Free Republic

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...

It is one of the great dilemmas of climate change: We take such comfort from air conditioning that worldwide energy consumption for that purpose has already tripled since 1990. It is on track to grow even faster through mid-century - and assuming fossil-fuel–fired power plants provide the electricity, that could cause enough carbon dioxide emissions to warm the planet by another deadly half-degree Celsius. A paper published Tuesday in the Nature Communications proposes a partial remedy: Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) systems move a lot of air. They can replace the entire air volume in an office building...

A recent article in the Scientific American titled “Climate Change May Have Helped Spark Iran’s Protests” suggests climate – not Iran’s active export of terrorism and neglect of its civilian population – is responsible for the second consecutive week of protests in the Islamic Republic. “The impacts of climate change are among the environmental challenges facing Iran that helped spark protests in dozens of cities across the Islamic republic,” the publication wrote. At least 22 people have died during the protests, which began on December 28. One young man, 23-year-old Sina Ghanbari, reportedly died while in custody at Iran’s notorious...

The mathematical physicist and cosmologist Roger Penrose, now professor emeritus at Oxford University, is best known to mathematicians for his discovery of Penrose tiles. These are two four-sided polygons that tile the plane only in a nonperiodic way, that is, without a fundamental region that repeats periodically like the hexagonal tiling of a bathroom floor, or the amazing tesselations of the Dutch artist M. C. Escher. To everyone’s surprise, including Penrose’s, his whimsical tiling turned out to underlie a previously unknown type of crystal. You can read all about this in my book Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers. Penrose’s two...

This patently false claim is part of the ongoing Big Lie campaign to try to downplay and minimize the jihad threat. It first surfaced in June, and in wake of he Oregon murders, the media elites are dragging it back out again. But it is no more coherent or reasonable than it was in the summer.The study is based on the number of those killed by each group since 9/11. It skews the results by leaving out 9/11: what possible justification can there be for leaving 9/11 out of what is supposed to be a calculation of the magnitude of...