Science & Society

Mark your calendars! A Japanese broadcaster is joining forces with the Science Channel and renowned giant squid biologist Tsunemi Kubodera (the guy who went fishing with a long string and a bag of shrimp) on an "international quest to find and film a living giant squid." (Again.) The mission will be captured in Giant Squid: Last Mystery of the Deep, which will also showcase other nearly unknown creatures, such as the mega-mouth shark and a predator that resembles a 350-million-year-old sea serpent. Exciting! Kubodera is a rock star, and he's got the best chance of anyone of getting…

No country is immune from gender discrimination, says the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report, and most companies feel like they are gender neutral and perhaps are - but because people and perceptions are different it's dificult to say what is discrimination and what is sensitivity or even militancy. It's not to say there aren't disparities - "No country in the world has yet managed to eliminate the gender gap"  they write in the report.   But it may be more looking for causation in the correlation than entrenche discrimination.  In the U.S., the Bureau of Labor Statistics…

I start my activity on these pages by pointing to a security problem we have here. I found it when viewing one of my comments to a news article where a new comment appeared:http://www.science20.com/comments/24095/Re_2009_Peer_Review_Survey_Issue...I thus wrote there this, which indeed is unfortunately true:The comment by Tiffany is a spam. It only says "Nice" but points to some shop with cheap bracelets. Tiffany should be removed and then one can remove also this comment. I would think that it should not be possible to insert a link into the signature. This is opening this site to…

I always like to hear who got the Nobel Prize (well at least the one in medicine, anyway- I am definitely not a physics person), because lately it is almost someone who researched something that I remember learning about in school, when it was "new".  This year, it's telomeres- the particular sequences on the ends of chromosomes that protect the actual genes from getting broken down.  It's also nice to see 2 women getting the prize.  Oh, and a man, too, don't want anyone to think I wasn't paying attention. When I was skimming through my RSS feed after finding the announcement…

You've heard of the Mercury 7 astronauts; they became the backbone of the NASA program and inspiration to an entire generation of young people.   But you may not have known there were also a Mercury 13 - and they were women. In the early years of the space race two men sought to test a scientifically simple yet culturally complicated theory - that women might be better suited for space travel than men. In 1960 a woman in space instead of a man was a revolutionary idea: 75% of American women did not work outside the home and females were banned from military flight service.   Wives…

Can Walmart sell nutrition better than the U.S. government? Honestly, it might be able to, says agricultural trade policy analyst Sallie James in this NPR report. James says it's not economically feasible for the vast majority of Americans to buy and eat local foods, and it will be difficult not only to get many people within reasonable distance of a local market, but also to create enough production to feed America's 300-million-plus population. This is one of the problems we discussed in my public health classes that's stuck with me - you can promote healthy eating all you want, but if…

You would think religious people and atheists don't have a lot in common regarding thinking but they do, says a study by UCLA, Pepperdine and USC neuroscientists.     It's tough to systematically compare religious faith with ordinary cognition, so calibrate accordingly, but in a neuroimaging study the researchers found that while the human brain responded very differently to religious and nonreligious propositions, the process of believing or disbelieving a statement, whether religious or not, was governed by the same areas in the brain.  So believing in God or believing…

Outreach campaigns like 'Rock the Vote' don't generally do a lot for the image of young voters - if you're in the tank for one party the other party gives up on you and your own party takes you for granted because they are going after undecided people in swing states who keep their votes up for grabs.   But get-out-the-vote campaigns are essential, politicos say, because students are flaky, so if they're in your party you don't have to listen to them on issues but you have to rent a bus, take them to the booths and buy them a sandwich to get them to actually vote. College students may…

For all of you postdocs who worry about an uncertain future, endure low pay, fret about getting stuck on uninspiring research, then you might take heart from the example of Francis Crick. In late 1953, at the age of 37, Francis Crick began his postdoc in the United States at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he was supposed to work on X-ray crystallography studies of ribonuclease: "I wrote two very dull papers," Crick said. "And Harker expected me to be in promptly in the morning. To which my response was to leave promptly in the evening! And as we were in a new country, I didn't…

A recent LiveScience article "Recession May Boost Life Expectancy" suggests that economic downturns may boost the life expectancy of the population.  The conclusions suggest that, while not specific to individuals, the general effects of an economic decline are reflected in the overall population. "He did note, though, that while overall population health and life expectancy may improve during down times, that might not be the case for any particular individual, especially someone who is unemployed or serious worried about getting laid off and suffering attendant stress." However,…