Science Education & Policy

Does it work to communicate the scientific consensus to the public? If anti-science beliefs about energy, medicine, and agriculture are any indication, sure.  We don't get bans on science in the U.S. the way Europe aggressively denies the consensus precisely because the American science community does a great job at talking with the public about data, exporting critical thinking is a big reason we are creating Science 2.0 Europe. European scientists have been impressed at how well we have beaten back ban-happy activists. They want to make positive changes there as well. That does…

For those who used to believe that taking on massive student loan debt to pay for increased salaries for university employees that would lead to a high salary, a new reality has set in: the gig economy.  And that counts in journalism too. In the days of Walter Cronkite and Watergate, media enjoyed a great deal of trust, but as the public got more savvy about bias that trust declined and people began to seek out alternative sources. If media are going to be biased, people believed, it might as well be biased in ways they like. Columbia University, for example, which once sold a 2-…

Math and science students do better who take music courses score significantly better on exams than their non-musical peers, and so do all students, according to a recent paper. This is a hot topic in education. Some argue that vocational schools should make a comeback, and that students interested in math and science should focus on that rather than music, the way musicians practice rather than taking more science classes, but a look at 112,000 Canadian students shows it's not a two-way street. Some will do more art or music and not benefit from more STEM courses, perhaps because they…

A new paper in JAMA Pediatrics correlates US immigration policy to adverse mental health outcomes in kids who are not immigrants at all - but their parents were. There are confounders. The data were small, distilled from a group of 397 U.S.-born adolescents with at least one immigrant parent from a long-term study of Mexican farmworker families in just one area, the Salinas Valley of California, just south of Berkeley. These were self-reported claims about mental health by teenagers and there was an increase after the 2016 election even though the previous administration had the same…

Ever since President Clinton turned the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 into law, taking away federal authority over food and supplements unless bodies started dropping, the US Food and Drug Administration has been a little timid in doing the things it should do. Obviously it still approves products, but it has acted more like an agency buffeted by politics. When grassroots vaping caused smoking to drop, they responded to narrow political interests on the coasts, who were supported by both pharmaceutical and cigarette money, and basically declared all non-pharmaceutical…

With a new executive order, President Trump has done something that the science community has wished would have been done since the 1980s; he has ordered his administration to streamline the federal regulatory process for agricultural biotechnology so that every new product is not treated like a new invention. An Atlantic salmon that expresses a gene from a Chinook salmon to grow faster being stuck in the approval cycle for 19 years, for example, was a shocking miscarriage of regulatory justice. Especially when the same activists who now call it Frankenfish complain about too much Atlantic…

Though every world science body sees no reason to be concerned about genetic engineering - hundreds of millions of humans and billions of animals have been fine with a gene in one plant that is simply found naturally in another plant, as you'd expect - well funded activist campaigns about "Frankenfoods" have largely succeeded. Organic food has ballooned in revenue using claims it claims no GMOs all while not mentioning their own less precise genetic engineering; mutagenesis, bathing organisms in chemicals and radiation to get a desired effect.  Knowing that fear about GMOs while…

If you survey educators and students, current or former, many will claim they have a learning style -  such as visual, auditory or tactile - that they were born with, and some say it predicts both academic and career success. There is no scientific evidence to support this common myth, according to new researc, but   surveys in the United States and other industrialized countries across the world have shown that 80% to 95% of people believe in learning styles. It's difficult to say how that myth became so widespread.  In two online experiments with 668 participants, more…

A new index of scientific output has been released and it finds that the United States continues to dominate in research, bolstered by the private sector accounting for nearly 70 percent of science funding, where most other developed countries instead rely on government. The analysis factored in the number researchers as percentage of population, patents, papers released, and GDP spending.  To the science community, there will be few surprises. Though the casual public may regard China or India as science hotbeds, they instead either do lower level work or manufacturing. China, for…

Surveys show that on issue after issue, women are more liberal than men, save for one: Men are more likely than women to support the legalization of marijuana. Americans are becoming more supportive of marijuana legalization each year but the gender gap remains a constant: While 68 percent of men now support marijuana legalization, only 56 percent of women do. What’s behind this gender gap? We suspected mothers might be a key driver. In our book “The Politics of Parenthood,” we were able to show that mothers support policies that help children, whether it’s subsidized health care or public…