Sports used to bridge a lot of cultural gaps. You could walk into any bar and ask what the score was and everyone was your friend, regardless of race, creed, or color.Those days are gone, according to humanities scholars at coastal universities. Even elite athletes are shook by being around anything different from them, they write in a new paper. The authors even suggest their work means business...
read moreRisk factors like salt and sugar intake and high blood pressure for heart attacks and disease need constant rethink if they are going to be more than folk wisdom.Low-salt and sugar-free have too many vested interests to get critical thinking on how valid population-level statistics are for individuals, and 'high' blood pressure rarely gets questions about how reliable the correlation was that...
read moreWhen we think of Mt. Everest, it's usually imagery like Sir Edmund Hillary and his guide Tenzing Norgay in parkas and with oxygen tanks making the hazardous 29.000 climb. And then there are the dead bodies, nearly 300 of them, those who perished on the trek to the summit.What we don't think of is a man running, yet that is what Kilian Jornet Burgada did part of the way in famous photos - and...
read moreThough the World Series is over, baseball never really ends in the modern era. There are MVP announcements, free agency and then the winter meetings. Before we know it, it will be February and pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training in Florida and Arizona. read...
read moreSan Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick is going to take the field in two hours and it won't just be a vindication of the decision by coach Jim Harbaugh to replace Alex Smith and his 13-3 run with a passer rating over 100 - Harbaugh can't lose in the eyes of the public even if the team does - it will be a vindication of science. read...
read moreMost people regard journalists as biased, though it is most evident in the bias of journalists at places politically different from the consumer - in the US, MSNBC viewers regard Fox News consumers as biased while Fox News consumers regard everyone else as biased. Science media does not have this issue because everyone votes the same way politically and it makes no difference; except on political...
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