Junk science is spurious or fraudulent scientific data, research, or analysis. The concept is often invoked in political and legal contexts where facts and scientific results have a great amount of weight in making a determination. It usually conveys a pejorative connotation that the research has been untowardly driven by political, ideological, financial, or otherwise unscientific motives.
The Discovery Institute (DI) is a politically conservative think tank that advocates the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design (ID). It was founded in 1991 in Seattle as a non-profit offshoot of the Hudson Institute.
The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is a U.S. nonprofit organization that works to mitigate belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal and to fight the influence of religion in government.
Deborah Leigh Blum is an American science journalist and the director of the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several books, including The Poisoner's Handbook (2010) and The Poison Squad (2018), and has been a columnist for The New York Times and a blogger, via her blog titled Elemental, for Wired.
Science journalism conveys reporting about science to the public. The field typically involves interactions between scientists, journalists and the public.
The Republican War on Science is a 2005 book by Chris Mooney, an American journalist who focuses on the politics of science policy. In the book, Mooney discusses the Republican Party leadership's stance on science, and in particular that of the George W. Bush administration, with regard to issues such as climate change denialism, intelligent design, bioethics, alternative medicine, pollution, separation of church and state, and the government funding of education, research, and environmental protection. The book argues that the administration regularly distorted and/or suppressed scientific research to further its own political aims.
Benjamin Radford is an American writer, investigator, and skeptic. He has authored, coauthored or contributed to over twenty books and written over a thousand articles and columns on a wide variety of topics including urban legends, unexplained mysteries, the paranormal, critical thinking, mass hysteria, and media literacy. His book, Mysterious New Mexico: Miracles, Magic, and Monsters in the Land of Enchantment, was published in the summer of 2014 and is a scientific investigation of famous legends and folklore in the state of New Mexico. In 2016 Radford published Bad Clowns, a 2017 IPPY bronze award winner, and he is regarded as an expert on the bad clowns phenomenon.
Matthew H. D. Chapman is an English journalist, author, screenwriter, director and activist.
Science Debate 2008, currently ScienceDebate.org, was the beginning of a grassroots campaign to call for a public debate in which the candidates for the U.S. presidential election discuss issues relating to the environment, health and medicine, and science and technology policy.
Point of Inquiry is the radio show and flagship podcast of the Center for Inquiry (CFI), "a think tank promoting science, reason, and secular values in public policy and at the grass roots". Started in 2005, Point of Inquiry has consistently been ranked among the best science podcasts available in iTunes. It has been celebrated for its guests and for the quality of its interviews. Former guests include leading scientists, writers and public intellectuals such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Paul Krugman, Lisa Randall, Brian Greene, Oliver Sacks, Susan Jacoby, David Brin and Temple Grandin.
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.
Scientocracy is the practice of basing public policies on science.
Watts Up With That? (WUWT) is a blog promoting climate change denial that was created by Anthony Watts in 2006.
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is a nonfiction book by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. It was a New York Times best seller. In the book, the authors tackle the problem of scientific illiteracy in America. The authors criticize scientists for talking down to the misinformed and insulting the religious while calling for more friendly and magnanimous science advocates. They also blame the New Atheist movement, the creation–evolution controversy, the entertainment industry, the media, and science skeptics.
Cara Louise Santa Maria is an American science communicator. She hosts the podcast Talk Nerdy and co-hosts The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast, and was a co-host of TechKnow on Al Jazeera America.
Indre Viskontas is a Lithuanian-Canadian neuroscientist and operatic soprano. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While at UCLA she was a member of the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab and Cogfog. and a M.M. in opera. She is a Professor of Psychology at the University of San Francisco and serves on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She is also the Creative Director of Pasadena Opera.
The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality is a 2012 book about the psychological basis for many Republicans' rejection of mainstream scientific theories, as well as theories of economics and history, by the American journalist Chris Mooney.
Sharon A. Hill is an American science writer and speaker known for her research into the interaction between science and the public, focusing on education and media topics. Hill's research has dealt mainly with paranormal, pseudoscience, and strange natural phenomena and began at the University at Buffalo, where she performed her graduate work in this area. Hill attended Pennsylvania State University, earning her Bachelor of Science degree in geosciences and working as a Pennsylvania geologist.
Sheril Kirshenbaum is an American science writer and scientist. She co-authored Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future with Chris Mooney, and wrote The Science of Kissing. She also co-founded and led Science Debate, a nonprofit organization with a stated goal of restoring science to its rightful place in politics.
Science Debate is a nonpartisan American nonprofit organization working to elevate the importance of science and technology in the national public dialogue. They ask candidates running of office to share their science policy perspectives before Election Day so that every politician arrives in office prepared to meet the 21st centuries greatest challenges on day one. Driven by the vital role that science and technology play in the health, environmental, and economic well-being of society, Science Debate strives to provide voters with sufficient and meaningful information on these key issues when electing people to serve in public office.
