Science & Society

Last month I wrote an equation with New York Times columnist, John Tierney, calculating the chances a celebrity marriage will last. Some looked rosy (Kate and Prince William) and some looked less rosy (Will Smith and Jada Pinkett are in a dangerous window). Notably absent from the in-depth discussion was Brangelina — last month they were shacking up and this month, well, unless you’ve been living in a boarded-up shack in rural Montana, you know the smell of wedding bells is in the air (or however the idiom goes). Brangelina’s getting hitched. But will it last? I ran the numbers imagining the…

It's taken decades but the U.S. Forest Service is finally being allowed to use science in managing America's natural resources. Instead of environmental activists tying up science and the government by using other government regulations and red tape to block meaningful improvements, we can actually reduce wildfires, manage water responsibly and protect endangered species, instead of pitting those outcomes against each other, as environmental lawyers had successfully done in the past. With the new rules, the forest service will be allowed to manage each national forest by ecological outcomes…

A new study estimates that more than 260,000 dogs and cats were sent to UK rescue shelters in 2009, the first full year of the worldwide recession. Dogs and cats are popular pets in the UK and two of the authors of the new estimate study, Dr. Jane Murray and Professor Tim Gruffydd-Jones, having previously estimated the owned cat and dog populations at approximately 10.3 and 10.5 million respectively.  Over 1,550 welfare organizations were contacted by post, email or telephone between November 2010 and June 2011. They were asked to provide details including the number of cats and dogs…

As soon as protestors began to occupy Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in New York City, people began to wonder why? Was it the result of disgust towards the New York Stock Exchange, chronic unemployment, or even boredom? Or are Americans working through the stages of an on-going cycle of generational behavior? Yes, to the latter. Sorry #ows, you are not original, but instead the correct timing of social movements and civic duty. The Occupy movements of America, or social movements in general terms, were predicated by history. Written in 1997,The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by…

Everyone has heard of the politicization of science, where science results are framed and manipulated for political gain, but increasingly more common is the scientization of politics, where political and cultural world views are rationalized with a science - and sometimes pseudoscience - basis to gain legitimacy. Coming into American election season, the jingo-ism about how anti-science conservatives (wink, wink, any Republican campaigning against President Obama in 2012) are has been out in full force among mainstream science media writers. Like good Oprah viewers, science blogging has…

A few months ago, I read Electric Universe by David Bodanis (ISBN 1400045509).  There are two chapters on radar during the Second World War, #7 dealing with Britain’s defences and #8 dealing with the area bombing of Germany, a tactic down to ‘Bomber’ Harris, which to this day gives rise to doubt in Britain, such that we feel a conflict between honouring the bomber crews who sustained the heaviest proportional loss of all our armed forces, and disturbance at the methods of their commander, who went for mass slaughter of civilians rather than military or industrial targets. What makes it…

Periodically it seems that the subject comes up regarding human colonization of space and then all manner of problems and difficulties are discussed with various people taking their respective sides on the physics that's possible and what isn't. However, I would offer a different perspective on this and argue that it isn't a physics problem.  This isn't about speed, about time, or about energy, although these are problems.  The problem is about biology. More specifically, the problem is about the passengers we have to take.  Not humans, not embryos, or not some cryogenically…

INTERPLANETARY SPACE The burden of human and future human ‘TAB’ life on our planet’s natural resources assure that they will eventually be depleted below our collective needs to consume them. An unbiased observer from outer space might even consider humanity to be a plague species, permanently undermining the health of its host planet. The question for this chapter is to surmise how likely a hypothetical outer space intelligence is to meet a human? The high probability of the existence of other intelligent life within our universe is heavily predicated on the vast size and age of the universe…

The Kavli Foundation, which gives awards to science writers annually with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, also sponsors a video contest for middle and high school students. It was launched as part of the first USA Science&Engineering Festival in 2010 and round two is now available for voting online. The "Peoples' Choice" finalists are posted and the work shows just how creative the next generation of scientists and engineers can be. It will also make you smile. The topics addressed? How to Save the World Though Science. The 20 finalists are primarily high school…

Neutrinos come in three "flavors", electron, muon and tau, but they are able to 'morph' between the different types, a change called neutrino oscillation.   Neutrinos matter a lot to the future of physics because solving little mysteries can lead to solving big ones. When neutrinos were predicted in 1930 and then detected in 1956, they were also assumed to have zero mass. That belief held for 50 years but the discovery of neutrino oscillations made mass a requirement. Now physicists believe that neutrinos can be described in terms of combinations of mass states, like m1, m2 and m3 and…