Science Education & Policy

Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Strikingly Truewww.ripleybooks.com/newsroom Time For Kids Big Book Of Science Experiments (even a nifty 'Family Tree' chart on the last page, after the index, with sections for eye color of your ancestor's and whether or not they had dimples)

Overworked patent offices are struggling to keep up with the rapid explosion in information and technology that genetic sequences represent. An international project may have a solution - a free and open public resource that will bring transparency to the murky and contentious world of gene patenting. "Apparently, many patent offices have no way of tracking genetic sequences disclosed in patents and currently do not provide them in machine-searchable format," said principal author Professor Osmat Jefferson, a Queensland University of Technology academic who leads an international team…

Economists and sociologists have long insisted that abortion and birth control lead to economic growth and a new paper  in the journal Demography says it's instead education. All of those are correlated so there is no wrong answer. More economically developed, educated nations suffer population declines to such an extent they have to recruit immigrants to work and pay taxes to support an elderly population that doesn't replace itself. But spending billions of dollars on education rather than birth control would not be the answer - food and energy are. With the ability to grow food and…

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) advocacy has become all the rage at colleges, universities and other institutions as the US government spends billions doing outreach to make students more technical. But that doesn't mean one-dimensional. The University of Houston College of Education Urban Talent Research Institute wants to encourage creative endeavors to attract more and better STEM students.  They call it STEAM, which takes STEM efforts and incorporates art (the "A" in STEAM is for "Art"). They are focused on how to incorporate creativity into STEM…

Though Europeans are commonly regarded by Americans as more accepting of climate science, when it comes to putting plans into action, that isn't the case. America has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions from energy back to early 1990s levels and its dirtiest emissions, from coal, back to early 1980s levels. Aside from mistaken ethanol and solar subsidies and mandates, this hasn't been done by mitigation, rationing or cost increases but by adopting cleaner natural gas. In Europe, however, the relevant strategic policies and planning documents of 200 urban areas in eleven European countries…

Google money magic can only take you so far with the federal government.  23andMe, the highest profile genetic testing company, co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, has gotten a warning letter from the FDA. The problem? They don't disclose how accurate they are, but they claim all kinds of awareness benefits that make them look a lot like a medical device. The FDA is so unimpressed by Google money they even spell her name as "Ann". Google and Yahoo are now encrypting a lot of user data to prevent the rampant spying the current administration has been…

Americans have had it good. Drug companies have consistently produced new products that have done terrific things, but they are hated by much of the public, to such an extent that marijuana advocates have not only invented medical benefits for cannabis, they think Mexican drug cartels are more ethical than Merck. We only have no issue with the the reality that drug companies are going to be sued at some point no matter how well the products work. Then there is the political grandstanding of politicians and an increasingly hostile regulatory environment. The salad days for Americans are…

Contrary to sociological claims that poor people are more likely to be criminals, increasing the minimum wage will not lower violent crime or property crime, according to research presented today at the American Society of Criminology’s 69th annual meeting in Atlanta.  The scholars studied official U.S. crime data and economic data from 1977 to 2012 to compare violent crime and property crime rates among states that abided only by the federal minimum wage standards, and the 18 states that had raised their minimum wage requirement at one time or another above the federal mandate. The…

Health care costs are going to continue to go up and a new paper says that physicians control more than 80 percent of those costs. That part is true, though doctors are often forced to practice such "defensive medicine" for legal reasons.  A new paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine says providing physicians with real-time information about the cost of what they order help to restrain excessive testing. The research project was led by Daniel Horn of the Massachusetts General Hospital's Division of General Medicine in the US and was conducted among 215 primary care…

If biology fear mongers can't get referendums (let's vote on science!) passed in states like California and Washington where, let's face it, evidence-based thinking about science left long ago, what chance do they have in more politically moderate states?  Not much, at least in New Hampshire.  A well-funded effort by Gary Hirshberg, he of the organic giant Hirshberg’s Stonyfield Farms, failed to alarm lawmakers, who instead said that warning labels on GMO foods, in defiance of every scientific body's statements, would be a "rush to judgment", notes National Grange legislative…