Science & Society

The infrastructure vulnerability to the climate change is increasing around the world and its implications are evident in many sectors. Settlement patterns, urbanization, and changes in socioeconomic conditions have all influenced observed trends in exposure and vulnerability to climate extremes. Small island states are particularly vulnerable to climate extremes, especially where urban centers and/or island infrastructure predominate in coastal locations. Asia’s mega-deltas are also exposed to extreme events such as storm surge flood and have vulnerable populations in expanding urban areas…

Everyone agrees that interdisciplinary research is a good idea - for someone else. A survey of social and environmental scientists found that limits to career advancement and lack of credit for promotion and tenure were big obstacles. There have been efforts to promote work on interactions between humans and the environment but success has been elusive. To better understand the obstacles facing natural and social scientists attempting such work, PhD student Eric D. Roy of Louisiana State University and co-authors from a variety of institutions surveyed researchers at all career stages who…

Racial and ethnic communities in the United States prioritize health concerns differently and addressing those concerns in culturally-specific ways may be beneficial, new results from the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health show. While U.S. adults ranked childhood obesity overall as the top concern, that isn't telling the whole story. It was first among whites and among Hispanics but for black adults obesity in children ranked sixth. Black parents (40%) listed smoking as their top health concern. Drug abuse was 34 percent, school violence…

What happens if you adhere to every process restriction that a corporation that sells its food using the 'organic' label adheres to, but you don't pay the fees to get a government 'certification' and still try to claim you are 'organic' at a local Farmer's Market? About $20,000 in government fines, it seems. There are not many people who truly still believe an 'organic' label is healthier food. Organic pesticides are no better (or worse) for us than synthetic pesticides and the list of exemptions for synthetic ingredients that organic food conglomerates have gotten approved by the US…

If I tell you that adult science literacy has tripled since I was in college, that would seem to be a good thing.  And if I tell you NIH funding has gone up 50% since 2001, that would also be a good thing. But then you're probably not in science media. Like in mainstream news, good things are boring and if you are a politically-funded constituency like education or science academia, good news is bad for business. We can't note that science literacy has tripled in the last 25 years, we must insist that there are not enough teachers and presidents must commit to hiring a lot more. (1) We…

It was announced today that systemwide Academic Senate representing the 10 campuses of the University of California system had passed an “open access” policy. The policy will work like this. Before assigning copyright to publishers, all UC faculty will grant the university a non-exclusive license to make the works freely available, provide the university with a copy of the work, and select a creative commons license under which is will be made freely available in UC’s eScholarship archive. A lot of work went into passing this, and its backers – especially UCLA’s Chris…

I am making the call: despite all the buzz it is currently getting due to crowdsourced funding for lots of projects, by wading into the anti-technology culture war, I am predicting the demise of Kickstarter.  The people behind Kickstarter have declared that they are going to artificially pick the winners and losers of crowd funding and once that happens, the road to ruin is sure to follow.  The issue that set tripped them up is genetic modification technology - a glowing arabidopsis plant. There is nothing harmful in that gene, there is no Frankenlight, other than in the warped…

Humanitarian research at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is geared toward various projects, among them saving millions of children from death and blindness due to Vitamin A deficiency. One obvious solution is the well-documented Golden Rice, a free technology created by scientists to provide more Vitamin A in poor countries with a rice-based diet. Before that can be done, every new GM crop must undergo thorough testing to make sure no harmful effects arise during cultivation or after consumption.  That's obviously a good idea and IRRI and the Philippine Department of…

An international analysis of conservation biologists finds that they work late at night and over weekends - just like much of the salaried corporate world and science writers.  The paper affirms why many Nobel laureates get their prizes for work they did while they were young; it's tough to balance career and family life. But if you want a six-figure income and tenure at a college, it takes paying some dues, and at least in America, where there are six times as many PhDs as there are jobs for them each year, competition is fierce. The submission of manuscripts for publication in a…

Sociologists have challenged the perception that there is a "new and pervasive hookup culture" among contemporary college students that is substantially greater than a generation ago. They used an analysis of surveys of college students to make their case. Martin Monto, a sociology professor at the University of Portland, and co-author Anna Carey, a recent BA in sociology and psychology, used a nationally representative sample from the General Social Survey of more than 1,800 18 to 25-year-olds, who had graduated from high school and completed at least one year of college. "Recent…