Science Education & Policy

Bella Abramovna Subbotovskaya is a little-known heroine of 20th century mathematics who died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 44. She was a mathematician who founded the "Jewish People's University" to help talented young Jews who had been prevented from studying mathematics due to the anti-Semitic policies of the Soviet government. During the 1970s and 1980s, Jewish students in the Soviet Union were routinely denied admission to advanced study in many institutions of higher education. In mathematics, one of the best places for advanced study in mathematics was---and still is---…

Although current teacher training programs generally omit the science of how we learn, an overwhelming number of the teachers surveyed by the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) felt neuroscience could make an important contribution in key educational areas. Dr Sue Pickering and Dr Paul Howard-Jones, at Bristol University's Graduate School of Education, asked teachers and other education professionals whether they thought it was important to consider the workings of the brain in educational practice. Around 87 per cent of…

Cultural mind games or good science? The first openly gay male high school sports coach in the US is now a sociologist in England, where European football rules the sports pages, and has done a study concludng that a lot of former American football players are not necessarily gay, but they have had sex with other men anyway. And they're now cheerleaders. “The evidence supports my assertion that homophobia is on the rapid decline among male teamsport athletes in North America at all levels of play,” writes Dr. Eric Anderson, of the University of Bath in his study, ‘Being masculine is not…

The Flynn Effect is the steady improvement in IQ scores over the last 50 years or so in many places. It was documented by James Flynn, a professor of moral and political philosophy at the University of Otago. Flynn gave a talk at Berkeley recently. I asked him how the Flynn Effect came to be. Flynn finished college at the University of Chicago in one year (lots of advanced placement) and went on to get a Ph.D. at the same school. His first job was at Eastern Kentucky University. It was during the Korean War; better schools were afraid he’d be drafted. He lost that job because of his CORE (…

Dr. Vernon Grose, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board shares many of my interests, including, but certainly not limited to the TWA Flight 800 disaster. Dr. Grose has recently published his long time coming book, "Science but Not Scientists," published at last after a 30-year delay. The book includes a foreword by none other than Dr. Wernher von Braun, father of America’s space program. In Science but Not Scientists, Vern Grose tells the story of a high-stakes battle over California public policy on science education. Self-characterized as a most unlikely person to…

Ancient DNA retrieved from the bones of two Neanderthals suggests that at least some of them had red hair and pale skin, scientists report this week in the journal Science. The international team says that Neanderthals' pigmentation may even have been as varied as that of modern humans, and that at least 1 percent of Neanderthals were likely redheads. The scientists -- led by Holger Römpler of Harvard University and the University of Leipzig, Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona, and Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig --…

Before political science existed as a discipline it was assumed all countries wanted the same thing; land and security. The Industrial Revolution brought a new focus on strategic resources. In the late 1800s America was already producing more strategic resources than anyone and in World War 2 the USA asserted its industrial might geopolitically. In the post-World War Two era the American focus as a superpower was on ideology and trade. Since that time, the recurring question has been 'who's next?' Rome fell from power, as did Mongolia and Great Britain. America would fall too, it was said…

Thousands of high school students are currently deliberating over which university to attend next year. But which are the best? A study published in the open access journal BMC Medicine warns against using international rankings of universities to answer this question. They are misleading and should be abandoned, the study concludes. The study focuses on the published 2006 rankings of the Times Higher Education Supplement "World University Rankings" and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University "Academic Ranking of World Universities". It found that only 133 institutions were shared between the top-…

A topic often left out of discussions about the promise of personalized medicine that science and society offers for the future is whether or not ordinary people want that extra responsibility. Does everyone want to know if they are susceptible to certain diseases? A two-day showcase called Genomics and Society: Today’s Answers, Tomorrow’s Questions – is taking place in London on Thursday 25 and Friday 26 October 2007. This gathering brings together policymakers, researchers and natural scientists with what is becoming the world’s largest concentration of social scientific research in this…

Much of today’s conservation strategies focus on “charismatic mega fauna” such as pandas, tigers, and whales or on vascular plants such as giant redwoods and orchids. Ricardo Rozzi (University of North Texas and Universidad de Chile) and colleagues from Chile are pushing for the integration of other less conspicuous but not less important organisms in regional biological inventories. When it comes to conservation and understanding biodiversity, a biome or regional approach to identify suitable ecosystem indicator groups can be more useful than a set of global indicator species. This, say the…