Free Republic

Comedian Bill Maher and Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson engaged in a tense clash over the issue of transgender athletes in sports. As part of a wide-ranging discussion about the many reasons why the Democrats lost the 2024 election, Mahher and Tyson delved into the topic of the recent resignation of Laura Helmuth, the former chief editor of Scientific American magazine, who stepped down from her post after the revelation of deleted social media posts in which she referred to Trump voters as the “meanest, dumbest, most bigoted” people. Helmuth chalked the posts up to “shock and confusion” following the election....

Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, has resigned after receiving fierce backlash for her online expletive-filled tirade where she called Trump voters “f–king fascists” on election night. “I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief,” Helmuth announced on her Bluesky account Thursday. “I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching).” The president of the magazine, Kimberly Lau, said that Helmuth decided to step down on her own. She thanked Helmuth for her time leading Scientific American, noting that the magazine “won major science communications awards...

The number of children being educated at home has been growing for the past few decades. No one knows by how much, and that is part of the problem. Home­school­ing is barely tracked or regulated in the U.S. But children deserve a safe and robust education, whether they attend a traditional school or are educated at home.The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported that by last count, in 2019, nearly 3 percent of U.S. children—1.5 million—were being home­schooled. This number, calculated from a nationwide survey, is surely an undercount because the home­schooling population is notoriously hard to survey, and...

Thomas Gingeras did not intend to upend basic ideas about how the human body works. In 2012 the geneticist, now at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, was one of a few hundred colleagues who were simply trying to put together a compendium of human DNA functions. Their ­project was called ENCODE, for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. About a decade earlier almost all of the three billion DNA building blocks that make up the human genome had been identified. Gingeras and the other ENCODE scientists were trying to figure out what all that DNA did. The assumption...

Scientific American has published a piece claiming that “misinformation,” such as the notion that there are only two sexes, is “being used against transgender people” and in order to target “gender-affirming medical care.”The article states that there are three types of “misinformation,” and they are “oversimplifying scientific knowledge, fabricating and misinterpreting research, and promoting false equivalences.”Three types of misinformation are being used against transgender people: oversimplifying scientific knowledge, fabricating and misinterpreting research, and promoting false equivalences. https://t.co/1AOp6Bk6A2 — Scientific American (@sciam) April 20, 2024The piece asserts that “Many of the arguments against trans rights center on the idea that transness...

Today I received the following in my email:Dear Friend of Scientific American,Many parents of children who are LGBTQ are desperately trying to protect their kids from discrimination and moral panics, and provide them with proper health care, safe communities and welcoming schools. Research overwhelmingly shows that supportive parents help non-conforming kids thrive, as our story in this month’s issue shows. It’s a hopeful story about parents learning from and for their kids, and supporting other families in creative ways.”I confess to not having a subscription, so I have not read the advertised article. Based on past experience with Sci-Amer, I...

In this line of work, we frequently have occasion to make use of articles from a variety of scientific journals when researching topics of interest. One of my favorite sources over the years has been the journal Nature, which covers a wide variety of science topics. Science journals can be of value, at least in part because they tend to cut through all of the partisan opinions and brouhaha and rely on actual data... or at least they used to. These days, however, it seems as if some science journals are getting a bit less "sciency" and dipping a toe...

Avi Loeb, bestselling author and the former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, penned an op-ed in Scientific American this week positing that the universe could have been formed in a lab by an “advanced technological civilization.”….

They’re meant to be heroes within the Star Wars universe, but the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work The acronym “JEDI” has become a popular term for branding academic committees and labeling STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) initiatives focused on social justice issues. Used in this context, JEDI stands for “justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.” In recent years, this acronym has been employed by a growing number of prominent institutions and organizations, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. At first glance, JEDI may simply appear to be an elegant way to explicitly build “justice”...

The breakdown of institutional legitimacy helped shape our current information crisis All governments lie and distort to advance their agendas. But it’s fair to regard the current moment as a singular age of unreality in recent United States politics. Most members of one party have embraced an explicitly fictional world, one in which the 2020 election was stolen by rampant election fraud by Democrats. Historian Timothy Snyder has called this fabricated conspiracy “the Big Lie.” The rise of such a flagrant mendacity is usually located very recently, in Donald Trump’s first election run or in the dawning of the social...

Hailed as a miracle in the 1950s, the potent bug killer DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) promised freedom from malaria, typhus and other insect-borne diseases. Manufacturers promoted it as a “benefactor of all humanity” in advertisements that declared, “DDT Is Good for Me!” Americans sprayed more than 1.35 billion tons of the insecticide—nearly 7.5 pounds per person—on crops, lawns and pets and in their homes before biologist Rachel Carson and others sounded the alarm about its impacts on humans and wildlife. The fledgling U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972. Friends and family often ask Barbara Cohn, an epidemiologist at Oakland's Public...

After a year of lockdown, museums, libraries and bookstores across America are reopening. This cultural reawakening’s beginning coincided with both the Juneteenth holiday and the one-year anniversary of the one of the largest protests in American history against racial injustice. As bookstores reopen, many are organizing displays of children's books that celebrate Black history. What you won’t find in even the biggest collections of books is the story of the dark-skinned early people who launched human civilization.

It's a no-holds-barred attack on Christianity to advance the opposing worldview, and if that means smearing as racist a — *checks notes* — time-tested historical account in which a divine Middle Eastern man is the central figure, so be it.“Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy” is Scientific American’s not-so-subtle way of saying this synonymous phrase: “The Bible is racist.”It would be easy to dismiss the whole article as record-setting idiocy or editorial catfishing. After all, what editor at a magazine with “scientific” in the name green-lights an article arguing that the religion that worships a man born...

Scientific American found itself taking heat this month after the scholarly, 176-year-old magazine published an opinion piece titled “Health Care Workers Call for Support of Palestinians.” The screechy diatribe accused Israel of “vaccine apartheid” and “war crimes” among other alleged abuses. The piece blasted “Israeli settler colonial rule” and called on US healthcare and academic institutions to condemn “long-standing oppression” against the Palestinians and adopt the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign against the country. The piece was written by Harvard University research fellows Osaid H. K. Alser and Asmaa Rimawi; Seattle Children’s Hospital Dr. Sabreen Akhter; Mayo Clinic Dr. Nusheen...

For over 175 years, the magazine Scientific American has bragged that it coversthe advances in research and discovery that are changing our understanding of the world and shaping our lives. (snip) Authoritative, engaging features, news, opinion and multimedia stories from journalists and expert authors — including more than 200 Nobel Prize winners — provide need-to-know coverage, insights and illumination of the most important developments at the intersection of science and society.However, around six years ago, the American segment of the publication changed, as it was purchased by a private German-British conglomerate, Springer Nature, which has affiliates and publications worldwide. And...

A number of major news organizations worldwide, ranging from Scientific American and The Columbia Journalism Review to The Guardian and Al Jazeera, have signed a pledge to begin referring to “climate change” as a “climate emergency” in their reporting. “Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term ‘climate emergency’ in its coverage of climate change,” the publication announced Monday in a tweet to its 3.9 million followers touting “the impact we hope it can have throughout the media landscape.” “We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So,” the headline...

In an unprecedented move, a number of high profile scientific and medical journals have declared their opposition to President Donald Trump in the upcoming 2020 election. In this article, we take a look at their reasoning. a look at their reasoning. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. As of this week, The Lancet Oncology, Science, Nature, and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) have all publicly announced their opposition to President Trump. Historically, journals of this ilk rarely dip their toes into the political world, but, in this most unusual year, they have made an...

In today’s refusal to wear a mask, we see echoes of this condom rejection embedded in white masculine ideology. Led by the Masculinity Performer in Chief, these men are making what increasingly looks like the last stand for that celluloid masculinity. As in another infamous “last stand,” they risk ending up dead on the battlefield they insisted on creating, along with the casualties they take with them. A lot of people are baffled at this behavior—at balking at something so basic, a disease transmission preventative that has such a low barrier to access. Why do these men perform this mask-free...

If you ever find yourself at a cocktail party of astrophysicists and don't know what to say, try this: "But what about the angular momentum?" No matter what the topic of conversation, you'll be guaranteed to sound erudite. Nearly every field of astronomy, from galaxy formation to star formation, has an "angular momentum problem." Nothing in the cosmos ever seems to spin or orbit at the rate it should. The moon is no exception. It is the flywheel to end all flywheels; if its orbital angular momentum were transferred to Earth's axial rotation, our planet would come close to spinning ...

I just won a bet I made in 2002 with physicist Michio Kaku. I bet him $1,000 that “by 2020, no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, which recognized solid work in cosmology (yay Jim Peebles!) and astronomy, was Kaku’s last chance to win before 2020. Kaku and I made the bet under the auspices of Long Bets, a “public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake.” Long...