2012 was the year that global warming came roaring back - in science media, anyway. Despite the IPCC asking the media to help a little less when it came to attributing every weather event to climate change, science media insisted global warming created a 'superstorm' named Sandy and that global warming had finally hit the American Mid-West, after peskily not rising in temperatures since the...
read moreA study by the University of Winnipeg - 2,300 first-year psychology students were surveyed online for three consecutive years - found that psychology students who do a lot of texting tend to be more shallow and ethnically prejudiced (that's racist, south of the border) and place less importance on moral, aesthetic and spiritual goals and greater importance on wealth and image. The...
read moreThe adage that 'there is a sucker born every minute' has always been true. Organic food? Homeopathy? Social psychology? I am cool with all of those unless poor people who think they are accepting science are being exploited for financial gain.And so if a company claims they will name an asteroid after you for five bucks, or a star, and you don't want to do the creative design work of making...
read moreIf you're not a researcher, you probably don't use Mendeley a lot, I don't have an account there even though I have written lots of pieces about their stuff. But it's popular among researchers and in the early days of Science 2.0, when I had the Science 2.0 name itself reserved for a collaboration tool, I always assumed we would buy something like Mendeley or something like Mendeley would...
read moreAre your eggs free range? Do you care?Well, chicken farmers care, because marketing success for 'free range' labels has made it a big business. There actually is a somewhat fuzzy limit, 1,500 birds a hectare, but a group in Australia says some larger producers are using the "free range" label for their chickens, even if they have 20,000 per hectare. Basically, the farmers claim, the...
read more