Reading Time: 4 minutes The first CRISPR-based genetic therapy for human beings is approved, kicking off a revolutionary new era of medicine.
Health
Posted inScience
The revolt against reality: Harassment of scientists is escalating
Reading Time: 5 minutes From COVID-19 to climate change, scientists who speak out are facing a flood of hate mail, threats and harassment from conspiracy theorists who don’t want to hear facts that contradict their beliefs.
Posted inHealth
Reminder: Reject anti-vax politicians
Reading Time: 4 minutes Anti-vax ideology isn’t a harmless quirk or a side issue. It reflects a worldview unmoored from empirical reality, and that’s an extremely bad sign for a candidate’s ability to make the right choices in a crisis.
Posted inHealth
Antivax idiocy asks: ‘How many more kids have to die?’
Reading Time: 8 minutes An article from the right-wing news source The Stream gets a lot wrong in a recent anti-vax article. Let’s take it apart.
Posted inLeaving Religion
A journey through chronic illness to freethought
Reading Time: 17 minutes Take yourself back to the mid-nineties, if you’re able to. We’re in a British Christian evangelical youth meeting, in a long white canvas tent on an agricultural showground a few miles North of the historic Cathedral city of Lincoln in the East of England. It smells of trampled grass and teen sweat. A sweet soaring […]
Posted inHealth
Why anti-vaxxers get in more car crashes
Reading Time: 4 minutes People who reject the COVID vaccine also get in more traffic accidents than vaccinated people. What explains the link between these seemingly unrelated events?
Posted inHealth
Living and teaching in an unruly body
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’m not disabled. Not yet. If I had to state it succinctly without referencing any diagnoses: my body is punitively fine-tuned—which doesn’t work well in academia, or anywhere else.
Posted inHealth
Your gas stove might make you sick, but your politics can kill you
Reading Time: 4 minutes Living longer and being healthy should be uncontroversial, nonpartisan ideas—but to the American right, they aren’t.
Posted inRaising Freethinkers
The science you will never know
The science you will never know can kill you, and it can save your life. Getting scientific answers right is more important at this point in history in countless ways than it has ever been. You and I cannot be productive contributors to every scientific conversation, except in one way: by pointing, on a given issue for which we lack expertise, to the people who do know what the hell they’re talking about.
Posted inPolitics
Did anti-vaxxer deaths from COVID swing elections?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Anti-vaccine conservatives suffered a disproportionate death toll during the COVID pandemic, compared to liberals who got vaccinated in huge numbers. Could this dynamic have affected the outcome of any elections in 2022, and if so, which ones?