Science is Big!

The metaphor of a two-edged sword applies very well to modern science.

Besides the obvious stories of Dr. Mengele or the Manhattan project, where both projects involved ended up doing great harm regardless of intention, social media is the new hot stuff that can warp our interpretations of new scientific discovery. News media by itself has had a tumultuous history with covering science.

This blog post by Jonathan Eisen highlights an interesting case of modern government programs engaging with science. Long before any real results come out of projects like these, reporters pick up on the story and try to sell it to their audience to varied results.

John Oliver took on science reporting in popular media and Phil Plait's take on it makes it very easy to apply the two-edged sword metaphor. We have way more capability than ever before to disseminate information and stimulate scientific discourse. We are also way more likely to pick up only bits and pieces of complex issues, never truly understanding the implications or context of what shows up in our feeds.

Meanwhile, big complicated expensive efforts to do science on a global scale like NASA's ATom are super cool. ATom has the potential to gather a ton of data on atmospheric phenomena in ways never before done.

Hopefully Homo sapiens keeps working on progressing scientific research as well as developing ever more powerful frameworks for ensuring scientific research efforts actually do something good in the end!


See you later.

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