science

Scientist Claire Patterson spent…

Weirdo

Scientist Claire Patterson spent over 20 years trying to convince the public that lead was poison.

The inventor of leaded gasoline meanwhile once went to New Jersey to argue that leaded gasoline was perfectly safe, by pouring tetraethyllead onto his hands, and then putting a bottle of it under his nose and inhaling it for 60 seconds saying he could do it every day without any problems. He then had to leave work after being diagnosed with lead poisoning.
He also went on to invent Freon, a CFC that was later banned after being shown to be responsible for ozone depletion.

Then he got polio, so he invented another thing, a pulley system that let him pull himself out of bed. He would then die after becoming entangled in this and strangling himself.

In 1996 a physicist submitted…

Weirdo

In 1996 a physicist submitted a paper full of word salad and gibberish to a postmodernist journal and it actually passed peer review and was published. This is known as the Sokal Affair.

“feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.“

According to a University of Pennsylvania study…

Weirdo

According to a University of Pennsylvania study, you are more likely to remember the news if it is delivered in concert with jokes. The rise of comedy-news programs, like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert or John Oliver, may actually help inform the public. A new neuroimaging study using fMRI suggests that humor might make news and politics more socially relevant, and therefore motivate people to remember it and share it.