Science Education & Policy

Throughout the 1990s, environmentalists insisted that ethanol was the wave of our energy future. Vice-President Al Gore even famously broke a tie in the Senate to allow the Environmental Protection Agency to push its use. In reality, ethanol was just the latest poster child for 'anything but oil' activists who flit from random belief to fundraising belief, since evidence and research are not required. (1)  They likely only realized something must be horribly wrong with ethanol when a Republican Congress and a Republican president finally caved into their green initiative - and it became…

New research from the University of Washington Information School and Harvard University, followed 20 years of student creative writing and visual artworks and finds that the dynamics of creativity are changing. They wanted to find out if creativity was in decline and found instead that some aspects of creativity — such as visual arts — have been rising over the years, while other aspects, such as creative writing, could be declining.  Katie Davis, UW assistant professor, and fellow researchers studied 354 examples of visual art and 50 examples of creative writing by teenagers published…

Can you have a real climate treaty when the world's largest polluter says it is a developing nation and can't be bound by emissions obligations?  Add in India and Mexico as exemptions and there is a reason why CO2 emissions have continued to climb while the US and western nations have jeopardized their economies to reduce them; the emissions have come with either a high replacement cost or the manufacturing has just been outsourced to countries that have no obligation to reduce CO2. Optimization is dwindling and estimates can only accomplish so much so the so-called Durban Platform…

In the first decade of the 21st century, blogging really took off. In America, it was embraced by the technologically progressive left and therefore immediately exploited as a marketing tool against the right. Every anti-science position adopted by the politicians on the right was immediately spun as a crisis of a kind never seen before. A few school districts didn't accept evolution? Republicans nationwide were deemed anti-science, even though a scant few percentage points separated them from Democrats regarding evolution acceptance. Didn't buy into global warming effect estimates from 2001…

In the 1990s, the US administration decided the best way to protect wages for American workers was by making it very difficult for those pesky foreign science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates living here to get work visas. Student visas remained easy to get, it was okay to spend money to live in the US, but getting paid was a no-no. Result: America trained a lot of foreign Ph.D.s who then wanted to remain in the US but were instead forced to return home and become competitors. It was American nationalism coupled with warmed-over 1930s protectionism. Since that time, the…

Online course platforms are good for easier topics, like manufacturing or history, but they only provide a sort of "X For Dummies" way to get overview knowledge of science (still, free is hard to complain about) but Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is trying to do what Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare or iTunes U and even Phet Interactive Simulations cannot - let students interact with a real physical experiment. The U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has developed software for an experiment that can be observed and controlled from anywhere in the world.…

In the summer of 2012 I wrote Celiac: The Trendy Disease For Rich White People, which annoyed a few people with celiac disease but a whole bunch of people who had latched onto a fad and craved medical or scientific legitimacy in doing so. That article had been building for years but now everyone has caught on. Gluten-free is suddenly a $5 billion business and it has snowballed to a point where gluten-free labels are creating people who are worried about gluten because of so many gluten-free labels - the tail wags the dog. The newfound array of choices are, as I noted then, terrific for celiac…

Late nights are not great for most people and especially roe children, according to a new paper. Teenagers who go to bed late during the school year are more prone to academic and emotional difficulties in the long run, compared to their earlier-to-bed counterparts. The scholars analyzed longitudinal data from a nationally representative cohort of 2,700 U.S. adolescents of whom 30 percent reported bedtimes later than 11:30 p.m. on school days and 1:30 a.m. in the summer in their middle and high school years. By the time they graduated from high school, the school-year night owls had…

I-522, the initiative in Washington state that would have required special labels for foods that are genetically modified (a gene has been transferred from another organism to express a natural trait), has been defeated, making two high-profile defeats in a row for detractors of science who were trying to accomplish through legislation what they could not do in the marketplace. A similar California initiative lost last year. When even voters in states that are squeamish about science, like California and Washington, won't agree that genetically modified food deserves warning labels, there is…

There's a little-known dirty secret in science funding; prior to World War II and the Manhattan Project, the overwhelming majority of basic research was done by corporations. Thus, the tanks, planes, materials advancements and everything else were created by the private sector. With the runaway success of the nuclear bomb, the government moved next to space travel, and though that was still primarily government contractors the perception was that 'the government' did it.(1) Werner von Braun and all that. From that point on, federal government control of academic research has been solid. When…