Which scenario best represents pseudoscience

Definition the experiment should be adjusted and repeated to be sure the results are reliable. Term Scientists should not undertake a research project that is considered. Definition unethical to society. Term When comparing scientific debate to social debate we can conclude that,.

Definition they both involve using evidence to discuss differences of opinion. Term Which statement is false? Definition Scientific evidence always agrees. Term Which description best shows how society plays a part in scientific research and funding? Definition In the United States, many citizens believe it is wrong to clone humans.

They got together and campaigned against cloning. As a result, the U. Term In the United States, if most citizens believed a certain type of scientific research was ethically wrong,. Definition it is likely that the government would make it illegal. Term Which statement best describes the goal of scientific research on genetic engineering?

Definition To create plants that solve societal problems like hunger and pollution. Term Anything that is gathered using the scientific method that supports a hypothesis can be considered. Term When scientists all over the world use technology and share information,. Definition the entire scientific community benefits. Term Which statement is true? Definition Scientific bias can lead to problems with ethics.

Term Which statement best describes the relationship between science and technology? Definition Advances in science can lead to new technology. Term Which statement represents an ethical concern? Term Which example best shows how scientific discoveries benefit society in times of disaster? Definition Scientific models help scientists predict the path of storms. Term When evaluating a product claim, it is important to determine whether:.

Term The government will not allow a manufacturer to make a product claim if:. Definition The evidence they use to back up the claim is based on research that has not been reviewed by other scientists and shown to be reproducible. Term Which statement best describes why scientific evidence supports scientific laws? Definition Scientific evidence supporting scientific laws is always the same and observable by many.

Term In order for the government to allow a product to make a certain claim:. Definition The manufacturer must produce adequate scientific evidence to support that the claim is true. Term Which concern about genetic engineering would be the best example of an ethical issue? Definition If genetic engineering was used to clone a human for organ transplantation, the clone would be killed for the transplant surgery.

Term Which process is most useful when trying to make sure the results of scientific experiments are reliable? Definition peer review. Term Which scientific tools, or technologies, could help governments set policies and procedures to follow during a natural disaster? Definition Scientific models and satellite technology.

Term Which statement is the best example of how ethical issues affect policy and scientific research? Definition In England, because of public concerns, government officials have made it illegal to do research on human cloning.

Term How do teams of scientists with varied backgrounds better solve complex problems than individual scientist? Definition In a team, each scientist will have a different idea and perspective and the scientists work together to find the answer.

Term Which statement best describes the benefits of scientific discoveries? Definition The development of new technology. Term As a consumer, you constantly have to be careful that you do not buy useless products. The government addresses complaints but some products still participate in false advertising. One easy way to evaluate a product claim is to determine whether:. Term If we have a set of data, and one number is much higher than all the other numbers, which measurement would give us the least amount of information about the overall information gained from the data?

Definition the mean because the average would be thrown off by the extremely high number. Term Before coming to a final conclusion about the problem presented in the lesson, it was necessary for you to.

Definition evaluate each research study and compare the results. Term Which statement best describes how peer review can prevent errors?

Definition Peer review is a way to check scientific work to be sure that their results and claims are correct and without bias. Term Why were people not able to predict the damage using fossil fuels would do to our environment? At the time, scientists did not have the proper tools and research to predict the threats. Term Which statement best illustrates how science helps individuals make every day decisions. Term Before scientists come up with a scientific question, what do they have to do first?

Definition Make an observation. Term Which of these would you study if you wanted to learn more about the human body? Term If a scientist has a specific reason or motive for an experiment to turn out a certain way, which of the following is true?

Definition We should not trust the experiment because there might be bias. Term Which of the following is true about the results of an experiment?

Definition The results of an experiment are used to support or disprove the hypothesis. Term How can science benefit government? Science provides information and knowledge that can help government make wise decisions. Term What is the first step in the scientific method? Term Before the result of an experiment can be considered reliable, you must:. Definition Repeat the experiment and get the same results.

Term When scientists have different points of view,. Definition they can work together to solve problems. Term Scientists rely on the scientific community to. Term Which statement is true about scientific debates? Definition They are a chance for scientists to work out different points of view.

Term Which statement best describes what would happen if a scientist misrepresents data to support his or her hypothesis? Definition He or she would be considered unethical. The computationally simplest explanation for our observations is that the trends are caused by human carbon dioxide emission. In summary, to judge a scientific model, do not ask for predictions. Ask instead to what degree the data are explained by the model and how many assumptions were necessary for this.

And most of all, do not judge a model by whether you like what it tells you. Zeke Hausfather, Henri F. Drake, Tristan Abbott and Gavin A. Schmidt in Geophysical Research Letters , Vol. Credit: Nick Higgins. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital.

Glad You Asked. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. In SD, we know a little common courtesy can go a long way. The open questioning of face masks or refusal to enforce mandates will likely continue to have tragic consequences for the American people. Thus, anti-science disinformation that advocates shunning masks could inflict a mass casualty event in the US.

Its occurrence should not surprise us. Instead, our tragic loss of American lives would reflect the handiwork of an evolving anti-science movement that aggressively accelerated in the last 5 years beginning in California and Texas. In this Essay, I argue that to understand how a nation state might seek to attack and dissolve modern biomedicine, it is helpful to revisit a tragic period in 20th century Russia see Box 1. It began following the assassination of Sergei Kirov in , a Soviet leader and revolutionary, before halting in , although significant elements of the purge remained throughout the s.

Vavilov was a botanist and a scientific pioneer in using genetic approaches to improve cereal crops for the USSR [ 6 — 8 ]. Lysenko and his colleagues proposed moistening and chilling winter wheat and allowing it to germinate in order to sense these conditions in time for the spring when it would supposedly flourish [ 6 ].

Through vernalization—which bore some resemblance to Lamarckian evolutionary theories by claiming that acquired traits could be inherited—Lysenko aspired to adapt wheat to the harsh Russian climate. As a sort of proof of concept, he had his father soak his winter wheat in water before burying it in a snowbank to keep it cold prior to spring planting [ 6 ]. Initially, Vavilov took on a mentoring role for Lysenko, even touting his accomplishments at the Sixth International Congress of Genetics held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in the summer of [ 8 ].

Cook, the editor of the Journal of Heredity during the s [ 8 ]:. The remarkable discovery recently made by T. Lysenko of Odessa opens enormous new possibilities to plant breeders and plant geneticists of mastering individual variation.. The essence of these methods, which are specific for different plants and different variety groups, consists in the action upon the seeds of definite combinations of darkness photo-periodism , temperature and humidity. This discovery enables us to utilize in our climate for breeding and genetic work tropical and sub-tropical varieties This creates the possibility of widening the scope of breeding.

Its extraordinary claims aside, vernalization was seen as a form of Soviet homegrown science and a source of national pride. In contrast, Lysenko was able to convince Stalin that genetics was an evil science, much like relativity. Ultimately, Lysenko became the President of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Science in , whereas Vavilov was arrested in and rounded up with other intellectuals, including the founder of the Marx-Lenin Institute of World Literature.

He was interrogated and sent to a Soviet prison in Saratov where he perished, possibly by starvation in January , despite repeated appeals from international leaders including British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill Fig 1 [ 6 ].

Official photo from the file of the investigation. It remains a great irony that Vavilov devoted his scientific career to the humanitarian cause of feeding the population of the Soviet Union only to die by starvation. Following the death of Stalin in , the USSR began reopening to international science, ushering in a new era in vaccine development.

Throughout the s, both the US and Soviet Union suffered from severe polio epidemics prompting the 2 nations to embark on an unprecedented scientific collaboration [ 10 ].

Albert Sabin sent his polio strains to the USSR where they were manufactured at large scale to produce a trivalent vaccine. Moreover, the physicist and father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov, won the Nobel Prize in advocating for human rights, but was subsequently arrested and exiled to Gorky [ 11 ].

The mathematician and chess champion, Natan Sharansky, was arrested on treason charges in and kept in solitary confinement before he was released through a prisoner exchange, later emigrating to Israel in The American physicist Robert Oppenheimer also endured persecution during the red scare in the s, though on a lesser scale, having had his national security clearance revoked. Although the exploitation of biomedical anti-science as a political instrument reached its darkest hour during the Great Purge, it did not end with Lysenko.

Today, Russian politicization of biomedicine—the biological sciences as they apply to translational medicine—reveals a confusing or ambivalent system of legitimate scientific endeavors alternating with an ever-widening program of disinformation designed to undermine the field. This is especially true in the area of vaccines.

An irony is that a parallel and vast Russian anti-vaccine internet campaign is helping to undermine public confidence in vaccines [ 14 ], with Sputnik V potentially swept into the disinformation vortex as collateral damage. In the US, Russian vaccine disinformation on the internet amplifies an anti-vaccine movement that began following publication of a paper by Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues alleging links between measles vaccinations and autism [ 15 , 16 ].

However, the damage from Russian bots and trolls accelerated starting around ahead of the US Presidential election. During this time, the anti-vaccine movement began rallying behind medical freedom to counter the introduction of bills in the California legislature designed to close nonmedical exemptions for vaccines.

In , Texas rapidly adopted and expanded this new reframing of vaccine refusal leading to the formation of Texans for Vaccine Choice and other medical freedom groups [ 17 , 19 ]. The number of children denied access to their vaccines required for school entry increased significantly in Texas and other western states [ 20 , 21 ]. Ultimately, measles outbreaks returned to the US almost 20 years after this childhood infection was eliminated [ 16 ].

From Texas and California, medical freedom and the anti-vaccine movement spread across the US, running in parallel or linked to a new national expression against vaccines.

By , a confederation of anti-vaccine groups occupied almost websites, amplifying on social media and e-commerce and dominating the internet [ 16 ]. Russian weaponized health communication continued to sow discord. An unwanted mold grew on the dish, killing the bacteria. The mold turned out to be Penicillium and a new antibiotic was discovered. Even in the highly organized world of science, luck, when combined with an observant, curious mind, can lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

Publication of scientific research in a peer-reviewed journal allows other scientists access to the research. Scientists must share their findings in order for other researchers to expand and build upon their discoveries. Collaboration with other scientists—when planning, conducting, and analyzing results—are all important for scientific research.

Scientists can share results by presenting them at a scientific meeting or conference, but this approach can reach only the select few who are present. Instead, most scientists present their results in peer-reviewed manuscripts that are published in scientific journals. The process of peer review helps to ensure that the research described in a scientific paper or grant proposal is original, significant, logical, and thorough. Grant proposals, which are requests for research funding, are also subject to peer review.

Scientists publish their work so other scientists can reproduce their experiments under similar or different conditions to expand on the findings. The experimental results must be consistent with the findings of other scientists. Scientific Journal : Scientific research is published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. A scientific paper is very different from creative writing.

Although creativity is required to design experiments, there are fixed guidelines when it comes to presenting scientific results. Scientific writing must be brief, concise, and accurate. It needs to be succinct but detailed-enough to allow peers to reproduce the experiments. The scientific paper consists of several specific sections: introduction, materials and methods, results, and discussion. There are usually acknowledgment and reference sections, as well as an abstract a concise summary at the beginning of the paper.

There might be additional sections depending on the type of paper and the journal where it will be published; for example, some review papers require an outline.

The introduction starts with brief, but broad, background information about what is known in the field. A good introduction also gives the rationale and justification for the work. The introduction refers to the published scientific work of others and, therefore, requires citations following the style of the journal. Using the work or ideas of others without proper citation is considered plagiarism. The materials and methods section includes a complete and accurate description of the substances and the techniques used by the researchers to gather data.

The description should be thorough, yet concise, while providing enough information to allow another researcher to repeat the experiment and obtain similar results. This section will also include information on how measurements were made and what types of calculations and statistical analyses were used to examine raw data. Although the materials and methods section gives an accurate description of the experiments, it does not discuss them.

Journals may require separate results and discussion sections, or it may combine them in one section. If the journal does not allow the combination of both sections, the results section simply narrates the findings without any further interpretation. The results are presented by means of tables or graphs, but no duplicate information should be presented.

In the discussion section, the researcher will interpret the results, describe how variables may be related, and attempt to explain the observations. It is indispensable to conduct an extensive literature search to put the results in the context of previously-published scientific research. Therefore, proper citations are included in this section as well. Finally, the conclusion section summarizes the importance of the experimental findings. While the scientific paper almost certainly answered one or more scientific questions that were stated, any good research should lead to more questions.

A well-written scientific paper leaves doors open for the researcher and others to continue and expand on the findings. Review articles do not follow the IMRAD format because they do not present original scientific findings or primary literature. Instead, they summarize and comment on findings that were published as primary literature. They typically include extensive reference sections. The field of biology can be divided into various branches and subdisciplines, which leads to careers that result in more focused fields.

The scope of biology is broad and therefore contains many branches and subdisciplines. Biologists may pursue one of those subdisciplines and work in a more focused field. The biological branches are divided according to the focus of the discipline and can even be divided based on the types of techniques and tools used to study that specific focus. However, with the increasing amount of basic biological information growing due to advances in technology and databases, there is often cross-discipline and collaboration between branches.

For instance, molecular biology and biochemistry study biological processes at the molecular and chemical level, respectively, including interactions among molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins, as well as the way they are regulated. Microbiology, the study of microorganisms, is the study of the structure and function of single-celled organisms. It is quite a broad branch itself, and depending on the subject of study, there are also microbial physiologists, ecologists, and geneticists, among others.

Forensic science is the application of science to answer questions related to the law. Biologists as well as chemists and biochemists can be forensic scientists. Forensic scientists provide scientific evidence for use in courts, and their job involves examining trace materials associated with crimes. Their job activities are primarily related to crimes against people such as murder, rape, and assault.

Their work involves analyzing samples such as hair, blood, and other body fluids, including the processing of DNA found in many different environments and materials associated with the crime scenes.

Another field of biological study, neurobiology, is the study of the nervous system, and although it is considered a branch of biology, it is also recognized as an interdisciplinary field of study known as neuroscience.

Because of its interdisciplinary nature, this subdiscipline focuses on different functions of the nervous system using molecular, cellular, developmental, medical, and computational approaches. Biologists can also specialize as biotechnologists, ecologists, or physiologists. This is just a small sample of the many fields that biologists can pursue. Biology is the culmination of the achievements of the natural sciences from their inception to today.