Science & Society

TransAsia GE235 crash - Plane Missed Power Cables The Transasia ATR 72-600 which crashed into the Keelung river narrowly missed flying into high voltage power cables strung across the Keelung river.  Flight into those high voltage power distribution cables would have been unsurvivable: fire would have been a virtual certainty. The images below, from Google and from SETnews.net show that power distribution lines cross the Keelung river at a point which the ATR 72-600 would have reached had it not banked left. The plane's wings were level approaching the power lines across the river.…

The 2014 European Astronomy Journalism Prize has been announced.   Now in its third year, the prize looks to reward excellence displayed in the field by professional journalists as well as students of both astronomy and journalism. It is awarded by Science  & Technology Facilities Council and ESO, in association with the Royal Astronomical Society and the Association of British Science Writers.  The honor this year goes to  Physics World  features editor Dr. Louise Mayor for the article “Hunting Gravitational Waves Using Pulsars” in Physics World. The winning…

TransAsia ATR 72 Crashes Into Keelung River A twin engined ATR 72-600 turboprop suffered an engine failure shortly after takeoff from Taipei Songshan Airport, destination the Kinmen islands.  The plane, which was less than one year old according to Flightglobal crashed into the Keelung river.  The number of survivors is uncertain at this time. The plane which crashed into a river in Taiwan at about 02:55 GMT was successfully craned out by about 13:00 GMT.  The incredibly swift reaction of the various organisations responsible for rescue and recovery is exemplary.  The task…

AirAsia 8501 - News, Rumours, Facts And FACs Until such time as an official report is issued it will be difficult for both professionals and ordinary members of the public to determine what most probably happened during the last flight of AirAsia 8501.  That is most unfortunate because passengers have a right to fly as safely as is humanly possible, and safety cannot be assured unless manufacturers, operators and pilots have the most up-to-date knowledge available about the causes of accidents, so as to avoid repetition. This article is based on credible reported evidence, photographic…

Does only spending what you make lead to suicide? In the world of weak observational studies, it can. Suicides in Greece reached a 30 year all-time high in 2012, with a sustained upward trend starting in June 2011, the month that the government introduced austerity measures to get loans and help pay down the country's debts, currently at 175 percent of GDP and caused by overspending on social services.  Writing in BMJ Open, scholars tracked the number of suicides recorded in Greece every month between January 1983 and December 2012 to correlation between austerity measures and…

One saved the U.S. space program, another invented a better treatment for leprosy and a third spawned an industry in the American Midwest - but you have probably never heard of these female "legends of chemistry". Their names are Mary Sherman Morgan, Alice Ball and Rachel Lloyd and they all had amazing accomplishments in chemistry, but their work was nearly lost to history. Mary Sherman Morgan, Alice Ball and Rachel Lloyd. Credit: The American Chemical Society This week ACS Reactions shines the spotlight on them so they can get some proper acclaim:

Women – and little girls even more so – are desperate to see images and stories that don’t actively oppress them onscreen, says Olivia Murphy. Image: Nadia Mel, CC BY-SA By Olivia Murphy, University of Sydney Some time ago my then five-year-old God-daughter began insistently and, it must be said, somewhat repetitively humming a few bars that would quickly become one of the world’s most ubiquitous earworms. As it turned out, when she opined in tiny soprano about a “kingdom of isolation” in which there was “not a footprint to be seen” she was quoting not Robinson Crusoe, but Let It Go, the…

A new study indicates that sexual behavior among female university students in Sweden has changed during the last 25 years, with behavior now appearing more risky than before. The surveys were taken as part of contraceptive counseling delivered at a Student Health Center in Sweden.  In 1989, age at first intercourse was 17.6 years vs. 16.7 years in 2014, number of lifetime sexual partners was 4.0 vs. 12.1 in 2014, and number of sexual partners during the previous 12 months was 1.0 vs. 2.8 in 2014. Condom use during first intercourse with the latest partner decreased from 49% to 41% in…

Though the anti-vaccine hotbeds in the United States are strongest in regions that are overwhelmingly Democratic, a new paper says it may not be Democrats that are most anti-vaccine. Why would they be? the authors argue, when Democrats like government the most. It's a fair point, Republicans and Independents are least likely to trust government decision-making and historically they were against government efforts like water fluoridation. It is only in the last 10 years that regions like Marin County, San Francisco and Humboldt have turned into 21st century versions of the John Birch Society.…

In American scientization of politics culture, evolution acceptance is a big deal, as is climate change. Yet other science acceptance issues get much less attention. Why? Evolution and climate change are not the most pressing short-term science issues we face, food, energy and medicine are. I am in awe of evolution but no one dies if some crank school district wants to put religion side-by-side with biology in a classroom, and American CO2 emissions from energy, obviously our biggest polluter, are back at early 1990s levels, thanks to science finding ways to make natural gas extraction better…