Science & Society

The developed world loves to put on food drives, places to donate canned goods to the needy. It is an easy feel-good thing to do. But it may be unnecessary, according to findings in The European Journal of Public Health. Instead of going hungry, the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), which tracks nearly 20,000 families from across the UK and made measurements when the children were aged 5 and again at age 11, finds that obesity is rampant in poor kids. At age 5, poor children were almost twice as likely to be obese compared with their better off peers. 6.6% of children from families in the…

The thalidomide tragedy, which resulted in thousands of deaths and disabilities in the late 1950s and early 1960s, changed medicine forever. One of its outcomes was the establishment of more robust mechanisms for the regulation of medicines and medical devices. Regulatory bodies – including the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in Australia, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States and the Medicines and Health care products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the United Kingdom – now decide which products pharmaceutical and medical device companies can market. They also…

As the son of a cruise ship captain, Dr. Amir Aczel spent his early life traveling, and that experienced informed how he spent all of his 65 years intellectually. He is most famous as the author of “Fermat’s Last Theorem,” the solution of a 300-year-old number theory problem proposed by Pierre de Fermat in 1637, but to Science 2.0 readers he was just a smart man who wrote on fascinating subjects, like The Mystery Of The Newly-Discovered Einstein Manuscript: Why Did He Come Back To Lambda? and Why The Higgs Is A Bad Ballerina. But those were later. Years before that, he had always been…

Earlier this year, I visited the library at the Australian National University with my son so he could borrow some books for an essay on Chinese history. Wandering past shelf after shelf, he asked me, “How does it feel to be writing another book that no-one will read?” It was just another teenage jibe, but in policy terms it was a prescient analysis. In recent weeks there have been reports that the government is considering making publication output much less important in the formulae that allocate research funding to universities. Prime Minister Turnbull has signaled a desire to move away…

The first mention of the bagel is in a 1610 text in a sumptuary law from the city of Krakow but in the late 19th century doughnut-shaped bread and smoked meat became popular in the New World thanks to successive waves of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Why did Jews take up bagels in the first place? "The addition of other ingredients besides flour and water makes them something other than bread," explains Olivier Bauer, a professor at the University of Montreal's Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies. "So Kashrut allows Jews to buy them and eat them right away without performing…

Though activists on the poles of science and religion see science and religion as being in conflict, most in science and most of the public do not. Instead, most recognize 'non-overlapping magisteria' and leave the philosophical subjects aside to theologians and explaining the universe according to natural laws to scientists. A worldwide survey of scientists finds it's even more nuanced than believed. Hong Kong, for example, has 55 percent atheists in the general population but among the scientific community atheists are only 26 percent. 54 percent of scientists in Taiwan identify as…

Dave Goulson’s latest anti-pesticide study is sure to thrill his activist backers. The University of Sussex biology professor has a new study concerning declining butterfly populations in the UK, which he claims “adds to the growing mountain of evidence that neonicotinoids are one of the causes of these declines.” It’s yet another case of the headlines not matching reality. Neonicotinoids (neonics for short) is the name for a class of modern seed treatments that have become a favorite of farmers because their effects are targeted to hit destructive pests the hardest, making pesticides a good…

Though more urbanization has been linked by activists to better environment and various other social engineering desires, science has instead demonstrated the benefits of contact with nature for human well-being. Rather than criticizing rural life while lobbying for more spending on city green spaces, it makes more sense to talk about just getting people out of the city mentality. For a paper in  BioScience, scholars used nationally representative data from the United Kingdom and model testing to examine the relationships between objective measures and self-reported assessments of…

When you see someone wandering all over the street because they are on the phone, it is irksome. When you have to reply to a text, not so much. At Science 2.0 we call this phenomenon "mobile drift" but the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons lumps such mobile deadwalkers under the term "distracted walking." They find that more than three quarters (78 percent) of U.S. adults believe that distracted walking is a "serious" issue; however, 74 percent of Americans say "other people" are usually or always walking while distracted, while only 29 percent say the same about themselves.…

Recently, the American actress Jennifer Lawrence said she could never be a Republican even though she was 'raised' Republican. To the American public, that was no surprise, it is quite common for kids to rebel in lots of ways, including in politics, and Republicans in the Hollywood community, where fantasy is the core business, are rare. Yet sociologists think they have discovered something new in finding this out, so they may be living in a fantasy world of their own. Writing in American Sociological Review (ASR), they collate data from two family-based surveys that contain self-reported…