Science & Society

Lower incomes are associated with higher obesity, though lower income in America is very much a relative term. Poor and minority kids lead the country in bedroom television ownership, so being poor in the US is not the same as in other countries. Native Americans have an advantage over other countries too; they can open casinos even when they would otherwise be illegal. Most communities are concerned about crime and other issues related to gambling but a new paper in JAMA finds that the opening or expansion of a casino in a community is associated with increased family income, decreased…

Two analyses examined issues of sexual orientation and intimate partner violence, including its impact on substance abuse and physical and mental health. The first study found that homosexuals and bisexuals were more likely to be involved in intimate partner violence. In the second study, homosexual or bisexual victims of intimate partner violence were more likely to use drugs and alcohol and have health issues compared to heterosexual victims. They found the was risk compounded if one of the couple had experienced abuse as a child. Homosexuals and bisexuals had 36 percent more likelihood…

If you as a farmer have a choice between growing food that can feed lots of people or diverse food that can feed only a few, the answer will be obvious. As science has discovered that certain varietals will have better yields, it is no surprise that people want to adopt them. Food security, and meeting other basic needs, allows people to pursue wealth, both the economic and cultural kind. The ability to grow staples like wheat, maize and soybean has meant fewer people than ever are starving, and numerous countries are ahead of UN goals in having food security, but some worry that this…

When it comes to demographics and society, no one likes surveys and statistics that make them look less positive. Yet surveys and statistics are all we have to go by in order to know if people are treating each other the way they expect to be treated in turn. In society, there is a belief that women will be more cooperative than men. In academia, that is not the case, according to a paper in Current Biology. Instead, women in academia are less likely to cooperate than men. The findings are based on an analysis of the publication records of professors working at 50 North American universities.…

Recent research has shown an alarming number of peer-reviewed papers are irreproducible and it isn't just social sciences surveys or weak observational studies. It's in fields like biology. The ability to duplicate an experiment and its results is a central tenet of the scientific method but it is getting harder to require. Sometimes because the experiments are not easy to reproduce - it took $10 billion to find the Higgs boson - but perhaps also because it isn't stressed enough in culture. There is something to that. As we have seen with SCIgen just writing papers based on a computer…

In times of easy access to the Internet and cheap travel, we consider ourselves part of a global society, but how connected this really makes us will surprise many of us. A Portuguese research group has found that social networks are allowing us to influence people everywhere, and not only those that we know, but also people that we never or will ever meet, which is nothing short of extraordinary.  Flávio Pinheiro, Jorge Pacheco and colleagues were studying the recently proposed “3-degrees of influence” rule - which suggests that we can influence not only the behavior of our friends,…

Numerous studies have concluded that children who were breastfed score higher on IQ tests and perform better in school. Why would that be? Is it the mother-baby bonding time, something in breast milk or other attributes of families that have mothers who breastfeed their babies? Sociologists from Brigham Young University think they have the answer and pinpoint two sources of this cognitive boost: Responding to children's emotional cues and reading to children starting at 9 months of age. Breastfeeding mothers tend to do both of those things, said lead author Ben Gibbs.  So it's not…

To sane people, parents who kill their kids are both horrifying and tragic, though levels of acceptance and blame flow with cultural trends. Once upon a time, when a mother in Texas killed her children in a bath tub, celebrities like Katie Couric blamed everyone but the murderer. Today, there is a lot less exculpatory rationalization about killers. A new paper in Forensic Science International invokes correlations to psychology and biology and therefore might be used to make filicide exculpatory once again - with enough data, epidemiology can prove anything.  The paper is a …

If you ask aging environmental activists, the worst thing that can happen to nature is to have people step onto it. This is the completely wrong approach, but one adopted by their corporate leaders in the last two generations when they found their donor base becoming increasingly urban. While it was once recognized that hunters, hikers and other sportsmen were obviously the most in love with nature, gradually they became treated like the enemy of environmentalists. Younger activists are a little more practical. They recognize that parks where standards are maintained and the funds are spent…

Politics always make strange bedfellows. When George W. Bush was president, the claim of his political opposition was that Iraq was 'no harm to anyone outside its own borders' and so we should not be involved there, much less do any nation building. Yet when his political opposition gained control of the White House, the calls to do that same thing in Libya, Egypt, Syria and other places have been quite vocal. They just rationalized that they were helping an Arab Spring to flourish by removing the military power of despots.  Yet at least one political science paper disagrees. Instead, it…