Science Education & Policy

Several of the world’s most eminent health scientists and organizations today publish a landmark global consensus on the 20 foremost measures needed to curb humanity’s most fatal diseases, their study featured in Nature magazine. Known as chronic, non-communicable diseases, they are reaching world epidemic proportions and include cardiovascular diseases (mainly heart disease and stroke), several cancers, chronic respiratory conditions, and type 2 diabetes. In their paper for Nature, the 19 authors (list appended) say chronic non-communicable diseases: - Cause the greatest share of death and…

Call for adequate initial system to produce insights, forecasts useful to public, policy makers Speedy diagnosis of the temper and vital signs of the oceans matters increasingly to the well being of humanity, says a distinguished partnership of international scientists urging support to complete a world marine monitoring system within 10 years. The Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans (POGO) says warming seas, over-fishing and pollution are among profound concerns that must be better measured to help society respond in a well-informed, timely and cost-effective way. “A system for…

There has recently been a huge growth in transnational English language television channels, with the launch in the UK of Al Jazeera English, Press TV (Iran), CCTV9 (China), France 24 and Russia Today. These join existing channels such as CNN International, Voice of America and BBC World TV. But what are the purposes of these channels? Who are they for and who is watching them? Do they constitute a global group of English speaking nations, an ‘Anglosphere’? These were some of the questions debated by media professionals and academics at a workshop, sponsored by the Economic and Social…

To derive embryonic stem cells, it is necessary to remove critical cells from an embryo, resulting in its destruction. That triggers opposition from right-to-life critics of the research, who cite moral and ethical concerns. The research has also generated opposition from some members of the women's movement who object the use of stimulating drugs in women who agree to donate eggs for cloning research aimed at creating specialized embryonic stem cell lines. Recent research has the potential to render both of those objections moot, since it showed that introducing four genes into cells…

At MIT economist says U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could grow more quickly in the next 50 years than in the previous half-century and technological advances could hurt rather than help. The paper by Professor Emeritus Richard Eckaus of the MIT Department of Economics and his co-author, Ian Sue Wing, of Boston University, "The Implications of the Historical Decline in U.S. Energy Intensity for Long-Run CO2 Emission Projections," was published in the November issue of Energy Policy. In it, the pair portray the changing interplay among technology, energy use and CO2 emissions based on a…

New research from Northwestern University finds that college students’ choice of social networking sites -- including Facebook, MySpace and Xanga -- is related to their race, ethnicity and parents’ education. The findings challenge discourse about the democratic nature of online interaction and fly in the face of conventional wisdom suggesting that all college students communicate via Facebook, the popular social networking site (SNS) launched in 2004 by a Harvard undergraduate. “That race, ethnicity and the education level of one’s parents can predict which social network sites a student…

Traditional roles of women in the home and a negative bias in workplace support result in less career success for women versus men at the same stage of their research careers, determined researchers at the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in a study appearing in the November 2007 issue of EMBO reports. Despite the fact that more than half the European student population is female, women hold less then 15% of full professorships in Europe, according to the She Figures 2006 from the European Commission. While the percentage of female university graduates and PhD holders has…

MIT scientists have devised remotely controlled nanoparticles that, when pulsed with an electromagnetic field, release drugs to attack tumors. The innovation, reported in the Nov. 15 online issue of Advanced Materials, could lead to the improved diagnosis and targeted treatment of cancer. In earlier work the team, led by Sangeeta Bhatia, M.D.,Ph.D., an associate professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology (HST) and in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, developed injectable multi-functional nanoparticles designed to flow through the…

Previous studies have shown that when a drug study was funded by the company that made that drug, the results might be biased in favor of that drug. New research published in the British Medical Journal shows that, at least for blood pressure drugs, studies are now much less likely to have biased results but still tend to have overly positive conclusions favoring the company's products. The authors call on editors and peer reviewers to scrutinize the conclusions of these studies to ensure that they contain an unbiased interpretation of the results. Meta-analyses represent the highest level…

Research announced this week by a team of U.S. and Japanese geoscientists may help explain why part of the seafloor near the southwest coast of Japan is particularly good at generating devastating tsunamis, such as the 1944 Tonankai event, which killed at least 1,200 people. The findings will help scientists assess the risk of giant tsunamis in other regions of the world. Geoscientists from The University of Texas at Austin and colleagues used a commercial ship to collect three-dimensional seismic data that reveals the structure of Earth’s crust below a region of the Pacific seafloor known as…