Antiscience

Meet William Happer, high on the list to be Delirium Tremens' chief science advisor. The notoriously reality-biased scientific journal liberal rag Nature reports: Happer, an emeritus professor at Princeton, is no stranger to government: he directed energy research at the US Department of Energy from 1991 to 1993 and is a long-time member of JASON, a US defence advisory group. He is also a well-known critic of mainstream climate science and as such, a frequent target of environmental activists. In 2015, the environmental group Greenpeace UK announced that it had caught Happer in a sting operation. Greenpeace officials, posing as representatives of an unnamed Middle Eastern oil company, offered Happer money to write a report on the benefits of increasing atmospheric levels of CO2 — while keeping the funding source a secret. Happer agreed, and maintains that he did nothing wrong. He says that he told the ‘oil company’ officials that any payments should be sent to the CO2 Coalition, ...

A splendidly horrible press release touts a nematode worm model for teenaged fickleness. Worms and people respond to the smell of the chemical diacetyl, known to humans as “buttered popcorn smell,” which is present in a number of foods, including ones in the C. elegans diet. In fact, the worms have a pair of neurons called AWA dedicated to sensing it. To observe behavioral variation between adult and adolescent worms, the Salk team placed the animals in the center of a dish with a drop of diacetyl on one side, and a neutral odor on the other. Then, in a series of trials over several days, they characterized the paths the worms took. What the scientists saw surprised them: Adolescent worms meandered and took their time getting to the diacetyl, if they got there at all; adult worms made a beeline for it. I hate C. elegans , having spent far too many years trying to teach this microscopic nematode how to do tricks. Press releases like this stretch the bounds of credibility for an organism...