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In addition to my career as a PhD chemist, I am one of a select few who enjoy the privilege of moderating content on reddit.com’s science forum. The science forum is a small part of reddit, but it nonetheless enjoys over 4 million subscribers. By comparison, that’s roughly twice the circulation of The New York Times. The forum, known as /r/science, provides a digital space for discussions about recent, peer-reviewed scientific publications. This puts us (along with /r/AskScience) on the front line of the science-public interface. On our little page, scientists and nonscientists can connect through discussions on everything from...

Geographers from Kansas State University have created a map of the spatial distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins across the United States. How? By mapping demographic data related to each of the Sins. Below are screenshots of the maps in standard deviation units; red naturally is more sinful, blue less sinful.

Junk Science: Our secretary of state can't stop talking about the climate change threat. Allow us to cite some recent headlines that should encourage him to rethink his position. When John Kerry and other alarmists talk about climate change, he means man-made global warming. Climate change is a meaningless description because the climate is always changing, always has, always will. The alarmists moved on from "global warming" to "climate change" because it was obvious that not only was the world not getting hotter, winter kept arriving with intense cold and mountains of snow. How could they sell the oppressive swelter...

Engineering breakthroughs like the Tesla Model S may be burning up the electric car market (figuratively and literally), but they’re leaving drivers cold and under-powered in the face of Old Man Winter. Cold temperatures have adverse effects on batteries, slowing down the incoming and outgoing flow of energy and inevitably losing some in the process. The 250-mile average range of an electric car in normal climate conditions can see its performance reduced by 70-miles on a single charge in average winter conditions. The colder it gets, the shorter than range. Not only that, the average winter driver tends to turn...

KILLER freezes, floods and heatwaves will devastate Britain during the next 30 years, climate ­experts have warned. Many people could die as extreme weather becomes common. There will be more freak winds like the October storm, which killed four people. Heatwaves will be lethal and the sea level will rise, leaving coastal towns at risk of being swamped by storm surges. Sir Brian Heap, president of the European Academies Science Advisory Council, said he felt “obliged” to issue the warning after a new study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It comes on the back of Typhoon Haiyan in...

The human species began as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee, a leading geneticist has suggested. The startling claim has been made by Eugene McCarthy, of the University of Georgia, who is also one of the worlds leading authorities on hybridisation in animals. He points out that while humans have many features in common with chimps, we also have a large number of distinguishing characteristics not found in any other primates. Dr McCarthy says these divergent characteristics are most likely the result of a hybrid origin at some point far back in human evolutionary history....

(CNN) -- Mom-to-be Maggie Baumann knew she most definitely would not be "eating for two." She couldn't. During her first pregnancy, she was extremely preoccupied with just how many calories she consumed and stuck to a very strict exercise routine. "Getting on the scale at the doctor's office was very triggering for me," said Baumann of Newport Beach, California, who is now an eating disorders specialist and trauma therapist who devotes some of her practice to pregnant women and moms suffering from eating disorders. She gained 32 pounds during her first pregnancy, which is very much in line with the...

<p>Why did all the experts get the hurricane season outlook so wrong?</p> <p>Twelve forecast teams predicted an average of 16 named storms, including eight hurricanes, four major. Yet this season, which ends Saturday, saw only 13 named storms, including two mediocre Category 1 hurricanes.</p>

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Duke Energy Renewables, a commercial business unit of Duke Energy, today announced it has reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) regarding the deaths of golden eagles and other migratory birds at two of Duke Energy’s wind generation sites in Wyoming. The DOJ brought misdemeanor charges under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) for 14 golden eagle mortalities within the past three years at Duke Energy’s Top of the World Windpower Project and Campbell Hill Windpower Project near Casper, Wyo. Golden eagles are not listed as threatened or endangered under U.S. law. However,...

California's newest wind turbines may be killing more than 100,000 birds a year, according to a peer-reviewed study to be published in December. Those mortalities seem to climb the taller wind turbines get. And California wind turbines kill more wildlife per megawatt than identical turbines in other parts of the country. ... The study, conducted by Scott R. Loss and Peter P. Marra from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute's Migratory Bird Center and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Tom Will, appears in the December 2013 issue of the journal Biological Conservation. The study was based on a survey of...

After certain press criticism and a productive online backlash in the blogosphere, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is performing a gratifying volte-face in its use of the term sexual "orientation" for paedophilia. In its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the APA has distinguished between paedophilic disorder and paedophilic orientation. Paedophilia-advocacy groups, like B4U-ACT, a grassroots lobby group, have long seen the declassification of paedophilia to the status of an "orientation" for “minor-attracted persons" (MAPs) to be a necessary means to their ends. The North American Man-Boy Love Association (and numerous international affiliates advocating...

I was perusing through the news and saw many articles on the horrific destruction the storm in the Philippines had wrought. As I reading through the stories at Google, yahoo News, the term 'Climate Negotiator' kept on appearing in article after article. Well, I had no idea what a Climate Negotiator is, does. I mean, trying to negotiate with the climate seems a sissyphean task if not the most mentally stable thing to attempt. I tried searching Google, Yahoo for some precise meaning, job description for a Climate Negotiator but information was far and few between. It seems it is...

Baby Boomers might not be aware of the harm to their health that could come from high levels of copper and iron in the blood stream. Of course, that's because you haven't seen any public health messages and probably haven't been warned by your doctor that you could be ingesting either of the two from unknown sources that can put you at risk for a variety of common health problems that we shrug off as inevitable with aging. Iron is necessary to carry oxygen throughout the body. Copper helps our body use iron, protects our nerve cells and is important...

The entire resurrection of the Arafat poisoned by Polonium-210 story is complete junk science. I’ve said it before at Israellycool but lets expand on it. The story so far: Nine years ago, on November 11, 2004, Yasser Arafat died. That he could have died from natural causes or some “lifestyle disease” was too unpalatable for his followers so they came up with a rather bizarre theory that he was poisoned with Polonium-210. After decomposing in Ramallah for eight years his wife and followers dug up his corpse to try to prove it. >>SNIP<< With the most amazing measuring equipment, in...

The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) decision to once again reclassify pedophilia has led to further concerns that the professional organization is attempting to legitimize the disorder, paving the way for its defense and the recommendation of removal of age-of-consent laws.In a press release Friday, Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit organization that promotes the causes of religious liberty, the sanctity of human life, and the family observed that in its newly published Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), APA “changed the classification of pedophilia from a ‘disorder’ to a ‘sexual orientation,’ but, following the public outcry, APA released...

Ellmers: But men are required to purchase maternity coverage. Sebelius: Well, an insurance policy has a series of benefits whether you use them or not… Ellmers: And that is why health care premiums are increasing, because we are forcing them to buy things that they will never need. Thank you. Sebelius: The individual policies cover families. Men often do need maternity care for their spouses and for their families, yes. Ellmers: A single male, aged 32, does need maternity coverage. To the best of your knowledge, has a man ever delivered a baby?

n today's world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you'd think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science. You'd be wrong. Many billions of dollars' worth of wrong. A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology. The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the...

A SIMPLE idea underpins science: “trust, but verify”. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better. But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity. Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis

In 2007 advocates of global warming at the BBC wrote an article titled “Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’”[1] based on findings presented to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN led body that assesses the state of the Earth's climate. While the public has been bombarded with false data supporting the CO2 green house gas scare, nature seems to be taking its own stand in favor of the world’s “skeptics.” Inexplicably, an unpredicted frigid Arctic summer has covered an additional 533,000 square miles of ocean with ice resulting in an increase of twenty nine per cent in less...

The Los Angeles Times is giving the cold shoulder to global warming skeptics. Paul Thornton, editor of the paper’s letters section, recently wrote a letter of his own, stating flatly that he won't publish some letters from those skeptical of man’s role in our planet’s warming climate. In Thornton’s eyes, those people are often wrong -- and he doesn’t print obviously wrong statements.