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About a month ago, some bioethicists claimed that bioethics should prevent climate change. My eyes had finally stopped rolling when lo and behold, I learn from three UN Women researchers — in Scientific American, no less — that feminism holds the real key to preventing the planet from cooking. As you would expect, the opinion piece is a godawful mess that attacks capitalism and the use of fossil fuels, in other words, its authors disdain prosperity. From “How Feminism Can Guide Climate Change Action:” The current economic system that underpins that status quo is rooted in the extraction of natural resources and exploitation of cheap or unpaid labor, often done by women and marginalized communities. This system therefore drives the climate crisis while perpetuating inequalities based Read More ›

San Francisco was once a conservative city. Oh, sure, it had its bohemian side. The Beats of the ’50s were at home in North Beach, and Harry Bridges, the suspected communist who served for years as head of the longshoremen’s union, had a definite influence. But for the most part, San Francisco was well within the cultural mainstream. Indeed, the city was so staid that the Republican Party’s nominee for mayor won landslides in 1955 and 1959, and the GOP nominated the archconservative Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate from the Cow Palace in 1964.

Then, San Francisco changed. Radically. In 1964, the University of California, Berkeley, a few miles across the bay, became the center of the “free speech” movement. Civil rights and then militant anti–Vietnam War advocacy found great sympathy. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became a hippy haven and the focus of a growing drug culture. The gay-rights movement sprang energetically out of the Castro District, and the once predominately Italian working-class neighborhood was transformed into a radical front of the sexual revolution. By the 1980s, the term “San Francisco values” — wielded by conservatives to describe the cultural and political radicalism of the Bay Area — had turned the city into something of a national joke.

Over the years, policies enacted by the city’s ever more extreme progressive leaders slowly destroyed San Francisco. I lived in and around the city for almost 25 years, starting in 1992, and saw the decline happen in real time. It broke my heart.

Nature is supposedly the most respected science journal in the world. But its reputation is sinking because it has become so overtly political, as with its decision last summer to endorse Kamala Harris for president. Now, in the mushiest softball Q&A one can imagine, the journal is boosting an anti-Israel protester and promoting her views on Israel’s war with Hamas. What’s the science hook? Well, there isn’t one beyond the protester’s being a doctoral student at MIT. From “Why this PhD candidate joined campus protests against the Israel–Hamas war”: Jessica Metzger, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, researches non-equilibrium statistical physics — the study of how matter, especially living matter, behaves. Metzger traces her love of scientific exploration to Read More ›

This is how the scientific method is supposed to work. For years, a neuroscientist and National Institutes of Health official named Eliezer Masliah led the field in researching dementia, Parkinson’s, and other neurological diseases. His work became primary bases for developing experimental treatments, offering hope for these scourges of human aging. But now, Science reports that much of this research was mistakenly compiled — or worse. From “Picture Imperfect:” Over the past 2 years questions have arisen about some of Masliah’s research. A Science investigation has now found that scores of his lab studies at UCSD and NIA are riddled with apparently falsified Western blots—images used to show the presence of proteins—and micrographs of brain tissue. Numerous images seem to have been inappropriately reused within Read More ›