Science Education & Policy
Last year, 6 million tons of “wood pellets” harvested from forests in Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Virginia were shipped across the Atlantic, to be burnt in renewable “biomass” power plants.
This was almost double the 2013 figure. The US “wood pellet” industry is booming.
Demand is largely driven by European countries wanting to meet targets set out in the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive. Half of the pellets exported from the US were used to generate electricity in Britain’s massive Drax power station, which is slowly converting from coal to biomass in order to reduce carbon…
A new study indicates that younger female gynecologic oncologists are less productive scholastically and that is why they are poorly represented in the higher academic ranks compared to male contemporaries.
There are obvious differences in gender make-up in the higher levels of academia. The reason for that is obvious: tenure. More women than ever are choosing to remain at universities but older males are not just going to be fired to achieve gender parity. And academia is far harder on women than the private sector, so women with childbearing and family responsibilities get…
Do you feel good about getting that National Institutes of Health (NIH)? You should. As government has spent billions on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) outreach promoting the idea that only government-funded science is real science, the rolls of those wanting to stay in academia have ballooned. Grants are more competitive than ever so if you got one, you beat out up to nine other people.
Does that mean that taxpayers are getting the best value for their money? Perhaps not. A new study finds that the NIH is no better at picking beneficial projects than if researchers were…
A Cochrane Library review suggests that smoking bans may reduce harms of passive smoking, unclear as they are, since there has never been evidence that second-hand smoke has harmed anyone. Yet epidemiologists have linked it to risks of heart disease and some have even claimed third-hand smoke - particulate matter residues on clothing or in a room - can cause cancer.
But the review does correlate lower rates of cardiovascular disease with bans.
Cigarette smoking is the second major cause of mortality in the world, and currently lunked to deaths of 10 percent of adults…
With the attacks in Paris and in California recently, all linked to Muslim terrorists, where is the line between being factual about who is committing terrorist acts and fueling anti-Muslim sentiment?
Craig Anderson, Distinguished Professor of psychology at Iowa State University, and colleagues think they can find out, by surveying college students.
According to their results, published in the journal Communication Research, there is a link between negative media stories of Muslims and support for military action and restrictions against Muslims. And since conservatives in America are mostly…
Vice President Joe Biden's 'moonshot' initiative to defeat cancer - an outline which will be written by political staffers and delivered a month before the Obama administration leaves office - received support from 50 percent of Americans, according to a survey funded by Research!America.
Not really a surprise, nearly half of Americans support more taxes on lots of things and may not realize we first began the War on Cancer during the Nixon administration over 40 years ago.
In the survey, support for more taxes to go toward government work on cancer was predictably along political lines,…
The Director of the Centers for Disease Control recently highlighted a campaign to convince up to 86 million Americans that they have pre-diabetes, a condition that doesn't even exist. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is concerned that health care costs under the Affordable Care Act have skyrocketed and millennials are opting to pay the penalty rather than get the health care, which could be twice as expensive.
That is one of the reasons why increasing diagnoses and hospitalizations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are a concern.
There's no doubt that asthma is…
When you don't have much money, you have to prioritize, and that is a key issue that the wealthy elites who set off on insurance reform forgot to factor in. Massachusetts, which the Federal government claimed was a model for its Affordable Care Act, now has to spend 40 percent of its budget so that 25 percent of people can have even basic health care. That is not sustainable.
In other states that won't teeter on the edge of bankruptcy to fund health care, things are bleak for other reasons. In Texas, people would rather the IRS seize their bank accounts in the future than have to pay for…
One progressive effort to wipe out racism today is to insist it's still omnipresent now but eliminate it from the past. So authors like Mark Twain, or even Ian Fleming, are shoved to the side if they examined the culture of their day uncritically. In the case of Mark Twain, even a black character who is clearly a hero has to be censored.
So it goes in film media as well. There is a Disney film you can't buy in the United States, but you can buy in England, because it is racist in the United States. Yet the English brought slaves to America, Thomas Jefferson instead made importation of…
Children who participate in collaborative group work to learn about significant social issues become better decision-makers than their peers who learn the same curriculum through teacher-led discussions, a new study finds.
More than 760 fifth-grade students were involved in the study, which compared the efficacy of collaborative group work with conventional direct instruction at promoting students' ability to make reasoned decisions and apply those skills in a novel task.
The students studied a six-week curriculum in which they explored whether a community should hire professional hunters to…