Science & Society

Though perception is that academia is harder on women when it comes to career and families, and they need to adopt a more corporate approach to penalize mothers less, it isn't just women; one third of men in academic science scale back their careers to focus on family life, according to surveys. University labs share a lot of culture with the corporate world - just tinier. A lab is like a small business, with just a few employees and in the midst an ongoing effort to stay in business, so the loss of any person is devastating. When a parent needs to scale back, there is no one to take up…

It's uncommon for there to be reanalyses of data from randomized clinical trials (RCTs) - once a product has failed, it isn't smart to keep putting more money into it. Some critics insist that patients should have access to failed trial data and complain that only successful trials get published, but that thinking is simplistic anti-pharmaceutical posturing. Accessibility to raw data by people at universities or in advocacy groups who are just looking for problems risk trial patient confidentiality, along with the more likely inappropriate use of data sets, resulting in spurious findings. The…

Like most young people, the first job is not the best job and they will often leave when a better opportunity comes along.  There is strong demand for nurses so it's no surprise that there is turnover among young ones. Once they prove they can do the job, hospitals and practices are going to recruit them and pay higher salaries, because they are not paying training costs. A study in the current issue of Policy, Politics&Nursing Practice reveals that an estimated 17.5 percent of newly-licensed RNs leave their first nursing job within the first year and one in three (33.5%) leave…

Before they reach young adulthood, many children in the United States will experience their parents separating, divorcing, finding another partner or getting remarried.  When families change structure, it is more common for children to exhibit behavior problems, such as aggression and defiance, and a new psychology paper say that behavior problems in children increased in high-income families most, and that children's age also played a part in their likelihood of having behavior problems. Moving from a single-parent family into a step-parent family then improved children's behavior in…

A Ripper murder, Illustrated Police news, c. 1888. By Rosalind Crone, The Open University A panic erupted in Britain 126 years ago. At daybreak on Saturday September 8, the mutilated body of Annie Chapman, a prostitute, had been found in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Her injuries and the removal of some of her abdominal organs led investigators and journalists to link Chapman’s murder with that of another woman, only a week earlier. The publication of graphic details of the murder together with claims that an anonymous serial killer was stalking the streets at night in…

If depictions of animals in ancient Egyptian artifacts are an accurate climate record, they have helped scholars assemble a detailed record of the large mammals that lived in the Nile Valley over the past 6,000 years. They then determined that species extinctions, probably caused by a drying climate and growing human population, made the ecosystem progressively less stable.  In their PNAS paper, they say that local extinctions of mammal species led to a steady decline in the stability of the animal communities in the Nile Valley. When there were many species in the community, the loss…

Dora grows up. Credit: Lisa West Photography, CC BY-NC-ND By Bruce Fuller, University of California, Berkeley It may take a budding Latina tween with warm dark eyes and undaunted courage to ready America’s children for our multicultural future. After dominating children’s television for a decade the heroine most watched by preschoolers – Dora the Explorer – has blossomed into a precocious young ten year old, starring in Dora and Friends – Into the City, which premiered last month in the US. Yet while Dora’s evolution may be another money-spinner for the show’s giant corporate parent, Viacom,…

Critical mass of editors could help solve the puzzle.Credit: bastique, CC BY-SA By Mark Graham, University of Oxford The geography of knowledge has always been uneven. Some people and places have always been more visible and had more voices than others. But the Internet seemed to promise something different: a greater diversity of voices, opinions and narratives from more places. Unfortunately, this has not come to pass in quite the manner some expected it to. Many parts of the world remain invisible or under-represented on important websites and services. All of this matters because as…

Scientists can be victims of sexual abuse from their peers just as in any institution. Credit: Minerva Studio By Margaret C. Hardy, The University of Queensland The life sciences have come under fire recently with a study published in PLOS ONE that investigated the level of sexual harassment and sexual assault of trainees in academic fieldwork environments. The study found 71% of women and 41% of men respondents experienced sexual harassment, while 26% of women and 6% of men reported experiencing sexual assault. The research team also found that within the hierarchy of academic field sites…

The hijab isn't a symbol of oppression for many women. Credit: diegofornero, CC BY-NC-SA By Pina Sadar, Durham University Terrorism, oppression, fundamentalism and victimhood are only a few of the buzzwords that inevitably accompany discussions about Islamic headgear. From burqa-bans to atrocities against women in some Islamic countries, the veil is frequently framed as a piece of cloth imposed on an individual by her religion and culture. But beyond the oft-peddled static images of oppressed and depressed Muslim women, the reality is far more dynamic. In multicultural Britain in particular,…