Science & Society

Word-of-mouth marketing is recognized as a powerful route from long-tail sales to blockbuster and in the age of social media and online networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, spreading the word could mean the difference between consumers seeing a product as the best thing since sliced bread or the most rotten of tomatoes. It can also sell a lot of tickets even if the film is bad, as "Snakes On A Plane" showed. Chong Oh, Assistant Professor of Computer Information Systems at Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA, has analyzed social media measures from the well-known…

It's easy to complain about child obesity but one way to help solve it is to have kids do more exercise in ways that don't feel like exercise; like walking or biking to school. Yet parents, the people most likely to be concerned about child health, are the biggest obstacle to letting kids walk or bike to school, according to research led at the University of Strathclyde.  The study of children's habits in commuting to and from school discovered that, in the vast majority of cases, parents were the main decision makers in how the children traveled. Colder weather in autumn and winter…

An Apple Orchard In Bloom There is an interesting new "GMO" apple nearing approval in the US and in Canada called the "Arctic Apple."It was developed by a British Columbia grower-based organization called Okanagan Specialty Fruit. Certain genes in these apples are turned off so that the fruit doesn't express the enzymes that make the apples turn brown after cutting. You could slice the apples, put them in your lunch or your kid's lunch, and they would still have full flavor, vitamins, and color when it was time to eat them. I think this is a useful, consumer-oriented trait.Predictably, there…

After reaching a high-water mark in 2006, when media talking points were portrayed by journalists as settled science prior to the actual IPCC reports in 2007, people have steadily lost interest in climate change since then. There is an upside to that. Scandals like ClimateGate didn't damage public support. The bad thing remains that all of the new evidence for climate change isn't helping either. The public in the middle is simply numb and then people on the sides are entrenched. In order to do more than move the public a little, climate scientists need to reexamine how to effectively and…

Oil and gas development from shale fields leads to high-paying jobs and a boost to property taxes, sales taxes and state-collected severance taxes or fees. Do they outweigh the increased costs related to road damage heavy truck traffic, water and sewer service expansion, government staffing and other needs brought on by rapid population growth? An analysis of data from communities surrounding 10 oil and gas "plays" from September 2013 through February 2014, in Arkansas, Colorado, Louisiana, Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming found that the net impact of recent oil and…

Friends of the Earth, most famous for being against nuclear energy and every other bit of modern science and technology, now thinks most scientists are unethical - unless they are hand-picked by Friends Of The Earth. The first-ever Congressional subcommittee hearing on pollinator health, the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Horticulture, Research, Biotechnology and Foreign Agriculture, held a few weeks ago, failed to include "independent" scientists who would properly rant about neonicotinoid pesticides. In modern culture, where all chemicals are bad and all corporations are bad and so…

Did you cheer when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks made the news but boo when Snowden showed the NSA is spying on American citizens? Are you boycotting NASA because of an espionage-prevention rule that is keeping Chinese nationals from conferences at government facilities? I know how you vote. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/05/us-scientists-boycott-nas...

http://nypost.com/2013/10/08/us-adults-are-dumber-than-the-average-human/ The study, called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, found that it was easier on average to overcome this and other barriers to literacy overseas than in the United States. Researchers tested about 166,000 people ages 16 to 65 in more than 20 countries and subnational regions. The test was developed and released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is made up of mostly industrialized member countries. The Education Department’s Center for Education…

two Representative are Republicans - Richard Hanna and George Miller (but he is a Californian, so pretty much a Democrat) Sen. Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat, he is an Independent Democrat-Socialist, so even more Democrat than Democrats. 45 U.S. representatives and 10 U.S. senators signed a letter to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg in support of a legal petition that asks the FDA to require labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods. http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/03/55-congress-members-ask-fda-to-la… "The use of novel food technologies like genetic…

In Science Left Behind, I made what seemed to be an obvious point to everyone outside science journalism - but to very few in it: do not defend science. Science does not need defending. So if you started writing about science because you wanted to stick it to Republicans/climate change deniers/skeptics/(insert whatever term you want here), you are already not doing journalism, and you are not even doing science outreach.  Because you have already lost the ability to be a trusted guide for the public. They are smarter than you think. Now, sometimes you do have to call it like it is.…