Recipe for a long life: overweight people have lower death risk #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/tk7UxlYJ — The Independent (@Independent) January 1, 2013 I must be getting old. Things are beginning to repeat themselves. It feels like déjà vu all over again. In fact, even that play on the expression ‘déjà vu’ seems […]
Authority appeals
Chief Scientific Advisor gets the chop: Getting DNA backwards not the reason
I have been reading a lot recently about the Irish Government’s decision to get rid of its Chief Scientific Adviser. My fellow blogger Maria Delaney has covered this well both on her award-winning Science Calling! blog and on Journal.ie. The story is that, due to budgetary cutbacks, the supposedly independent Adviser […]
Guess what: Cancer vaccines don’t cause cancer
We’ve previously discussed the whole “oh-my-god-vaccines-are-terrible” carry-on that seems to have gripped the popular Luddite imagination since, well, since vaccines were basically invented. Well, they’ve been at it again. This time the controversy has related to the tragically young death of a teenager in New Zealand, who died some three […]
Todd Akin’s empirical question
So, as you may have heard, Mr Akin, the Republican Party Senate candidate in Missouri (hi, Missouri!) has some weird views on rape, conception, and abortion. Basically, this is what the Todd Akin t-shirts are going to be saying this November: It seems to me, from what I understand from […]
Are conservatives less intelligent? Let’s ask a liberal…
Here is an interesting article from Discover Magazine, about some recent research into the association between intelligence and social attitudes. The study was conducted by some psychologists from Canada, and published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science. It represents a newly burgeoning tradition of investigating whether social conservatives (such as […]
Cancer: Misinformation is a risk factor too
People who know me personally will know that I don’t take cancer lightly (for various reasons I won’t go into here). So I am always a bit reluctant to criticize people who make the fight against cancer their life’s mission. After all, there are easier jobs. But cancer is not just […]
Recent Posts
That BMJ review of Long Covid therapies does not show what it says it does
My submission on the new Canadian draft recommendations for Long Covid
The cries for help are getting louder. And that’s a good sign
“A science that does not allow opposing opinions abolishes knowledge.” Er, kind of
Getting it Right: Addressing Myths about the 2021 NICE Guideline for ME/CFS
