Building knowledge, training new scientists, sharing a world.
This post is about standing with DNLee and discovering science. In the event that you haven’t been following the situation as it exploded on Twitter, here is the short version: DNLee was invited to guest-blog at another site...
Near the beginning of the month, I asked my readers — those who are scientists and those who are non-scientists alike — to share their impressions about whether scientists have any special duties or obligations to society that non-scientists don’t have...
I’m a vegetarian, which is probably not a total surprise. I study and teach ethics. I’m uneasy with the idea of animals being killed to fulfill a need of mine I know can be fulfilled other ways...
Today in my “Ethics in Science” class, we took up a question that reliably gets my students (a mix of science majors and non-science major) going: Do scientists have special obligations to society that non-scientists don’t have?...
Not quite 20 years ago, I was between graduate programs. I had earned my Ph.D in chemistry and filed my applications to seven Ph.D. programs in philosophy.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog (or, you know, attentive at all to the world around you), you will have noticed that scientific knowledge is built by human beings, creatures that, even on the job, resemble other humans more closely than they do Mr...
I’ve been watching The Newsroom*, and in its second season, the storyline is treading on territory where journalism bears some striking similarities to science.
Talking about science in the public sphere is tricky, even with someone with a lot of training in a science. On the one hand, there’s a sense that it would be a very good thing if the general level of understanding of science was significantly higher than it is at present — if you could [...]..
In this post, I’m sharing an excellent short film called “A Chemical Imbalance,” which includes a number of brief interviews with chemists (most of them women, most at the University of Edinburgh) about the current situation for women in chemistry (and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, more generally) in the UK...
Earlier this week, the Scientific American Guest Blog hosted a post by Jessica Richman and Zachary Apte, two members of the team at uBiome, a crowdfunded citizen science start-up.
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