Science Education & Policy

Although they look normal, people suffering from body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) perceive themselves as ugly and disfigured. New imaging research reveals that the brains of people with BDD look normal, but function abnormally when processing visual details. The report in the December Archives of General Psychiatry is the first to demonstrate a biological reason for patients’ distorted body image. “Our discovery suggests that the BDD brain’s hardware is fine, but there’s a glitch in the operating software that prevents patients from seeing themselves as others do,” explained Dr. Jamie Feusner…

Subjects like physics, calculus and biology are challenging for most students, but imagine tackling these topics without being able to see the graphs and figures used to teach them. A new smartpen and paper technology that works with touch and records classroom audio aims to bring these subjects to life for blind students. “Mainstream approaches to teaching STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) courses all rely strongly on diagrams, graphs, charts and other figures, putting students with visual disabilities at a significant disadvantage,” Andy Van Schaack, lecturer in Vanderbilt…

Researchers at Wageningen University, Netherlands, have shown that a drop in atmospheric nitrogen deposition will slow down forest growth. Lower tree growth implies less carbon sequestration and thus a decrease in the sequestration of carbon dioxide. This may have a significant impact on the targets set in the Kyoto protocol. Researcher Wieger Wamelink of Wageningen University showed in model calculations that the carbon sequestration for all forests in The Netherlands, for example, may drop to 27 % of its present value. This reduced sequestration is expected as a result of pollution control…

How a 20-gram rodent conquered the world of science The following is the beginning of my new article in the December Harper's, which is generating a lot of response already. I was asked onto the Colbert Report ( which I declined, much to the chagrin of certain younger members of the family), and I have been called "some sort of PETA" type, (which I am not). To read the whole thing you will have to get the magazine, on newsstands now. It is worth it because you can also see the eery art by Adam Stennett they used with it. This past June, while Americans spun in a daze of war, bad summer…

A study carried out in the Department of Evolutionary and Education Psychology of the University of Granada (UGR) has revealed that Latin American immigrant adolescents are more likely to become infected with HIV than the Spanish, as they use methods of birth control less frequently, start having sex earlier and have more sex partners than Spanish adolescents. In addition, foreigners consume drugs more frequently when having sex with penetration, according to this work. For the performance of this research work, professors Mª Paz Bermúdez Sánchez and Ángel Castro Vázquez used a sample of 218…

It can crush ice sideways and stay precisely on station to an accuracy of one meter. It can drill a hole 1,000 meters deep into the seabed while floating above 5,000 meters of ocean and can generate 55 megawatts of power. So far, Aurora Borealis is the most unusual ship that has never been built, and it represents a floating laboratory for European science, a breakthrough for polar research and a very big headache for international lawyers. Aurora Borealis will be the first ever international ship, the brainchild of the European Science Federation, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and…

Fertilizing the ocean with iron or other nutrients to cause large algal blooms, has been proposed as a possible solution to global warming because the growing algae absorb carbon dioxide but research performed at Stanford and Oregon State Universities and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research suggests that ocean fertilization may not be an effective method of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, this process, which is analogous to adding fertilizer to a lawn to help the grass grow, only reduces carbon dioxide in the atmosphere if the carbon incorporated into the…

Meiosis is a type of cell division that produces cells with only one copy of each chromosome—spores in yeast, and eggs and sperm in higher organisms. During meiosis, chromosome pairs line up in the middle of the cell. The chromosome pairs are then pulled apart, with complete copies of all of the chromosomes ending up at opposite sides of the cell. To ensure that the chromosomes align properly in the middle of the cell, the chromosomes crossover—swap certain sections of genes. Without the crossovers, the chromosomes could misalign and both copies of a chromosome could end up in one cell. When…

It's hard to say when scientists realized that policy makers were not always going to make the best decisions regarding science funding but a safe bet would be somewhere before 3,000 BC. In the intervening 5,000 years, not a lot has changed in how well scientists, politicians and the public really understand each other. A week doesn't go by when there isn't an article lamenting that one project or another doesn't get funding or that one government bureau is over-zealous or too conservative. Scientists learned early that the best way to get the message across to the people who can truly…

Climate change is the largest environmental change expected this century. It is likely to intensify droughts, storms and floods, which will undoubtedly lead to environmental migrations and potential conflicts in the areas migrated to. In the aftermath of environmental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in the US, Rafael Reuveny from Indiana University in the US looks at the role of environmental degradation on population migration, or ‘ecomigration’. He examines its impact on areas receiving migrants and resulting violent conflict in particular. His study has just been published online in…