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Comment by Pope Paul on September 16, 2011 at 2:01am

Bioethicists Offer Reward For Proof On HPV Vaccine Claim

Even as Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann backs off some from an inflammatory claim that a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer led to mental retardation in a young girl, two bioethicists are turning up the heat.

...

...Dr. Steven Miles, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, has ponied up $1,000 if the mother Bachmann talked about can produce medical proof that her daughter suffered mental retardation from the HPV vaccine, the Star Tribune reports. "These types of messages in this climate have the capacity to do enormous public health harm," Miles told the paper. "It's an extremely serious claim and it deserves to be analyzed."

And Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania has placed what amounts to a $10,000 bet on the issue. He, too, wants proof of the claim and described his wager with Bachmann on Twitter...

Read and/or listen to whole story here.

 

Comment by Dallas Gaytheist on July 15, 2011 at 9:49am

Hey, this rock looks like a human face. I mean, what are the chances of that just happening? It must have been created that way. Why else would it exist? If this isn't proof that an omnipotent invisible god created the world, impregenated a virgin who had a son who died and then came back to life, then I don't know what is.

 

Comment by Jaume on July 15, 2011 at 5:51am

When we find an arrow head we can see that something created it. The chances of an arrow head being created by some rocks falling down a cliff and hitting each other just right are just astronomical so we assume that it was created by man an intelligent designer.

 

When we find Jesus' face on a dog's butt we can see that something created it. The chances of Jesus' face on a dog's butt being created by some hair growing around its ass and being colored just right are just astronomical so we assume that it was created by man an intelligent designer.

Comment by RockyTIJ on July 14, 2011 at 5:40pm

Dallas,

Mind-boggling, ain't it?

Six words:

    Blinded by the veil of faith.

Take care,

Rocky

Comment by Dallas Gaytheist on July 14, 2011 at 3:47pm

Tee hee, look what I found online:

 

How some can look at the complexities of nature and say there is not an intelligent designer is baffling to me.

Did the bees and flowers get together and decide to both evolve so that they could help each other out not now but in millions of years from that time? What about the time frame? If it takes millions of years for a change then if the change was necessary the species would die out before the change was accomplished. No change was needed for survival because they survived for millions of generations before any change could be noticed. When people say everything we see was created by pure chance I really do question their intelligence and/or their ability to think logically.

When we find an arrow head we can see that something created it. The chances of an arrow head being created by some rocks falling down a cliff and hitting each other just right are just astronomical so we assume that it was created by man an intelligent designer. At the same time we look at the universe, the human body and the incredibly ways plants and animals interact and the "intelligent" say it just happened. Which of these two would be more likely to believe that they happened by chance? The rock falling off a cliff and on the way down it just so happens that the several times it hits another rock everything is aligned just right and an arrow head shaped rock lands at the bottom of a cliff. Or is there more of a chance that the human body is created by pure chance? If we look at this logically and someone says it is impossible for a rock to be shaped like an arrow head by pure natural forces and chance but yet all of creation must have been created by chance we have to look at them and conclude they are wrong.

Comment by Dallas Gaytheist on July 9, 2011 at 9:35pm

How Science Will Shape Human Destiny

From the archives – How will the fields of medicine, computers, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, energy production and astronautics change our lives in the not-too-distant future? We talked in April with Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and author of the new book “Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100″ (Doubleday, 2011).

Listen here.

Comment by Dallas Gaytheist on July 7, 2011 at 6:21pm

The Belly Button Biodiversity Project

 

Ever wondered what microorganisms live on you?
You are alive, but just how alive? We know that species live under our beds or in our backyards. But how many living organisms are on a square centimeter of your skin? What do they do, and how they differ from those of your neighbor? Very little is known about the life that breathes all over us. Each person’s microbial jungle is so rich, colorful, and dynamic that in all likelihood your body hosts species that no scientist has ever studied. Your navel may well be one of the last biological frontiers. It is time then, to explore.

Sampling the nation for Belly Button Bacteria
We are a group of biologists and science communicators from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and we want to know what lives on us. But this project is as much about teaching as it is about learning. We imagine germs as bad, and yet most are not. Most are either good or simply present, whether in between your toes or up your nose. The diversity on our bodies is, like any biological diversity, fascinating and full of awe and we want to share the joy of discovering it, one body part at a time. You give us a sample, we will grow and identify the bacteria, and you get the results. Meet your personal ecosystem, in color! With time we will not only grow the microbes off of your parts, we will sequence them, to know the easy to cultivate species but also all the rest. The life on us knows no celebrity, or rather it knows them as well as it knows the rest of us. Lady Gaga may live the wild life, but she also hosts it.

Why begin with the belly button?
Because no one volunteers when we ask for armpit samples. Because our belly buttons are relatively isolated, a place where microbes are safe. Because everybody has one, its what once connected us to our past. Yet, we barely notice it in our daily lives, to the point that few people actually wash theirs. Which is great for the bacteria! They are well protected, and provide a refuge of our wild nature. We can ask many questions about the microbes on our bodies (what controls which live where, whether the species on men and women are different, whether innies and outies sport different fancies, etc…) but a first step is to simply see who is there, the way the first explorers, upon arriving at new continents, simply wrote home to describe what they found.

So far, so bountiful
Your body’s life is beautiful. Browse through our collection of bodily life, or, if you have already been sampled, find your own sample here. Samples shown in our collection came from the first few sampling events: the ScienceOnline 2011 convention (see microbes that grow on our favorite science writers), the Darwin Day at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, and various others.

 

Comment by Jon van Rooyen on June 16, 2011 at 12:40pm

Currently reading "The Canon: The beautiful basics of Science" by Natalie Angier. Awesome book so far! Just wanted to share a quote I came across in it that I particularly like. Natalie is speaking of how a lot of people (including many scientists) dispute certain theories because they believe it is a matter of opinion or bias.

The quote:

"Those of us who are not overly philosophical believe that there is a reality to nature but that it can be very hard to see it and understand it, given all our biases" - Elliot Meyerowitz

It's a simple thing really, but I think if more people understood the difference between scientific fact (supported by evidence) and opinion, we may just break through to the next level in our understanding of the universe. I fear we as "intelligent" humans may be quite far off from that, however.

Comment by Dallas Gaytheist on May 17, 2011 at 8:37pm



Cancer in the 1800s: 23 rare photos (GRAPHIC)

America's war on cancer? With 600,000 Americans dying of the disease each year, we're still a long way from declaring victory. But doctors have come a very long way in their abilities to detect and treat cancer - as these 19th Century photos make abundantly clear. They appear courtesy of New York ophthalmologist Dr. Stanley B. Burns, whose collection of early medical photography is one of the world's largest.

Until the mid-1800s, there was no anesthesia. Patients endured horrific pain, and surgeons' reputations depended upon the speed with which they could perform operations. The best could amputate an arm in one minute, a leg in three. For the photograph shown here, taken in the winter of 1846, doctors gathered at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to demonstrate the first surgical procedure involving the anesthetic sulfuric ether.

Comment by Victor on May 12, 2011 at 8:52pm

Well, for atheists who love science and know some spanish, here is my blog: https://mtabok.wordpress.com/

Bye!

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