If you want to head off regulation arising from evidence that links your product to ill health, muddy the waters by creating the impression of a controversy where none exists. A US study highlights this approach, suggesting the “manufacture of scientific controversy” casting doubt on the connection between sugary drinks, obesity and diabetes. Of 60 …
Continue reading ‘No wonder people distrust some scientists’ »
In the recycling industry, waste materials are typically crushed and torn into tiny pieces to make them easier to sort. The mixture is then dumped into a pool where wood and plastic float, and metal and rock sink. Salvage robots like those made by Zen Robotics in Helsinki, Finland, are making this process obsolete. The …
This is a disgraceful. Dr. Jonathan Lundgren is the award- winning scientist, who discovered that Bayer pesticides were killing bees in huge numbers, as discussed on this blog last Friday. It appears that Dr. Lundgrun was told by the US Department of Agriculture to stop publicizing his research, which didn’t suit USDA at all. When …
Continue reading ‘The hounding of the bee scientist (follow-on from Friday’s posting)’ »
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, among the world’s 10 wealthiest couples, with a net worth of $55.2 billion, have announced a $3 billion effort to accelerate scientific research with the ambitious goal of “curing all disease in our children’s lifetime.” They will be giving away 99 percent of their Facebook shares …
About one third of all medical studies in the United States involving children never end up being put to use because scientists frequently don’t publish the results of their work. 19 percent of the studies that recruited children didn’t run to completion because researchers weren’t able to recruit as many volunteers as they needed to …
Continue reading ‘Is it unethical not to publish the results of medical studies?’ »
A self-powered waste water treatment plant using microbes has just passed its biggest test, bringing household-level water recycling a step closer. Personal water treatment plants could soon be recycling our waste water and producing energy on the side. Boston-based Cambrian Innovation have began field tests of what’s known as a microbial fuel cell at the Naval Surface Warfare Center …
Continue reading ‘Microbial fuel cells – an amazing new technology’ »
Fear of machines taking jobs dates back at least as far as the Luddites. Two centuries on, many of us could face the same predicament. In 2013 Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the University of Oxford looked at 702 types of work and ranked …
A small pilot project in Iceland has shown that carbon dioxide can be safely stored in basalt rocks. The finding could be used to help tackle climate change, especially in countries such as India that have lots of basalt rock. The team found that when CO2, dissolved in water, is injected into hot basalt deep …
It might be preaching to the converted, but I think one has a duty to publicise the facts about the effects human beings are having on their environment, even if other people couldn’t care less. Young people, hopefully, do care – it is their future at stake. The following appeared recently in the New Scientist: …
“The vast majority of the so-called research turned out in US universities is essentially worthless”, says Page Smith, a history professor at the University of California. “It does not result in any measurable benefit to anything or anybody…….It is busywork on a vast, almost incomprehensible scale”. The number of journal articles published has climbed from …
In Western philosophy, the theory of infinite worlds dates back 2500 years to the “atomists” of ancient Greece. For philosophers like Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus, the universe was composed of microscopic atoms, moving eternally in a void, colliding haphazardly with one another until they formed a vortex. In this vortex, the heavy elements clustered together …
I always thought my mathematics were a bit weak, and that teaching at my school on this subject was poor, until I read an article in the New York Times of February 28th 2016 by Andrew Hacker. The author quoted a national survey that found that 82% of all Americans could not compute the cost …
Epicurus was a very serious person and his work, now lost, may have been hard going. He was fortunate that Lucretius was later able to explain Epicureanism in an accessible way. His six volumes of poetry now rank as outstanding pieces of literature in Latin. You might have the greatest idea ever thought up, but …
In 2014, the overdose death rate from opioid addiction among white Americans aged 25 to 34 was five times higher than the equivalent figure in 1999. In New York state all prescriptions for a medicine will now be sent by doctors via the internet directly to a person’s pharmacy of choice. Because doctors will no …
Continue reading ‘Good news: at last the US tackles the opioid painkiller epidemic’ »
Apparently, there are still people that believe that the Earth is flat and that there is a conspiracy by NASA or other authorities to hide the fact. Surveys also show that many people in the US believe that there was some kind of conspiracy behind the 9/11 attacks, or, at least, that the US government is …
