Wikipedia
Merchants of Doubt
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming is a 2010 non-fiction book by American historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. It identifies parallels between the global warming controversy and earlier controversies over tobacco smoking, acid rain, DDT, and the hole in the ozone layer. Oreskes and Conway write that in each case “keeping the controversy alive” by spreading doubt and confusion after a scientific consensus had been reached, was the basic strategy of those opposing action. In particular, they say that Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, and a few other contrarian scientists joined forces with conservative think tanks and private corporations to challenge the scientific consensus on many contemporary issues.
Aeon
Going nowhere fast
After the success of the Standard Model, experiments have stopped answering to grand theories. Is particle physics in crisis?
THONYC
The Phlogiston Theory
Wonderfully wrong but fantastically fruitful. // There is a type of supporter of gnu atheism and/or scientism who takes a very black and white attitude to the definition of science and also to the history of science. For these people, and there are surprisingly many of them, theories are either right, and thus scientific, and help the progress of science or wrong, and thus not scientific, and hinder that progress.
PBS
Sugar industry withheld possible evidence of cancer link 50 years ago
Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, said they have uncovered documents demonstrating that members of the sugar industry called off a study, named Project 259, in the 1960s because it linked sucrose — a common sugar — to heart disease and bladder cancer in preliminary experiments.
BBC
Supersymmetry theory dealt a blow
Researchers at the LHC detect one of the rarest particle decays seen in nature - and the find threatens a popular theory physicists have been backing.
NEWYORKER
Operation Delirium
Decades after a risky Cold War experiment, a scientist lives with secrets.
SLATE
When Scientists Created a New Form of Water Out of Thin Air
Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, a central plot element is called ice-nine. The substance, created in a lab, was made up of familiar H2O molecules, but they were locked in a novel crystalline structure that froze solid at room temperature.
NPR
Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Mass. Legal System In Turmoil
A scandal in a Massachusetts crime lab continues to reverberate throughout the state's legal system. Several months ago, Annie Dookhan, a former chemist in a state crime lab, told police that she messed up big time. Dookhan now stands accused of falsifying test results in as many as 34,000 cases.
nih
Unifying Theories of Psychedelic Drug Effects
How do psychedelic drugs produce their characteristic range of acute effects in perception, emotion, cognition, and sense of self? How do these effects relate to the clinical efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapies? Efforts to understand psychedelic phenomena date back more than a century in Western science. In this article I review theories of psychedelic drug effects and highlight key concepts which have endured over the last 125 years of psychedelic science.
NAS
Irreproducibility Report
A reproducibility crisis afflicts a wide range of scientific and social-scientific disciplines, from epidemiology to social psychology. Improper use of statistics, arbitrary research techniques, lack of accountability, political groupthink, and a scientific culture biased toward producing positive results together have produced a critical state of affairs. Many supposedly scientific results cannot be reproduced in subsequent investigations. // This study examines the different aspects of the reproducibility crisis of modern science. The report also includes a series of policy recommendations, scientific and political, for alleviating the reproducibility crisis.
Science
South America’s Inca civilization was better at skull surgery than Civil War doctors
Cranial surgery without modern anesthesia and antibiotics may sound like a death sentence. But trepanation—the act of drilling, cutting, or scraping a hole in the skull for medical reasons—was practiced for thousands of years from ancient Greece to pre-Columbian Peru. Not every patient survived. But many did, including more than 100 subjects of the Inca Empire. A new study of their skulls and hundreds of others from pre-Columbian Peru suggests the success rates of premodern surgeons there was shockingly high: up to 80% during the Inca era, compared with just 50% during the American Civil War some 400 years later.
NATURE
Sex matters in experiments on party drug — in mice
Mouse experiments with the popular club drug ketamine may be skewed by the sex of the researcher performing them, a study suggests.
YouTube
Unlikely results
Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not.
nature
The ethics of computer science: this researcher has a controversial proposal
Nature talks to Brent Hecht, who says peer reviewers must ensure that researchers consider negative societal consequences of their work.
Wikipedia
Diederik Stapel
Some level of healthy doubt is necessary even when talking about scientific results presented in prestigious publications... // Diederik Alexander Stapel (born 19 October 1966 in Oegstgeest) is a Dutch former professor of social psychology at Tilburg University and before that at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In 2011 Tilburg University suspended Stapel for fabricating and manipulating data for his research publications. This scientific misconduct took place over a number of years and affected at least 55 publications.
quantamagazine
Viruses Can Scatter Their Genes Among Cells and Reassemble
Some viruses can replicate without passing all their genes into any one cell.
quantamagazine
New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
A newfound pair of giant viruses have massive genomes and the most complete resources for building proteins ever seen in the viral world. They have refreshed the debate about the origins of these parasites.
The Guardian
A real-life Lord of the Flies: the troubling legacy of the Robbers Cave experiment
In the early 1950s, the psychologist Muzafer Sherif brought together a group of boys at a US summer camp – and tried to make them fight each other. Does his work teach us anything about our age of resurgent tribalism?
google
Understanding Bias in Peer Review
In the 1600’s, a series of practices came into being known collectively as the “scientific method.” These practices encoded verifiable experimentation as a path to establishing scientific fact. Scientific literature arose as a mechanism to validate and disseminate findings, and standards of scientific peer review developed as a means to control the quality of entrants into this literature. Over the course of development of peer review, one key structural question remains unresolved to the current day: should the reviewers of a piece of scientific work be made aware of the identify of the authors? Those in favor argue that such additional knowledge may allow the reviewer to set the work in perspective and evaluate it more completely. Those opposed argue instead that the reviewer may form an opinion based on past performance rather than the merit of the work at hand.
VOX
What a nerdy debate about p-values shows about science — and how to fix it
The case for, and against, redefining statistical significance.
Wikipedia
Instrumentalism
If ~6 different models (for quantum mechanics) calculate with reasonable precision, and most have their own niche application, to commit to hard realism, of which there is no evidence outside hidden premises, is totally arbitrary.
NPR
Can Scientific Belief Go Too Far?
Can scientists have too much faith, insisting that an idea is right despite contrary evidence? Commentator Marcelo Gleiser says yes, which could pay off in the end — or be a colossal waste of time.
NYBOOKS
Physics: What We Do and Don’t Know
In the past fifty years two large branches of physical science have each made a historic transition. I recall both cosmology and elementary particle physics in the early 1960s as cacophonies of competing conjectures. By now in each case we have a widely accepted theory, known as a “standard model.”
hyle
The Hidden History of Phlogiston
How Philosophical Failure Can Generate Historiographical Refinement by Hasok Chang (PDF)
collectorsweekly
From Boy Geniuses to Mad Scientists: How Americans Got So Weird About Science
In Donald Trump’s America, the tough guys are in charge now, and they don’t want to hear from any nerdy intellectuals. Scientists are dropping from government payrolls, environmental regulations are being rolled back, and the United States is pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, despite the heavy majority of climate scientists who say man-made climate change is real.
3quarksdaily
Why Neil deGrasse Tyson is a philistine
Far from me to defend Philosophy, but this is actually an accurate criticism. He annoys the hell out of me. He is just so damn simplistic. (Carl Sagan, after puberty -- mine --, also became an annoyance. I used to like the old Cosmos, but when Contact came out I was already loathing the guy).
Grupo de Whatasapp (apenas anúncios)
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