treated, after having told her and her husband that "chemo is for losers" and claiming that he could eliminate her cancer in three months. The second was even more shocking. Basically, a naturopath in Encinitas…

Mike Adams sinks to a new low

I've written a lot about Mike Adams, the man who founded NaturalNews.com and has been one of the most prominent promoters of quackery on the Internet. Indeed, Mike Adams appears to be battling it out with Joe Mercola for the title of owning the biggest quackery website on the Internet. There's one area, however, where Mike Adams clearly reigns supreme, and that's latching on, ghoul-like, to major tragedies in order to promote his pro-quackery agenda. For example, when former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow died of metastatic colon cancer a couple of years ago, Mike Adams was right there…

Choosing quackery over evidence-based medicine: When is a patient old enough?

Over the couple of days or so, a minor flurry of comments have hit the ol' blog. I hate to let commenters dictate the content of my blog, but it's strictly a coincidence that this happens to be a post I had been planning sometime this week anyway and it comes around the same time as the minor altie comment deluge hit the blog. Or maybe it's not such a coincidence, coming as it does in the wake of a court hearing relevant to the case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix. Recent commenters have castigated me, claiming that the Hoxsey treatment is not quackery; asserting that cancer is "not due to a…

It's full steam ahead for cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski

I'm having flashbacks now. I feel as though it's 2012, and I was just in the midst of examining the Houston cancer quack known as Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. As you recall, he's the Polish expat doctor who discovered peptides in the blood that he dubbed "antineoplastons" and postulated to be endogenous cancer suppressors. He ultimately made them into a cancer treatment that he's been using on patients for over 40 years now, despite never having demonstrated its efficacy or safety. Despite that, he's become a rock star in the world of alternative cancer cures, with two propaganda movies disguised…

A zombie meme rises from the grave: Maurice Hilleman, the polio vaccine, SV40, and cancer

The Internet has produced a revolution with respect to information. Now, people anywhere, any time, can find almost any information that they want, as long as they have a connection to the global network and aren't unfortunate enough to live in a country that heavily censors the Internet connections coming in. In addition, anyone any time can put his or her opinion out on the Internet and it might be read by people on the other side of the planet. For example, it continually amazes me that my blatherings here are read by people in Australia and New Zealand, as well as Europe and pretty…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date and, as someone who has been through this three times already, I have to say I am impressed both by the number and the quality of submissions to date. And it's only early May! As we have surpassed 130 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock:…

Tangled Bank #109: LOL Evolution!

Welcome to the One Hundred and Ninth Edition of The Tangled Bank, the Weblog Carnival of Evolutionary Biology. This is the LOL edition of the Tangled Bank.... Carnival business ... The main page for The Tangled Bank is here. The previous edition of The Tangled Bank was here, at Wheatdogg, and the next edition of the Tangled Bank will be here, at Blue Collar Scientist. And now, on with the show. ... In Small Things Considered... Rational redesign of bacterial signaling proteins based on amino acid co-evolution at Chance and Necessity is a bit of Peer Reviewed Research Blogging, covering an…

The Friday Fermentable: Tuscan Wines, by Erleichda

Another Wine Escapade : The Tuscan Dinner by Erleichda, special guest correspondent to The Friday Fermentable (Note to readers: As mentioned in previous editions, guest-blogger Erleichda is a slightly more senior colleague with a much more experienced and seasoned palate. I find Italian wines to be especially vexing, mostly due to their number and use of grape varieties seen rarely outside of Italy, but enjoy them tremendously when educated about them. Erleichda lives in one of those states with odd alcoholic regulatory laws, but I'd welcome the chance to do BYOB with him and his Sweetpea…

A new low at HuffPo

The stupid truly burns brightly in this one. Dana Ullman, known to readers of Respectful Insolence, Science-based Medicine, and this blog as Hahnemann's cognitively impaired bulldog, has started blogging at the Huffington Post. It's certainly an appropriate venue for his brand of cult medicine belief, but that doesn't make it any less painful. His inaugural piece, entitled The Wisdom of Symptoms: Respecting the Body's Intelligence betrays a stunning level of ignorance of basic human biology. I have good and bad news about the human body: it is neither wise nor foolish, good nor evil, nor is…

Science blogs and public engagement with science

As you may know, I love the Journal of Science Communication. It publishes some very interesting and useful scholarly articles on a wide array of issues pertaining to the communication, education and publishing of science. I wish more science bloggers (and non-blogging scientists) read it and blogged about their articles. Unfortunately, human nature being as it is, most of the excellent papers go by un-noticed by the blogosphere, while an occasional sub-standard paper gets some play - it is so much easier to critique than to analyze or even praise. One such paper is now making the rounds - it…

How gekkotans evolved into predatory 'snakes' (gekkotans part XII)

In the previous article I provided brief reviews of all currently recognised pygopodid 'genera'*. Except one. I've left this one until last, largely because it's the most spectacular (up to 75 cm in total length) and (arguably) most fascinating pygopodid. We've seen throughout this series of articles that pygopodids are convergent with certain snake groups, and may in fact have been so successful at filling up ecological niches occupied elsewhere by colubroid snakes that they effectively prevented such snakes from evolving: you can imagine this as the 'pygopodids got there first' hypothesis…

Birds in the News 52 (v2n3)

Great Horned Owl nestling, Bubo virginianus. Photo copyright by Bill Hilton Jr. Contact Bill to purchase this and other photos, the sales of which support the wonderful work done by Hilton Pond Center. People Helping Birds The chimney swifts are coming! Have you seen them yet? If so, Chimneyswifts.org would like to hear from you! This is an organization that promotes the conservation of Chimney Swifts, Chaetura pelagica (pictured), through public education, preservation of existing habitat and creation of new nesting and roosting sites. It appears that they have been doing the project for…

"Diseases of distress": Can we estimate the component that is work-related?

by Laura Punnett, ScD Perhaps you’ve heard that there are some unusual trends in U.S. death rates – specifically, that white people are experiencing an unexpected increase in mortality. Last year, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published an innovative analysis calling attention to the alarming increase in mortality rates, specifically in white, non-Hispanic, middle-aged Americans. This trend contrasts dramatically with previous historical declines among whites, the continuing declines in U.S. Blacks and Latinos, and the declines in many other developed countries.  The report has…

RFK Jr. is at it again, just not about autism this time

I'm probably going to regret posting this article, as I normally don't venture much into these areas. Chalk it up to its being 6/6/06 and say that the Devil made me do it, but I plan on diving in. Besides, I feel the need for a brief change of pace. Regular readers of this blog know my low opinion of RFK Jr. It began nearly a year ago when he published a deceptive conspiracy-mongering article about the alleged link between thimerosal and autism in Rolling Stone and Salon.com last year, in which he completely misrepresented a conference held about vaccines as a massive conspiratorial coverup…

I want my ANP! [NOTE ADDENDUM]

[NOTE ADDENDUM.] It's been a (mostly) all Stanislaw Burzynski week. I had been thinking of finishing up with a post about something completely unrelated; that is, until people started sending me a link. Also, because I was out last night with my wife in celebration of our wedding anniversary, I didn't have time for anything that wasn't relatively brief. (Yes, I do realize that "brief" by my standards usually means "under 2,000 words." OK, maybe under 1,500.) So, what the heck? I'll finish the week with one more post and then try to start fresh next week. I need a a break from all things…

The Dr. Will Sue You Now - A stolen chapter from Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science

In order to help spread the word about a dangerous altie quack and HIV/AIDS denier who is responsible for probably hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from AIDS in Africa, I'm reproducing The Doctor Will Sue You Now, here on denialism blog. The chapter, removed from Ben Goldacre's new book Bad Science due to libel litigation from the quack, Matthias Rath, in response to Goldacre's description of his activities in Africa and around the world. Another profile of a crank, this one goes a long way to show the extent to which denialism can damage a country and even cost thousands of…

More crappy flu journalism, this time Alternet [rant alert!]

I'm afraid I have to complain about crappy journalism again. AlterNet is an online newsmagazine I quite like. We've been linked by them numerous times and know their influence. Sometimes, though, some very smart writers write some very dumb things, even if they do it in a smart way. Alas, Joshua Holland has done it today on the front page of Alternet.org with a supremely wrongheaded story about why you don't have to be scared shitless about swine flu. We agree with that bottom line, but how he got there is the problem (that and the fact that he doesn't understand much about influenza). Let's…

Influence of Light Cycle on Dominance Status and Aggression in Crayfish

In this post from April 06, 2006, I present some unpublished data that you may find interesting. Understanding the role of serotonin in depression has led to development of anti-depressant drugs, like Prozac. Much of the research in this area has been performed in Crustaceans: lobsters and crayfish. The opposite behavioral state of depression, something considered a normal state, could possibly best be described as self-confidence. Self-confidence is expressed differently in different species, but seems to always be tied to high status in a social hierarchy. In crayfish, self-confidence is…

Axolotls on the EDGE!

I've said it before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: as a life-long zoology nerd, one of my greatest frustrations has always been the fact that there are so many animals that get mentioned - only ever mentioned - but never elaborated upon. I've always liked Axolotls Ambystoma mexicanum, and among the world's unusual amphibians this has got to be one of the most familiar, thanks of course to its widespread use in the pet trade and as a laboratory animal [assortment of captive axolotls show above]. As everyone knows, the Axolotl is neotenous: it retains juvenile characters into sexual…

Influence of Light Cycle on Dominance Status and Aggression in Crayfish

In this post from April 06, 2006, I present some unpublished data that you may find interesting. Understanding the role of serotonin in depression has led to development of anti-depressant drugs, like Prozac. Much of the research in this area has been performed in Crustaceans: lobsters and crayfish. The opposite behavioral state of depression, something considered a normal state, could possibly best be described as self-confidence. Self-confidence is expressed differently in different species, but seems to always be tied to high status in a social hierarchy. In crayfish, self-confidence is…

Influence of Light Cycle on Dominance Status and Aggression in Crayfish

In this post from April 06, 2006, I present some unpublished data that you may find interesting. Understanding the role of serotonin in depression has led to development of anti-depressant drugs, like Prozac. Much of the research in this area has been performed in Crustaceans: lobsters and crayfish. The opposite behavioral state of depression, something considered a normal state, could possibly best be described as self-confidence. Self-confidence is expressed differently in different species, but seems to always be tied to high status in a social hierarchy. In crayfish, self-confidence is…

On organizing and/or participating in a Conference in the age of Twitter

This is the first time ever that I cared about SXSW conference or was jealous for not being there. Watching the blogs and Twitter stream, it appears to have been better and more exciting than ever. I guess I'll have to figure out a way to finally get myself there next year.... But this post is not really about SXSW. It is about presenting at such conferences. More specifically, how the back-channel (on Twitter and elsewhere) affects the way one needs to approach an invitation to speak at meetings where much of the audience is highly wired online: to say Yes or No to the invitation in the…

The Tripoli Six - Do Something About It. [updated]

A senior science reporter at the journal Nature, Declan Butler, put out an urgent request for bloggers to help draw attention to the plight of the Tripoli Six - five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian physician that are on trial accused of deliberately (as agents of Israel and the United States) infecting 400 Libyan children with the HiV virus while working at a Libyan hospital. An independent scientific review conducted by highly respected French and Italian researchers found no evidence of deliberate infection, but their review was discarded because it disagreed with the conclusions of…

The Ring and the Cross

Folks: This is the first in a series of posts in which I am going to be republishing, to this blog, old articles of mine that I think are pretty good but that are no longer available online. I want to have a record of my work here, and this seems a reasonable way to do it. So, enjoy. The Ring and the Cross How J.R.R. Tolkien became a Christian Writer Originally published in The Boston Globe, Ideas Section December 29, 2002 By Chris Mooney From their mastery Middle-earth geography to their occasional fluency in Elvish, fans of the "Lord of the Rings'' books tend to be a pretty knowledgeable…

Stupidity caught on celluloid: The Beautiful Truth

Is it possible to pack a DVD with idiocy so dense that light bends around it? I don't know, but I found someone who gave it a damn good try. The Beautiful Truth is a 2008 documentary about Gerson Therapy, the supposed diet-based cure for cancer. It produced by earth NOW! a small indie label from the Cinema Libre Studio. There are numerous excerpts from the movie on YouTube, which give a fascinating insight into the nonsensical, incomprehensible world that the filmmakers live in. (weirdly, YouTube links all of them to a video entitled 'How masturbation damages the body'. It's not clear why,…

A P.R. flack from the Burzynski Clinic threatens a skeptical blogger

A common thread that runs through the activities of various antiscience cranks, quacks, charlatans, and denialists is an extreme aversion to criticism. In fact, in many cases their aversion to criticism is so extreme that a common reaction of cranks to even legitimate criticism is to try to shut that criticism down any way possible. Sometimes, this intimidation takes the form of harassment or attempts to get a critic fired from his job, as has happened with René Najera and yours truly. this takes the form of lawsuits or abuse of the legal process, as has been experienced by Dr. Paul Offit,…