...Social Media’s Views on Science The way the media depicts scientist has not been proven to be 100% true in regards to how they actually are in the real world. Although we know this, most people still see scientist in the same manner when asked to describe what a scientist looks like. Media usually depicts the scientist as geeky, nerdy, unattractive, crazy or mad, and even at times evil, but this does not rule out scientist being the hero. (Meredith, D.). When I hear the word scientist, the image that comes to mind is that of a male or female in a knee-length white lab coat, gloves and those clear experimental goggles we were all told to wear in grade school. This person might have a calculator and/or thermometer in their left breast pocket or even black plastic frame glasses as a finishing touch to give them that intelligent look that people associate the with smarter than average people. Some of the characters from television and films that comes to mind are the scientist Dr. Emmit Brown from the movie Back to the Future, Steve Urkel from a comedy television series called Family Matters and Temperance Brennan from the television series Bones. All three of these characters wore the white coat when in the essence of portraying a scientist. I’d like to think of the white coat as a sort of uniform for the job, just as a police officer and a firefighter have a certain uniform that helps to identify them. During grade school, I attended a health and science magnet school in Texas. One...
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...matter. This journal was published in The Journal Of Clinical Physics on July 29, 2010. The authors were Margret C. Linak and Kevin D. Dorfman. DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. Deoxyribonucleic acid is a material in humans and other organisms. Almost every cell in a persons body has the same DNA. A persons DNA defines who they are and what traits they have. This journal I choose experiments with the simulation that is used to describe the model of DNA through different experiments and tests. The tests that were done in this experiment were trying to show the correct melting temperature of the model. How will these experiments turn out in the end? To begin, the scientists in this experiment want to show how they tried to simulate DNA. The methods that were done were to try and show the nucleotide sequences and figuring out the values of the X and Y chromosomes. Also, the scientists tried to conserve the identity of the stem of the cytosine bases in the loop. The cytosine bases were replaced with guanines of different lengths. Cytosine bases are involved with the pairing of the DNA and the chromosomes. The experiment used DNA hairpins. DNA hairpins are the structure of the DNA. The scientists made an hypothesis to try and test what they thought would happen during the experiment. The hypothesis that was made during this experiment was that by the different tests that were done, one of those tests would have a better melting temperature. An independent variable changes...
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...Social Science & Medicine 66 (2008) 2520e2531 www.elsevier.com/locate/socscimed Biomedical scientists’ perception of the social sciences in health research* Mathieu Albert a,*, Suzanne Laberge b, Brian D. Hodges a, Glenn Regehr a, Lorelei Lingard a a b University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario, Canada Universite de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada ´ ´ ´ Available online 11 March 2008 Abstract The growing interest in interdisciplinary research within the Canadian health sciences sector has been manifested by initiatives aimed at increasing the involvement of the social sciences in this sector. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of field and Knorr-Cetina’s concept of epistemic culture, this study explores the extent to which it is possible for the social sciences to integrate into, and thrive in, a field in which the experimental paradigm occupies a hegemonic position. Thirty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore biomedical scientists’ receptiveness toward the social sciences in general and to qualitative research in particular. We found that these respondents exhibited a predominantly negative posture toward the social sciences; however, we also found considerable variation in their judgments and explanations. Eight biomedical scientists tended to be receptive to the social sciences, 7 ambivalent, and 16 unreceptive. The main rationale expressed by receptive respondents is that the legitimacy of a method depends on its capacity to adequately...
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...The topic of choice that I chose to write about for my short report paper is Earthquakes. I chose earthquakes because I am fascinated by them, and would like to learn as much information as I can about them. I have found out that these are phenomenons of nature and I am going to enlighten you on what the causes are behind them, the tools we use to track them, and some of the worst ones that have ever happened in history. The following paragraphs will be a complete review of all of the information I have found. I hope you enjoy my paper and let’s get started. First off let’s ask ourselves do we really know what an earthquake is? Not many people do but they have heard of them before, and know that they can be catastrophic. “An earthquake is a sudden and violent shaking of the ground caused by pieces of the crust that violently shift.”( ) Now let’s ask ourselves do we know what causes an earthquake? I have found that what causes an earthquake to form is that when the pieces of our earths four major layers move around they bump into each other, and we call these pieces tectonic plates. The edges of these plates which we call boundaries are made up of faults, these faults are most of the earthquakes in the world today occur. Since the edges of the plates are rough they get stuck together while all the other plates are moving. And then finally when the plates have moved to far from these edges that is when an earthquake will occur. () So how does this movement of these plates...
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...SC250-05: Science for Everyday Life Unit 9 Assignment August 05, 2014 When I hear the word “scientist” there are multiple things that run through my thoughts. I picture someone in a lab coat trying to discover a cure to a disease like cancer or the next plague that comes along. There is this image of dry ice coming out of test tubes and beakers surrounding them. Maybe even a bunch of stressed out yuppie looking guys who had way too much coffee, desperately trying to find the vaccine to stop the zombie apocalypse. I also picture Beaker from the Muppet show. He did a wonderful job forming an image of what a scientist probably was to me as a child. He was insecure and he made a mess. My cousin is a scientist so then there is an image of this very stern but sarcastic guy testing and testing and retesting. That image sounds so boring but I’m grateful there are brilliant minds like him out there. Scientist come in many different forms. They study and discover many different things. Over time there have been many types of scientist and they weren’t all wearing lab coats. Leonardo da Vinci was one I found interesting due to my love of art. He combined art and science in his sketches. He has amazing futuristic designs and even envisioned flight. Sadly he was a chronic procrastinator and had frequent disasters with his experiments of new techniques (Leonadoda-Vinci). Galileo Galilei was an Italian scientist who developed the telescopes and started to observe the solar system. ...
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...sciences witnessed a major reform in their field. Scientists such as Galileo and Copernicus contributed greatly to the astronomical sciences. Other like Newton discovered completely new theories and ideas. All of these scientists were affected by similar political and religious factors. The works of scientists were both negatively affected by the Church, who oppressed new scientific ideas and positively by political leaders who became patrons and helped scientists. The Church had a great amount of power over science at...
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...College of the Holy Cross *I wish to thank Dave Hummon for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, 1998. © 2005 Royce A. Singleton, Jr. Is Sociology a Science? A Classroom Exercise for Promoting Discussion Abstract Though sociology was founded on the idea that the social order is subject to scientific study, the “science” question remains controversial. By learning about this controversy, students can learn much about the discipline. This paper describes an exercise, together with data collected from six classes, that asks students to project their personal images of scientists and social scientists. These images invariably contain half-truths and misconceptions that can be used to address three related questions: (1) What is science? (2) How is sociology scientific? and (3) What are the major challenges to sociology as a science? I draw upon my own students’ responses to show how the exercise can generate a wide-ranging discussion of these issues. Is Sociology a Science? A Classroom Exercise for Promoting Discussion The question of whether sociology is a science has a long history in the discipline. It was addressed by virtually all the classical social theorists. But for some time the debate about the scientific status of sociology was muted. In the post-World War II period up to the early 1960s, quantitative methods were ascendant and theorists and methodologists...
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...In the year 2257 earth is being overrun by xenomorphs.The last remaining countries are focusing on ways to exterminate the xenomorphs on earth.Xenomorphs are the perfect killing machines they are 7ft tall with a tail to double that.They are the color black they undergo 3 stages in lifetime they go from facehugger to chestburster to xenomorph.They gain the adaptation of the host.The last remaining science facilities are being overrun by the xenomorph hives.As sirens goes off in one of the science faculty,one scientist says to a marine,”You must hurry you are all the forces we got”.Marine named Obi-wan Kenobi asked,”what is the mission”.Scientist responded by saying,”your mission is to go to the xenomorph homeworld to collect the royal jelly from what we call the...
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...August 2, 2013 * The title of the article that I have chosen for this assignment is “The Era of Memory Engineering Has Arrived”. The article begins by explaining a basic plot of a sci-fi movie in which the main character has had his memories altered by scientists using electrode caps. The article then goes into detail about how a new set of experiments, led by MIT neuroscientists Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu in Susumu Tonegawa’s lab, shows that by using a stunning set of molecular neuroscience techniques. Scientists have captured specific memories in mice, altered them, and shown that the mice behave in accord with these new, false, implanted memories. The scientists needed a way of labeling neurons that were active during a specific experience, and a switch to make them work. It has been found that by using by using the molecule Channelrhodopsin, in already genetically modified mice. Scientists could see recent events that had been recorded to specific brain cells in those mice (Castro 2013). The article then states how with the use of doxycycline, the scientists were able to turn off the labeling or recording process of the experiment. This is important because the scientists were able to label memories in specific times and places. Once the scientists had labeled a memory to the mice, and were able to re-awaken that memory by using light that was shone onto the rodents brains. The scientists were able to (with the use of electrical shocks and a new setting)...
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...SPECIAL REPORT CRACKING THE CODE OF THE HUMAN GENOME Henrietta Lacks' cells were essential in developing the polio vaccine and were used in scientific landmarks such as cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. (Courtesy of the Lacks family) Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells Journalist Rebecca Skloot’s new book investigates how a poor black tobacco farmer had a groundbreaking impact on modern medicine By Sarah Zielinski SMITHSONIAN.COM JANUARY 22, 2010 1.3K 31 6 14 73 17 7.7K 1.3K31147367.7K Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are “immortal”—they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line's impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family. Who was Henrietta Lacks? She was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she...
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...regulation. Three of these “experts” happened to be all physicists: Bill Nierenberg, Fred Sietz and Fred Singer. Nierenberg and Seitz worked on the atomic bombs. They were also involved on topics like acid rain, tobacco smoking, global warming and pesticides. The book claims that these scientists challenged and diluted the scientific consensus in various fields including: dangers of smoking, the ozone layer, effects of acid rain and climate change. The evidence is there. Smoking does kill. Acid rain is caused by pollution. The glaciers are melting and the seas are rising due to the effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I am not shocked that many scientists and tobacco companies have lied to us over the years about their products and their effects. I can remember less than 5 years ago, reading a magazine with that had a Newport cigarette ad. The ad had a...
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...How has the development of fingerprinting techniques in forensics increased the succession rate of convicting criminals from the period of 1890-1950? Introduction The birth of forensic science within the use of the police force revolutionised how crime investigations were conducted, via the work of the forensic scientists, or also known as ‘forensic officers’. This work would consist of collecting evidence from a crime scene such as looking for fingerprints on either a suspected murder weapon used by the murder or on a touchable surface which is in the crime scene where the suspect laid their hand on. Furthermore this collectivisation of evidence from the crime scene could mean collecting; foreign fibres (unusual fibres that seem to look like that they do not belong their i.e. due to their different colour, type of fabric or thickness of the fibre.); retrieving bullets and firearms form the crime scene and any possible DNA samples that can be collected in the crime scene such as blood spatter on the walls of a room, where in this case the crime was committed. This evidence would then be sent to be analysed by more forensic scientists in different subdivisions to help led a path to a final suspect, thus leading the police to a quick and successful conviction of a criminal and bring justice to their crimes. Overall this revolution of the police force saw the birth of a new era of fighting crime throughout the whole of the country, as well as throughout the rest of the...
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...the genetics field, telling about DNA that was found in the leg bone of a 400,000 year-old fossil. This is a huge development since scientists have not been able to find DNA in fossils older than 60,000 years (Rincon, 2013). The bone described in this article was found in Spain in an area referred to as the ‘Pit of Bones’(Rincon, 2013). This is a cave where the remains of 28 people were found. The ‘Pit of Bones’ is located near Burgos in Northern Spain (Rincon, 2013). The bones were found to be of ancient people who lived in the Middle Pleistocene Age. For scientists, accessing these bones was not an easy task as the cave is hidden and is only accessible through ropes and tunnels. One of the most important renowned characteristics of DNA is that it breaks down as time passes. It is therefore fairly difficult to access DNA as old as 400,000 years (Rincon, 2013). However, as reported in this article, technology has helped scientists to make such discoveries as the one described herein. The scientists who made this discovery were also able to come up with a sequence of mitochondrial DNA from the femur, although it was incomplete. This sequence showed a relationship with 40,000 year-old fossils found in Siberia (Rincon, 2013). The cause of this relationship is said to be interbreeding across ancient populations from different regions. The scientists also related the DNA acquired to the Homo antecessor, an ancient human species. The next step from this discovery is to find nuclear...
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...Freezer I have never known the horrors of smallpox, if you showed me a picture of a smallpox infection, I would not be able to identify it. Being born 11 years after its final eradication in 1980, the only time I can recall learning about smallpox was in history class when we discussed for a brief moment the pox riddled blankets given to the Native Americans in 1763. Reading this book, I begin to have a greater understanding of the real terror that smallpox imposed on the world and the great lengths people have gone to, to eliminate this virus from the world. There is an argument within the book on whether smallpox should be completely eradicated including the vials of the virus located within the CDC in Atlanta and Vector in Russia. Should we destroy the only verified sources of the virus, do we leave it to be used for future research, even if we destroyed the only verified known sources of smallpox, will it...
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...Scientists Rani A. Perales Kaplan University Scientists Scientists. How would you define a scientist? According to Merriam-Webster, a scientist is “a person who is trained in a science and whose job involves doing scientific research or solving scientific problems” (2015). Now, how would you envision a scientist? Could there be a long-term impact because of how the media makes fictional scientists look? The media has portrayed scientists in many different ways, and can influence how people view scientists. Also, the media can even influence how scientists view certain research and technology. When the word scientist comes to mind I tend to think of Temperance Brennan from the television show, Bones played by Emily Deschanel. She is extremely brilliant, has no sense of humor, very head strong, emotionally detached, and yet somehow finds love. Another scientist that I found interesting is Adrian Helmsley from the movie “2012,” played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. He too is a brilliant man, full of compassion, and wanting to help others. The likeness they both have is how they want to find the answers to help people. He wants the right answers to try to save humanity and she wants the right answers to help find people’s identities and put away murderers. When I think about a scientist I think of someone who is intelligent; they would have to be, to think and figure out their research and explain how they see their work. They would have to be open-minded; they would neet to be in...
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