Reading Time: 7 minutes Last year, I wrote about the crisis in Alzheimer’s research: a cruel affair involving a research direction and course of treatment built in part on papers with doctored data, and the heated venture-capitalist backstory that complicated the virtuosity of whistle-blowers. More recently, authors attempted to defend the original data, but the defenses were often just […]
scientific method
Posted inSpace
NASA’s quest for scientific literacy around so-called UFOs
Reading Time: 6 minutes In a four-hour public meeting on Wednesday, May 31, NASA gathered a team of scientific experts to discuss the role of the US civilian space agency in monitoring and analyzing Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). Associate Deputy Associate Administrator for Research Daniel Evans chaired this conversation, which he described as the “first deliberative actions” for a […]
Posted inSpace
Early black holes simplify the question of ‘dark energy’
Reading Time: 7 minutes The physics of our universe can be splendidly straightforward at times, even if it takes physicists a while to get there. That’s the current major takeaway from a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on February 15, authored by 17 astronomers in collaboration across nine countries, led by the University of Hawai’i. You’re going to […]
Posted inEvolution
Surprise! The Nobel goes to evolutionary sciences, not COVID research
Reading Time: 4 minutes Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo joined a rare group this morning: not just of Nobel Prize winners, but of “family Nobels”. His father, Karl Sune Detlof Bergström, shared the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane, for work related to local-tissue hormones, or “prostaglandins”. Forty years later, that award went solely […]
Posted inNews
Alzheimer’s, artificial sweeteners, and depression meds: A heavy month for health science literacy
Reading Time: 2 minutes Three major reports this month highlight the fragility of ongoing health sciences research, and challenges for broader scientific literacy. Earlier in July, the World Health Organization recommended against the use of non-sugar sweeteners, in a blow to many conventional weight-loss strategies. On July 20, Joanna Moncrieff and Mark Horowitz shared a research review that undermines […]
Posted inHealth
What does fasting tell us about the state of scientific literacy?
Reading Time: 10 minutes In the last two episodes of Global Humanist Shoptalk, I explored the question of human agency in relation to food. In “The Humanist Chicken Egg”, I reflected on how product choices are shaped by the cultures we inhabit. In “The Humanist Carbon Footprint”, I considered the onus placed on consumers to interpret manipulative labeling. But […]
Posted inCritical thinking
The messy problem of scientific illiteracy
Reading Time: 8 minutes Pity the poor bipedal ape. We’re a strange species, to have grown so much in shared knowledge, and still be so limited by the fragility of individual noggins. Though I have never been religious, and never believed in a god, still I share with theists the same neurological “meat” that can make personal conviction feel […]
Posted inReligion
Evil, Nasty Scientism in ‘Atheist Overreach’
Reading Time: 8 minutes Hi and welcome back! Of late, we’ve been checking out Christian Smith’s 2019 book Atheist Overreach. One of the ways he feels atheists ‘overreach’ involves what he refers to as ‘vulgar imperialistic scientism.’ Oh my, what oh what can scientism possibly be? Today, we’ll find out — and then we’ll see why our author likes this accusation […]
Posted inScience
Avoiding the Burden of Proof in ‘Atheist Overreach’
Reading Time: 11 minutes Hi and welcome back! Lately, we’ve been reviewing Christian Smith’s 2019 book Atheist Overreach. In it, he seeks to persuade his audience of two things: first, atheists need to quit talking about religion, and second, that everyone actually needs religion to continue to be a dominant force in the world. One section of the book deals […]
Posted inScience
News About Mars: How Science Progresses
Reading Time: 2 minutes Hi and welcome back! It’s miserably hot in my house today and I can’t get anything done while I’m this hot, so this won’t be a long post. I just saw this story recently and loved it. Today, let me show you some science news about Mars, and what it says about the progress of […]