Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Study: Consensus on Climate Still Means Consensus

May 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
climate-viz

An article of faith in the climate warming community is that a “scientific consensus” exists on humanity’s role in raising the planet’s temperature. An equal and opposite article of faith among global warming skeptics (to check their temperature scroll down the comments section on any mainstream media article about climate change), or at least skeptics of anthropogenic climate change, is that this consensus is at best less than sweeping and at worst illusory. A new study published online today in the journal Environmental Research Letters puts a figure on how real this (genuine) ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Sexists in White Coats: Men Favored for Laboratory Jobs

September 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Decades into the post-feminist era, there are still pockets of society where women are held back from advancement due to pervasive stereotypes. If that reminder conjures up images of a military base or a corporate boardroom, think again. We’re talking about university science laboratories. “Both male and female faculty judged a female student to be less competent and less worthy of being hired than an identical male student,” a Yale University research team reports in a disturbing new study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Specifically, the ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, Education, Findings
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Protein Data Bank Deposits Are Life’s Building Blocks

February 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Biology’s newest knowledge, fused with the special effects of The Hobbit or Harry Potter films — that’s what’s in store from a stunning new cinematic field of biomedical animation. Catch a glimpse in this video — The Inner Life of a Cell — that might have made biologists of us all had we seen it earlier in our lives. It offers an unprecedented, scientifically accurate dramatization of how cells function, sense their surroundings and respond to external stimuli in mind-blowing moving imagery. It is part of a continuing animation series created by Xvivo, a Connecticut scientific ... Read More

More like this: Science
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Pets, Vets and Stalking Horses

December 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

It’s not just on campus research labs that some are feeling the heat brought by increasingly sophisticated efforts to enshrine animal rights. Veterinarians are right on the front lines of animal rights litigation, veterinary ethicist Jerrold Tannenbaum told attendees at a 2010 Society for Neuroscience panel titled “Conferring Legal Rights to Animals: Research in the Crosshairs.” That’s because of a trend that started in the 1990s to push for what lawyers would call “non-economic” damages like “emotional distress” or loss of companionship. Pepperdine University law ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs
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Should Animals Be Considered People?

December 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

This is the second of several stories exploring the contentious relationship between the scientific community that insists animal research is essential to medical progress and the animal rights activists working to abolish animal experimentation. In part one, we examine pressure put on the biomedical research community by an increasingly savvy animal-rights effort. On December 19, 1994, animal protection lawyer Steven Wise — a deeply patient man — was frustrated. A decade into his 25-year plan to upend the fundamental legal principle that animals are property or “things” with no ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs
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Teens Weigh Ethical Animal Research Dilemmas

December 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Animal Research’s Changing Equation

Earlier this year, 65 Seattle-area high school students spent a day at the University of Washington’s Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine as part of the 2011 Youth Ethics Summit, co-sponsored with the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research (NWABR). The institute’s co-director, Dr. C. Anthony Blau, gave an overview of stem cell ethics, medicine, and biomedical research. The students then toured labs and watched beating heart cells in a petri dish. They also worked hands-on with planaria, a non-parasitc flatworm, and Play-Doh to learn about worm regeneration: one worm ... Read More

More like this: Science
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Animal Research’s Changing Equation

December 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

This is the first of several stories exploring the contentious relationship between the scientific community that insists animal research is essential to medical progress and the animal rights activists working to abolish animal experimentation. In part two, we examine the push to grant animals “personhood.” One morning in late 2010, a few of the 32,000 registered attendees for the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting gathered in a room of the San Diego Convention Center for a panel whose name exemplified their fears: Conferring Legal Rights to Animals: Research in the ... Read More

More like this: Science
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Feds Put Chimp Experiments in Cage

December 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Arguing that in most cases there are better alternatives, the National Institutes of Health announced Thursday it will drastically limit future biomedical research using federally owned chimpanzees. No new awards for research involving chimps will be issued pending a review of some three dozen current studies to see whether they meet the new guidelines, and as many as half may be phased out, NIH director Francis S. Collins told reporters during a news conference. But he left open the possibility of maintaining a population of potential research subjects in the event of an unforeseen future ... Read More

More like this: Science
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Scientists Deflated by Obama’s Policy Decisions

December 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Scientists and their advocates always come back to the Inauguration Speech. It was a high point in the enthusiasm Barack Obama carried into office, riding the endorsements of dozens of Nobel laureates who during the 2008 election had called for a new era in Washington where scientific expertise would be deferred to, not dismissed. Obama seemed to be speaking directly to all of these people the day he was sworn into office nearly three years ago. “I admit to being a little giddy when I heard those words — ‘restore science to its rightful place’ — in his inauguration speech,” ... Read More

More like this: Science, The Idea Lobby
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Ultimate Weapon: Knowing a War Zone’s Culture

November 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

When U.S. soldiers first went into Afghanistan and Iraq a decade ago, the military gave little thought to how an understanding of regional language, values, and norms could ease the interaction between troops and the locals they encountered. “There was this early period there when we invaded Iraq, in particular, where we just thought that this was a military endeavor,” said Rochelle Davis, an assistant professor of anthropology at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “If you go back and look at how we talked about it and the things we did, culture just ... Read More

More like this: Culture, The Idea Lobby
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