Science Education & Policy

Obama is playing good cop to Bush's bad cop, letting EPA know that his administration will not deny facts but be guided by them.Continuing efforts to overturn more of the last administration's policies, President Obama signed a presidential memoranda today requesting the EPA consider approving a waiver that will allow 14 states to set their own stricter automobile emissions and fuel efficiency standards. Obama also signed a memorandum directing the Department of Transportation to expedite finalization of more fuel-efficient standards for the auto industry to cover 2011 model-year cars. "…

Positive racial role models may have an effect on school performance, according to new research by Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management professor Ray Friedman and co-authors who document what they call the “Obama Effect” - namely that the performance gap between black and white Americans in a series of online tests was dramatically reduced during key moments of the 2008 presidential campaign, when Obama’s accomplishments garnered the most national attention. In the study, tests were administered to a total of 472 participants using questions drawn from Graduate Record…

If you haven't already, you should read this interesting guest post at Olivia Judson's blog: Many of the best-known scientists of our day are men and women exceptionally talented in herding the resources — human and otherwise — required to plan, construct and use big sophisticated facilities. Is that a good thing? The phenomenon is not new: think of Bohr, Rutherford, Bragg - there were many great scientists who were also great administrators. But you also had people who didn't spend much time as administrators, like Einstein, Heisenberg, Feynman, Wheeler, Crick, Lederberg, Delbrück. The…

The economic crisis may actually help science. Cross your fingers - part of the stimulus package is tagged for expansion of the NSF, NIH and other entities. From Science online: House Democratic leaders this morning strongly signaled their support for including research, training, and scientific equipment in a massive economic recovery package being crafted this month. The funding is most likely to come by expanding existing programs at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, and elsewhere that could financially support a lot more…

Here at the University of Reading, the good folks of the Association for Science Education have been holding their annual conference, and RU staff members like myself are invited to participate. The event manifests itself by an exhibition marquee taking up the larger part of our central lawn, and various traders and institutions are plying their wares.  One which caught my eye was a Mobile Science Lab – Data logging & computing in a single product with 65 varieties of probes: humidity, temperature, oxygen for starters.  The brochure describes it as a Student computer with built…

John Hawks discusses how messy the abuse of genetic testing results could get: Imagine a custody battle, in which the father hires a private investigator to get a mother's genome. With two variants that yield a 15 percent higher risk of schizophrenia, will the mother's genetic risk be held against her? Or think of corporate boards, looking for a way to dismiss a CEO without paying that golden parachute. Could a genetic test result showing a higher risk for early Alzheimer's give them a reason to invoke a "health" clause in the contract? Or what about, Hawks asks, "a sitting President, whose…

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) has been launched by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) under the theme, “The Universe, yours to discover”. Thousands of IYA2009 events are described on the national websites, as well as on astronomy2009.org, and a few of the global projects are listed here. The official IYA2009 Opening Ceremony will take place in Paris on 15 and 16 January 2009, and the press is invited to attend. It will feature keynote speakers, including Nobel Laureates, and live…

Across the University of Colorado at Boulder campus students are sharing answers, checking their responses to questions against those of their neighbors and making adjustments to those answers in hopes of earning a better grade. Not surprisingly, the students are getting more answers right. But what may be startling is that professors are encouraging the whole thing. The students aren't cheating, they are learning from each other in a meaningful way, according to Tin Tin Su, an associate professor in the molecular, cellular and developmental biology department. Su is one of a group of CU-…

Clichés are soft.. they leave it to your imagination.  Clichés are hard.. they leave it to your imagination. Embedded in the clichés are stereotypes. A new cliché: "2009 is years-old." P.S. A Happy 2009 to ALL with peace and love.

Well, it's now a merry Christmas for everyone except Nicholas Cage. The U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency (CMA) announced Monday that as of Christmas Eve, 2008, they've completed the destruction of all munitions carrying VX gas in the possession of the U.S. Army. Unfortunately for Mr. Cage, this means that he's far less likely to be called upon to save San Francisco from rockets armed with the deadly gas by breaking into the former prison on Alcatraz Island aided by Sean Connery, as he proved he could do in Micheal Bay's 1996 film, The Rock. Between 1961 and 1969, the U.S. synthesized…