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Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Why the world is awesome in 60 facts - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-facts-about-our-awesome-world

science

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Earth Unplugged crew give you epic facts that show why the world is awesome.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14
     
    8-minute fast-paced video with brief, interesting facts about the planet, animals and humans, from physics to biology to chemistry; good for a stimulating end to a class...
Lawrence Hrubes

Rachel Aviv: The Scientist Who Took on a Leading Herbicide Manufacturer : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...140210fa_fact_aviv

TOK science chemistry herbicide ethics causality objectivity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Feb 14
     
    "Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta's public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was "discredit Hayes.""
Lawrence Hrubes

My Great-Great-Aunt Discovered Francium. And It Killed Her. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rancium-and-it-killed-her.html

TOK science chemistry physics ethics health

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • There is a common narrative in science of the tragic genius who suffers for a great reward, and the tale of Curie, who died from exposure to radiation as a result of her pioneering work, is one of the most famous. There is a sense of grandeur in the idea that paying heavily is a means of advancing knowledge. But in truth, you can’t control what it is that you find — whether you’ve sacrificed your health for it, or simply years of your time.
  • How quickly an element decayed and how it did so — meaning which of its component parts it shed — became the focus of researchers in radioactivity. Apart from purely scientific insights, there was a hope that radiation could lead to something marvelous. X-rays, a kind of radiation discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen and produced by accelerated electrons, had already been hailed as a major medical breakthrough and, in addition to showing doctors their patients’ insides, were being investigated as a treatment for skin lesions from tuberculosis and lupus. In her 1904 book “Investigations on Radioactive Substances,” Marie Curie wrote that radium had promise, too — diseased skin exposed to it later regrew in a healthy state. Radium’s curious ability to destroy tissue was being turned against cancer, with doctors sewing capsules of radium into the surgical wounds of cancer patients (including Henrietta Lacks, whose cells are used today in research). This enthusiasm for radioactivity was not confined to the doctor’s office. The element was in face creams, tonics, even candy. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica article that Curie and her daughter wrote on radium in 1926, preliminary experiments suggested that radium could even improve the quality of soil.
  • Perhaps the most tragic demonstration of this involved workers at the United States Radium Corporation factory in Orange, N.J., which in 1917 began hiring young women to paint watch faces with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. The workers were told that the paint was harmless and were encouraged to lick the paintbrushes to make them pointy enough to inscribe small numbers. In the years that followed, the women began to suffer ghoulish physical deterioration. Their jaws melted and ballooned into masses of tumors larger than fists, and cancers riddled their bodies. They developed anemia and necrosis. The sensational court case started — and won — by the dying Radium Girls, as they were called, is a landmark in the history of occupational health. It was settled in June 1928, four months before Marguerite Perey arrived at the Radium Institute to begin a 30-year career of heavy exposure to radiation.
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  • We know now that alpha and beta particles emitted in radiation attack DNA and that the mutations they cause can lead to cancer. Ingested radioactive elements can concentrate in the bones, where they continue their decay, in effect poisoning someone for as long as that person lives. By the time Perey made her discovery, she was already heavily contaminated. She spent the last 15 years of her life in treatment for a gruesome bone cancer that spread throughout her body, claiming her eyesight, pieces of her hand and most of the years in which she had planned to study francium. As the disease progressed, she warned her students of the horrible consequences of radiation exposure. Francis, my grandfather, says he recalls hearing that when she walked into labs with radiation counters in her later years, they would go off.
  • Over the years, historians have pondered what drove the Curies to throw caution so thoroughly to the wind. Perhaps it was inconceivable to them that the benefits of their research would not outweigh the risks to themselves and their employees. In a field in which groundbreaking discoveries were being made and the competition might arrive there first, speed was put above other concerns, Rona noted. But you almost get the impression that in the Curie lab, dedication to science was demonstrated by a willingness to poison yourself — as if what made a person’s research meaningful were the sacrifices made in the effort to learn something new.
markfrankel18

Let's Abolish Social Science | The Smart Set - 2 views

thesmartset.com/lets-abolish-social-science

TOK science economics psychology Social Science

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Social science was — it is best to speak in the past tense — a mistake. The dream of a comprehensive science of society, which would elucidate “laws of history” or “social laws” comparable to the physical determinants or “laws” of nature, was one of the great delusions of the 19th century.
  • Economics, for example, grew ever more pseudoscientific in the course of the 20th century.
  • The very term “political science” betrays an ambition to create a study of politics and government and world politics that will be a genuine science like physics, chemistry or biology.
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  • The difference between the natural sciences and the humanities is the difference between motion and motive. Laws of motion can explain the trajectories of asteroids and atoms. The trajectories of human beings, like those of any animals with some degree of sentience, are explained by motives. Asteroids and atoms go where they have to go. Human beings go where they want to go.
  • All human studies are fundamentally branches of psychology.
Lawrence Hrubes

There's a good reason Americans are horrible at science - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...ricans-are-horrible-at-science

science bias facts assumptions

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • There are a number of problems with teaching science as a collection of facts. First, facts change. Before oxygen was discovered, the theoretical existence of phlogiston made sense. For a brief, heady moment in 1989, it looked like cold fusion (paywall) was going to change the world. In the field of medical science, “facts” are even more wobbly. For example, it has been estimated that fewer than 10% of published high profile cancer studies are reproducible (the word “reproducible” here is a euphemism for “not total poppycock”).
  • It’s not possible for everyone—or anyone—to be sufficiently well trained in science to analyze data from multiple fields and come up with sound, independent interpretations. I spent decades in medical research, but I will never understand particle physics, and I’ve forgotten almost everything I ever learned about inorganic chemistry. It is possible, however, to learn enough about the powers and limitations of the scientific method to intelligently determine which claims made by scientists are likely to be true and which deserve skepticism. As a starting point, we could teach our children that the theories and technologies that have been tested the most times, by the largest number of independent observers, over the greatest number of years, are the most likely to be reliable.
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