Science Education & Policy

Kakadu National Park, Australia. Rita Willaert/Flickr, CC BY-NC By Bob Pressey, James Cook University and Euan Ritchie, Deakin University While we can never know for sure, an extraordinary number of animals and plants are threatened with extinction — up to a third of all mammals and over a tenth of all birds. And the problem is getting worse. At the same time, we have more land and sea than ever in protected areas (“parks”) — more than 200,000 protected areas covering about 15% of the world’s land area and 3% of the oceans. So why are protected areas making so little difference? This is a…

Blaming 'Jordan syndrome' doesn't really cut it. British celebrity Katie Price (R) on the red carpet before the start of the Vienna State Opera Ball in Vienna, Austria, 11 February 2010. Robert Jaeger/EPA By Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, University of Leicester Our obsession with women’s weight and attractiveness manifests in different ways in the media, including being sold images that are far removed from reality and often impossible to achieve, or focusing on women’s looks rather then their achievements. Overblown ‘plus-size’. Calvin Klein The pressure to represent more realistic images…

The Drax plant in Yorkshire. Gareth Davies, CC BY By Richard Tol, University of Sussex Winter is coming. And the UK has a real chance of brownouts or even blackouts from lack of power. The long predicted capacity crunch in electric power generation is likely to hit us earlier than expected after the fires in Didcot, Ironbridge and Ferrybridge power stations, and the discovery of cracks at Hartlepool and Heysham nuclear plants. But there are structural problems in both senses of the word and a serious and powerful regulator needs to unpick a policy tangle if we are to make sure the nation’s…

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Gavin Andrew Stewart, CC BY By Arnaud Chevalier, Royal Holloway and Olivier Marie, Maastricht University Germany and the rest of Europe are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the associated communist regimes in Eastern Europe. This event had colossal repercussions in the economic development of the region but also, and maybe less obviously, on its demography. Following the collapse of the Communist regimes, fertility in Eastern Europe went into a sharp decline. This was especially marked in East Germany which over a…

If graduates are helped along through school, how will they cope in the workforce? Shutterstock By Rachael Sharman, University of the Sunshine Coast A research center in the UK recently found that lavishing praise on students, particularly low-attaining students, may be counter-productive. By providing a no-fail, no-consequences environment in which the top priority is to make everybody feel good about themselves, we are doing little more than setting young people up to fail. It would appear our modern education systems have delivered us not only a backslide of Australian student rankings,…

As both a word and an idea, 'medieval' carries centuries of connotation of a murky and brutal pre-scientific age. Swanson Scott/US Fish&Wildlife Service  By Louise D'Arcens, University of Wollongong and Clare Monagle, Monash University “Medieval” has become the accusation du jour in Australian domestic politics, used with equal conviction across the spectrum to discredit opponents’ views. One debate where this accusation has taken center-stage is over Australia’s response to human-induced climate change. The government’s abolition of carbon pricing, the position of science minister…

It has slowly dawned on climate researchers that promoting the belief that curbing CO2 will prevent climate change has been a bad idea. American and European CO2 emissions have gone down, for example, but Asia's has risen, and we went beyond the 'point of no return' and not much has changed. It was once the case that any mention of other climate-forcing gases got vitriol and hostile emails but now it is recognized that soot particles also contribute to global warming, along with methane. They just disappear quickly from the atmosphere. Short-lived climate pollutants (also known as Short…

If one believes the backers of mandatory labeling initiatives in Colorado and Oregon, Tuesday’s vote is simple common sense: It’s about the “right to know” what’s in our food. This is the beguiling message pushed by a myriad of activists linked to such organizations as Right to Know GMO, Label GMOs and Just Label It. It’s powerful and superficially persuasive. “To be clear the Just Label campaign is not an anti-GMO effort,” says Gary Hirshberg, founder of organic food maker Stonyfield Organic, and director of Just Label It. After all, what but a conspiracy of the federal government and…

Improved behavior and learning in the classroom by primary school students can be achieved in just for minutes according to new research by Brendon Gurd.  Since the education industry needs to buy something, they can put a "FUNterval" in the budget - an outline or a book or a DVD explaining how to do high-intensity interval exercise for Grade 2 and Grade 4 students. A recent pilot study found it reduced behaviors like fidgeting or inattentiveness in the classroom.  For the study, students were taught a class and were then given an active break, where they would perform a FUNterval,…

The IPCC is clear on the dangers of fossil fuels. Pete Markham, CC BY-SA By Simon Buckle, Imperial College London The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is set to publish the “synthesis report” of its fifth assessment period, drawing on three individual working group reports already published on: the physical science of climate change; climate impacts and adaptation; and mitigation, or how to reduce emissions or enhance the natural uptake of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The latest report is the first collective assessment of climate change by governments since the 2007 report,…