The 10 worst "science" stories of 2006

[discovery1]

Girls Not As Wild As Hoped, Part II
In February the Wall Street Journal reported that the consumption of alcohol among teenage girls increased by over 30% from 1999 to 2004. But alcoholic drinks were measured by volume, and included mixers as well as actual alcohol. Thus, a 6 ounce glass of alcohol was treated the same as an ounce of alcohol mixed with 5 ounces of orange juice. In fact, US government studies show that "binge drinking" by college age females has remained steady since 1980, and daily drinking has been dropping since 2002.

[Geoffrey S]

It's just barely before 2006, but that whole faked stemcell business in South Korea springs to mind,

[Xiahou]

I seem to remember this being discussed in the backroom:

Toxins for Tots?
Just in Time for Christmas! The Dec. 13 issue of Time magazine warned parents to throw out all their soft vinyl toys, teethers, pacifiers, nipples, sipping cups, and baby bottles to avoid poisoning their children with phthalates, a family of chemicals that makes plastics flexible. This grinchlike recommendation came despite the fact that phthalates in toys have been cleared for children’s use by both the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the European Union’s Institute for Health and Consumer Protection.

Naturally, here it wasn't about children's toys, but sex toys.

[Don Corleone]

Interesting article, Xiahou. John Stossel himself couldn't have said it any better.

My personal favorite, being in New England this winter, is global warming. By the most extreme accounts, global warming is supposed to cause an average increase in temperature of about 4 degrees Farrenheit. Yet every night, on every news broadcast, we hear about how the unseasonably warm winter we've had thus far 'just must' be caused by global warming. (For the record, our daily temperatures are approximately 15 degrees above average). To these folks, I have two questions:

1) If global warming is pretty much caused my mankind, did we quadruple our CO2 emissions in the past year without anybody noticing?

2) Did Denver and Nebraska reduce their Carbon emissions, hence all the snow?

In reality, the culprit is a well-known phenomenon, a weather pattern that was recorded by Spanish explorers 200 years before the invention of the combustion engine, known popularly as 'El Nino'.

But if we could only force the USA to adhere to Kyoto protocols... then we'd get some snow!!!

[Banquo's Ghost]

Actually Don, almost no-one disputes the evidence that the earth is getting warmer.

The argument nowadays is whether this is a natural cycle or man-made, which determines what, if anything we should do about it.

[Don Corleone]

I totally agree, BQ. I do not doubt that we are in a warming trend. Winters are much, much milder than when I was young. My point was all the people seeing this year's unusually warm termperatures and playing chicken little. Even if you listen to the most ardent Luddites, that man is a pox upon the planet, they'd tell you we've raised the temperature by only a quarter of the aberration we're currently experiencing. If it's all caused by us... where is all of this unaccounted harmful activity occuring?

Yes, the planet is warming. But we're still not as warm as the Earth was in the early Middle Ages.

[BigTex]

Actually Don, almost no-one disputes the evidence that the earth is getting warmer.

The argument nowadays is whether this is a natural cycle or man-made, which determines what, if anything we should do about it.

Suppose the earth is getting warming. But Texas has had the coldest decade since records were kept. It's getting warmer, but so has the sun. Man made not so much as man slightly assisted it get a little warmer. When the sun die's down a bit so will the temps.

But where on the right track. The combustion engine is soon to be CO2 free. The first of the GM electolosys based hydrogen burning car's were showed off in the New York auto show not to long ago. Plastic's are steadily being made more from soy beans and other beans rather then oil. Even the US Navy is in the process of changing it's acedaline torches to the same electrolosys based device. All in all it's getting better.

[Phatose]

Eh, Hydrogen is a red herring. Sure, the engines themselves don't produce CO2, but getting the hydrogen in the first place requires energy. Can't burn hydrogen to get that energy, since we don't even have it yet, so we're back to classical sources. More centralized, perhaps, and certainly easier to control then millions of gas powered vehicles, which is an advantage, but unless the centralization allows for enough reduction in waste output to offset the inefficiencies of transferring energy from one form to another twice, we end up putting out more pollution then we did before we switched.