Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: As the first COVID-19 vaccines arrived at Penn Medicine last year, Penn Today reported with great pride, “It was mRNA research conducted at Penn—by Drew Weissman, a professor of Infectious Diseases, and Katalin Karikó, an adjunct associate professor—that helped pave the way for the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID vaccines.” While Weissman and Karikó…
Tag: history of science
From Climate Change to the Dangers of Smoking: How Powerful Interests ‘Made Us Doubt Everything’
BBC News reports:
In 1991, the trade body that represents electrical companies in the U.S., the Edison Electric Institute, created a campaign called the Information Council for the Environment which aimed to “Reposition global warming as theory (not fact)”. Some details of the campaign were leaked to the New York Times. “They ran advertising campaigns designed to undermine public support, cherry picking…
The Lady Astronaut series tackles historical sexism brilliantly
Two recent books imagine a different history of science, but one handles the prejudices of the time much better than the other, says Jacob Aron Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24732940-500-the-lady-astronaut-series-tackles-historical-sexism-brilliantly/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
How To Talk To Coronavirus Skeptics
Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker interviews Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard who has focussed much of her career on examining distrust of science in the U.S.: Chotiner: This idea that we reject science because it clashes with our beliefs or experience — how does that explain why people in Miami, whose homes are going…
Physicists Simulate Critical ‘Reheating’ Period That Kickstarted the Big Bang
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Just before the Big Bang launched the universe onto its ever-expanding course, physicists believe, there was another, more explosive phase of the early universe at play: cosmic inflation, which lasted less than a trillionth of a second. During this period, matter — a cold, homogeneous goop — inflated exponentially quickly before processes of…