Science Education & Policy
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The United States of America hasn't been interested in building big new physics collaborations, such as the Large Hadron Collider, in the last 20 years, since the Clinton administration canceled the Superconducting Super Collider. The James Webb Space Telescope overruns and President Obama canceling NASA's Constellation program confirm why America has a crisis of confidence about building big and there is a belief that maybe we should stick to small experiments like cute robots on Mars.
It isn't just the perception of a glorified job-works culture for government union workers that makes the…
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It's no secret that politicians have always favored corporations that are involved in their pet causes - and it's no secret that wind turbines are killing endangered birds and forcing a giant migration of more.
What is less well known is that if you are a wind energy corporation, not only have you been stuffed with government subsidies for the last five years, you are not going to be prosecuted no how many eagles you kill. Unless you are also a fossil fuel company, like Duke Energy, they got prosecuted. Otherwise, you pay a token fine and that is that.
Now the president has used yet another…
In 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued warnings about a potential danger for young people taking antidepressants. The warnings drew intense and outright exaggerated media coverage.
Result: A sudden, steep decline in the number of prescriptions for antidepressants and an increase in suicide attempts by teens and young adults.
Writing in BMJ, researchers at Harvard Medical School's Department of Population Medicine and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute report that in the year following the warnings, when antidepressant prescriptions fell by more than a fifth among…
American children learn the meanings of number words gradually: First they understand "one," then they add "two, "three," and "four," in sequence. At that point, however, a dramatic shift in understanding takes place, and children grasp the meanings of not only "five" and "six," but all of the number words they know.
The pattern is the same in all industrialized nations - number learning begins around age 2, and children fully understand numbers and counting by the age of 4 or 5.
What about developing nations, or even primitive cultures? It happens the same way, just a little later…
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Since 1990 organic food has been allowed to exist independently of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the one federal agency responsible for food safety and quality. Sure, organic food still gets recalls, lots of them - using feces as fertilizer and having customers who think food doesn't need to be washed will do that - but the definition of 'organic' is not determined by the USDA.
Those dozens and dozens of synthetic additives allowed on the organic food National List?
That is because of the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), which was created by Congress in 1990. The reason…
When UK Child-Mortality-Rates (CMR) for children aged 0-14 were compared with 20 other Western countries between 1979-2010, it revealed a "scandal",
Countries such as Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain had child death rates higher in 1979 than the UK’s but are now all substantially lower. If the UK had the same average rate of the 17 countries with lower CMR, then there would have been 1,827 fewer child deaths in 2010.
Professor Colin Pritchard of Bournemouth University, who led the research, said, "The poverty aspect is a matter of shame, as the five countries with the…
Hank |
You might think that with Iraq collapsing and Russia and China preparing for giant land grabs, our foreign policy would consist of more than 'global warming stinks' and 'you other countries should have nicer LGBT policies'. If so, there is good news, the State Department is now also criticizing mislabeled international seafood.
Secretary of State John Kerry is directing federal agencies to work together to develop a program to combat seafood fraud. Since there isn't even a program yet, just a directive to create a program, it will be 10 years before various agencies 'work together' to…
A new poll by The Boston Globe and Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) finds, eight years into the state's universal health insurance legislation enacted in 2006, 63% of Massachusetts residents support the law and 18% oppose it, while 7% are not sure, and 12% have not heard or read about the law. The percentage of residents supporting the law remains unchanged since a 2011 Boston Globe/HSPH poll. Support for the law varies by party affiliation, with 77% of Democrats, 60% of Independents, and 49% of Republicans saying they support the legislation. The poll was conducted May 27-June 2, 2014…
A new study has found that 12 minutes of exercise can improve attention and reading comprehension in adolescents.
In the paper, all kids saw improvement in selective visual attention up to 45 minutes after exercising. Selective visual attention is the ability to remain visually focused on something despite distractions. The Lower income students also improved on tests of reading comprehension following the physical activity, though high-income students did not.
So you don't need money to be a good dad, just throw a football. This study is a follow-up to one that study author Michele Tine…
I have spent the last few days at a School of Science Journalism in the pleasant town of Erice, in western Sicily. The school, held at the Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture, brought together science communicators, freelance writers, magazine editors and press office consultants to listen to a small set of lectures, which this year (the fifth of the school) centered on the topic of "the digital world".
I contributed to the lessons with a 1-hour seminar titled "Science Blogging versus Science Journalism". I do not particularly like the title of my presentation, which was offered by…