Science & the Public

Where scienceand society meet

  1. Earth

    Frogs: Weed killer creates real Mr. Moms

    Several months back, a Berkeley undergraduate began witnessing distinctly odd behavior in frogs she was caring for in the lab. At about 18-months old, some frisky guys began regularly mounting tank mates, as if to copulate. Except that their chosen partner was invariably male. He had to be. Because genetically, every animal in the tank was male.

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  2. Climate

    IPCC looks to vet, report climate-science better

    Major U.S. science organizations aren’t the only ones to realize that the climate-science community has bungled – and badly – its portrayals of research on global change in recent months, if not years, and its responses to criticisms. Yesterday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (a group established by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization) said: “we recognize the criticism that has been leveled at us and the need to respond.” So will be convening an “independent review” panel to investigate what the organization’s procedures should be to vet not only the data it uses and how to synthesize conclusions based on those data, but also how it should convey those conclusions (and any necessary caveats) in reports to the public and policymakers.

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  3. Animals

    Whale hunts: Discussions on lifting the ‘ban’

    The International Whaling Commission will formally address its future, next week, at a meeting in St. Petersburg, Fla. Once comprised of whaling nations, the IWC now includes member states just as likely to condemn any hunting of cetaceans. That internal tension is guiding the meeting’s agenda. On it’s plate: whether to overturn the organization’s long-standing moratorium on commercial whaling.

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  4. Science & Society

    Science literacy: U.S. college courses really count

    Over the past two decades, science literacy in the United States – an estimate of the share of adults who can follow complex science issues and maybe even render an informed opinion on them – has nearly tripled. But – and it’s a big but -- the proportion of people who fall into this category remains small. Just 28 percent.

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  5. Climate

    Climate science: Credibility at risk, scientists say

    Publication of hacked emails exchanged by climate scientists. News accounts of problems in vetting data used in climate-assessment reports. Charges by critics that scientists won’t release their raw data so that others might independently vet published analyses of climate trends. Taken together, these events have marred the reputations of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and perhaps science generally. Or so concluded a distinguished panel of science luminaries.

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  6. Tech

    Leasing car batteries to the power company

    Most people, on average, drive their cars only an hour or two a day. The rest of the time, those pricey vehicles sit parked on the street or in some garage. But if those cars had a big bank of batteries – typical of today’s gasoline hybrids or soon-to-hit-the-road plug-in hybrids – they could be earning their owners money while sitting parked. Maybe $5 to $10 a day, just by serving as a back-up energy-storage system for the electric-utility grid.

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  7. Agriculture

    EPA reviews hints of weed killer’s fetal risks

    The Environmental Protection Agency will be convening meetings of its Scientific Advisory Panel on pesticides throughout 2010 to probe concerns about the safety of atrazine, a weed killer on which most American corn growers rely. The first meeting of these outside experts started Tuesday. And although a large number of studies have indicated that atrazine can perturb hormones in animals and human cells — and might even pose a possible risk of cancer amongst heavily exposed people, these outcomes were not the focus of EPA’s review Tuesday. Risks to babies were.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Body fat linked to late puberty in boys

    Boys can take a lot of ribbing from their peers for not being macho enough. A new study now indicates that it can take longer to begin transforming into a man if a boy starts out fat.

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  9. Earth

    The FY 2011 budget: So much for transparency

    Cabinet officials and other administration leaders met with reporters yesterday to outline the President’s Fiscal Year 2011 federal budget. That spending blueprint includes $147-billion-and-change for research and development programs. But in contrast to past years, details tended to be skimpy today — and any chance for followup or verification of apparent trends has proven more difficult than usual.

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  10. Climate

    Indian climatologist disputes charges over Himalayan projection

    London’s Sunday Mail reported that it had reached the author of a chapter in a purportedly authoritative 2007 climate-change assessment and learned that this scientist – Murari Lal – deliberately used unsubstantiated sources for conclusions about the rate of glacier melting in the Himalayas. Lal doesn’t dispute that mistakes were made – ones that likely exaggerated projections of glacier melting. But he does challenge the newspaper’s charge that those mistakes were politically motivated.

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  11. Humans

    Cigarettes might be infectious

    Science & Society blog: The tobacco in cigarettes hosts a bacterial bonanza — literally hundreds of different germs, including those responsible for many human illnesses, a new study finds.

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  12. Climate

    IPCC’s Himalayan glacier ‘mistake’ not an accident

    A London newspaper reports today that the unsubstantiated Himalayan-glacier melt figures contained in a supposedly authoritative 2007 report on climate warming were used intentionally, despite the report’s lead author knowing there were no data to back them up.

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