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How President-Elect Trump Views Science

By Christine Gorman

It’s hard to know what President-elect Donald J. Trump will do on scientific issues, since he has not gone into much detail on the stump. But before the election we and our partners at ScienceDebate.org asked his campaign for his positions on certain important science issues. Here are the relevant passages, which may offer clues on his policy directions.

Innovation

Science and engineering have been responsible for over half of the growth of the U.S. economy since WWII. But some reports question America’s continued leadership in these areas. What policies will best ensure that America remains at the forefront of innovation?

Innovation has always been one of the great by-products of free market systems. Entrepreneurs have always found entries into markets by giving consumers more options for the products they desire.  The government should do all it can to reduce barriers to entry into markets and should work at creating a business environment where fair trade is as important as free trade.  Similarly, the federal government should encourage innovation in the areas of space exploration and investment in research and development across the broad landscape of academia. Though there are increasing demands to curtail spending and to balance the federal budget, we must make the commitment to invest in science, engineering, healthcare and other areas that will make the lives of Americans better, safer and more prosperous.

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CRISPR gene-editing tested in a person for the first time

By David Cyranoski

A Chinese group has become the first to inject a person with cells that contain genes edited using the revolutionary CRISPR–Cas9 technique.

On 28 October, a team led by oncologist Lu You at Sichuan University in Chengdu delivered the modified cells into a patient with aggressive lung cancer as part of a clinical trial at the West China Hospital, also in Chengdu.

Earlier clinical trials using cells edited with a different technique have excited clinicians. The introduction of CRISPR, which is simpler and more efficient than other techniques, will probably accelerate the race to get gene-edited cells into the clinic across the world, says Carl June, who specializes in immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and led one of the earlier studies.

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Turkish bill to clear men of child sex assault if they marry their victims

By AFP in Istanbul

A bill in Turkey that would overturn men’s convictions for child sex assault if they married their victim has provoked fury, with critics accusing the government of encouraging rape of minors with the proposals.

The opposition, celebrities, and even an association whose deputy chairman is the daughter of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan expressed alarm over the move.

But the government insisted the legislation was aimed at dealing with the widespread custom of child marriages and the criticism was a crude distortion of its aim.

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A new ruling finally requires homeopathic ‘treatments’ to obey the same labeling standards as real medicines

By Lindsay Dodgson

The Federal Trade Commission issued a statement this month which said that homeopathic remedies have to be held to the same standard as other products that make similar claims. In other words, American companies must now have reliable scientific evidence for health-related claims that their products can treat specific conditions and illnesses.

In the US and UK, drug manufacturers have to show that their products are effective by performing double-blind scientific studies with control groups. These show whether the drug is superior to a placebo at treating a condition or not.

The new policy statement called the Enforcement Policy Statement on Marketing Claims for Over-the-Counter (OTC) Homeopathic Drugs states that “the case for efficacy is based solely on traditional homeopathic theories and there are no valid studies using current scientific methods showing the product’s efficacy.”

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‘We can’t let the bullies win’: Elizabeth Loftus awarded 2016 John Maddox Prize

By Ian Sample

A leading psychologist whose research on human memory exposed her to death threats, lawsuits, personal abuse and a campaign to have her sacked has won a prestigious prize for her courage in standing up for science.

Professor Elizabeth Loftus endured a torrent of abuse from critics who objected to her work on the unreliable nature of eyewitness testimonies, and her defining research on how people can develop rich memories for events that never happened.

The work propelled Loftus into the heart of the 1990 “memory wars”, when scores of people who had gone into therapy with depression, eating disorders and other common psychological problems, came out believing they had recovered repressed memories for traumatic events, often involving childhood abuse.

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Richard Dawkins a god among atheists

By Pat Johnson

On Sunday night, I nabbed a couple of the last seats at the Chan Centre to hear in person two of the rock stars of the so-called New Atheist movement. It was a birthday gift, actually, for my nephew, who is an atheist of evangelical fervour.

The event featured Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, best-selling author and apparently a veritable God among atheists. Dawkins was on stage with Matt Dillahunty, a Texan who was raised Southern Baptist and was headed for a life in the pulpit until his conversion to atheism.

There was an air of self-righteousness at times, which is understandable among people who know The Truth. The two men spoke of their frequent interactions with religious people and Dawkins recalled one particular debate in which he and a theist were asked what could change their respective minds.

“Evidence,” Dawkins replied.

“Nothing,” replied the religious man.

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Australian continent shifts with the seasons, study finds

By Phys.org Staff

Australia shifts and tilts back and forth by several millimeters each year because of changes to the Earth’s center of mass, according to a new study. The findings could help scientists better track the precise location of Earth’s center of mass, which is important for GPS and other satellite measurements, according to the study’s author.

All bodies have a center of mass, or the average position of the mass of an object. Earth’s center of mass lies roughly at the center of the planet’s molten core, about 6,000 kilometers (about 3,700 miles) beneath the surface.

Seasonal changes to the distribution of water on Earth’s surface—largely through precipitation and evaporation—shift the planet’s center of mass a few millimeters in different directions.

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Bernie Sanders: our job is to oppose Trump’s bigotry vigorously

By Matthew Weaver

Bernie Sanders has urged millions of progressives “to mobilise and fight back at every instance” against Donald Trump’s presidency.

In a post-election interview with the BBC, the Vermont senator backed those who have protested against Trump’s election.

“Our job is to oppose him vigorously through millions of people in many many different ways,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “I am very worried that a President Trump may take us back to where we were before, and we in the progressive community are not going to allow that to happen. We have travelled too far to descend back into racism and sexism.”

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Ingenious: Richard Dawkins- The evolutionary biologist reads Robert Frost.

BY MICHAEL SEGAL

INTERVIEW BY ELISA NEW

In some ways, Richard Dawkins has been thinking about contingency for most of his life.

The book that catapulted him to fame, The Selfish Gene, is about one kind of contingency, which shapes genetic codes and chooses winning species (and genes). This contingency is nested in many others. In his memoir, An Appetite For Wonder, Dawkins imagines a dinosaur that would have caught and eaten the shrew-like ancestor of all mammals, had it not sneezed. “We all can regard ourselves as exquisitely improbable,” he writes.

Then there are the contingencies of an individual life. Is it true, Dawkins wonders, that “the course of a named individual’s life is sucked back, magnetically, into predictable pathways, despite the Brownian buffetings of sneezes and other trivial, or not so trivial, happenings?” Would Dawkins still have been Dawkins, had he been raised in a religious household? If he’d had different tutors?

In this video, Harvard poetry professor Elisa New sits Dawkins down in a lush field outside the Aspen Institute and talks to him about the most famous American poem on the topic of contingency, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” The conversation was recorded as part of New’s initiative, , which brings poetry into classrooms and living rooms around the world.

To see the video interview, click here.

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Astronomers have found ‘intriguing’ shadows in new photos of alien solar systems

By Dave Mosher

Astronomers have used a powerful mountaintop observatory to record three of the most detailed photos yet of infant solar systems and their nascent planets.

The scientists were even able to see “intriguing” shadows cast by clouds of gas and dust in two of the images.

The photos could help pop more pieces into the longstanding puzzle of how Earth came to exist.

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