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The 20 most bizarre science experiments of all time

There's a long and strange history of truly bizarre experiments done in the name of science. Alex Boese has gathered twenty of the strangest examples here. There are the usual suspects, such as the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram obedience experiment, but there were others that I hadn't heard of. To me, the award for the most bizarre has to be a tie between the vomit drinking doctor and this one: Ever since the carnage of the French Revolution, when the guillotine sent thousands of severed heads tumbling into baskets, scientists had wondered whether it would be possible to keep a…

Les Roberts on Deaths in Iraq

Les Roberts in the Independent: On both sides of the Atlantic, a process of spinning science is preventing a serious discussion about the state of affairs in Iraq. The government in Iraq claimed last month that since the 2003 invasion between 40,000 and 50,000 violent deaths have occurred. Few have pointed out the absurdity of this statement. There are three ways we know it is a gross underestimate. First, if it were true, including suicides, South Africa, Colombia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia have experienced higher violent death rates than Iraq over the past four…

Misinformation from Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg makes the (by now traditional) claim that the new IPCC report has significantly reduced the estimates of projected sea level rises. Six years ago, it anticipated ocean levels would be 48.5 centimeters higher than they are currently. In this year's report, the estimated rise is 38.5 centimeters on average. But the 38.5 number Lomborg presents does not include increases from accelerating ice flows. About these, the report says: For example, if this contribution were to grow linearly with global average temperature change, the upper ranges of sea level rise for SRES scenarios…

In Boltspeak 97% = "some"

In Andrew Bolt's latest column he sort of admits that Peiser was wrong, but still misleads his readers. As Attard reported, I'd cited research by British academic Benny Peiser, who claimed to have disproved a survey that concluded none of a sample of scientific papers doubted the theory of man-made global warming. That was a mistake, because Peiser now says he messed up some of his checking -- even though he insists "hardly a week goes by without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory". Bolt implies that only some of the checking was wrong, but…

Financial-disclosure Policies of Science Journals

In June, the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine retracted a fraudulent paper because: "financial and intellectual input to the paper by outside parties was not disclosed." Paul Thacker has an interesting article on financial-disclosure policies in scientific journals. Most journals do not require authors to make financial disclosure statements: The editors of several environmental journals recently discovered that they had published papers by industry-funded researchers, yet had not disclosed the authors' financial backers. Officers of the American Geophysical Union (AGU)…

The Skeptics Circle turns 40 (sort of)

Today, the Skeptics' Circle turns 40. Well, not exactly, but it is the 40th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, and this time around it's being held at Daylight Atheism. Once again, it's time for an antidote for the rampant credulity in the blogosphere, where dubious stories travel around the world far faster than skeptics can apply critical thinking skills to them, this time by entering the Daylight Atheism Museum of Superstition and Pseudoscience: The doors of the Observatory are closed, and an eager crowd has gathered before them, milling about anxiously to await the unveiling of the newest…

Jon Jenkins was not an adjunct professor of virology

Remember Jon Jenkins and his sixth degree polynomial fit? Well, Jennifer Marohasy is presenting him as a martyr for the denialist cause. Interestingly Bond University has a new name for its business and IT faculties, The Faculty of Business, Technology & Sustainable Development, but apparently didn't like Professor Jenkins' very public opinion on the subject of sustainable development. For his opinion, Professor Jenkins received an official reprimand from the Bond University Registrar and then was informed last Friday that his adjunct status had been revoked. And sure enough, he's not…

Doubt is Their Product

Chris Mooney reviews a new book about the war on science Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels (Oxford University Press, 359 pages, $27.95) ... Tobacco companies perfected the ruse, which was later copycatted by other polluting or health-endangering industries. One tobacco executive was even dumb enough to write it down in 1969. "Doubt is our product," reads the infamous memo, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a…

Tell the truth about Heartland, get fired

A few weeks ago Dave Hansford, the environmental writer for the New Zealand Listener, wrote an article on how global warming deniers create an illusion of dissent: In November, three members of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition - Bryan Leyland, Owen McShane and Vincent Gray - spoke at UN climate talks in Denpasar in support of a US-based conservative group, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). They told delegates "climate change is a non-problem" and that they should "have the courage to do nothing". Leyland says CFACT did not pay him to attend the Bali talks, but…

New book spreads DDT ban myth

Reader James reports that the DDT ban myth is repeated in a new book: Over the last few decades, however, the WHO has discouraged the use of DDT in member states â encouraged by environmentalists, who have often massively overstated the negative effects of DDT on human and animal health (Roberts et al., 2000). Until recently, most Western aid agencies discouraged the use of DDT and indoor residual spraying generally, and the WHO has provided little financial assistance to those governments that wish to go down this route. They also run down bednets. While bednets may have a role in…

Dr. Dr. Stupid (a.k.a. Orac)

As much as I hate to admit it, I'm not perfect. I know, I know, given the (usually) tasty (usually) Respectful Insolence⢠dished out nearly every day here, that's a hard thing to believe, but it's true. In fact, occasionally I even do something that is so unbelievably, incredibly, outrageously boneheaded that there's only one thing to do: Blog about it. About four months ago, I decided I needed (in actuality wanted) a new cell phone. So I perused the offerings of Sprint, the company I happen to be with right now, mainly because of an insanely cheap plan that we managed to get a few years ago…

Wegman Heartland update

John Mashey, in comments writes: It has been a busy week or so, with more to come. 1) See Fakery, p.3 and p.12. In ~2009, Heartland+SEPP+CSCDGC got ~$8M. The other 9 on p.3 got ~$39M.The additional 36 501(c)(3) on p.12 added another $283M. Now, only some of that is for climate disinformation, but some of it is for tobacco advocacy and other science disinformation, such as on environmental issues. In addition, these entities cross-support each other in various ways. One often finds them cross-quoting, cross-writing articles, signing petitions, together. It is far cheaper to create confusion…

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature algorithm

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature algorithm seems to work quite well, with coverage by the Economist, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the London Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Los Angeles Times, US News and World Report, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Independent and CNN. Here is the BEST algorithm: State that "reported global warming may be biased by poor station quality". Collect funding from Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Make the utterly predictable finding that warming is not a product of poor measurement. Brief reporters. If only I had used…

Leakegate scandal gets bigger

The Leakegate scandal keeps getting worse. Jonathan Leake, already in trouble for his habit of deliberately concealing facts that contradicted the story he wanted to spin is back with a story that reads like it was ghost written by Mark Morano. Leake wants to spin a tale that the world isn't really warming, so he trots out the usual collection of discredited papers. Leake first cites John Christy: "The story is the same for each one," he said. "The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations,…

Michelle Malkin on Lott, Reynolds repeats false claims

Michelle Malkin writes an excellent article on the Lott affair. And if you think that she is one of those mysterious people out seeking revenge for Bellesiles, you should look at this 1998 article where she praises Lott. Atrios explains why he cares about Lott. He quotes Sullywatch: We forget now how much there was an all-out effort (kind of like a certain recent special prosecution) to throw anything they could find at Bellesiles until it stuck, and finally one thing relatively marginal to the whole thesis of the book did. I can't agree with this statement. If…

This Day in Medicine - July 13th

Near the Dordogne River, Southwest France, 14,207 B.C. - The inhabitants of a new settlement along the river have become ill. Several months ago they settled near the present-day village of Montignac after a long hegira to free themselves from the cold, not to mention the amateurish musical concerts of their erstwhile residence in the peninsula now called Denmark. While initially enjoying the more temperate climate of ancient Gaul, they now suffer from failing health. Many of the adults are too weak to collect the roots and fruits that form the staple of their diet. Their children are…

In Defense of Gentleness

My eyes long for your promise; I ask, "When will you comfort me?" -Psalm 119:82 Sometimes I hear patients recite the following: "I don't care what kind of bedside manner my doctor has as long as he knows what to do for me," a rather barefaced rejection of the concept of the kindly physician. Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful relationship, doesn't it? The patient gets his problem fixed and the doctor is under no pressure to dally with a lot of unnecessary hand-holding. If all patients adopted this attitude I suspect many of us would get home a lot earlier. Is it possible that…

Why 'Poor Man's Bread' is Better for You Than the Daily Loaf

Watercress Diet 'Can Cut The Risk Of Cancer' Watercress (Nasturtium officinale) is a semi-aquatic perennial herb grown for thousands of years not only as a foodstuff but also for its medicinal properties. In Victorian times it was used by the working class as a bread substitute (hey, wait a minute - I work, so I must be a member, compared with all the foyl olreitniks). Perhaps the gentle reader recalls the effervescent watercress sandwich Mother used to make for breakfast, hmm? Well, guess what - as the title above states, new research suggests that the ancients were right to cram the leafy…

The Five Deadly Sins of Doctors, Part IV: Nihilism

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. -George Bernard Shaw Pessimism never won any battle. -Dwight D. Eisenhower nihilism: an extreme form of skepticism; nothingness; nonexistence; an approach to philosophy that holds that human life is meaningless; skepticism as to the value of a drug or method of treatment (cf. therapeutic nihilism) When it comes to cancer care I suspect you can count on one hand the number of nihilists in this country who are also oncologists. You could probably find a higher number of the proverbial…

Words of Wisdom, Chapter One

[Editor's Note: the following anecdotes were selected from I Love the Sound of My Own Voice: Twaddle and Bromides from The Cheerful Oncologist, published by Venal Literary Infatuations Press, 2006. The author has asked me to announce that first editions will be available as soon as his secretary is finished with the copy machine.] I leaned up against the exam table, inspecting a woman who had finished a course of aggressive chemotherapy and chest radiation therapy for limited-stage small cell lung cancer. She still had some areas of increased 18-FDG uptake on her follow-up PET scan, but…

Look Backward in Anger

"The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see." -Winston Churchill Other than those esoteric gentlemen (or is it gentlepersons?) whose job it is to dispatch robust but morally askew, to say the least, prisoners to the shores of the river Styx (by way of the needle and the damage done, if you know what I mean), is there any other career more displeasing than that of the medical oncologist? Not that we don't get a frisson of delight whenever the towering monstrosity named Cancer keels over after a relentless chemotherapy attack and crashes to Earth, never to…

When the economy tanks, psychics prosper

I should have seen this one coming. After all, the economy's been in the crapper for several months now. Things are bad and getting worse, with the bottom not yet in sight. So who could prosper in this environment, except for repo men and liquor stores? Psychics, of course: NEW YORK (CNN) -- The housing crisis will deepen, the country could fall into a depression and laid-off workers may need to start their own business. New York psychic Roxanne Usleman says the bad economy had been good for her business. If this sounds like the advice of a financial planner or an economist, think again. It's…

Friday Fractal LXXV: Top of the Atmosphere

What if you could escape this busy world, rise above the clouds, and see everything from a new perspective? From that astronauts-eye-view, you could see the greenhouse effect in action: Sunlight pouring in, some reflected off of clouds in the upper layers of the atmosphere, some filtering down below. The light that does manage to reach the earth is absorbed or reflected by the surface below. That reflected earth shine bounces off the clouds as well, in colors imperceptible to you or I. Would it be an alien sight? Colors we can’t see, our homes obstructed by that foggy greenhouse roof, with…

Whining, not Pining

I hadn’t planned to write another post full of complaints. I’m a mother; I intrinsically hate whining. Yet, here I am, with nothing but frustration and disappointment (and an awful pun in the title) to share. Here it is, in a nutshell: I missed my lab in the field yesterday. It was one of those moments where life is chaos, pure and simple. I left for Boulder early, only to face slippery roads (covered in several inches of slush from Monday’s snowstorm) and heavy traffic. I made it to the park-n-ride where I catch a regional bus at what would normally be a reasonable time. If the busses were…

Flying in Vapor: Friday Fractal LXXII

I figured I'd post this fractal set while it is still Friday somewhere (here in Colorado, for instance.) My thoughts on it follow below. Flying in Vapor: A poem and a fractal for riding the waves I know what it's like To be down in the water And tossed by the waves Each day, crashing into the next Pulling me, seething, frothing Falling Exhilarating ride through time Through the tumbling surf Dance on the shimmering crests Only then to be pushed beneath Into the surrounding, suffocating Cold Plunging and diving Grows wearisome after a while And so I'll ride above Flying, so to speak…

Sizzzzzle.....

Sizzle follows Randy Olson as he tries to make a movie about global warming. The main characters are an outrageously stereotypical new age gay couple and the thug life camera crew who are there to supply a comic foil to both Olson and the pretty boring scientists who get interviewed about global warming. It's a very strange contrast between the fake characters (who are REALLY fake) and the scientists trying to sound professional and only talk about global warming. The movie is billed as a mockumentary but it doesn't quite fit the bill of a mockumentary since it's about a serious topic…

Booze, Fat, & Now Coffee Good For You

It's just about weekly that some scientist finds that one of our guilty pleasures is actually good for us. First it was red wine, then it was all alcohol. Followed by Omega-3 Fatty Acids - mmm.... fat.... And Now?! It's coffee. It doesn't just wake you up in the morning so you can avoid those pesky rush hour accidents with half drunk and asleep drivers. Now coffee is purported to protect us against dementias by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on our body. So go ahead eat those extra eggs and an entire package of bacon. You can just drink an entire pot of coffee to protect…

Women/geoscience/blogs survey closes Sept 7

We've gotten a lot of responses to our survey about women in geoscience and blogs, and we're going to wrap it up soon, so we'll have time to analyze the data before the Geological Society of America meeting in October. If you haven't participated in the survey yet and you want to, here's the information: Over the past several years, the geoscience blogosphere has blossomed so much that this fall, the Geological Society of America (GSA) will be convening a Pardee Keynote Symposium called "Google Earth to Geoblogs: Digital Innovations in the Geosciences." Kim Hannula started wondering how…

Pending Results and Maps from the Blogger Bioblitz

We are still "in the lab" so to speak with the final results of the Blogger Bioblitz. All of the data crunchers and digital cartographers are involved in academia in one way or another and this is crunch time. So, stay tuned and we'll have the final tabulation in the next week or so. In the meantime, Jenn has shared some impressive preliminary results of plants, fungi and mosses at the Google Group. You can read them below the fold. Here is some metadata from our compiled BioBlitz records. This only includes data mailed out to us as of 5/5/07, and only includes plants, algae, mosses, fungi,…

Announcing the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz

UPDATES: Part I, Part II In honor of National Wildlife Week, April 21 - 29, I am inviting bloggers from all walks to participate in the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz, where bloggers from across the world will choose a wild or not-so-wild area and find how many of each different species - plant, animal, fungi and anything in between - live in a certain area within a certain time. Pick a neat little area that you are relatively familiar with and is small enough that you or the group can handle - a small thicket, a pond, a section of stream, or even your backyard - and bring along some taxonomic…

Levitt and Dubner Visit Seattle

In 2006, I bought Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's first book Freakonomics and, like the four million other people who bought the book, thought it was excellent.  It was full of originality with chapters on why parents disadvantage their children with bad names and why crack dealers live with their mothers. For this reason (plus the fact that I spent $30 and drove a total of 3 hours), I had high expectations when I went to see the pair in Seattle last night. Sadly, I left feeling that Levitt and Dubner seem to be suffering from a bad case of overexposure. I should have seen the writing…

Dehumanized and Possibly Deluded

Because it is so beautifully concocted, it is tempting to digest every last drop of Mark Slouka's delicious potion ("Dehumanized" published last month in Harper's) without questioning the recipe. That Slouka pits capitalism (or, to be more specific, the puerile, corporate-driven aspects of capitalism) against citizenry was a well articulated but obvious face-off. More subtle (and noxious in its subtlety) was the claim that somehow math and science better equip students for lives as capitalist droids. Here's Slouka: It troubles me because there are many things "math and science" do well,…

Potassium Iodide (Favorite salt of survivalists for over 50 years)

Potassium iodide isn't much of a structure: It's a source of iodide. Thyroid hormones contain iodine; the source of this is dietary iodide. The human dietary requirement for iodine is vanishingly small; on the order of 100 micrograms per day. Trace iodine is present in seawater and many soils, so most people get some from seafood, fruits, or vegetables. In the absence of iodine, thyroid hormone levels are low. This induces a cascade of hormone releases; the last of which is the release of thyroid stimulating hormone. This enhances production of thyroid hormones. In excess, this induces…

Homicides in Kellermann's study

Mary Woods wrote: Kellermann also used a control case study, limiting his cases to the following criteria; "Any death ruled a homicide was included, regardless of the method used. Assault related injuries that were not immediately fatal were included if death followed within three months." ( NEMJ vol.329, no.15, pg. 1084). Right there, that raised a red flag in my mind. If the case studies included deaths occurring three months after an assault, one has to question the validity of those cases. The questions that come to mind were; what were the cause of death for those who were…

Harvard Libraries join the fight for open access

A few months ago, I wrote about the problems with academic publishing: These days, there's an entire industry of academic publishers that have become so fully integrated into the research system that many scientists don't realize that there's any distinction between doing science and publishing in journals. However, these journals cost an enormous amount of money (mostly public tax dollars), yet add little value to scientific research, while simultaneously slowing the pace of discovery and limiting the dissemination of knowledge. Many individual scientists have taken personal action to combat…

Gary Kleck responds to Tim Lambert

I argued that the estimate of 200,000 DG woundings derived from Kleck's survey (p163 of TG) was inconsistent the estimate of 7700-18,500 DG woundings on page 164 of TG. Kleck accuses me of sloppy reading for not noting that the p 164 estimate is for medically treated wounds only. However, even if we accept Kleck's generous estimate that there are as many untreated gunshot wounds as treated ones (chapter 1 of TG), it is quite clear that if we multiply the page 164 estimate by two to allow for this possibility, that it is still not at all close to the estimate from Kleck's survey. In any case…

I'd Like to Thank the Academy

My committee has my thesis draft. We're getting over a heat wave here in Berkeley. My office is neither air-conditioned nor particularly well shaded and ventilated, so I've been hanging out in my nice cool living room (not air-conditioned, but protected from the yellow face), putting my files in order, catching up on laundry, assembling alternate resumes and writing my acknowledgments. I imagine committees sitting on drafts as adopting the posture of a brooding hen. That's funnier for some committee members than for others. My ability to actually write the acknowledgments is limited by the…

Women in Science Linky-Post

My beautifully kludgy little script that does much of the work of putting together linky-posts for me - pulling everything with a special "to SB" tag off my del.icio.us account and formatting it - has stopped working. I cry tears of sadness. I also have a backlog of links. Like, f'rinstance, April's Scientiae carnival. And the announcement for next month's Scientiae carnival - I'm excited about the theme! And a couple of things on the social status of women in relation to geology: A Broadsheet summary of this article (pdf) about how oil and mineral-resource economies are bad for women. The…

23andMe performs genome-wide association study on NFL players, fails to find athlete genes

Details are pretty sketchy, but a press release announced today suggests that personal genomics company 23andMe has performed a genome-wide association study comparing 100 current or former professional NFL players with a set of controls of unspecified sample size. The shocking result: The study did not find the tested players to be genetic outliers, suggesting that genetics may not be a good predictor of athletic success. It's unsurprising that the results of this study are negative (more on this below), but the conclusions they draw from this are fallacious. In fact we know from twin and…

Outrage over DNA testing for UK asylum seekers

ScienceInsider reports that plans by the UK Border Agency to employ DNA and isotope testing to test the origins of asylum seekers are being met with outrage by scientists and refugee advocates. There's not much information about the precise tests that will be employed, but what information has been made available has horrified a number of scientists including the University of Leicester's Alec Jeffreys: After reviewing the Border Agency's plans, Jeffreys echoed those criticisms in an e-mail to Science: "The Borders Agency is clearly making huge and unwarranted assumptions about population…

Check Out Meredith on TV This Sunday!

If you get the Smithsonian Channel on your TV, then tune in at 8 pm this Sunday (January 10th) to watch the program Zoo Vets: Claws, Paws, and Fins. Not only does this look like a pretty neat program (from my admittedly very biased perspective), but it features--among others--my girlfriend, Meredith Clancy, and her long-time mentor, Kathryn Gamble, the head veterinarian at the Lincoln Park Zoo. The program, which follows vets at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, Brookfield Zoo, and Shedd Aquarium, was filmed in fall 2008, when Meredith was completing an external rotation at Lincoln Park as part of…

UK Science Minister Addresses Critics on Twitter

In an attempt to save the sinking ship that is his current government, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has extensively shuffled his cabinet. As part of this the science (formerly the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills [DIUS]) has been merged with business (formerly the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform [DBERR]) to form the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (DBIS). Paul Drayson will remain Minister of Science, but--in another twist--he'll now also be moonlighting as Minister of Defence Procurement (a position he has held previously).…

A Big Thanks to Everyone Who Contributed to Our Blog Paper

Yesterday, I blogged about the paper that Shelley Batts, Tara Smith, and I just published in PLoS Biology on integrating blogging into academia. As promised, we have a very long list of people we would like to acknowledge for their contributions to this work. As I noted yesterday, this paper was built upon the anecdotes, suggestions, and other feedback we collected from across the science blogosphere. In addition to the people listed below, we also gained insight from a variety of discussions that took place within the internal ScienceBlogs forums, and we owe a big thanks to all of our…

Bush Administration Institutes More Political Interference in Scientific Regulation

Although the Bush Administration has already proven itself pretty effective at interfering with science and regulation through existing channels, yesterday's New York Times reports that this wasn't quite enough: President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy. In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political…

More on Edible Cotton Seeds

Last month, I wrote a post about a research group at Texas A&M University that reported genetically engineering "edible cotton seeds" by using RNAi technology to stably and specifically knock out production of the gossypol toxin in the seeds of the plant. I thought that the paper was interesting for a variety of reasons, including the use of RNAi and the fact that this was a novel usage of transgenic crop biotechnology coming from an academic group. I recently contacted the study's leader, Dr. Keerti Rathore, to ask him a couple of questions in hopes of further understanding the…

Should I Sell my Car for NY Giants Season Tickets?

MetLife Stadium: NY Giants vs. Washington Redskins, Dec. 18, 2011 (my own photo.) This may be a sign of football withdrawal syndrome, but the day after the NY Giants won the Super Bowl I was searching for 2012 season tickets (more on that later.) I was reminiscing about last December when I took my son to his first professional football game at MetLife stadium. It was a bright, freezing cold day and the stadium was packed with more than 80,000 fans. The NY Giants were having a bad day battling the Washington Redskins; several times the announcer excitedly reported "Touchdown!" followed…

Intern at the Dolphin Research Center

Want to get experience working with marine mammals? The Dolphin Research Center, in Grassy Key, Florida, is looking for interns for the Fall semester, and the deadline to apply is next week! The DRC is home to a pod of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins (you might recognize A.J. from my banner image, used with permission of course) and a group of California sea lions. While the DRC hasn't yet been hit by oil from the BP oil spill, they are monitoring the situation closely - this may be a great opportunity to learn a ton about marine mammal research and help in the conservation effort. Check out…

Five copies of the mega-book SCIENCE to be won!

This week, five SciencePunk readers will win a copy of SCIENCE: THE DEFINITIVE VISUAL GUIDE, edited by Adam Hart-Davis! I received a copy in the post today, and let me tell you, this book is HUGE. Huge in scope, in detail, and in raw physical presence. That is I am going to insist on calling it SCIENCE, all in caps. Words couldn't do justice in describing just how massive this hardcover is, so here's a picture of me shortly before I was crushed under the weight of it and had to be rescued by my pet ants: Science follows in the tradition of publisher DK's lavishly produced pictorial…

Proving our products are safe is excessive regulation, claim herbalists

The alternative medicine industry has been complaining that regulations demanding they prove their products are safe before being granted a licence resemble "a sledgehammer to crack a walnut". Global Regulatory Services reports from a keynote debate at the Natural & Organic Products Europe Show held in London earlier this month. A panel of speakers from across the herbal remedies industry stated that while they supported the MHRA's Herbal Directive in principle, some felt it was too stringent and expensive in requiring companies to prove their products were safe, effective and…

Elephant Seals and Donors Choose Update

Check out this awesome David Attenborough video: So far the readers of this fair blog have managed to fully fund two Donors Choose science education requests. We can do better. Do you like the stuff that you read here? Do you like David Attenborough? Consider donating to this project. Mr. T teaches at a "high poverty" high school in Los Angeles. He writes: I teach Biology and freshman science in an inner city/urban public school where over 50% of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. Daily life is often a challenge for many students, so textbook learning due to lack of…