Science & Society

Political party affiliation has little bearing on the number of “green” actions people take, a new study by Porter Novelli and George Mason University shows. According to the survey of more than 11,000 American adults and nearly 1,000 of their children, Democrats and Republicans differ only slightly when it comes to taking actions to protect the environment, despite great differences in their perceptions of danger related to global warming. While Democrats were almost twice as likely as Republicans to believe that global warming is a serious problem and a threat to all life on the planet,…

Monster.com is the perfect example of a company that spent its entire marketing budget on a Super Bowl ad and launched a success story. Is that the exception? No, it turns out that Super Bowl advertisements do work, but not in the way you might expect. They don't often launch small companies into the Pro Bowl of the business world. Rather, a good Super Bowl ad means people assume the advertising works, anticipate more revenue, and push up the stock price of the company - without actually increasing sales. Researchers in the University at Buffalo School of Management and Cornell…

Communist dictatorships don't get credit for much but one thing about them made anti-smoking advocates happy; a lack of cigarettes meant fewer people puffed. Yes, according to a new study in an anti-smoking journal, capitalism is to blame. Contrary to health wisdom in the west, the number of Russian women who smoke has more than doubled since the collapse of the Soviet Union, say authors of a study published in the journal Tobacco Control. In 1992, seven per cent of women smoked, compared to almost 15 per cent by 2003. In the same period, the number of men who smoke has risen from 57 per…

From Bora Zivkovic's A Blog around the Clock: Here is a video of SPARC-ACRL Forum '08 on 12 January, 2008 at the Pennyslvania Convention Center in Philadelphia: The SPARC-ACRL Forum at ALA '08 entitled "Working with the Facebook generation: Engaging students views on access to scholarship." Panelists discuss the merits of student activism, patent reform, blogs as a communication medium for scientists, and students as active members of a discussion about the right to access information for scholarly work. Features Andre Brown, Nelson Pavlosky, Stephanie Wang, and Kimberly Douglas as panelists…

Dr. Shaohua Xu, Florida Tech associate professor of biological sciences, has an original theory of the origin of Alzheimer’s Disease and has earned a $150,000 grant from Space Florida to test it. The grant was matched with $30,000 from NASA’s Aerospace Medicine and Occupational Health Branch. He is also the sole medical researcher at the State of Florida’s Space Life Sciences Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and the research is being conducted both at the university and KSC. Xu’s theory, both controversial and praised, involves the start of the disease when molecules of a normal…

It’s not always best to be first, finds a new study from the Journal of Consumer Research. The researchers examined how consumers evaluate new products and found that many products may actually benefit from having competition, entering the market as followers rather than as the first of their kind. New types of products are constantly being developed and introduced. When a brand releases a product that has never been offered by any brand before, it is the “pioneer” product, and consumers can’t evaluate it in the same way they evaluate existing products, the researchers explain. For example,…

A good fight with your spouse may be good for your health, research suggests. Couples in which both the husband and wife suppress their anger when one attacks the other die earlier than members of couples where one or both partners express their anger and resolve the conflict, according to preliminary results of a University of Michigan study. Researchers looked at 192 couples over 17 years and placed the couples into one of four categories: both partners communicate their anger; in the second and third groups one spouse expresses while the other suppresses; and both the husband and wife…

I wouldn't touch celery without a swath of peanut butter layered on top. I probably wouldn't touch it even then. Celery is not a stand-alone food for me. But a study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reports identification of the flavor-boosting components in celery - and it reaffirms what cooks have known all along. In their paper, Kikue Kubota and colleagues note that cooks have long recognized celery’s “remarkable” ability to enchance the complex flavors of soups and broths - it takes on a sweet-spicy flavor after boiling, helping to give food a thick, full-bodied,…

Environmental hypocrisy is the new Prius, it seems. While people coo about Toyota they label the Tata Nano an environmental disaster. Why? Because it gets 54 MPG? No, because the new middle class in India can afford it, which means more cars and more emissions. The 15% of the world that has 2/3rds of the cars telling third world people who are finally making some money (and isn't a better life what we all said we wanted for people?) they can't have a car without causing the earth's destruction doesn't sound all that progressive.

In November 2007, Donald Kennedy, then-editor of the prestigious journal Science, announced that for the next five issues, each of the research articles would include a brief "author's summary" written in plain language. This was being done as part of a publishing experiment by the journal because, as Kennedy put it, It's clear that accessibility is a problem, because we're all laypeople these days: Each specialty has focused in to a point at which even the occupants of neighboring fields have trouble understanding each others' papers. Some of the more general and widely read journals, such…