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Autism's False Prophets: Finally, science pushes back against antivaccine lunacy

Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste... Well, not really. I might have one of the two. Or not. Be that as it may, I'm Orac, and I blog regularly at Respectful Insolence. In the more than two and a half years I've been with ScienceBlogs (not to mention the more than a year before that on my own), I've become known as its resident "vaccine blogger." True, others around here sometimes do posts about vaccines, antivaccine lunacy, and the discredited idea that vaccines somehow cause autism, but with nowhere near the frequency and intensity that I do. Without a doubt,…

Another week of GW News, December 26, 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 Global Warming News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdomDecember 26, 2010 Chuckles, Solstice, COP16, Bolivia, COP17+, Season's Greetings, Roundups, Weather AGU, IPBES, CableGate, Pakistan, Subsidies, Amstrup, Thermodynamics, Cook Melting Arctic, Polar Bears Food Crisis, Agro-corps, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures,…

Scientia Pro Publica 2, The Science, Nature and Medicine Blog Carnival

tags: Scientia Pro Publica, Science for the People, biology, evolution, medicine, earth science, behavioral ecology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, blog carnival Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux). Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power) -- Sir Francis Bacon. This is only the second issue of Scientia Pro Publica, but I am so pleased with its progress so far. Not only are friends and colleagues contributing their essays to this blog carnival, but there is an impressive influx of "new blood", too. Together, all of us are helping to promote the value of…

Birds in the News 143

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter ABSTRACT: Chattering Lory, sometimes known as the Scarlet Lory, Lorius garrulus. Image: John Del Rio [larger view]. Birds in Science News The Horsfield's bronze-cuckoo, Chalcites basalis, specializes in laying a single egg in the nests of fairy-wrens, but sometimes parasitizes nests of other species such as thornbills or robins. The cuckoo chick has a shorter incubation period than the hosts' chicks, and after the cuckoo chick hatches, it pushes the host's eggs out of the nest and imitates the begging calls of the…

Birds in the News 90 (v3n17)

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter A forest that is home to nearly one-third of Uganda's bird life, including the great blue turaco, is under threat, says the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. There are plans to change laws protecting the Mabira Forest Reserve to allow huge sugar cane plantations to be grown inside its boundaries. Image: Nature Uganda. Birds in Science New research has found that birds aren't sentimental when it comes to music. Songs from just 30 years ago are received with equanimity, while newer tunes make the males…

Birds in the News 135 -- Father's Day Edition

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter "Blue enough for ya?" Male Eastern Bluebird, Sialia sialis. Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU [larger view]. Birds and Dads News I stop for pileated woodpeckers. That'd be my life's bumper sticker. These days, I know my birds. Not because I ever saw them as a kid, but because on the way home from hikes with my dad, I'd grab his Golden field guide, Birds of North America, and read up on what we just spent the whole day not seeing. Pileated, by the way, means capped, a reference to its distinctive triangular red crest. Woody…

Study: Re-Framing Climate Change as a Public Health Issue

Changing the conversation about climate change: Graduate students from American and George Mason Universities prepare interview tent on the National Mall. WASHINGTON, DC -- How do Americans respond when they are asked to reflect on the public health risks of climate change and the benefits to health from mitigation-related actions? In other words, if we were to re-frame climate change in terms of localized impacts that people personally experience and can understand--such as vulnerability to extreme heat or poor air quality--could we shift public thinking on the issue? Those are the…

Some preliminary thoughts on the UCLA panel discussion on animal-based research.

The panel discussion took place, as planned, on the evening of Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at UCLA. The hall was well-populated, if not completely packed, with members of the UCLA community. (Honestly, for week 7 of a 10-week quarter, during a spell of lovely weather, I'm impressed they had such a high turnout of students.) There was also a serious security presence (which the university felt was needed in light of past instances where strong feelings have been displayed in more than just words). Both Pro-Test for Science and Bruins for Animals deserve huge props for all the work they put…

Anatomy of a scientific fraud: an interview with Eugenie Samuel Reich.

Eugenie Samuel Reich is a reporter whose work in the Boston Globe, Nature, and New Scientist will be well-known to those with an interest in scientific conduct (and misconduct). In Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, she turns her skills as an investigative reporter to writing a book-length exploration of Jan Hendrik Schön's frauds at Bell Labs, providing a detailed picture of the conditions that made it possible for him to get away with his fraud as long as he did. Eugenie Samuel Reich agreed to answer some questions about Plastic Fantastic and…

Update on "coma man" Rom Houben: Dr. Steven Laureys still just doesn't get it

The day before the Thanksgiving holiday, I wrote about a serious contender for the worst medical reporting of the year, if not the decade, specifically how credulous reporters had swarmed all over the case of a Belgian man named Rom Houben. If you don't remember or haven't heard about the details, feel free to peruse the link I just cited, but I'll give you the brief rundown. Basically, Rom Houben is an incredibly unfortunate man who was involved in a motor vehicle crash 23 years ago at age 23. As a result, he suffered a severe head injury and was diagnosed as being in a persistent…

Antivaccinationists abuse reporting algorithms to silence pro-vaccine skeptics on Facebook

This is not what I wanted to write about for my first post of 2014, but unfortunately it's necessary—so necessary, in fact, that I felt the obligation to crosspost it to my not-so-super-secret other blog in order to get this information out to as wide a readership as possible. I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Facebook. On the one hand, I like easily how it lets me stay in contact with family and friends across the country, people whom I would rarely see more than once or twice a year, if even that. On the other hand, I have the same privacy concerns that many other…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: There's no woo like stem cell woo

It's time for a change of pace on Your Friday Dose of Woo. I'm getting the feeling that you my readers may have gotten tired of the theme I've been doing the last three weeks. I can relate somewhat but I think it served a purpose (other than giving me free rein to indulge in a lot of bathroom humor, that is). First, I subjected you to a rather disgusting foray into the bowels (if you'll excuse the term) of colon cleansing, complete with links to some truly disgusting websites where people not only enthusiastically discuss their poop, but take pictures and post them on the web. Next, I moved…

The Canadian War on Science: A chronological account of chaos & consolidation at the Department of Fisheries & Oceans libraries

As is occasionally my habit when a big story breaks, I have gathered together all the relevant documents I could find concerning the recent controversy about the Canadian Conservative government's recent consolidation of the libraries at their Department of Fisheries & Oceans. The consolidation has resulted in severely weeded collections, library closures and staff layoffs. I have more to say on the situation, probably next week, but I thought I'd compile this list first both for the common good and to help me frame my own thoughts. As usual, if you note any errors or omissions in my,…

Another Week of GW News, August 21, 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 of Global Warming News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdomAugust 21, 2011 Autobahn Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Keystone XL Protest Monnett, Chen et al., Shell Leak, Conoco Leak, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Walrus, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro-Corps, Food Prices, Food Riot, Food vs Fuel…

Scientific bias and the void-of-course moon

Stuart Buck persists in claiming that scientists have a bias against the supernatural, and that we dismiss it out of hand. This isn’t true; the problem is that supernatural explanations are poorly framed and typically unaddressable, so we tend to avoid them as unproductive. What one would actually find, if one took the trouble to discuss the ideas with a scientist, is that they are perfectly willing to consider peculiar possibilities if they are clearly stated. We’ll even briefly consider something as insane and worthless as astrology, which is even less credible as a field of study than…

Epigenetics

Epigenetics is the study of heritable traits that are not dependent on the primary sequence of DNA. That's a short, simple definition, and it's also largely unsatisfactory. For one, the inclusion of the word "heritable" excludes some significant players — the differentiation of neurons requires major epigenetic shaping, but these cells have undergone a terminal division and will never divide again — but at the same time, the heritability of traits that aren't defined by the primary sequence is probably the first thing that comes to mind in any discussion of epigenetics. Another problem is…

The Rolling Stone Fallout and What This Means for Rape Victims

I've been following the fall-out of the Rolling Stone article a Rape on Campus as well as their evolving preamble to the story, first expressing doubt, then seemingly dismissing Jackie's account, now falling somewhere in-between with assertions that they have supporting evidence that Jackie was assaulted that night, but no idea of the details. I got a visit from some overly gleeful commenters that seemed to rejoice that the story is a hoax, and Jackie a liar, but it's clear this situation is more complex. The story contained more than Jackie's experience, and the focus of our original…

Poker Report and an Amusing Aside

Two words sum up last night's poker: high variance. It was truly feast or famine night. I think there were more showdowns that ended with "Holy shit!" than ever before, as good hands got beat by great hands that were slow played time and time again. It started for me almost immediately with pocket kings on a flop of K99. I bet, everyone folds but one. Turn is a blank, I bet and get called. River is another blank, I bet and get raised. I call and he turns over 99 for four of a kind. Ouch. Huge hit that early in the night and I was down about $100. I treaded water, a little gun shy at that…

The Trouble With Theistic Evolution

The current issue of The Philosopher's Magazine contains a lengthy interview with philosopher Elliott Sober, a prominent philosopher of biology. Most of the interview focuses on the problem of reconciling evolution and theism, with Sober serving up the standard talking points. For me the interview is a reminder of what I find most frustrating about theistic evolution. Too often the defender of reconciliation acts as though his job is done as soon as he has tossed off a logically possible scenario that includes both God and evolution. The interview does not seem to be freely available…

Folk Meta-Ethics

There's a really interesting paper by Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley in press at the journal Cognition on the subject of lay meta-ethics, and ethical objectivism specifically. That is, the paper explores the question, "How do lay individuals think about the objectivity of their ethical beliefs?" (from the abstract). The paper contains a ton of data, and I couldn't possibly do it justice in a blog post, but unfortunately, there's no free version online (if you have a subscription, you can read the paper here). So you'll have to do with my incomplete discussion of it. The paper is interesting…

I know you are, but what am I?: Medical Voices' woo-ful anti-vaccine whine

"I know you are, but what am I?" That's basically the child's version of a familiar logical fallacy known as the tu quoque, which basically means, "You, too!" It's a very simple and simplistic logical fallacy that tries to argue that, if one's trait shares one or more of the same bad traits of the people he is criticizing, then his arguments can be dismissed. It's sometimes very effective in that implied within the fallacy is a charge of hypocrisy. As a diversionary tactic, it can be very effective. Not too surprisingly, I've found a doozy of an example of just this fallacy over at the other…

Why oh why Y?

So in the last few posts, I've been building up the bits and pieces that turn lambda calculus into a useful system. We've got numbers, booleans, and choice operators. The only thing we're lacking is some kind of repetition or iteration. In lambda calculus, all iteration is done by recursion. In fact, recursion is a pretty natural way of expressing iteration. It takes a bit of getting used to, but anyone who's programmed in a language like Scheme, ML, or Haskell for a while gets very used to idea, and feels frustrated coming back to a language like Java, where you need to write loops. It can…

Japan Nuclear Disaster Update 26: "My head is full of question marks"

Even as the situation at the troubled Fukushima Nuclear Reactors ... well, remains troubled ... the post-game analysis of what went wrong and what could have been done better develops. It is becoming clear that the plant had no real plan for the event of a tsunami even though it was built at an elevation within that affected by historically known and documented tsunami waves, and there is post-hoc confusion and denial related to early screw ups in trying to avoid a meltdown in the reactors (which ended up occurring), for instance. Highly radioactive water continues to leak out of at least…

Garden Doom...No, Not Really

I wrote this post in 2008, which was one of my worst gardening years ever - I made the insane mistake of setting the deadline for _A Nation of Farmers_ for June 1, which meant I spent most of the planting season in front of my computer. But I knew I wasn't the only one, and I've come to worry a lot less about it - because an awesome fall garden is worth a lot. BTW, not entirely coincidentally, I'm going to teach a 4 week online, asynchronous class on fall gardening during the month of July, beginning Tuesday, July 6. The class will help you either get started or begin to make use of fall…

The "pharma shill" gambit

It was a late night in the O.R. last night; so I didn't get to spend my usual quality blogging time. However, it occurred to me. In honor of being called a "pharma moron" on Whale.to, coupled with all the antivaccination lunacy that's been infesting the comments of this blog, only to be tirelessly countered by certain regulars here, I thought I'd repost a blast from the past that I somehow missed reposting when I was on vacation last month. Yes, it's my piece about the "pharma shill" gambit. It appeared originally on August 11, 2005. I think its reappearance now is particularly appropriate,…

Reiki propaganda in U.S. News & World Report

Sigh. Just a week ago, I deconstructed an awful article touting how the mass of prescientific quackery known as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as somehow being “validated” by modern science. Specifically, some truly misguided scientists were attempting to use modern systems biology techniques to look for biomarkers associated with TCM diagnoses such as “hot” or “cold” syndromes, specifically with respect to rheumatoid arthritis. The article is an example of just how the false narrative of TCM has taken hold. Although the article acknowledged that there was little evidence to support…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: H2Ooooooommmm

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: There's a reason that I don't get seriously into blogging about politics that much, and this week reminded me why bigtime. For one thing, political bloggers are a dime a dozen, meaning that you have to be really, really good to distinguish yourself from the chattering hordes. (Or you have to be rabidly right or left wing.) Also, I like to think that I've carved out a nice unique niche in the blogosphere for myself in the world of skepticism, critical thinking, and the debunking of quackery. Were I to wander too far astray from those topics that my…

Another Week of Anthropocene Antics - November 10, 2013

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 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsNovember 10, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, WG2 Leak, Haiyan, Fukushima, Maldives, Energiewende Bottom Line, Subsidies, GFIs, Cook, ShrinkologyFukushima: Note, News Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics, AntarcticaFood: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Extreme Weather GHGs, Nitrogen Cycle, Solar, Cosmic Rays, Aerosols, Volcanoes ENSO,…

More Hilarity from Gribbit

I know, I'm going at this guy like Marvin Hagler on a speed bag, but there's just so much nonsense to refute and so many contradictions to point out. Gribbit's latest demonstration of ignorance and cognitive dissonance is this post about education, wherein he actually claims that only the left lies - and this after getting caught lying just a few days ago. He begins with this tired old cliche, which he elevates to the status of "undisputed truth": There is an old saying, Those who can - do, those who can't - teach. And this is a undisputed truth. Think of it. If an economics professor was any…

The Link? "Going Broad" with Darwinius masillae

Fronting the NY Times today is a preview of a bold new strategy for engaging hard to reach audiences on science. As the NY Times describes, today's media event that unveils the fossilized remains of the monkey like creature Darwinius masillae features a unique collaboration between the History Channel, the open-access journal PLoS One, and the American Museum of Natural History. Along with today's publication at PLoS and the media unveiling at AMNH, there will be a two hour documentary on Monday at the History Channel, an exclusive arrangement with ABC News to appear on Good Morning America…

Friday Sprog Blogging: getting information you can trust.

Dr. Free-Ride: I wanted to ask you guys a question. I think maybe I asked you this question (or something like it) some time ago, but you were a lot younger and, you know, you keep growing and changing and stuff. So the question is, when someone tells you something about science, how can you tell if that person knows what they're talking about? Younger offspring: No way. Dr. Free-Ride: What? What do you mean, "no way"? Younger offspring: I don't know. Dr. Free-Ride: You don't know how to tell if someone knows what they're talking about? Like, if a kindergartner told you something about…

Dr. Francis Collins and "integrative oncology"

I was disturbed several months ago when I learned that the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, had agreed to be the keynote speaker at the Eight International Society for Integrative Oncology Conference in Cleveland, OH. I say "doubly" disturbed because it disturbed me that Francis Collins would agree to speak at such a function and, perhaps even more, because the host institution was Case Western Reserve University, the institution where I both completed my surgery residency and my PhD in Physiology and Biophysics. Sadly, it now appears that my old stomping…

What to make of the Yowie?

Like many people interested in cryptozoology (the study of animals - or alleged animals - known only from anectodal evidence), I'm of the opinion that the Australian Yowie is one of the most problematic of mystery beasts. It is, in fact, so ridiculous and inconvenient that it's difficult to take seriously. As if sasquatch, yeti and orang pendek aren't difficult enough*, what are we to make of antipodean reports of a hairy, bipedal, ape-like creature? Back in 2006 (oh my god, four years ago already), Tony Healy and Paul Cropper collated everything known about the Yowie for their book The…

Interview with HIV denier-turned-science-advocate John Strangis

Long-term readers of the blog know of my interest in HIV denialism, especially as it is maintained and spread via the Internet. In my online travels, I recently met John Strangis via this blog post. John has an interesting story to tell regarding his experiences with HIV denialism and subsequently, his turn to patient and science activism. Many thanks to John for sharing it here. John with his wife and son. TS: Can you tell the readers a bit about yourself? JS: My name is John Strangis. I was born in the United States from Italian parents but lived for fifteen years in Italy…

Peer Reviewed Bad ID Math

In comments to [my recent post about Gilder's article][gilder], a couple of readers asked me to take a look at a [DI promoted][dipromote] paper by Albert Voie, called [Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent][voie]. This paper was actually peer reviewed and accepted by a journal called "Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals". I'm not familiar with the journal, but it is published by Elsevier, a respectable publisher. Overall, it's a rather dreadful paper. It's one of those wretched attempts to take Gödel's theorem and try to apply it to something other than formal axiomatic…

Getting Publishing up to Speed: Interview with Bill Hooker

Bill Hooker blogs on Open Reading Frame, is a vocal proponent of Open Access publishing, has attended both Science Blogging Conferences to date, and I am happy to call him a friend. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job? I'm a molecular biologist.  I did my graduate degree through the University of Queensland, cloning and characterizing proteins from Schistosoma japonicum with potential as vaccine targets.  My first postdoc was with David Harrich, working on…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Eric Roston

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Eric Roston, author of The Carbon Age and blogger on Climate Post and Carbon Nation (also on Twitter) to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? What is your (…

REPOST: Creationist Claims about ERVs

This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that! I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;) WHOO! Classes over! Scary 'wait for grades' time begins... But Im finally going to get to jump into an ERV series Ive been wanting to do for a while! It will hopefully turn into a great resource for all you science defenders when you encounter a Creationist online/real life…

See Behe Flail

Perhaps you saw this article from The New York Times last week. It describes some significant new findings in protein evolution: In work published last year, Dr. Thornton reported how his group reconstructed an ancestral protein of two hormone receptors found in humans. The two, once identical, diverged along different evolutionary paths. One is now part of the stress response system; the other is involved in different biological processes, including kidney function in many animals. In the new study, the researchers determined the exact positions of more than 2,000 atoms in the ancestral…

The magical world of epigenetics

Let me tell you the hard part about writing about epigenetics: most of your audience has no idea what you're talking about, but is pretty sure that they can use it, whatever it is, to justify every bit of folk wisdom/nonsensical assumption that they have. So while you're explaining how it's a very real and important biological process that is essential for development and learning and behavior, half your readers are using the biology to confirm their biases about evolution and inheritance, and the other half already know all the basic stuff and want to get to the Evisceration of the Wrong,…

Unscientific America: like speed-dating at science policy happy hour

The initial reviews of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future produced a small blogospheric kerfuffle last month. But I think Unscientific America has much more constructive and useful things to offer than provoking more arguments, and there are a lot of reviews focusing on the positives. This surprisingly short but wide-ranging book is a nutshell primer on science policy and communication issues, perfect for dissatisfied lab rats who want to engage in advocacy but don't have communications or policy training outside…

Cluelessness and sexism embarrass the American College of Surgeons

I'd like to thank Buckeye Surgeon for reminding me of something I had seen and wanted to blog about but totally forgot about. Maybe it was so forgettable that I should just skip it, but as a surgeon I actually don't think so. Basically, it's a story of a surgeon making a fool of himself. I know, I know, that's such an impossibility that it's well nigh inconceivable, but it actually did happen. Perhaps what brought my attention to this sordid tale is that there is a connection to the University of Michigan, where I went to both undergraduate and medical school. The surgeon in question is Dr.…

You haven't walked in my shoes!

Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging. Because I foresaw this day coming, however, I did set up a series of "Best of" reposts to autopost for you while I am in mourning. Some I have even updated and/or spiffed up with actual editing. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. This particular one I've updated slightly.…

Apologetics for chelation therapy in The Atlantic

As I sat down to do my final post for this week, I perused my list of posts thus far and was amazed to discover that I hadn’t done a single post on vaccines. After all that nonsense the other week, where I spent more than a week blogging about nothing but the antivaccine movement, I thought this a refreshing change. So I figured I’d keep the momentum going, at least for today (I’m sure the subject will come up next week sometime) and stick with a topic that doesn’t involve vaccines. That topic, I hate to say, is another frequent topic of this blog, namely the infiltration of quackery into…

A little schadenfreude over animal rights activist Steven Best's latest little problem

It's no secret that I have little but contempt for radical animal rights activists. I make no apologies for this and, quite frankly, consider my contempt for them well-justified based on their behavior and words. Be it their fetishization of violence against researchers who use animals, their threatening of students in order to frighten them away from careers in scientific research that might involve the use of animals (for example, Alena Rodriguez), intimidating researchers by declaring their children as "not off limits," trying to burn investigators' houses down, harassing researchers, and…

The Burzynski Clinic disavows Marc Stephens but not the legal intimidation of bloggers who criticize its therapy

Remember yesterday how I said I would be following the "rule of three" in blogging about the Burzynski Clinic, its questionable practices in charging patients huge sums of money for dubious therapies, the even more dubious science behind his "antineoplaston therapy," and his shill Marc Stephens threatening bloggers with legal action in hilariously crude ways? In other words, in the tradition of comics and documentaries everywhere, I'd stop at three posts about Burzynski, at least for the moment. I lied. Well, no, actually I didn't lie. When I wrote yesterday's post, I fully planned on taking…

Thoughts on the 2nd Annual Science Blogging Conference

It's amazing how quickly three days can pass by; on Thursday I made a mad dash to make sure everything was in order for my trip to North Carolina and by 10:30 Friday morning I was sitting in an NC hotel room, not sure if I was awake or asleep. I didn't have much time to sort myself out, though, as I soon had to head out again to the Duke University Lemur Center. There I met up with Reed, Josh, Euan, and others for a tour of the facility. It was a fascinating place (even if a little pungent), and although I did happen across a television celebrity the highlight of the day was a face-to-face…

Angelina's Ark Excerpt - Fiction

Some of you may know that a publisher contacted me last year about turning a piece of short fiction I'd written from an adult perspective into a young adult novel. There are several reasons I wanted to do this - the first is that in many ways, the young adult fiction market is much more vital than the adult fiction market - a lot of adults read YA fiction, while the reverse is rarely true. There's the potential to reach a large audience this way. The other, more important reason to me is simply that teenagers and young adults have to know about our future, and they need a vision of a…

Dr. Mark Hyman mangles autism science on--where else?--The Huffington Post

Dr. Mark Hyman is famous as the "founder" of a form of woo known as "functional medicine." This new form of woo is...well, I'm not sure what it is, and neither are Wally Sampson (1, 2, 3, 4). Suffice it to say that it appears to be a serious grab bag of various forms of woo that, according to Dr. Hyman's website itself, involve environmental inputs, inflammation, hormones, gut & digestive health, detoxification, energy/mitochondria/oxidative stress, and, of course, "mind-body," whatever that means. No woo would be complete without mind-body, you know. Actually, no self-respecting woo…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Wands imploding, sort of

Now this is unexpected. Normally, I find my victims/targets/subjects for my usual end-of-the-workweek bit of fun and skepticism from one of two sources. Either a reader sends a link to some woo or other that desperately deserves a little bit of Orac's loving attention, or in my wanderings across blogosphere I find some little (or huge) bit of woo that catches my attention and holds it long enough to make the case for a spot on my weekly feature. This time around it was different. While applying a sorely needed bit of skepticism to a story that's been going around the more credulous parts of…