2022-07-22 How sustainable are fake meats? Marketed to meat lovers, plant-based burgers like Impossible and Beyond claim to taste like the real thing and to have far lighter environmental footprints. Here’s what the numbers have to say. By Bob Holmes If you’re an environmentally aware meat-eater, you probably carry at least a little guilt […]
Category: Opinion
Opinion: Davos Was a Case Study in How Not to Talk About Climate Change
2022-07-01 Davos Was a Case Study in How Not to Talk About Climate Change by Jag Bhalla Science has a resistance to ill-founded assertions embedded deep in its bones. Carl Sagan called this “baloney detection.” But in the face of climate change, arguably our largest science-related crisis, these baloney detection capabilities haven’t kept our leaders […]
Opinion: Make electric vehicles affordable for the rest of us
2022-06-22 Opinion Make electric vehicles affordable for the rest of us OPINION: EV subsidies are poorly designed and mostly benefit the rich. Some simple changes could make them more effective and equitable. By Tamara Sheldon As an environmentalist who totes kids around town, I would love to buy an electric car. But here […]
The Long, Uncertain Road to Artificial General Intelligence
2022-06-03 The Long, Uncertain Road to Artificial General Intelligence By Tristan Greene Last month, DeepMind, a subsidiary of technology giant Alphabet, set Silicon Valley abuzz when it announced Gato, perhaps the most versatile artificial intelligence model in existence. Billed as a “generalist agent,” Gato can perform over 600 different tasks. It can drive a robot, […]
Opinion: Trolling Is Taking a Toll on Science Journalism
Trolling Is Taking a Toll on Science Journalism by Lisa Palmer & Silvio Waisbord For the past several years, we’ve watched with rising concern as journalists in the United States and abroad have been increasingly subjected to online harassment. As journalism professors specializing in science reporting and violence against the press at George Washington University, […]
Opinion: The science of placebos is fueling quackery
Opinion The science of placebos is fueling quackery OPINION: The placebo effect is real. So are the ethical conundrums posed by those who would exploit the latest research advances for profit. By Fabrizio Benedetti For several decades now, many scientists, including me, have been working hard to reveal the full power and scope of the […]
To Prevent Future Variants, We Must Protect Those Most At Risk
2022-03-19 To Prevent Future Variants, We Must Protect Those Most At Risk By Michael Rose As the omicron wave wanes, people across the U.S. are welcoming reprieve from a virus that has killed nearly 1 million Americans and hospitalized millions more. But as recent articles in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other outlets have pointed […]
Pandemic psychology: Nothing new under the Sun
2022-03-11 Opinion Pandemic psychology: Nothing new under the Sun OPINION: Our behavior during Covid-19 echoes that of individuals, societies and governments during past plagues. We can and should do better. By Steven Taylor In early 2019, months before the world had heard of Covid-19, I finished writing a book titled “ The Psychology […]
How to short-circuit short-term thinking
2022-02-12 How to short-circuit short-term thinking OPINION: Human behavior is fueling major social dilemmas — from climate change to the Covid pandemic to the spread of misinformation. But that means it’s also the solution, if only we can harness psychology for the common good. By Paul Van Lange By David Rand The world is […]
A New GMO Labeling Rule Takes Effect, but Food Anxieties Remain
A New GMO Labeling Rule Takes Effect, but Food Anxieties Remain By Kavin Senapathy On Jan. 1, the long-running public debate about labeling genetically modified foods entered a new phase. A U.S. federal rule went into effect mandating that food companies disclose whether their products contain a detectable amount of recombinant DNA — genetic material […]