Game of Thrones is science fiction?

There has to be a balance between the risks associated with this research and possible gains. Given the potential cost to human life it is hard to understand why this research should continue. Particularly as it is the community in which the lab is based that will inevitably suffer most should there be an incident.

I hope you never need neurosurgery.

I'm dusting off my old Motorola 8000 DynaTAC.

In particular, they have made over ear headphones popular. Which is great as those in ear things make my ears hurt. I wouldn't buy Beats but do have some nice earphones and don't mind wearing them in public.

Trying to find out whose twitter feed is causing all the commotion, but no joy. It would seem entirely appropriate to simply retweet the tweets.

IANA astro-physicist - but something bothers me about the big bang theory (or at least what I know about it). Why just one? Why aren't we able to detect other big bangs elsewhere? And another thing - we theorise based on what we are able to measure and observe. While we seem to have a theory that fits the data available, surely it is quite possible that our data are just unique to our locality. Seems like we are looking into someone's CA backyard and trying to say something about volcanic action in Iceland.

This reminds me of those signs you sometimes see in car parks "the owners will not be held responsible for any damage to your vehicle." I am reliably informed that this is not true in all cases. If, for example, the owners fail to maintain equipment or the building adequately and you can attribute cause of damage to their dereliction of duty they can be held responsible. Putting up signs does not usurp consumer rights.

If you risk infection in the course of activities you have to undertake, like driving to work, then fine. But I for one would not choose to subject my self to a risk of .2% through infection by this flesh munching turd monster. And if infected I would rather take a course of pills to erradicate it from my body, even if there were transient side effects such as explosive diarrhea.

I agree that the usual suspects, Facebook, Twitter and so on do very little. However, I have recently set up an account on Researchgate - a platform specifically for scientists to share their work, and have been modestly surprised. I have been able to connect with researchers, particularly more junior ones who I would not usually come across, and their work. In so doing I've found some very good studies in my area that I didn't know about.

Substituting one god for another isn't going to effect your well-being to any great extent. Substituting homeopathy for medicine will.

I visited a homeopath once. I had dreadful allergies and was quite desparate. So off I trundled to the homepaths tent in the festival I was attending. There they did some sort of reading and asked a few questions. They opened a huge old book and spent a few moments throughtfully reading through various passages. Then delivered the news that I needed arsenic. Only this poison could help me. They procused a small plastic bag containing small spherical white pills. I complained that I was not keen on taking arsenic in any shape of form. So they explained that they started with a huge vat of water with a little bit of arsenic in it. Took a tiny drop of that water and diluted it further, and once again until only the essense of asenic remained. There wasn't any arsenic in those pills. By this time I was laughing so hard I had completely forgotten about my allergies. I left with a big smile on my face and used the sugar pills in my coffee.

So sorry everyone, homeopathy works.

Why are scientists increasingly concerned about what some people in our society think and believe? I don't want to sound argumentative, but surely a good scientist does what a good scientist does? We are not here to force a particular world view on everyone, just carefully research and explain the world around us. In any scientific discipline there will be people with different perspectives and often these differences of opinion can boil over into quite hostile interactions. Discourse, argument and differences of opinion motivate research and science benefits from this. Research groups compete - do meticulous research to prove their view, have it peer reviewed and hopefully trash the competition in the process. This is science. This is progress. What we have here is a mentality of "you can't believe in ghosts because I am a scientist and I say so". A view that is not consistent with scientific method and smacks of arrogance. I would much rather science engaged and provoked wide eyed wonderment. I personally do not care if people want to believe in ghosts, gods, psychic powers and the like. I care that these same people can appreciate the work I do, understand it and (hopefully) find it interesting.

I completely agree with this - but more with those maybe cases. There will always be a bunch of kids with very clear and profound issues and who need a formal diagnosis to trigger appropriate support. It is those kids who go through the usual developmental issues but who have uninformed helicopter parents pushing clinical staff into providing treatment in some shape of form. It is not just school. What I think we do need in some cases is professional face slappers to bring people back to the real world and just let kids grow up.

I sometimes wonder why such research finds the light of day. Perhaps for epidemiologists there is merit - but there dose not seem there is much anyone else can do. All sorts of these worrying little nuggets of nonsense appear. People die. It is one of the most definite outcomes of life. Those deaths can be related to circumstances outside of our control. It just promotes hand wringing.