Science Education & Policy

What happens when thousands of scientists do decades of research and taxpayers spend spend $15 billion on a scientifically validated site for nuclear waste storage but those science conclusions conflict with the anti-science beliefs of a president and his key ally in the Senate? The Scientization of Politics happens, that's what. Scientization of Politics is the flipside of the more commonly known Politicization of Science. Politicization of Science is obvious - as the federal government in America has taken more control of science funding they have taken more control of the nature of…

This is a video from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 200th anniversary celebration. You'll need to start at minute 17 unless you are strong in northern European languages and want a musical interlude (which is actually quite civilized). The basic gist made by Professor Louise Fresco is that without science progress, we would not be thriving in food production, we would have the apocalyptic scenario predicted by Doomsday prophet and Obama Science Czar Dr. John Holdren in the 1960s and beyond. Modern Europeans, who are now incredibly anti-science, have clearly benefited the most from…

The moribund western economy has not doomed global health care just yet. Donations to health projects in developing countries are holding steady, according to a new paper from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.  After reaching a historic high during the Bush presidency and with previous commitments allowing it to climb to $28.2 billion by 2010, developing nation health funding dropped in 2011 and stabilized in 2012, say the findings announced today at the Center for Global Development and published online as part of the fourth annual…

Medical research is both derided and essential.  The public complains that a new experimental drug is not available due to the FDA being too conservative while also complaining that drugs have too many side effects and companies should be sued over the lack of proper testing before release. In popular television, every show that has a character who enrolls in a medical research trial develops giant boils and body tics, it is a humor standby to show that medical research is only done by the economically desperate. In research itself, scientists trust other scientists little and they trust…

President Obama has awarded 12 researchers the National Medal of Science. 11 inventors also received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Those are the highest government honors bestowed upon scientists, engineers and inventors. This year's event marks the 50th presentation of the National Medals of Science, first awarded in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy.   The recipients received their awards at a White House ceremony. The president spoke of the importance of "lending a hand" to promising scientists and engineers so that they may pursue research and contribute to their…

Professor Steven Chu, who was appointed Energy Secretary under as much optimism as can be imagined in late 2008, has officially resigned, a move everyone knew was coming. Except for his irrational CO2 fanaticism - an energy Nobel laureate who takes a job in the cabinet has to know we can't just cut off CO2, the way an academic working at a national lab can talk about it - Chu was a much safer choice than the UFO believers and Doomsday prophets the Obama administration was determined to hire after his victory in November of that year. Yet he ended up not doing much at all to advance America's…

The alternate medicine industry is about to be dealt a massive blow. Progressive Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has decided not to run for re-election in 2014. What does that mean?  His political stonewalling of NIH studies that debunk pseudoscience woo can now come to an end. And hopefully someone at the NIH who cares more about science than politics can scuttle the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which has been his pet crackpot project that all Americans have bankrolled to the tune of billions of dollars since 1998. So if you are trying to study whether or not "the…

In the United States, billions of dollars have been spent on marketing to convince people to go into science careers, despite the difficulty many PhDs will have finding jobs in academia. That, coupled with the fact that efforts are on to make funding more 'equal' and establish quotas for young researchers, minorities and female grant applicants means a finite funding pool could be even more limited. The best and brightest, regardless of demographics, could end up leaving to other countries where science is more of a meritocracy. Despite that, the BrightFocus Foundation says more federal…

Antidepressant prescriptions in the UK increased by 9.6% in 2011, to 46 million prescriptions. Since that is for a total of only 63 million people in the last census, a lot of whom are children, the antidepressant prescription total is quite high. But does that reflect over-medication or appropriate treatment for better diagnoses?  Glasgow GP, Dr. Des Spence, writes in BMJ that "we use antidepressants too easily, for too long, and that they are effective for few people (if at all)" and acknowledges that depression is an important illness but argues that the current definition of…

In Europe, where over 19 million students are in tertiary education, they are looking for ways to improve the teaching skills of scientists in order to teach more effectively the next generation of innovators.  It would seem obvious that reducing the anti-science mentality of the culture would be the obvious step but the sociologists argue instead that the position of 'teacher researcher' should be created under the social sciences banner. The new position paper, 'The Professionalisation of Academics as Teachers in Higher Education', published today by the European Science Foundation,…