Science News

The adapted virus that immunized hundreds of millions of people against smallpox has now been enlisted in the war on cancer. Vaccinia poxvirus joins a herpesvirus and a host of other pathogens on a growing list of engineered viruses entering late-stage human testing against cancer. [More]

In his 1974 commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology, Nobel laureate physicist Richard P. Feynman articulated the foundation of scientific integrity: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool.... After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”

Unfortunately, says Feynman’s Caltech colleague David Goodstein in his new book On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science (Princeton University Press, 2010), some scientists do try to fool their colleagues, and believing that everyone is conventionally honest may make a person more likely to be duped by deliberate fraud. Nature may be subtle, but she does not intentionally lie. People do. Why some scientists lie is what Goodstein wants to understand. He begins by debunking myths about science such as: “A scientist should never be motivated to do science for personal gain, advancement or other rewards.” “Scientists should always be objective and impartial when gathering data.” “Scientists must never believe dogmatically in an idea or use rhetorical exaggeration in promoting it.” “Scientists should never permit their judgments to be affected by authority.” These and many other maxims just do not reflect how science works in practice.

The New York Times Sunday business section recently ran an enormous puff piece on Ray Kurzweil and the "Singularity" cult (my term, not the Times 's). Kurzweil is a successful inventor–entrepreneur best known lately for his sci-tech prophecies. He claims that advances in AI, nanotech, biotech, computer science and neuroscience are bearing us toward a radical transformation of our minds and bodies called the Singularity--aka "rapture of the geeks". [More]

There must be something in the water here in Lanesboro, Minnesota, because last night I dreamt of an encounter with a very muscular African-American centaur, an orgiastic experience with – gasp – drunken members of the opposite sex and (as if that weren’t enough) then being asked by my hostess to wear a white wedding dress while giving a scientific keynote presentation. “Does it make me look too feminine?” “Not at all,” she assured me, “it’s a man’s dress.”

Now Freud might raise his eyebrows at such a lurid dreamscape, but if these images represent my repressed sexual yearnings, then there’s a side of me that I apparently have yet to discover. But I doubt that this is the case. Dreams with erotic undertones are like most other dreams during REM sleep--runaway trains with a conductor who is helpless to do anything about the surrealistic directions they take. Rather, if you really want to know about a person’s hidden sexual desires, then find out what’s on his or her mind’s eye during the deepest throes of masturbation.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has struggled in the past two months to come to grips with dispersants , the chemical cocktails being used to break up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill into tiny droplets that are easier for microbes to eat . It now appears that the EPA failed to require adequate controls for dispersant toxicity testing, despite the fact that the agency set very explicit criteria for how such chemicals should be tested. This follows the agency's call for BP to use less deadly dispersants ( pdf ) with toxicities below a certain threshold when, in toxicology, it's smaller figures that indicate a concentration that is more dangerous. [More]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Private forecaster Weather Services International (WSI) said on Tuesday its latest forecast called for a more active 2010 Atlantic hurricane season.