Science Culture
hrynyshyn | August 15, 2006If only we could teach our kids what science is really about before they get too old, then they'd be better equipped to deal with intelligent design and other anti-intellectual propaganda that poisons the noosphere. At least, that's a common theory, one that's taken up again this week by Jonathan Osborne, the chairman of science education at King's College in London. There's nothing particularly new about his argument, but it's important to be reminded that the problem transcends North America, and that the case is worth making, repeatedly, until school board trustees get it through their…
hrynyshyn | August 14, 2006I have resisted reposting pre-ScienceBlog posts as the lazy way out, but seeing as how many of my fellow bloggers have done it, what the heck? This one comes from a year ago, on the heels of the discovery of "Xena," what might be a tenth planet. It seems appropriate given that newspaper columnists are doing the same kind of recycling as we anticipate the outcome of a big meeting in Prague later this month, when astronomers will announce just what it is that gets to be called a planet.
Astronomers have been finding new planets on an almost weekly basis for years. Until last week, though, they…
hrynyshyn | August 10, 2006If any member of the medical profession wonders why more than a few people prefer to seek "alternative" treatments, wonder no longer. While ignorance and gullibility among the lay public are rampant, there is also the very serious problem that people simply don't believe that conventional, accredited doctors always have the patient's best interests at heart. Yesterday I came across a recent study that offers some good justification for that lack of confidence.
The paper, in the June 2006 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (subscription required), reports the findings…
sporte | June 28, 2006Some of us walk by the bus stop and nervously glance at the scruffy-looking man carrying the ragged sign. I try not to breathe through my nose while I read the sign, carefully pretending all the while that I'm not really interested. Ah, it says "Repent! The world will end tomorrow!"
I smile since I always love a testable hypothesis. Tomorrow morning, I will wake up and I will know the scruffy street preacher got it all wrong.
It is "An Inconvenient Truth" that global warming presents us with another testable hypothesis.
But this one doesn't make me smile.
Al Gore has described some…
sporte | June 20, 2006I recently completed a long trip out-of-town, giving a presentation at a Bio-Link conference in Berkeley, and teaching a couple of bioinformatics classes at the University of Texas, through the National Science Foundation's Chautauqua program.
The Human Subjects Protection Course
Before I left town, I had to take a class on how to treat human subjects. It seems strange, in some ways, to be doing this now, several years after completing graduate school, but my experimental subjects have generally been plants, protozoans, and bacteria; with a few rabbits, rats, and mice thrown in as antibody…