Science & Society

Having your child bullied at school is one of the greatest fears of parents – and research shows this fear is well founded. School bullying has been described as the single most important threat to the mental health of children and adolescents. Well-controlled studies show that being bullied in primary school increases the risk of serious mental health problems into adolescence and ongoing depression leading well into adulthood. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t? So when parents find out their child is being bullied, they are right to be concerned. But what exactly should they do about it…

If you to make new friends and get people to open up to you, make them laugh.  Laughter makes people more willing to talk about personal details, without being aware that they are doing so. The act of verbally opening up to someone is a crucial building block that helps to form new relationships and intensify social bonds. Such self-disclosure can be of a highly sensitive nature - like sharing one's religious convictions or personal fears - or a superficial tidbit such as one's favorite type of food.  To investigate the role and influence of laughter in this disclosure process, Alan…

Sometimes science is the only witness to a crime. Fortunately, the application of scientific evidence in criminal proceedings has grown in proportion to the availability of cutting-edge methods and technologies that can produce answers to critical questions related to guilt or innocence. Scientific evidence, of course, is a good thing, provided that our courts do their due diligence to ensure that the testimony of expert witnesses and the observations, data, and interpretations upon which they are based are reasonably valid. The trial attorney whose case is supported by scientific evidence…

Sometimes popular concepts catch fire with the public for no reason, even when they are shown to be incorrect - virtual water, a gallon of gas to create a pound of beef, you didn't build that - but usually those fade with time. Not the Drake Equation, which sought to parameterize what other life may be out there. It is quite still popular, not just with casual science-fiction fans, but serious researchers. It's a nice idea, we all want something complicated to look simple, like E=MC^2, and there is always a valid science outreach debate about 'all science interest is good interest' versus '…

A decade ago there was a culture war surrounding human embryonic stem cells - people assumed it was a science issue, though in hindsight it was mostly politics. hESCS had never been funded by the federal government and the ethical and legal implications were unclear so President Bush compromised and limited federal funding to existing lines. Though the NIH was thrilled they could now pursue it for the first time (1), his political opposition claimed science was "banned". If you watched "The West Wing" back then, you were assured Parkinson's Disease would be cured by 2014 if Republicans got…

Ritalin, Adderall and their ilk are Schedule II controlled substances - the same as cocaine and methamphetamine - but they are widely available on college campuses, thanks to the ADHD diagnosis craze that made prescriptions easy to get and prevalent starting in the 1990s. As a result, a lot of students are abusing the drugs. How many? 17 percent of all college students, according to a recent literature review.  Some caution is warranted in that. Observational studies and surveys do not make for very good science, so doing a meta-analysis of a lot of studies does not lend them results…

One of the big topics in the science world is always how to make Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) more exciting. It may not always seem like it because, let's face it, we love STEM and it's baffling that people would want to do anything else, but not everyone graduates from high school wanting to pursue it, even though they might have when they were younger. It's no different in sports. Lots of kids love to play baseball when they are young but as they get older most stop, because they are not great at it and they instead focus on things they are great at. The way in which…

By Temple Grandin, Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University When I was an awkward teenager who did not fit in with the other kids, the logical Mr. Spock was a character I could really identify with. At this time, I did not know why I related to Spock because when I was a teenager, I did not know that my thinking process was different from that of most other people. I assumed that my logical picture-based thinking was the way that everybody thought. Today I know that most people think in words – not in pictures as I do – and their actions are highly motivated by emotions. Mr.…

The number of women in paid employment has risen significantly over the past 40 years. In developed countries especially, there are increasing numbers of women reaching top positions in different fields of work. And new research shows how girls are doing far better than boys educationally across the world. For all this good news for gender equality, however, some of the latest reviews of women and work across the globe reveals that on virtually every measure available, women suffer greater economic exclusion than men. Women’s earnings are significantly less than men’s – on average between…

Sunday marks the 106th celebration of International Women’s Day. Since New Yorkers first celebrated it in 1909, American women have made great strides toward equality in the workplace, politics and at home. Long gone are the days when women couldn’t vote or sex discrimination was blatant and legal. But a quick glance at the gender composition of society’s most influential leaders suggests that there is still a lot of work to do. For instance, women still comprise only 19.4% of the US congress and just 4.8% of chief executives in the Standard  &  Poor’s 500. Another equally…