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The "absurdity" of social sciences is not really the issue. Scientific Journals have been caught publishing AI generated nonsense as computer science papers, publishing pharmaceutical company marketing as medical papers, publishing a request to be removed from their mailing list as a paper and accepting a made-up researcher with no credentials as an editor.

Hopefully benign. Someone needs to study if those micro plastics encourage bad gut bacteria when the plastics are passing through or getting stuck on the gut lining. How about the news about the parasitic worm that helps improve good gut bacteria?

https://www.the-scientist.com/...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...

I don't think this factors in what I believe is a higher likelihood for scientific papers originating in China to involve plagiarism and/or fraud.

Yeah, this is what I came in here to say. It seems like all the obviously fake science that's not printed in an Elsevier journal is coming out of China. Is China actually producing more quality research, or just more paper output?

Its an interesting idea and it might be true but the evidence isn't in. Tedx isn't ted its just whoever wants to talk. In this case it is better than most, he is actually a PhD in charge of a research organization, but his research is based at least in part on falsified results.

https://www.the-scientist.com/...

I have been a pharmacist for many years.

Pharmaceutical companies funding fake scientific journals to create the "look and feel of a peer-reviewed publication to serve as a marketing tool" or to elicit favorable study results is a far more common problem then you think...

https://www.the-scientist.com/...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Physicians prescribing medications because they are getting kickbacks from the pharmaceutics companies is nothing new either...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/...

And hell, your prescription coverage employs a formulary that is driven just as choosing drugs because they provide cost savings as it is by scientific data showing greater efficacy.

Science isn't magic but neither are scientists omnipotent grand wizards fighting for the side of good. They are just as corruptible as anyone else on this planet. Corporations are still driven by profit above all other concerns, even ones that are staffed by research scientists.

Blind faith in "science" (technology) is just as dangerous, if not more so, then blind faith in religion. Skepticism is a cornerstone of scientific inquiry. If you aren't practicing it, your doing it wrong.

Touche, but since we are talking about Mars and providing references: how about these? The last one even explicitly mentions microbes that can survive on perchlorates.

It's a fairly safe bet that the environment of Mars will not pose any threat to the types of life that could survive the journey unprotected, in the vacuum of space, far colder than even the coldest night on Mars.

The journal however... if you are published in a big name journal that's an indicator

Yes, and if that name is Elsevier then you have proven that you support fraud and don't give a shit about the scientific process.

Elsevier is a fraud machine, and they should be begging people to lend them legitimacy by republishing papers they've published. The fact that they are not tells you everything you need to know about corruption in scientific publishing. They've done more than $15M in damage to the scientific process, let alone public health.

The reality is that most resistant strains of bacteria originate from antibiotics abuse, and the biggest abusers of antibiotics are third world countries and those who raise livestock. Normal un-resistant bacteria are actually more healthy vital and will grow and displace resistant strains because resistant strains are typically resistant due to the fact that they are missing receptors or features that antibiotics use to kill the bacteria. Those same features allow normal bacteria to be stronger and multiply faster than the resistant strains.

What the doctors and scientists are only recently realizing is that the way to deal with resistant strains is that we must crack down on antibiotics abuse in these two areas globally, and greatly step up and enforce the use of post-antibiotic use of un-resistant probiotics, replenishing the healthy, easy to kill bacteria in people and farm animals which then come out in their waste/manure/fertilizer or sometimes on the meat/eggs/milk etc. and spread from there.

I recall reading about a river in India where a pharmaceutical had been illegally dumping waste antibiotics and something like 90% of all bacteria tested in the river were resistant. The solution, after stopping the pollution, should have been to seed the river with a continuous stream of healthy un-resistant bacteria, and over time (maybe a year) the healthy, un-resistant bacteria would supplant the resistant strains 99% of the time, greatly reducing the odds of exposure to a resistant strain. We are just now discovering that regular old soil bacteria have over 40 different methods of killing off resistant bacteria that are completely new to us. We can and will convert some into new antibiotics, but we must learn from the past and minimize the spread of resistant strains of bacteria now by spreading as much as possible the un-resistant strains which will in turn supplant the resistant strains we have fostered around the globe with minimal additional human intervention.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?...

Not so much solved as a serious hint. The reason you know this might be the direct result of my great aunt dying. When she died she was the oldest living person in the world and she gave her body to science. (She open sourced her body)
And the result was published : http://www.medicaldaily.com/bl...
https://www.newscientist.com/a...
http://www.the-scientist.com/?...
among other places you might find info on it.

We have evidence that ordinary cells have a finite number of divisions due to telomeres, but we also know there's an enzyme called telomerase that can extend them. This remains active in egg and sperm cells so we can continue to go on as a species forever and for normal life spans there's enough divisions in ordinary cells. In the lab, we've extended normal cells' lifetime way past their ordinary limit with telomerase. So why don't we have immortal cells by default? It's probably a fail safe, if a cell starts reproducing extremely fast without working around this limit it'll fizzle and become little more than a harmless lump.

There's some indications that as we push for 100+ year lifespans we might be running out of divisions leading to among other things a weaker immune system because we lack white blood cells. It might be that we will develop telomere extension therapy to give us a few more regenerations (hello Dr. Who), but as you can probably tell the main problem today is that cells start dividing like crazy, not that they stop dividing. And if we made all cells immortal with genetic manipulation, all it'd take is one cell short circuiting the reproduction speed to cause cancer and kill the host. So if we want natural immortality we need to find a way to stop that first or we'll all die of cancer instead of aging.

We westerns had been eating processed foods for centuries as well. Pickling, Smoking, Dehydrating, Salting, Fermenting.... However for westerners as well obesity is also still a rather modern problem.

The issue I expect is beyond food. But lack of exercise.

Lack of exercise is one culprit. There are others as well. The push to cut out proteins and fats is one, and of course sugar intake.

Even then, there is a darker element. We are undertaking a sort of econo-social experiment by making huge increases in the amounts of phytoestrogens in our diets. As well, we have been dosing ourselves with Bisphenol A and pthalates. There is even a group word for these chemicals - obesogens.

And in the world of bizzare studies, feral rats living in close proximity to humans are becoming obese along with us: http://www.the-scientist.com/?...

Some interesting links:

http://loe.org/shows/segments....

http://loe.org/shows/segments....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://www.the-scientist.com/?...

It's a known quantity.

Right. . . It is not like there are tons of new discoveries every day , right? Sorry, but your assertion is absurd. Knowing how CRISPR, itself, works in no way reduces the risk when we use it on all the stuff (you know, life on planet Earth) we barely understand.

How about we perform an experiment. . .you and I both get into fully automated cars. I allow you to randomly change binary bits of my car's programming (much like natural mutation). You allow me to randomly change source code functions, configuration values, etc. . . of your car (much like the genetic script kiddie activities you are asserting are complete harmless). Let's see who lives longest. . . : )

Ahh, the famous peer reviewed articles that assert truth. Fairly sure nothing like this could ever happen.

I agree it's possible, and rarely do I see people mentioning the combination of biological and hardware, something that's moving along nicely these days.
2 examples.
http://news.discovery.com/tech...

http://www.the-scientist.com/?...

The actual genetic situation is substantially more complicated than your summary. Mitochondrial DNA indicates that Ashkenazic Jews (Jews from Eastern Europe) have a large influx of European women ancestors. See summary http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37821/title/Genetic-Roots-of-the-Ashkenazi-Jews/. However, chromosomal DNA shows a major Middle Eastern component to the point where almost any Ashkenazic Jew is easily genetically distinguishable from a generic European http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/12/09/ashkenazi-jews-are-middle-east/. Moreover, around half of all Israeli Jews are not Askenaz but are rather descended from Sephardim and Mizrachim and the like (e.g. from Morocco, Spain, Iraq, Egypt, etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel and have thus essentially zero European genetic ancestry.

I didn't just cite one source, half wit.

I cited a lot of things. And mostly recently I cited a peer reviewed paper.

Choke on it.

Did you say check on it? OK! Here's a complete list (as of this writing) of your citations in this thread in chronological order:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvfAtIJbatg (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.populartechnology.n... (Site is a one man operation that doesn't identify the operator or his alleged "staff". Attempts to debunk Cook paper by cherry-picking results from a nebulous survey.)
http://www.nature.com/news/pub... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://articles.mercola.com/si... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://arstechnica.com/science... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.the-scientist.com/?... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja... (opinion piece written by a lawyer (who doesn't appear to have ever practiced law) who claims to be a "trained scientist". The article relies exclusively on research done by unnamed "investigative journalists" at populartechnology.com - a blog that by all appearances is operated by a single unidentified individual.)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201... (first mention of a legitimate source rebutting the Cook paper)
http://link.springer.com/artic... (legitimate source debunking Cook)

So what have we got here...looks like a bunch of citations that have nothing to do with the Cook paper, one citation from a clearly bogus website, One citation written by a hack lawyer relying exclusively on the aforementioned bogus website, one citation from a pop-sci website alluding to an authoritative source, and (finally) a citation pointing to a legitimate source. And guess what? I've recognized your final source's potential legitimacy multiple times. You should probably take that as a win and call it a day.

In any event, don't you think you could've saved yourself a lot of time, effort, aggravation and ridicule if you'd have just kept your mouth shut until you actually come across a legitimate source? Instead, your process (if you can call it that) of supporting your arguments is to link to sources that you haven't subjected to any scrutiny whatsoever. It's a textbook example of a lack of critical thinking skills.

As to your claim that there is only one peer reviewed paper refuting your peer reviewed paper...

You're making things up again. I made no such claim. And for the last time, Cook's paper isn't MY paper. The only time I addressed it's validity I expressed skepticism of it's conclusions. Since you're having trouble remembering, here, let me help you:

"To be honest, I

And yet it happened:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

Also this notion that peer review catches all frauds is laughable:
http://www.nature.com/news/pub...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

http://articles.mercola.com/si...

http://arstechnica.com/science...

http://www.the-scientist.com/?...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04...

As to your point about reading the abstracts. That's not enough. You need to actually have the study itself vetted. And peer review does not do that.

These studies are getting busted all the time for making things up or using really sloppy methodology that could be "interpreted" to mean anything... often transparently the author had a conclusion they wanted before even starting the study.

That isn't real science. That's what creationists do. You have to do your study with an open mind and accept whatever the study might say. No forming your theory before the data comes in and no shaping the data to fit your theory. It is FINE to have a hypothesis before you start the study. But it can't go beyond that until you've actually got the data in... and then you base the theory on the data... you do not shape the data to equal your hypothesis.

And that is frequently what is going on.

... and as we know

http://www.the-scientist.com/?...

doesn't ever happen.

they better bathe every fucking thing in sterilizing UV going into and out of that negative pressure clean room.

It's kind of funny that everyone keeps saying that anti-oxidants are good for you, when studies show they're not (one of many links - you can google for more).

The assumption is that they prevent DNA damage by scrubbing the body of free radicals. This ignores a few things - I1) those free radicals are caused by damage that has already happened (cosmic ray hit, mutagen damaging DNA, etc); (2) removing the free radicals removes one of the signals the body needs to trigger either attempt repairs or if it's not possible trigger cell death; (3) the mechanisms for dealing with this damage have evolved over the course of a billion years, and have been optimized to ensure cellular survival only when cellular survival is the optimal solution.

People who go whole-hog on anti-oxidants accumulate more cells with uncorrected damage. Not a good thing.

Understanding the role of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in apoptosis opens new approaches for controlling cancer growth, and suggests that patients with cancer may not always want to ingest extra antioxidants. Many epidemiological studies suggest that increased intake of fruits and vegetables, and of other foods that contain antioxidants can protect against the DNA damage that can initiate carcinogenesis. However, recent data indicates that cells use reactive oxygen species as part of the signaling process responsible for activating an important mechanism for eliminating cancer cells, programmed cell death (also called apoptosis). Many anti-cancer agents depend on this form of cell death for their efficacy. In this review we present an overview of the role of ROS in carcinogenesis and in apoptosis, and we raise questions about the proper dietary recommendations for individuals with cancer.

Also note that the beneficial claims of anti-oxidants have been widely debunked using longterm double-blind experiments and here and even red wine fails the test

For years, the Western world has marvelled at the so-called French Paradox, which points to the low incidence of coronary heart disease in that population despite their high-cholesterol and high-saturated fat diet. This has been attributed to their regular intake of red wine, with its high levels of resveratrol and other polyphenols.

But this latest study, which assessed a large group of Italians - who consume a diet rich in resveratrol - found that they do not live longer and are just as likely to develop cardiovascular disease or cancer as individuals who consume smaller amounts of the compound.

"The story of resveratrol turns out to be another case where you get a lot of hype about health benefits that doesn't stand the test of time," says Dr. Semba. "The thinking was that certain foods are good for you because they contain resveratrol. We didn't find that at all."

There's a lot of science that looks good and logical on the surface that doesn't stand up to long-term investigation. Anti-oxidants are like cold fusion, but people want to believe, so they ignore the negative evidence.

Oil industry shill?

Fracking is about natural gas, not oil. Both fuels keep us warm in winter, let us travel places, and keep our electric and electronic equipment going.

The seismologists, however, are yet to learn even how to predict earthquakes — or come up with anything else to improve daily lives of their employers (us).

Here are some stats. https://www.opensecrets.org/in...

So, about $20mln all told? That's about half of what earthquake research has been getting from the taxpayers every year for decades...

http://www.the-scientist.com/?...
Despite a lack of evidence that peer review works, most scientists (by nature a skeptical lot) appear to believe in peer review. It's something that's held "absolutely sacred" in a field where people rarely accept anything with "blind faith," says Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and now CEO of UnitedHealth Europe and board member of PLoS. "It's very unscientific, really."

http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/20...
As soon as we receive a paper, we publish it," after a cursory quality check. Peer review happens after publication, and in the light of day.

http://www.economist.com/news/...
The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.

Geez, this is the most idiotic comment I've seen on Slashdot all day, and that's saying something. You couldn't be bothered to do a 30 second web search before implying that Apollo had no benefits?

http://web.archive.org/web/201...
http://m.computerworld.com/s/a...
http://www.the-scientist.com/?...
http://www.consumerreports.org...

Examples from those links: improved dialysis machines, credit card swipes, army field rations, improved building insulation, low recoil/shock rubber, cordless household appliances, cheaper Teflon and Velcro, asbestos-free fire proof textiles, better industrial lubricant, exercise equipment improvents used by pro sports teams, a great deal of insight into how the moons and planets formed, many rocket technology advances used in today's ICBMs and missile defense systems, etc., etc., etc.

Please, next time do five minutes of research before you post something so bonehead with so much conviction.

According to some recent studies there's something in the blood of younger people that makes their brains learn better. Enough so that giving an older person blood from a younger person actually has very noticeable affects on the brain.

So one possibility would be to get regular transfusions from a young person to keep your brain functioning at its best. Younger folks tend to be destitute so you might be able to pay for this. Otherwise I suppose you could use the techniques demonstrated in the documentary series Twilight to get yourself "volunteer" donors...

Just like most mutations are unsuccessful, most creative ideas are not "welfare increasing", after all, the status quo came about for a reason and your idea has to be pretty clever to beat it in all, or even most, metrics.

Of course, on the off chance a creative idea *is* successful, we're all for it, but that's pretty hard to determine in advance. And more importantly, after the fact, all the discomfort from change (and one shouldn't underestimate how much change hurts psychologically) has already been paid for, so we can simply enjoy the benefits.

Bad analogy since it is a myth that most mutations are unsuccessful. They have found that each individual has 60 to 100 genetic mutations...all quite functional.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/30692/title/Our-own-60-mutations/

You do realize that evolution can't be verified and proved? Macroevolution isn't reproducible testable science like newtonian physics or the germ theory of infection. A lot of these contrarians are just wanting that acknowledged rather than having Macroevolution presented as gospel truth.

If evolution can't be proved, how do you explain this: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38325/title/Ever-Evolving-E--coli/ ? Basically at Michigan State they have been letting E.Coli bacteria reproduce in constant conditions over 58,000 generations. And amazingly, the bacteria reproduce more quickly now than they did in the original 1988 version.

Generally speaking, the people who write the papers are the same cast of characters who do the reviews on the papers. Its a fairly incestuous process, so I don't put a lot of stock in "peer review" when it comes to something as unphysical as climate science. Peer review in general, in all sciences, is also undergoing a kind of crisis of confidence. http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34518/title/Opinion--Scientific-Peer-Review-in-Crisis/

People treat climate science like it was a hard science like physics or chemistry, where input A results in output B. It isn't. It is at best a "soft science" where opinion and confirmation bias creep in at every opportunity.

Keep in mind that people are trying to make predictions about the future behaviour of a complex, chaotic, non-linear dynamic system based on poorly founded, unphysical simulations of the past behaviour of that system -- you cannot simulate a system unless you understand all of its inputs and outputs, and the physical relationship between them. Prediction is, if not impossible, is very very hard. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/504.htm

Ah, yeah, that's the closest thing I could google for, and at least it did the job for most of the "citation please" people...

Here's something that looks more like the article I thought I misremembered :D
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/36670/title/Dying-Worms-Emit-Ethereal-Glow/

We're actually going to be quite short of weather sats in the next decade or so. That we had a backup this time is nice, but hardly indicative that everything is going well.

There are situations in which it is known to always fail, horribly.

I have to agree with the other poster. I doubt you can come up with a single "known" situation where free markets always fail, "horribly". Plus, for the known weaknesses of free markets, particularly externalities, we can always have a little regulation so that the cost of the externalities is reflected in the prices on the market.

In this case, realistically where would competition come from?

We don't need to look stupid here. We can look at history and see where competition for orbital launch has come from. In what follows, I briefly summarize all commercial (though not necessarily privately owned!) orbital launch businesses. There are many more companies involved, but these are the ones which put something in orbit for profit.

The first, Arianespace was in 1980 which sold access to the Ariane series of rockets. It remains significantly owned by French and German government interests.

It was followed by the opening of the US market to private enterprise in 1984. That led to three commercial orbital launch businesses in the next seven years (McDonnel Douglas's Atlas II in 1989, Orbital Sciences's Pegasus in 1990, and General Dynamics's Delta II in 1991). Orbital Sciences wasn't even ten years old when it first launched too. It was funded first by a group of Texas businessmen headed by a Fred Alcorn, who apparently was an "oil baron". SpaceX was created in 2002 by dotcom billionaire, Elon Musk.

In Russia, after the fall of Communism, we have something like four separate commercial entities created which launched rockets into orbit. There's one for the two big rocket platforms, Soyuz and Proton. Soyuz and Proton remain owned by the Russian government, but they created businesses to sell access to these rockets. There's also Dnepr and Eurockot Launch Services, both which launch converted ICBMs. All four are partly owned by government organizations from Russia and the Ukraine.

Sea Launch is a multinational business dominated by Russian government interests.

So we have ten commercial launch businesses here. Six, all the non-US organizations, are in large part government owned. In contrast, none of the four in the US were. Two were traditional aerospace firms adapting ICBMs to a new role. And two were funded at first from outside of aerospace. One had some oil money and one had dotcom money.

So when you ask "where would competition come from", it could come from anywhere. There's a vast amount of wealth and resources throughout the private part of the US economy. And sometimes that ends up in space related businesses.

While academics are involved in the process now, the publisher (in theory) acts as last guarantor of good behavior.

There's no point in having a body which in theory prevents bias when they can actually be a large part of the problem themselves.

Your arguments for the effort publishers go through are also very variable depending on who the publisher is. I'm quite "early career", so I've one paper published and one going through review at the moment. For the first paper, pretty much everything was done ourselves. The journal pointed out that it had procedures and protocols for format and specific grammar, but it was clear that it was entirely down to us to make sure we complied with that. The fine print warned that if we didn't then they wouldn't bother to fix it and they'd just reject it. In that situation the publishing fees really seemed unjustifiable: of course it costs them to do this and that but bearing in mind we were handing them several years worth of work and that the onus was on us for all formatting, layout, figures pretty much to the point where they just copied and pasted it into a two-column format before publishing it, the thousands of pounds that it cost us really seemed excessive.

On the other hand, the paper we've got going through review at the moment has had much more input from the publisher. They've passed our figures down to an art department who are doing a better job than we could of making them look great, they've been much more involved in the layout and editing, and so on. This time, I can understand where the money is going.

So yeah, some publishers do provide input and help, and seem to have a decent reputation for avoiding bias. Others really don't. I'm guessing that's why Gowers described this as an alternative system rather than a replacement.

No, it is not primitive cheese. where do you people get this stuff? oh right, out your ass.

I see what you did there. Nice job.

For those who don't, ponder this story... Beard Beer

Knowledge is power, and science as an institution makes no bones about who gets it. That's why the Dark Ages happened, and why we're just one major disaster or war away from it happening again.

Sorry, but no. The Dark Ages happened as a result of the fall of Rome and the invasions of barbarians, and the Muslim conquests.

Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited: The Epilogue
The Truth about Islamic Crusades and Imperialism
The Church Educates Europe

Pharmaceuticals spend billions developing new versions of dick hardening pills, while research into HIV, cancer, and other serious quality of life diseases languish.

Languish at their current high levels of research funding? HIV and cancer research seem to do especially well.

Curing a patient means denying yourself all that profit from name-brand life-saving drugs. I could come up with a hundred more examples from every industry in every country worldwide -- but you get the point.

I think the point is that you have an exaggerated sense of what is possible - the "Man on the moon syndrome", maybe? Modern medicine offers wonders, but it isn't even close to being able to cure everything. If anything the trend is the reverse - there are more and more antibiotic resistant diseases. Finding new ones that work is expensive, time consuming, and filled with all manner of difficulties posed by law and regulation. Changing social mores drop various former barriers to the spread of disease. The future of medicine, especially where infectious disease is considered, looks a bit grim at the moment.

Will humans lose the battle with microbes?

Whats wrong with sexy female scientists - they have them in movies.

related: only 22% of movie scientists are sexy women

and oblig.

Again: contrary to your assertion to the contrary, you cannot separate IP and contract law considerations from Monsanto's lobbying efforts AND business practices, AND market dominance; all of these are related, and it can behave the way it does in large part because of its worldwide oligopoly position.
For similar reasons, you cannot leave the decision to use/not use this "potentially useful tool" to individuals, because of Monsanto's aggressive blackmail practices.
As for your claim that insect die-off isn't caused by Roundup specifically, but some other herbicide: this may be, but monoculturation is a big reason why herbicides are becoming more important to use, making it undesirable that Monsanto (et al.) gain a (worldwide) oligopoly status as supplier of seeds. (This is also why your claim that 'this is also a problem with other cultivars' has only limited validity: before we saw this push towards monoculturation, herbicides played a far smaller role in food production.)

Lastly, here's a nice article that discusses how weeds are becoming multiply resistant in time-spans that were considered "theoretically" impossible.

THIS WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED UNDER BUSH.
http://classic.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54277/

Really. It wouldn't have happened.
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2010/02/10/obamas-budget-gives-a-boost-to-science- /did I make a funny?

Yeah yeah, tinfoil hat "Big Pharma is evil!" conspiracies.

Yeah, yeah, call something a "conspiracy" an we're all right again!

At least they can provide paid reviewed "studies" and clinical trials regarding their treatments, which is a fuckload more than these quack assholes can do.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028194_Scott_Reuben_research_fraud.html
http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/
http://classic.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55671/
http://classic.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55679/
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Drugs/story?id=7577646&page=1#.TtV4Xzg6e-M
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/article.cfm?id=2066
http://www.medcitynews.com/2011/07/fda-says-cro-cetero-faked-trial-data-pharmas-may-need-to-redo-tests/
http://jeps.efpsa.org/blog/2011/11/01/lessons-from-a-fake-study/
http://www.rense.com/general66/newhigh.htm

In short - "clinical trials" and "peer-reviewed" in pharmacology are mainly just buzzwords to make shit look legit.

Yeah yeah, tinfoil hat "Big Pharma is evil!" conspiracies.

Yeah, yeah, call something a "conspiracy" an we're all right again!

At least they can provide paid reviewed "studies" and clinical trials regarding their treatments, which is a fuckload more than these quack assholes can do.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028194_Scott_Reuben_research_fraud.html
http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/
http://classic.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55671/
http://classic.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55679/
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Drugs/story?id=7577646&page=1#.TtV4Xzg6e-M
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/article.cfm?id=2066
http://www.medcitynews.com/2011/07/fda-says-cro-cetero-faked-trial-data-pharmas-may-need-to-redo-tests/
http://jeps.efpsa.org/blog/2011/11/01/lessons-from-a-fake-study/
http://www.rense.com/general66/newhigh.htm

In short - "clinical trials" and "peer-reviewed" in pharmacology are mainly just buzzwords to make shit look legit.

Google it.

http://classic.the-scientist.com/article/display/57169/ http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.htm

The Scientist http://the-scientist.com/ is a good resource for the life sciences. Not too dumb, not too 'sciency'. It's a good read, with some pretty interesting articles.

That used to be the case, but increasingly in the USA over the last 20 years, companies like elsevier have been following a new paradigm: print whatever the corporations what you to print

There, fixed that for you. Just don't want anyone to think elsevier is a credible publisher of scientific journals.

Copyright Law Is Killing Science
Christians are Killing Science
Funding Cuts are Killing Science
Patents are Killing Science
Junk Science is Killing Science
Conservatives are Killing Science
Publishing is Killing Science
Public Education is Killing Science
Corporations are Killing Science
Capitalism is Killing Science
Immigration is Killing Science
Feminism is Killing Science (!)
Political Correctness is Killing Science
Networks are Killing Science
Too Many Scientists are Killing Science
Too Few Scientists are Killing Science

SCIENCE IS DEAD

Excellent post. Only one vital detail to correct:

Child porn is already highly illegal in most countries and yet children keep being abused. The filters, they do NOTHING!

I agree that porn filters don't do anything good, but research says they have their effect: it's just exactly the opposite as the proponents claim to be intended. I quote my earlier post Amazon vs. the society:

in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined

The full article Porn: Good for us? is also linked in that earlier post. It sums up a number of studies showing that when different forms of porn have been banned, sex abuse has increased, and the other way around, all through history. Seeing more porn makes you less likely to harm others sexually. The researchers found the rape-inducing correlation elsewhere:

What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing.

The Catholic Church is repeatedly mentioned as a pure example of how bans on sexual activity create such a high amount of molestation cases that it gets mainstream media attention on a constant basis.

On top of giving a statistical boost to rapes, porn censorship harms the society by misdirecting resources from fruitful efforts and by giving a false sense of accomplishment. Finnish censorship filter is a case in point: The police repeatedly does nothing to go after child predators while they are busy updating their "child porn" list. An activist set up a site to follow up their actions on a child porn site he reported and that was hosted on a location where the local law enforcement agency could easily press charges. Finnish police didn't act on the lead on the following six months and likely has not acted ever since. Except by adding the site and the activist's site to the censorship list.

In these two ways porn censorship makes us taxpayers spend money to make the society worse. And these are only the ways in which the proponents claim the society would be getting better. Others here have covered the rest of the aspects from freedom of speech to political oppression, where the censorship inevitably leads to.

This kind of move is not only against the freedom of press and speech. It's also against the society by increasing sexual abuse, especially of children. See article Porn: Good for us? and its references (emphasis added).

To examine the effect this widespread use of porn may be having on society, researchers have often exposed people to porn and measured some variable such as changes in attitude or predicted hypothetical behaviors, interviewed sex offenders about their experience with pornography, and interviewed victims of sex abuse to evaluate if pornography was involved in the assault. Surprisingly few studies have linked the availability of porn in any society with antisocial behaviors or sex crimes. Among those studies none have found a causal relationship and very few have even found one positive correlation.

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined . Significantly, no community in the United States has ever voted to ban adult access to sexually explicit material. The only feature of a community standard that holds is an intolerance for materials in which minors are involved as participants or consumers.

In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless, since most men have at some time used pornography. Looking closer, Michael Goldstein and Harold Kant found that rapists were more likely than nonrapists in the prison population to have been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster, while other research has shown that incarcerated nonrapists had seen more pornography, and seen it at an earlier age, than rapists. What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing.

Repressive, religious upbringing is exactly what porn bans are.

http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57169/#ixzz17eM23WmL

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined.

As for copyright or other messages in genetically modified organisms, it has been done before.

The ROI for scientific research is estimated at about 28% - for every pound you put in we give you 1.28 back in development of the economy - http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/53302/;jsessionid=70A3A380C17B8D70652CBFA0FBE630CC. That's what we do over the long term. We power the economy - without us there would be no tech jobs. So say thank you, because we're the ones with some actual product, and we're generating money.

You're the farmer who argues that after some banker comes and burns half his farm he shouldn't plant any new seeds, because he needs to eat all the bread he can make now. Short sighted and ignorant. So enjoy your internet, your computer with its billions of transistors, your digital transfer of information compressed using advanced algorithms, your plastic keyboard, electric power supply, your GPS systems, clean water supply, anti-lock brakes, medicine to keep you into your old age and the trillions of other tiny things you forget about every day that we did for you. We live in the world we have today, because scientists of the past made discoveries and worked damned hard to make the future better. And one day, find a scientist and say thank you, because we're the ones working our arses off to make an even better tomorrow. And pray that when you need it, the advanced medical care you need will have been invented by a struggling post-doc desperately working to get funding to cure Alzheimer's.

And what if the scientist IS committing fraud? It's not as if it never happened before:

http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/55383/
(humor)

Milton Diamond, The Scientist magazine, March 2010. "Porn: Good for Us?"

This opinion piece takes a look at scientific research around pornography.

http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57169/

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. . . .

In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. . . .

In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless . . . .

Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn’t see those movies . . . .

Adapted from “Pornography, Public Acceptance and Sex Related Crime: A Review,” Int J Law Psychiatry, 32:304–14, 2009. http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2005to2009/2009-pornography-acceptance-crime.html