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Supplements: Not mystical anticancer magic

It's no secret that over the years I've been very critical of a law passed nearly 20 years ago, commonly referred to as the DSHEA of 1994. The abbreviation DSHEA stands for about as Orwellian a name for a law as I can imagine: the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Of course, as we've pointed out time and time again, the DSHEA is not about health, and it's certainly not about education. Indeed, perhaps my favorite description of this law comes from blog bud and all around awesome internist Dr. Peter Lipson, who refers to it as a "travesty of a mockery of a sham." Rather, it's about…

The death of "Too many too soon": Not a moment too soon

There are some days when I know what my topic will be—what it must be. These are times in which the universe gives the very appearance of handing to me my topic for the day on the proverbial silver platter with a giant hand descending from the clouds, pointing at it, and saying, "Blog about this, you idiot!" Usually, it's because a study is released or something happens or a quack writes something that cries out for rebuttal. Whatever it is, it's big and it's unavoidable (for me, at least). This is one of those days. The reason it's one of those days is because just last Friday, as I was…

Another week of GW News, May 15, 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 Climate Instability News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdomMay 15, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, Fukushima Talk, Flooding Arctic Council, SRREN, Wikileaks, UNGCF, Fossils vs Biofuels, Thermodynamics, Cook Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Land Grabs, Food Production Hurricanes, Temperatures,…

Gwyneth Paltrow's quack empire goop strikes back against Dr. Jen Gunter

You know how you know when you've been effective deconstructing quackery or antivaccine pseudoscience? It's when quacks and pseudoscientists strike back. It's when they attack you. As much as Mike Adams' near daily tirades against me last year caused problems and poisoned my Google reputation (which was, obviously, the goal), I could reassure myself with the knowledge that his attacks meant that I had gotten to him. When Steve Novella was sued by a quack, as much as I didn't want to be sued by anyone, I knew that the fact that someone would sue him was testament to his effectiveness.…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - one of the last calls for submission!

Reminder: Deadline is December 1st at midnight EST! Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date (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): Make sure that the submitted posts are possible (and relatively easy) to convert into print. Posts that rely too much on video, audio, color photographs, copyrighted images, or multitudes of links just won't do. 10 days of science: Astronomical…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the deadline is looming!

Reminder: Deadline is November 30th at midnight EST! Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 440 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, 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): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 470 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, 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): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 470 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, 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): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 440 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, 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): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 420 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, 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): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 420 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, 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): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

Another Week of GW News, October 14, 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 in the Ecological Crisis Sipping from the Internet Firehose... October 14, 2012 Wonderment, COP18+, State of the Planet, Conservation Targets, Maldives Subsidies, World Bank, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, Production Hurricanes,…

Another Week of GW News, July 5, 2009

Sipping from the internet firehose... 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 Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose... July 5, 2009 Chuckle, Top Stories:Carbon Tariffs, G8, G8 Rankings, Meetings Galore, IRENA Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Methane, Education, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Climate Refugees, Wacky Weather,…

The flying carpet retort to "integrative medicine"

I didn't think I'd be discussing Dr. David Katz again so soon after the last time. In fact, when blog bud Mark Crislip (who clearly hates me and wants me to pop an aneurysm or have a heart attack, given how often he sends me links to articles as infuriating as this) sent me a link to Dr. Katz's latest article, "Cleaning the House of Medicine", published—where else?—in The Huffington Post, that home for "reputable" quack-friendly bloviation since 2005, when I first read the article, my first reaction was that Katz must surely be trolling supporters of science-based medicine. At first, I wasn't…

The Canadian War on Science: More updates to the chronology of the Conservative government’s anti-science actions

It has been a year since I last updated my chronological listing of the Harper Conservative government's war on science. The newly updated master list is here, where you can also read more about this project in general. The previous update from October 2013 is here. Some preliminary metrics about the impact of that original post in the wider world are here. This update contains 140 new incidents, mostly from between the last update and now. They have been integrated into the master list. Some notes. Many of the incidents I list are programs or locations that have sustained significant…

National Academies: Framing & State Policy Advice

Over the summer I addressed by video conference a meeting by the National Academies on state science policy advice. They've now produced a report based on that meeting and it is free as a PDF download. Chapter Five of the report focuses on the communication of science advice at the state level and provides a fairly detailed overview of the Framing Science thesis generally. Below the fold you can read that section of the report. The narrative follows closely the article that I published at The Scientist last year with Dietram Scheufele (PDF) and the presentation that I have been giving on…

Antivaccine cardiologist Jack Wolfson and the resurrection of false balance about vaccines

Yesterday, I wrote about false balance in reporting on vaccines in the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak. For those who've never encountered this blog, what I mean by false balance is when journalists, in a misguided belief that there are "two sides" (i.e., an actual scientific controversy) about the safety of childhood vaccines and whether they cause autism and all the other ills blamed on them by antivaccinationists or not, interview an antivaccine activist, advocate, or sympathizer for "balance" and to "show both sides of the story." The problem with that technique, so deeply…

Another Week of Anthropocene Antics, May 12, 2013

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 Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom May 12, 2013 Chuckles, Beauty, COP19+, G8, Red Lists, 400 ppmv Lake El'gygytgyn, CCAC, Unburnable , Pricing Nature, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Policies, Related Papers Melting Arctic, Arctic Fox, Methane, Geopolitics Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather…

A Day in My Life Redux

This will be a quiet week - I've got my Dad making his annual visit, a talk, a short trip, and then a slew of guests arriving for the weekend for Simon's 9th birthday party and Simon's first Torah reading (he's too young to read in the main synagogue, but he'll be the youngest kid ever to chant Torah at our shul in Junior Congregation), and there's a lot of cooking, plus the getting-ready-for-winter stuff is in high gear. So don't expect too much of me ;-). The single FAQ about me is "how do you do it all?" The standard answer I have given since the question started to occur is still true…

Are we playing it too safe in cancer research?

A couple of weeks ago, NEWSWEEK science columnist Sharon Begley wrote an article entitled From Bench To Bedside: Academia slows the search for cures. It was a rather poorly argued bit of polemic, backed up only with anecdotes that came across as sour grapes by scientists whose grant proposals the NIH had decided not to fund, and based on many misconceptions she had regarding basic science versus translational research, journal impact factors, and how journals actually determine what they will publish. Not suprisingly, Begley's article caught flak from others, including Mike the Mad Biologist…

"Green Our Vaccines": Serendipity and schadenfreude as antivaccinationists go to war

I know I've been whining a lot about how blogging about antivaccinationists has taken over here of late. The reason, of course, is the "Green Our Vaccines" rally taking place in Washington, D.C. as this post first appears in your newsfeed. Yesterday, I wrote about how "Green Our Vaccines" is a sham and nothing more than an anti-vaccine rally as well as about how its organizers were causing a bit of a rift in the antivaccinationist movement by trying to adopt a kinder, gentler, crunchier, media- and (seemingly) eco-friendly message. Unfortunately, stuff keeps happening. So I've decided that,…

Catherine DeAngelis and JAMA: What is going on here?

About a month and a half ago, I happened to be fortunate enough to be able to swing the time to attend a symposium in which Brian Deer (whom anyone reading this blog lately is well familiar with) spoke. It was an opportune time, coming as it did around the time when he had just published his new blockbuster story about how Andrew Wakefield, architect of the MMR vaccine scare in the U.K., had apparently falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that started it all. The symposium was entitled Science, the Media and Responsibility for Child Health: Lessons Learned from the MMR Vaccine,…

Another week of GW News, September 19, 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 Information overload is pattern recognitionSeptember 19, 2010 Chuckles, COP16+, WEF-Asia, WEC, MDG, MEF, Bug, Pakistan Bottom Line, World Bank, Ecuador, Cook, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Arctic Lows, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Pavlovsk, Higher CO2, AgroBiz, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Riots, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes…

Alternative oncology versus oncology

I hadn't planned on discussing the death of Jess Ainscough again, figuring two posts in a row were enough for now, barring new information. Besides, I was getting a little tired of the seemingly unending stream of her fans castigating me for being "insensitive" and saying it was "too soon" to discuss her death and wasn't sure I wanted to reawaken that discussion, which is only now finally dying down. This was a young Australian woman who was unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with a rare form of sarcoma at age 22 for which the only known treatment with a reasonable chance of providing her…

Another Week of GW News, June 1, 2008

Sipping from the internet firehose... 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) Information Overflow is Pattern Recognition June 1, 2008 Top Stories:Buckets, US CCSP, Methane, CDM Doubts, Nagris Melting Arctic, Ilulissat Meeting, CBD, Pricy Fuel, The 1700 Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Feedbacks, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Wacky Weather, Tornadoes, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Mitigation, Transportation,…

Another Week of GW News, January 6, 2013

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 Sipping from the Internet Firehose... January 6, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, Object Lesson, Tasmania, Retrospectives Bottom Line, Pricing Nature, Thermodynamics, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Kulluk, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Food…

Mothering for Money

Most of the comments people make about our slightly changeable and somewhat odd family are lovely.  Like all parents my husband and I love hearing how beautiful our kids are, how well behaved (even when it isn't always true), how nice it is to see us all together, what fun it is to see a big family having a good time. There are a few that trouble me a little, but I understand why people make those comments - our family is different and strange, and people are processing how to respond to it. I've made mistakes when in those kinds of situations too, so I don't mind it.  I know some people get…

Revisiting the question of "individualization" of treatments in "alternative" medicine

I kind of miss Peter Lipson on ScienceBlogs and wish he were still around. I realize it's been nearly a year and a half since he departed, but it's been a bit lonely here being the only physician blogging about quackery, the role of science in medicine, and other skeptical topics related to medicine. This point was driven home when I happened to come across a post he wrote the other day entitled Another crack at medical cranks. In it, Dr. Lipson discusses one characteristic that allows medical cranks and quacks to attract patients, namely the ability to make patients feel wanted, cared for,…

Congress is back in session, and sneaking the cruel sham that is right-to-try in a must-pass bill Is on the agenda

Anyone who has been reading this blog for the last three years or so knows that I'm not a fan of "right-to-try" laws. Basically such laws, which have sprung up like kudzu since 2014 and now exist in 33 states, purport to allow terminally ill patients the "right to try" experimental therapeutics. Thus far, they have been sold to the public as giving terminally ill patients "one last shot" and touting how such laws could save lives. As a result, as I've grimly quipped on multiple occasions, to politicians opposing right-to-try laws is akin to opposing motherhood, apple pie, and the American…

Another week of GW News, July 31, 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 Climate Disruption News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsJuly 31, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, DeChristopher, Monnett, BTI, Black Subsidies, Cook, Post CRU Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, POPs & Toxics, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Corps, Food Banks, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production…

Another week of GW News, May 16, 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 Information overload is pattern recognitionMay 16, 2010 Chuckles, Shiva, COP15, COP16, Cochabamba, Oh Oh, Sinervo, GBO-3, Hartwell, QUB Subsidies, Eli's Retirement, Open Letter, Pro-IPCC, IAC Review, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, CCD, IP Issues, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Aerosols,…

The Open Laboratory 2008 - you have 34 hours left!

It's time! We are closing the submission form on December 1st at midnight Eastern time! That is just 34 hours away! As expected, the entries have been flying in by the bushel over the past few days - it's hard to keep up with you all and add all the new entries to the list. But, keep them coming! Is there a topic, format or style that is grievously under-represented? This is your last chance to provide the balance. We definitely need more original poems and cartoons. Only submissions received through this form are valid. Do not add entries into the comments - this will not work! Keep in…

A Nagoya primer: with references to Star Wars, Kevin Bacon, LOL Cats, and Twitter

Image: Nagoya Congress Center plus Millenium Falcon reworked from original photo by Paula Pedrosa. link. Originally made for a series of Nagoya COP10 primers at Boing Boing (1 | 2 | SB | 3 | 4) I: SORTING OUT THE VERNACULAR So what is up with this Nagoya thing? Well, it's a big international meeting that is happening in Nagoya's Congress Centre (see the picture above), starting on October 18th and lasting until the 29th. No doubt, you weren't necessarily lured into finding out more by the conference's bouncy theme song. You certainly weren't intrigued by the reams of official documents,…

When "gut feelings" about science attack, or: Oh, no! Histidine and polysorbate-80 are going to destroy our girls!

Some people should keep their "gut feelings" to themselves. You know the type: People who have no knowledge about a topic or, even worse, just enough knowledge to sound as if they have a clue about it to people who don't have a clue but who are at the same time easily spotted as utterly and completely clueless by people who do have a clue. These people often think they've discovered something that scientists, in all their blindness have missed, and have a burning urge to share their "gut feeling" about what they think they have discovered as though it's some revelation, a bolt out of the blue…

Another Week of GW News, April 26, 2009

Sipping from the internet firehose... 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 Disruption News April 26, 2009 Chuckle, Top Stories:CARB-LCFS, Indigenous Peoples' Summit, EGU, G8 Meetings, Major Economies Forum, Methane Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Weight, Kash4Klunkers, Aerosols, Earth Day, Sol, Abruptness Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Ozone, Paleoclimate, Sea Levels Impacts, Forests, Corals,…

The author of the acupuncture meta-analysis lambastes the "sceptics' movement" in a "peer-reviewed" paper

So I finally made it to the Society of Surgical Oncology Annual Symposium. Thanks to the snowstorm that apparently wasn't (at least, I don't see any snow around), my arrival was delayed by a day, as all flights to the Washington, DC area were canceled on Wednesday. But I did finally get here, and, although I missed most of the first day, I did at least get to see a talk given by a friend of mine late in the day and I had a chance to hang out for a while with an old friend. I also got the chance after I got back to my hotel room to be highly amused by a "response" to criticism from the author…

Hostility towards scientific consensus: A sign of a crank

It has often been written on this blog and elsewhere that the mark of a true crank is hatred of the scientific consensus, be it consensus regarding the theory of evolution, the science that says homeopathy is impossible, anthropogenic global warming; various areas of science-based medicine; or the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Perhaps the most famous expression of distrust of a scientific consensus is the famous speech by Michael Crichton, in which he famously said: Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science…

15 antivaccine tropes for Christmas

Christmas is over, and we're in that weird time between Christmas and New Years Day, when, usually at least, I have to work but so many people are out and so few patients seem to want to come in that it hardly seems worth the effort. So it is with the blog, too. The week between Christmas and New Years tends to be the lowest traffic period of the year. Although that's been true this year as well, I've noticed more commenting activity than I usually see. So, I figured, what the heck? There are odds and ends worth writing about, although I don't plan on doing an epic posts before next Monday…

Another Week of Global Warming News, November 18, 2007

Sipping from the internet firehose... 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) Top Stories: SPM, US Reaction, Ban's Tour, OPEC Arctic Circulation, CARMA, State Of The Carbon Cycle, BBC on Denial, Global Dimming, ARGO Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Ozone, Satellites Impacts, Rainforests, Corals, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Adaptation Journals, Misc. Science Bali Summit,…

Another week of GW News, August 1, 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...August 1, 2010 Chuckles, BASIC, Bonn, COP16+, Water, Phytoplankton, State of the Climate, WCI, Free Access Subsidies, Psych, Snowstorms, Post CRU, Pepsigate Melting Arctic, HMS Investigator, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, Temperatures,…

Another week of GW News, April 25, 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 Information overload is pattern recognitionApril 25, 2010 Chuckles, Cochabamba, COP15, COP16, MEF, BASIC, Emerging Tech, Goldman Prize, Geology, Volcano, Earth Day Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, Subsidies, Medapi, McKibben, Spot the Error, Weaver , Post CRU, QUB, Lockwood Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food…

More atrocious antivaccine science promoted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr

It always amuses me how antivaccine activists have such a love-hate relationship with academia, particularly the higher echelons of academia. On the one hand, they routinely denigrate academics because inevitably well-designed, well-executed epidemiological studies testing the hypothesis that vaccines are correlated with the risk of autism always come up empty. That's because vaccines don't cause autism. I used to hedge a bit when I said that, but over the 12 years I've been doing this, I've covered more studies than I can remember testing this very hypothesis, and a clear pattern has emerged…

I get email — special cracker edition!

You asked for it, I deliver. Here's a good chunk of the opposition email that I've received in the last two days; not quite all of it, though, since I got bored and a lot of it has just been going straight into the trash. I've tried to cut out most of the identifying names and so forth, but if I missed a few…tough. Trust me, it's very tiresome to read. I know you are smarter than most people and probably even God himself, if you even believe in God. But you could learn something in humility. And there is nothing wrong with a Catholic standing up for his faith. In fact, a Catholic who…

The Shock Value of Science Blogs

There was a good reason why the form and format, as well as the rhetoric of the scientific paper were instituted the way they were back in the early days of scientific journals. Science was trying to come on its own and to differentiate itself from philosophy, theology and lay literature about nature. It was essential to develop a style of writing that is impersonal, precise, sharply separating data from speculations, and that lends itself to replication of experiments. The form and format of a scientific paper has evolved towards a very precise and very universal state that makes scientist-…

A misguided paean to a "brave maverick" chelation researcher on STAT News.

Quackademic medicine. I didn't invent the term. (Dr. R. W. Donnell did—nearly nine years ago.) However, I sure use it a lot, because it perfectly describes a phenomenon that has proliferated and metastasized throughout the body of academic medicine like the cancer it is. I like to think that, in my own way, I've popularized the word to describe this particular phenomenon. But what it this phenomenon? It is nothing less than the degradation of the scientific basis of medicine through the infiltration of pseudoscience and quackery into medical academia, with academic physicians who otherwise…

What is Collapse, Anyway?

With any reasonably successful blog, you have a conversation going on, often between an author and commenters who have a long history and background, and people coming into the conversation for the first time. Sometimes the people coming in are hostile, sometimes curious, sometimes troubled by what they are learning, annoyed by you or dismissive. Sometimes they stay, and sometimes they look in and look out. Balancing the degree to which you write for the regulars and to those new to you is always an interesting exercise. That's been an issue for me lately - I've now been at science blogs a…

Federal biomedical science policy under Donald Trump, nearly 100 days in

From the moment that Donald Trump was unexpectedly elected President, I couldn't help but be concerned about what President Trump would mean for medical science and science in general. I was not alone in my concerns. Of course, now, five months later, we know that such concerns were quite valid. If funding is a primary indicator, then, if anything, my concerns expressed last November were understated. For example, in his first budget, Trump proposed cutting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget by 19%, and, then, not content with that, proposed cutting $1.2 billion from this fiscal…

Another week of GW News, August 15, 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 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsAugust 15, 2010 Chuckles, Post Bonn, COP16+, KlimaForum10, Jet Stream, The Question, China, Russia, Pakistan Bottom Line, Ecuadorian Oil, 1 Sky's Question, Post CRU, Late Comments Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane Food Crisis, Pavlovsk Experimental Station, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production…

Open letter to AAAS concerning their new journal Science Advances?

To continue the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science theme, I present the text of a recent open letter I signed to the AAAS concerning their new journal Science Advances. Thanks to Jonathan Tennant for spearheading this effort. You can read more about the rationale behind writing the letter and the process involved at Jon's blog here. As well, he's listing the other places where the letter is being disseminated. Dear  AAAS, This is an open letter concerning the recent launch of the new open access journal, Science Advances. In addition to the welcome diversification in…

How Global Warming Disrupts Biological Communities - a Chronobiological Perspective

Since this is another one of the recurring themes on my blog, I decided to republish all of my old posts on the topic together under the fold. Since my move here to the new blog, I have continued to write about this, e.g., in the following posts: Preserving species diversity - long-term thinking Hot boiled wine in the middle of the winter is tasty.... Global Warming disrupts the timing of flowers and pollinators Global Warming Remodelling Ecosystems in Alaska ----------------------------------------------- Clocks, Migration and the Effects of Global Warming (December 23, 2005) Circadian…