Science Education & Policy

California Governor Jerry Brown has sided with the usually-anti-science National Resources Defense Council and vetoed a bill that would have forced factory farms to adhere to US Food and Drug Administration standards. Yes, the governor of California and the NRDC don't want farms to use FDA guidelines. There are two good reasons Governor Brown vetoed it, in defiance of the other advocacy groups that will shriek: The first and most important reason is that most farms are already more strict about antibiotics than FDA guidance is. Most farmers are not using antibiotics without a good reason…

Like a plant that needs the right environment for it to grow healthy and bear fruits, FIER is believed to be more of use in a world that shares its supporting principles and theories.  That is referring to a supportive educational system.  What educational system would that be?The educational system that is deemed supportive of FIER is the one that fosters the following principles: 1.  Learning happens within the learner. It starts from the time the information is received by the senses.  Within the learner, this information is processed, screened or retained, and…

Today and tomorrow I am attending a workshop in Padova titled as per the title above (but it is in Italian). If you know the language and are interested in the topic, there is available live streaming at the workshop's site, here: http://www.scicomm.it/p/pbt-2014.html My contribution will be titled "The researcher who blogs: social value, opportunities, challenges, anathemas". I am speaking tomorrow at 10AM (Rome time zone - it's 1AM in California!). I will post some extract of my slides in the blog later on... The workshop should be interesting, as many reknowned science popularization…

Abortion and teen pregnancy dropped among teens who received free contraception and were educated about the pros and cons of various birth control methods, according to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2008-13, the annual pregnancy rate of teens ages 15-19 in the study averaged 34 per 1,000, compared with 158.5 per 1,000 in 2008 for sexually active U.S. teens. During the five-year span of the study, the average annual birth rate among teens in the study was 19.4 per 1,000, compared with 94 per 1,000 in 2008 for sexually active U.S. teens. The abortion rate among teens…

Norway to the rescue? Credit: Travis Lupick, CC BY-NC-SA By Steffen Böhm, University of Essex and Katharine Rockett, University of Essex Despite all the treaties, pledges, export bans and labeling schemes, the world’s forests are still disappearing at an alarming rate. In poorer countries a forest may simply be worth less as a living, thriving ecosystem than it is as timber and farmland. So if money is a key factor, why not get rich countries to pay poor countries to stop chopping trees? The UN Climate Summit in New York saw major new agreements along these lines. Norway in particular has…

Just don't forget to listen scientists too. Credit: EPA By Toby Miller, Cardiff University Who should political leaders follow when it comes to climate change: environmental scientists, powerful corporations, or a million marchers? Sometimes the three groups disagree, sometimes they concur; but even then, their claims to authority are based on different and frequently conflicting ideas. The recent United Nations climate summit highlighted the confusion over how best to make progress. Gaining agreement on an emissions treaty will require governments of all kinds to pitch in and there are…

The public is not aware of this, but academic science is more like a small business than being part of a vast university structure. An investigator is the business owner and the researchers are independent contractors, augmented by graduate students who go to the school. In that sort of environment, where the life and death of the business is determined by beating other labs for a finite pool of money, while the government spends billions to try and increase the number of competitors who want to be in government-funded academia rather than the private sector, competitive instincts run high.…

The public supports most traffic safety laws. They routinely defy cell phone laws, believing that they should be pulled over for driving recklessly, not for having a cell phone, and they defy speed limits - but nothing like when the onerous national 55 MPH speed limit was forced on society - yet for the most part, road safety laws are obeyed. People stop at stop signs. Yet a new survey shows how to strengthen road laws; quantify the traffic-related injury risks associated with a given law. 2,397 adults were asked about their attitudes toward four types of road-safety laws —mandatory…

Climate March, New York City By Alessandro R Demaio, Harvard University Groundbreaking pledges of funding from the French, 120+ heads of state attending, famous faces calling for greater action and less talk. It’s all happening this week in New York City, where I join the UN Climate Summit. Hosted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon today, it has been a ‘hit the ground running’ week leading up to this unprecedented event - with building expectation (some would say desperation) that this is where we might see major commitments from governments and an uprising of the public in favor of real…

In 1993, Professor John Anthony Allan of King’s College London coined the term "Virtual water" because the term 'embedded water' "did not capture the attention of the water managing community" and he wanted to create a metaphor to talk about why the long-predicted water wars have still not happened. The mid-east, among the most water-scarce places on earth, fight over everything except water. After Allan coined it, a lot of water activists began to create models where it should be valid, so we got strange claims like that it takes 140 liters of water to make a cup of coffee. Invalid or not,…