Tag: science
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The Evidence For (and Against) Health Supplements: a Visualisation
After collating the results of over 1,500 studies and meta-studies (only “large, human, randomized placebo-controlled trials” were included), Information is Beautiful’s David McCandless collaborated with Andy Perkins to produce a comprehensive data visualisation mapping the the effectiveness (or not) of a wide range of health supplements (there’s a static image and interactive Flash version available).…
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The Efficacy of Hand Sanitizers
Given their prevalence in offices, hospitals and pharmacies (how naïve?), I would have thought the effectiveness of hand sanitizers would have been a lot greater than it is: In 2005, Boston-based doctors published the very first clinical trial of alcohol-based hand sanitizers in homes and enrolled about 300 families with young children in day care. For…
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Long-Term Thinking and Climate Change
One of the reasons the general public are slow in acting on climate change in the manner the situation’s importance demands is our reluctance to think too far beyond our immediate time horizon. However this shouldn’t stop us. That is the suggestion of Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, who extols the virtues of long-term thinking more eloquently than…
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The Neuroscience of Comedy
There is one essential condition required in comedy: “some kind of incongruity between two elements […], resolved in a playful or unexpected way”. That’s according to a fairly comprehensive article summarising the neuroscience research conducted to discover more about the phenomenon of why we find things funny (or not). Of particular interest was how we…
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The Anti-Vaccine Movement and the Rejection of Science
Already covered to death, it’s been on my bookmarks list since I read the following from Wired editor Mark Horowitz on it’s day of publication: Best/worst day. Story I am proudest of assigning and editing at Wired goes live today. […] But I also lose job. Bummer! That story is a fantastically well written and researched article…
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Dava Sobel on Writing Science Books Full-Time
Reflecting on her career as a science writer (she started as a technical writer at IBM before graduating into science journalism), Dava Sobel–author of the award-winning book Longitude–offers some thoughts on what it means to be a full-time author of popular science books: Both my parents loved to read, convincing me by their behavior that the best way…
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Why Pinker and Gladwell Disagree
If you didn’t already know, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, What the Dog Saw, is a collection of his best essays as published in The New Yorker (all of which are available on his site for free, if you prefer to read them there). Since its publication, journalists and scientists have been criticising Gladwell over what they perceive as his…
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Breeding Trust Through Better Science Journalism
With a public distrust of scientists comes the idea that “no scientific evidence will ever be compelling”. That’s what we can learn from Creationism, says Andrew Brown, and to solve this distrust we cannot rely on education to help the next generation understand, but instead we must improve science journalism. I’m not sure what the…
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Richard Dawkins and Hugh Hewitt Interview
The former Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and founder of the Foundation for Reason and Science, Richard Dawkins, was recently invited to appear on The Hugh Hewitt Show where the two discussed religion, Rome, evolution and much more. One particular exchange (the Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine? incident) has…
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Mysteries of Evolution and an Evolving Dawkins
It is time to move away from anti-religious sentiment/philosophy and instead appeal to the logic of those who refute the theory of evolution. This appears to be the premise of Richard Dawkins’ latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, where he “traces the scientific investigation of biological change as if it were a crime-scene investigation…