Science Education & Policy

States that have expanded Medicaid coverage as part of the Affordable Care Act have higher numbers of individuals with disabilities employed that states that did not. Medicaid is a taxpayer-funded program that provides free or low-cost health coverage to low-income people, the elderly, and people with disabilities.  As many states are considering work requirements for Medicaid eligibility, the authors of a new paper believe Medicaid expansion is acting as an employment incentive for people with disabilities. The humanities scholars analyzed data from the nationally representative Health…

Over 25 years ago, members of Congress saw statistics showing that U.S. people with college educations made more money, and they declared that college education should be a right. The solution was indicative of government - change student loans to being unlimited. Are young people all making more money? No, they are buried in debt, but schools that were once foundering are now doing quite well. An entirely industry built up around universities for under-achieving students with money. And on the other end, credentialism came into play. A bachelor's degree became what a high school diploma…

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is made from corn starch whereas sucrose us usually made from sugarcane or beets. Because starch itself is a simple sugar, a chain of glucose molecules joined together, once it's broken down into individual glucose molecules, it's corn syrup, which is essentially 100% glucose. It becomes high-fructose corn syrup when enzymes are added. HFCS is sometimes called isoglucose and is used in the food industry to sweeten processed foods such as soft drinks, creams, cakes, confectionery, yogurts etc. to keep costs lower. It's sweeter than regular sugar because the…

Thousands of lawsuits around the nation claim glyphosate—the active ingredient in Monsanto’s popular weed killer Roundup—causes cancer. These cases are based on pretty much zero evidence, but if trial lawyers can get a jury to accept their false narrative, thousands of more cases may proceed.  The first case to reach trial involves DeWayne Johnson, a former school groundskeeper who applied Roundup to control weeds during his employment from 2012 to 2015. Johnson was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in August 2014, which his case claims is a “direct and proximate result” of his…

A team of psychologists hope to win a battle in the "reading wars," emphasizing the importance of teaching phonics in establishing fundamental reading skills in early childhood.  By synthesizing findings from more than 300 research studies, book chapters, and academic journal articles published across a variety of scientific fields, they hope to create an evidence-based account of how children learn to read.  The "reading wars" are between teachers, parents, and policymakers who champion a phonics-based approach (teaching children the sounds that letters make) and those who support…

Tax and spend politicians and their supporters have begun framing austerity in a negative way. Austerity - spending what you make, or even less so you have a reserve - is now regarded as a negative by people that believe taxes and more government lead to growth, even if those beliefs are what led to their economic collapse. Such is the case in Brazil, which has led the world in defaulting on loans from other countries due to its boom-bust overspending. Now Brazil is once again trying to contain its deficit and is lowering the rates of increases in social spending and groups are concerned by…

In 2009 the U.S. government attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and pledged to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020. To make it happen, the Obama administration directed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to lead the way starting with carbon dioxide (CO2) and that resulted in the Clean Power Plan (CPP) in 2015. While the goal was laudable, no one is in favor of more pollution, it was a blunt instrument because it unfairly penalized fossil fuel power plants in order to provide nearly half the overall reductions the…

Don’t be fooled by those who say the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) sets the gold standard for chemical risk assessments. In addition to a long history of sloppy research, lack of transparency, and low productivity, IRIS suffers from a more fundamental flaw that recent reform efforts are unlikely to resolve. EPA officials created IRIS administratively in 1984 as a research program to provide information on chemical risks that other EPA offices could use for regulatory purposes. IRIS first produced a…

The litigation group Earthjustice, the sue-and-settle arm of Sierra Club, has joined other controversial environmental trial lawyer groups, such as Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Union of Concerned Scientists, in a lawsuit to try and force EPA to keep Obama-era standards that environmental lawyers helped write. The now discarded additional regulations would have further limited carbon dioxide emissions from cars and light trucks for the model years 2022-25. The estimates from 2012 were that the new regulations would reduce…

In 2015, 4,528 "children" - the mean age was 18, pediatricians presenting at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2018 annual meeting today counted children as anyone under age 21 - died from firearm-related injuries. Eighty-seven percent were male and 44 percent were black.  And the pediatricians argue that background checks and thus waiting periods to buy ammunition might help lower those incidents. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has an injury statistics query and reporting system and a group of pediatricians wanted to see if state level laws made a difference. Federal…