Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Biology Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Melanie Phillips: Crank magnetism in action on evolution and vaccines

A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed […]

Categories
Biology Clinical trials Medicine Politics Science

The UCLA Pro-Test Rally: Researchers stand up to animal rights terrorism

Better late than never, given that DrugMonkey has already been all over this. Unfortunately, there was another serious outbreak of antivaccine idiocy over at HuffPo that I felt I had to deal with before this: Embedded video from CNN Video It was a great day indeed. For far too long, animal rights terrorists have intimidated […]

Categories
Bioethics Biology Medicine Politics Science

Fighting back against animal rights terrorists

Enough. I don’t know about you, but as a surgeon and a biomedical researcher, I’m fed up with animal rights terrorists who threaten biomedical research with their misinformation about animal research, their terroristic attacks on scientists who engage in such research, and listening to the despicable self-righteous idiot who is a disgrace to surgeons everywhere, […]

Categories
Biology Entertainment/culture Humor Music Science

Homeobox, HOX, regulatin’ genes

This is about as geeky as it gets, but since a couple of the genes I study are homeobox genes, one of which is a HOX gene, one of which is not, I found this hilarious: There you go: All you need to know about homeobox genes if you’re not an expert in them. Hat […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Biology Humor Medicine Science

Don’t worry about those giant intelligent crabs…

Yet another reason why I love The Onion: Because giant, highly intelligent, acid-spitting crabs pose no danger to society. Of course, certain antivaccine advocates seem to think that this parody has something to do with vaccines, which just goes to show how far down the rabbit hole they’ve gone when they think that a parody […]