March for Science: news and updates

Alex Jones’s show Infowars often feels like a dark comedy.

According to the conspiracy theory–fueled media titan, there’s a “fungal epidemic” causing everything from rampant brain tumors to Crohn’s disease. Sesame Street’s new autistic Muppet was really designed to normalize autism, a disorder caused by vaccines. Bill Gates’s global health philanthropy is a mass eugenics effort. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was created by the US government. Claims about global warming are based on “fake science” and only “promoted by politicians to scare the public into accepting a vast expansion of government to supposedly stop ‘global warming.’”

Long before Hilda Bastian was a health researcher, she endorsed a practice she believes may have cost lives.

“I think people died because of me,” she said recently. “And I’ll spend my whole life trying not to do it again and to make amends.”

Last weekend’s March for Science brought a renewed sense of purpose and urgency to Earth Day — and the momentum should carry on at Saturday’s People’s Climate Movement March. Collectively, these mass demonstrations — the March for Science alone attracted more than 15,000 people to DC and thousands more in satellite cities — send a clear message that President Trump’s full-scale assault on the basic tenets of science on numerous fronts is among his most unforgivable sins of willful fiction. It is heartening that people are willing to take to the streets to defend the primacy of civilization’s most effective tools for establishing what the facts of the case really are in this strange age of aggressive alts.

For Canadians like me, the March for Science, in particular, brought not just encouragement but a sense of déjà vu, tinged with relief. For President Trump is not the first chief executive of a major Western nation to wage a war on science. Until Stephen Harper’s Conservative government was voted out of power in 2015, it spent nearly a decade as the free world’s chief aggressor on this front. Under Harper, the Canadian government waged a steady attack on science and data the administration deemed unnecessary or unhelpful to its agenda. Harper cancelled the long-form census — the government’s most important data-gathering tool — and slashed budgets for climate science programs. He mothballed vital environmental research labs and rewrote environmental protection legislation in the fine print of budget bills.

Three months after the largest demonstration in US history, Saturday’s March for Science again brought droves of people into the streets to celebrate their values and protest the Trump administration and its policies.

And like the Women’s March, the demonstrations happened not just in front of the symbols of political power in Washington, DC, but in cities and towns across the country and around the world. In all, organizers say people marched for science on Earth Day in more than 600 cities and towns across six continents.

Thousands of scientists and science enthusiasts braved cold, rainy weather on Saturday to march in Washington, DC, in the name of disciplines they love, the research and discoveries they value, and the policies they oppose. And they came bearing signs — some of the cleverest, most creative, hilarious ones we’ve seen in an already protest-heavy year.

Many in the crowd said they never imagined they’d be out at a rally for science support.

On Earth Day, April 22, thousands of people descended on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and took to the streets in cities across the globe — in the name of science.

Inspired by the success of the January 21 Women’s March on Washington, the March for Science celebrated the scientific method and advocate for using evidence in decision-makng in all levels of government. Though the event’s website didn’t explicitly mention Trump, it was a protest of his administration’s policies, including his proposal to cut billions in funding for scientific research.

This year’s Earth Day, April 22, will be dominated by March for Science rallies taking place in Washington, DC, and dozens of other cities around the world.

But I also like to mark Earth Day by looking at some of the best new discoveries we’ve made about this breathing, seething, never-dull planet of ours — the only place in the universe where life is known to exist.

On April 22, Earth Day, tens of thousands of people will assemble in Washington, DC, and several dozen satellite cities to march for science.

What does that mean, exactly, to march “for science”?

Labs across our country are a source of American optimism — advancing knowledge, technologies, and cures. And yet, as citizens in 500 cities worldwide prepare to march this weekend in support of science, many American scientific practitioners are afraid. They worry that American science as we know it would be hobbled if President Trump’s proposed 18 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health, America’s premier medical research funder, becomes reality.

We hope Congress will hear history’s call and re-assert American leadership in advancing humanity’s scientific knowledge.

The March for Science, planned for April 22 on the National Mall in Washington, DC, has a lot of momentum in its favor. President Donald Trump’s blueprint budget proposal released last week contains cuts that would “cripple” science funding as we know it. Many scientists are livid.

The rally on the Mall and the satellite demonstrations across the globe seem likely to attract at least thousands. The movement has received endorsement from the country’s major science interest organizations, which are powerful nonpartisan sources of science advocacy.

BOSTON — Scientists have long spoken up for causes like the proliferation of nuclear weapons and climate change. But with President Donald Trump in office, something’s different.

On Sunday, hundreds of scientists filled Boston’s Copley Square at a rally, holding signs with statements like “Alternative facts are the square root of negative one.” Thousands are expected to show up at the March for Science in Washington, planned for April 22.

In 2015, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that created the White House’s Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, a team of social scientists tasked with using psychological research to make the government work better. Mostly, the team went after projects like A/B testing language on a human resources form to get more service members to sign up for a savings plan, and testing whether a single signature box could get government vendors to report sales more accurately.

It was a small but meaningful program — one that showed how much the Obama administration valued scientists’ input, even in how to improve bureaucracy. Though the Obama years weren’t paradise for scientists — sequestration cut divots in research budgets, and funding for the National Institutes of Health essentially flatlined, among other things — the scientific community generally felt valued and respected.

The first week of the Trump administration was already full of tension at many science-producing federal agencies, where transition uncertainties and new communication and funding directives made scientists fear their work could be suppressed or even canceled by politicians.

But scientists are already mobilizing — and fast.