Science Education & Policy

During the past two decades, China has been rapidly changing from a mostly agrarian environment of food production and consumption to a more urban environment typically found in Western industrialized societies. This means transitioning from a simple diet mainly comprised of a few locally-produced plant-based foods to a diet comprised of significantly more animal-based foods. Such a poor-to-rich transition leads to more food variety, more food availability (i.e., more calories), more total and animal-based protein and more total fat. It also means less dietary fiber and antioxidants,…

As policy makers debate what levels of ozone in the air are safe for humans to breathe, studies in mice are revealing that the inhaled pollutant impairs the body’s first line of defense, making it more susceptible to subsequent foreign invaders, such as bacteria. While it has long been known that exposure to ozone, a major component of urban air pollution, is associated with increased cardiovascular and pulmonary hospitalizations and deaths, the actual mechanisms involved remain unclear. New studies by Duke University Medical Center pulmonary researchers on the effects of ozone on the innate…

Women have multiple options for preventing pregnancy but men have only two - vasectomy, which is usually permanent, and condoms, which can become tiresome in long-term relationships. For decades, pundits have predicted new contraceptives for men within the next 5 to 10 years but new technology at the second "Future of Male Contraception" conference says new solutions may finally be close: a) Researchers from the University of Washington used testosterone gel, which is marketed for men with low testosterone, plus a progestin shot used as a female contraceptive under the name "DepoProvera." The…

  Recently, I have been struck by the number of anniversaries of significant events that have been acknowledged this year.  This past summer was the 40th anniversary of the “Summer of Love”.  August was the 60th anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan.  This week marked the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of public schools in Little Rock Arkansas.  This year is also the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain.  Next week is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik.  All of these events were very…

Contrary to arguments by critics, a University of Utah-led study found that legalizing physician-assisted suicide in Oregon and the Netherlands did not result in a disproportionate number of deaths among the elderly, poor, women, minorities, uninsured, minors, chronically ill, less educated or psychiatric patients. Of 10 “vulnerable groups” examined in the study, only AIDS patients used doctor-assisted suicide at elevated rates. “Fears about the impact on vulnerable people have dominated debate about physician-assisted suicide. We find no evidence to support those fears where this practice…

The Model Institutions for Excellence Program (MIE) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has developed a body of work over the past 11 years demonstrating successful strategies for recruiting underrepresented minority students to science and engineering fields and supporting their successful completion of science degrees. Five minority-serving institutions--Bowie State University in Maryland, Spelman College in Atlanta, Universidad Metropolitana in Puerto Rico, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Xavier University of…

Melting icecaps and ‘climate chaos’ have put climate change at the top of the agenda for the UN General Assembly’s meeting this week. The meeting is a precursor to the November meeting in Bali where leaders will try to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. A new Institute of Physics’ (IOP) report, Climate change prediction: A robust or flawed process?, published today reveals that while there is general consensus on the underlying causes of the changes in our atmosphere, there is not unanimity. World leaders have been influenced by one very important document that drew its conclusions…

Several times over the past century, scientists and environmental engineers have proposed spreading slurries of dissolved iron into the oceans in order to “fertilize” the waters and promote vast blooms of marine plants (phytoplankton). Phytoplankton consume carbon dioxide as they grow, and this growth can be stimulated in certain ocean basins by the addition of iron, a necessary micronutrient. Though common on land, dissolved iron is often rare in the ocean. Some researchers and commercial interests have recently proposed to provide that missing nutrient on a large scale in order to create…

Today we can print documents from anywhere using protocols and techniques unknown 20 years ago. I can send them from my phone to my printer in seconds. But 'printing' solid objects, like a piece of sports equipment or a kitchen utensil, or even a prototype car design for wind tunnel tests could also be in the works soon. It just needs that always vague, always essential "killer app." Such technology already exists and is maturing rapidly so that high-tech designers and others can share solid designs almost as quickly as sending a fax. The systems available are based on bath of liquid…

Researchers from Duke University and the University of Cambridge think they can "shock the foundation of general relativity," according to Arlie Petters, a Duke professor of mathematics, by determining whether some black holes are not actually black. Finding such an unmasked form of what physicists term a singularity "would show that nature has surprises even weirder than black holes," Petters added. Albert Einstein originally theorized that stars bigger than the sun can collapse and compress into singularities, entities so confining and massively dense that the laws of physics break down…