Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Red Science, Blue Science

December 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality By Chris Mooney; (Wiley) Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fantasies and the Rise of the Scientific Left By Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell; (PublicAffairs) TIMES OF INTENSE IDEOLOGICAL POLARIZATION are always dreary for reasonable people. Consider the Marquis de Condorcet, a brilliant scientist, mathematician, and political philosopher who was forced into hiding during the French Revolution after running afoul of the radical followers of Robespierre. During his months as a fugitive, Condorcet penned a ... Read More

More like this: January-February 2013
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My Nuclear Bomb Detonates More Safely Than Your Nuclear Bomb

September 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In yet another example of the serendipity of science, a University of Michigan research team applied “cocrystallization”—a process used in the pharmaceutical industry to alter the physical properties of drugs—to the production of high explosives, and discovered what may improve explosives technology in use for the last half century. Mixing two mainstays, the volatile CL-20 and the popular HMX (two parts to one), chemist Adam J. Matzger and colleagues cooked up an explosive that travels about 1 percent faster than HMX alone, the military’s explosive of choice since the 1940s. Not a ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Findings, Politics, Science & Environment
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Entering a Dangerous Epoch — The Anthropocene

March 27, 2012 • By •
Entering a Dangerous Epoch — The Antropocene

Research scientist Gail Osherenko is blogging for Miller-McCune from the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London. For other posts from her, click here. According to scientists studying global environmental change, the Earth is moving out of the Holocene — the period of remarkably stable climate that began roughly 12,000 years ago — into the Anthropocene, an era in which a single species, humans, are driving the Earth’s systems. “Can we return to the nice, steady Holocene stage where we know humanity can survive or will we be able to transition to a new, much hotter state?” ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Nation’s Science Powerhouse Supports Family Time

September 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Internal changes to a government agency's home-and-work policy don't normally warrant a White House rollout and an accompanying Washington Post op-ed. But when the National Science Foundation unveiled plans this week to instill comprehensive support for work-family balance throughout the foundation and its grant work, it was a big step toward redressing the gender gap in U.S. science and engineering. The new policy isn't geared exclusively toward women, although they will be its most practical beneficiaries. Researchers will be able to extend or delay research grants to have a baby or adopt ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Foreign Aid Should Deliver Science, Too

July 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The United States Agency for International Development once had a robust record on science and technology, including work that helped lead to new crop strands and oral rehydration solutions for use in parts of the world where some of the biggest development challenges are drought and deadly diarrhea. That record all but disappeared over the last 15 years. "The funding dried up, the institutional structures went away, the scientists left the agency,” said Raj Shah, who became USAID’s administrator a year and a half ago. “By the time I got there, there were only two scientific ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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An Anti-Science Mania Takes Over GOP

March 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

You’ve got to go back to the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 for a precedent to the anti-science mania that is currently sweeping the GOP. Then, the issue was teaching Darwin’s work on evolution in the schools. Today, the issue is global warming. Then, as now, large numbers of politicians tapped into the stratum of popular culture that simply rejects science as the basis for public or personal decisions. The chief prosecutor of high school teacher John Scopes, William Jennings Bryan, gloated that literal interpretation of the Bible trumped scientific knowledge. This resonated with large masses ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Enamored with Enamel

November 25, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Having navigated Halloween and now facing Thanksgiving in the United States, and with the December holidays around the corner worldwide, the annual battle of tooth versus sugary treat has begun. Diligently toiling to repair the inevitable cavities is Stefan Habelitz, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Dentistry. Habelitz has been studying the wondrous and often complicated production of tooth enamel, our first line of defense against tooth decay. Tooth enamel is as thick as a dime, highly-mineralized, and can withstand an immense amount of pressure (up ... Read More

More like this: Health
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Four out of Five Experts Agree — With Me!

September 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

A clear consensus of opinion emerges within the scientific community on an important issue, such as climate change. But the public, and its elected leaders, remains unconvinced and unreceptive to well-founded warnings. With this phenomenon growing frustratingly familiar, researchers can be forgiven if they begin to feel like Rodney Dangerfields in lab coats. From their perspective, they don’t get no respect. Newly published research suggests that’s not entirely true: Americans do believe and trust researchers. But we focus our attention on those experts whose ideas conform ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Findings, NEWS
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Ice Capades At the Ends of the Earth

August 3, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

In December 2008, our Michael Haederle reported on a study from West Antarctica that used ice cores to understand the relationship between carbon dioxide and climate change. One of the goals of that project was to compare the Antarctic ice to that from Greenland in the Northern Hemisphere, where scientists have been drilling ice cores since 1971. In the latest news from Greenland, an international team of 300 scientists and students drilling in the ice sheets of the northwest part of the country reached bedrock — at 1.5 miles deep — on July 27 after two years of work. (In Antarctica, ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Environment
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A New View of Why Women Shun Science Careers

July 16, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

It’s a nagging question that has long haunted the equality-minded world of academia: Why are women so underrepresented in the fields of science and technology? Do they simply have less innate ability in these areas, as former Harvard president (and current presidential adviser) Lawrence Summers famously argued? Or are they held back by ingrained sexism? A team of Miami University researchers led by psychologist Amanda Diekman has come up with a different explanation. In a paper just published in the journal Psychological Science, they argue women perceive STEM careers (those in the fields ... Read More

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