Science & Society

Fast food advertising doesn't emphasize healthy menu items enough, and by giving away toys in things like Happy Meals restaurants are being deceptive even by their own self-regulation standards, according to scholars who showed 100 children aged 3–7 years McDonald’s and Burger King children and adult meal ads, randomly drawn from ads that aired on national U.S. television from 2010–11. After seeing the ad, children were asked to recall what they had seen and transcripts evaluated for descriptors of food, healthy food (apples or milk), and premiums/tie-ins. All children’s ads contained images…

According to a 2014 National Consumers League poll, 29% of American adults believe that childhood vaccinations can trigger autism. To many, these views are difficult to comprehend. After all, multiple controlled studies conducted on huge international samples have debunked any statistical association between vaccines and autism. Moreover, when the Danish government removed thimerosal – a mercury-bearing preservative that most anti-vaccine advocates regard as the suspect ingredient – from its vaccines in the late 1990s, the rates of autism went up rather than down. Why, then, does the belief…

Women are not under-represented in science, they dominate in some fields and lag in others, part of the natural variation in humanity - but in academia at the highest levels, they are under-represented. The reason is not sexism; women are actually over-hired, when they apply for the jobs. Instead, it is factors like that we don't engage in age-ism and penalize older researchers, the same reason that the average age of R01 grants has risen as older scientists have worked longer, so men were not fired to make room for women. The other big reason is that, by choice or by default, women care for…

Immigration continues to be one of the key issues in the build-up to the general election. The latest figures show a net flow of 298,000 into the UK. This is higher than when David Cameron’s government took office, despite his pledge to cut the number to the tens of thousands. But is this really bad news? Immigration is such an emotive issue that there is a tendency for the figures involved to be bandied about out of context. Both The Daily Telegraph and The Economist have threaded the fact of higher immigration numbers together with another piece of research that was recently published.…

A recent study found that people without three risk factors by age 45 were diagnosed with heart failure 11 to 13 years later, on average, than people who had those risk factors. Heart failure, a chronic condition in which the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the body's needs, can be pushed off by not developing obesity, hypertension and diabetes, the researchers found.  People who had only one or two of the risk factors, but not all three, developed heart failure an average of three to 11 years earlier than people with none of the risk factors.  "The message from this study is…

The typical biography of a scientist might look something like this: At a young age, a boy or girl discovers a love for science. Their dream is to become perhaps a geologist, a chemist, or a marine biologist. At school they work hard at math and science, and they supplement this with everything else they can get their hands on: books, documentaries, public talks and visits to museums. They take all the right courses at college and then embark on a PhD in their chosen field. After many years of hard effort (including chunks of time racked with doubt and frustration), they complete a solid…

The world's challenges demand science solutions - and fast - but it doesn't need the old style of detached experts, write a team of scientists in, ironically, one of America's most prominent and detached corporate science publications; Science magazine, a reputable legacy publication with a politician leading them. Segregated expertise, like segregated articles of taxpayer-funded science, is obsolete. Disciplinary approaches to crises like air pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change, food insecurity, and energy and water shortages, are not only ineffective, but also making many of these…

A new paper believes that a record drought in Syria from 2006-2010 and the 2011 Syrian uprising is not a coincidence. The rebellion was stoked by ongoing man-made climate change, they write. The drought, the worst in modern record-keeping, destroyed agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to cities, where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created unrest that exploded in spring 2011. The conflict has since evolved into a complex multinational war that may have killed 200,000 people and displaced many more.  There…

Synthetic cannabinoids ("synthetic marijuana"), with names like Spice, K2, Scooby Doo and hundreds of others, are often sold as a safe, "legal" alternative to marijuana but that is just marketing by drug dealers. Synthetic marijuana was linked to 11,561 reports of poisonings in the United States between January 2009 and April 2012.  It's no surprise that it has grown popular among teens, that is why legal businesses like cigarettes and alcohol cannot market to kids. In 2011, synthetic marijuana was used by 11.4% of high school seniors in the US, making it the most commonly used drug -…

The worst kept secret in science media, what one honest liberal blogger called The White Elephant In The Room, is its overwhelming partisanship. It's easy to rationalize that. If Republicans are anti-science then naturally the biggest defenders and cheerleaders of science, journalists and bloggers, would be Democrats. Except it was never that simple. The claim that Republicans were somehow more anti-science than Democrats was instead invented to rationalize pre-existing political belief. Evolution acceptance was magnified to being critical for human life and the fact that Republicans denied…