When Al Gore was Vice-President in 1994, he forced the U.S. EPA to mandate ethanol in gasoline by breaking the Senate tie in favor of environmentalists who had been pushing ethanol as 'sustainable biofuel' for decades. His vote forced gasoline manufacturers to include it despite science concerns it would drive up food prices and increase pollution. While biofuels were and are a viable field of...
read moreScience changes over time, that is no secret. We used to think we understood black holes, and that wasn't really true, and unless we use Dark Matter as a vague black box like aether, 100 years from now what we believe today in that regard will likely be regarded as quaint.Even on more terrestrial topics, as our understanding gets greater the facts change. We once weren't sure what set off the...
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Robert Krulwich, "the man who simplifies without being simple", has announced he is retiring, at least from his recurring gig at RadioLab, where he has been for the last 15 years.Not many people graduated from Columbia Law School and then immediately quit to cover the Watergate hearings as a journalist but Krulwich has lived his life the way he approaches science. At an obtuse angle, searching...
read moreSometimes lies on social media get immediate condemnation and sometimes they are even spread by people who should know better - X is a fascist or even entire science websites are fascists.How does that happen? Four experiments with participants from Prolific Academic and Amazon Mechanical Turk, published in Psychological Science, provide some insight. The quicker a lie can be made to "go viral"...
read moreIn December, people begin to think about the new year, and that means resolutions to lose weight. Exercising is a lot of work and feeling hungry much of the time is not desirable so many will instead opt for diet plans. One popular diet is the Atkin's Diet, where natural sugars are replaced with protein, while another is the Ketogenic Diet, where sugars are replaced with fatty foods. Both seek to...
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