Science

From Robin Nixon, Elizabeth Peterson and Karen Rowan (October 2016) at LiveScience: 25 Medical Myths that Just Won’t Go Away Despite what you may have heard, drinking eight glasses of water a day isn’t the key to good health. Also, neglecting to wear a coat on a cold day won’t make you sick. And — you might want to sit down for this — pregnancy doesn’t last nine months. Health-related myths are often repeated as fact, even though any diligent Google search will reveal the truth behind these fallacies. Here are 26 of the most common medical myths, debunked.More. Hmmm. Some women distinctly recall pregnancy lasting a year and a half. 😉 No, but seriously, while it’s good to read Read More ›

Nuclear chemist Dr. Jay Wile recently wrote a review of the book Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies.
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We didn’t realize it was still legal to say so. From Michael Le Page at New Scientist: Countries in the EU, including the UK, are throwing away money by subsidising the burning of wood for energy, according to an independent report. While burning some forms of wood waste can indeed reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in practice the growing use of wood energy in the EU is increasing rather than reducing emissions, the new report concludes. Overall, burning wood for energy is much worse in climate terms than burning gas or even coal, but loopholes in the way emissions are counted are concealing the damage being done. More. Report.* The Times was going on about this too: Chopping down trees and transporting Read More ›

From astrophysicist Paul Sutter at LiveScience: 1) What we now call science, philosophy and theology were all mixed up together. 2) Early (proto-)scientists made claims and arguments that would sound totally bananas today. I’ll leave Copernicus’ motivations to another article, but he did indeed publish a book in 1543 detailing his new cosmology with the sun at the center of the universe. While it did have some advantages over the en vogue geocentric model (like neatly explaining the precession of planetary orbits and requiring fewer circles-within-circles), it did have weaknesses (how, exactly, does something like the Earth move?), and the reaction among the literate community — including the Catholic clergy — was neither hostile nor supportive. At the time, the Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at at RealClearScience: On a recent broadcast of BBC Radio Four’s The Infinite Monkey Cage centered around science and the paranormal, Cox had this to say on the topic: “Before we ask the first question, I want to make a statement: We are not here to debate the existence of ghosts because they don’t exist.” He continued: “If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made. We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection Read More ›

Here’s my new article at Design Disquisitions. Enjoy: In the next two (potentially three) articles I’ll be taking an in-depth look at an excellent paper written by Jeffrey Koperski, a philosopher of science at Saginaw Valley State University. Koperski has written about ID in several publications (1), which I highly recommend, and he takes a balanced and sensible approach to this topic. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t accept ID, but takes a constructively critical stance, so his work is well worth engaging with. As one can tell from the title of the paper, Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Goods Ones(2), Koperski critically analyses two common criticisms of ID, suggesting that they are highly dubious lines of argument. He then Read More ›

Says Eric Scerri at Los Angeles Times: Detailed case studies on the history of chemistry and physics show that the role of genius in advancing those fields — and even the role of rationality — is overstated. Rather than a hyper-intellectual, alien activity practiced by a remote priesthood, science is hit and miss, the ever-changing product of less-than-brilliant people, just like every other human activity. … In the 1910s, the English mathematical physicist John Nicholson published a number of articles in which he proposed that several proto-elements (his term) existed in outer space and were the basis of our familiar terrestrial elements. Their presence in a number of celestial bodies, he claimed, enabled him for the first time to do Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views: We’re looking forward to the March for Science this coming April 22, planned for Washington, DC, and with satellite marches across the country. If you’ve read about it, it promises to be a screechy and politicized protest against questioning orthodox scientific views or criticizing scientists. Scientists, as you know, are now held by many to enjoy a status granting them permanent immunity from criticism (much like the media, judges, and intelligence officials). In this way, scientific authority transmutes into scientific authoritarianism. Meanwhile we’re told it’s the skeptics on Darwinism and other scientific ideas, perpetually dodging threats to their careers and reputations, that we are supposed to fear and revile. More. It’s increasingly Read More ›

The Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism in Biology conference is this Saturday February 25th. Since the conference is online, you can attend from anywhere in the world as long as you have an Internet connection.
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From Maria Gallucci at Mashable, on a March for Science event: On Sunday, thousands scientists and supporters gathered in Boston’s Copley Square to “stand up for science” under the Trump administration. … Many rally-goers were in Boston for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. … Hari, the science educator, said he is organizing more than 260 satellite events to coincide with the main March for Science in Washington this spring. More. The satellite events are probably going to be the important ones. Curiously, I O’Leary for News happened to be talking to two political operatives recently, one mature and one pretty young. (I don’t usually run into Read More ›

From Colin Dickey at New Republic: By focusing on high-definition thrills, nature documentaries obscure more than they reveal. What is a lemming, exactly? Most of us, I’m guessing, could name few of its basic biological attributes. (It’s a rodent weighing one to four ounces and measuring three to six inches in length that lives in the Arctic.) The primary thing we think we know about lemmings—that they throw themselves off cliffs in inexplicable mass suicides—is actually false. This myth originally arose as a folk explanation for the wide variances in lemming populations from year to year, and was cemented by White Wilderness, a nature film produced by Walt Disney that won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1958. In Read More ›

From Daniel J. McKaughan at Big Questions Online: The idea that science is a “value-free” enterprise is deeply entrenched. “Under standard conditions, water boils at 100°C.” This and countless other facts about nature are mind-independent; that is, they do not depend on what you or I think or feel. And the procedures by which we discover such facts are available to and respected by a diverse public, man or woman, black or white, rich or poor. It may seem, then, that the activities and results of science are inherently insulated from racism, sexism, political agendas, financial interests, and other value-laden biases that permeate the larger social context. Some even vigorously insist on keeping values out of science. Do you agree? Read More ›

Our johnnyb writes to note a new book, Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions, by science journalist Richard Harris: American taxpayers spend $30 billion annually funding biomedical research. By some estimates, half of the results from these studies can’t be replicated elsewhere—the science is simply wrong. Often, research institutes and academia emphasize publishing results over getting the right answers, incentivizing poor experimental design, improper methods, and sloppy statistics. Bad science doesn’t just hold back medical progress, it can sign the equivalent of a death sentence. How are those with breast cancer helped when the cell on which 900 papers are based turns out not to be a breast cancer cell at all? How effective Read More ›

From Heather Zeiger at MercatorNet: Politics is not the only place to look for ‘fake news” Jason Young, the US Food and Drug Administration’s acting assistant commissioner for media affairs, made sure before leaving that the agency will no longer use “close-hold embargoes.” This is a practice under which reporters are given advance access to news on the condition that they not seek outside perspective until the embargo is lifted. The revelation that the FDA had been spinning the news created a minor scandal late last year. The FDA was outed in articles in Scientific American and the New York Times for going against their own stated policy of not allowing close-hold embargoes. The Association of Health Care Journalists worked Read More ›

From Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky (of Retraction Watch fame) at the Scientist: “We have too often been reluctant to voice our protest, for fear of incurring the [National Institute of Mental Health’s] displeasure (and losing whatever opportunities we still have for funding),” wrote neuroscientist John Markowitz in The New York Times last fall. In a refreshing piece, Markowitz was arguing that “there’s such a thing as too much neuroscience.” As cofounders of Retraction Watch, a blog that focuses on some of science’s nasty episodes, we are occasionally admonished that pointing out cases of fraud—even when we also praise good behavior—will give anti-science forces ammunition. In some ways, we should be glad scientists are acknowledging these concerns, instead of pretending Read More ›