Yesterday, the LA Times ran a feature describing separate communication efforts by the American Geophysical Union and a small band of climate scientists-turned-activists. The effort by AGU seeks to engage […]
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The tax breaks put into place by the 2009 Economic Recovery Act stimulated a sharp rise in news and consumer attention to a range of energy efficiency home improvements, providing […]
It is that time a year again – final exams, Christmas music and the annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. All this does make the end of the […]
The C.I.A. planned to shoot separate mock, gay sex tapes implicating Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden in an attempt to delegitimize the men’s authority, according to The Guardian.
Some of Julian Assange’s defenders* are citing this special report by Mark Hosenball as proof that the rape allegations against the wikileaks figurehead are unfounded. WASHINGTON (Reuters) The two Swedish […]
Hunger is not sexy. Hunger is not the new black. Hunger is not in style, this season or any other. President Obama knows instinctively that the most important issue is […]
When the decision-makers at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery decided to drop David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video “A Fire in My Belly” from their exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American […]
No one has a crystal ball, but some predictions that I made in recent years are coming into sharp focus with every scientific advance. For starters, every year, more organs […]
“News that Ernest C. Withers, a photojournalist who documented the civil-rights movement, was also an F.B.I. informant has been met with mixed reactions from scholars.”
Theodore C. Sorensen, the special counsel to President John F. Kennedy who wrote the president’s speeches and helped shape his policy, has died, according to an obituary in the New […]
George Soros killed JR. I couldn’t figure yesterday out why all of these statements like this one about George Soros were appearing on my Twitter timeline. So I added a […]
Sustainable farming is a topic of pressing interest and a domain of growing innovation in agriculture, but it’s an incredibly complex issue involving multiple interrelated factors. A new partnership between […]
The open access Journal of Science Communicationhas published several outstanding commentaries authored by a diversity of European, UK, and U.S. scholars assessing growth and trends in the academic discipline of […]
Over the past few years, a growing body of research from the social sciences has pointed to one of the major challenges in communicating about climate change. This research suggests […]
When The New Yorker Probes the “Decline Effect,” An Opportunity Emerges to Rethink Science Education
At the New Yorker last week, science journalist Jonah Lehrer penned a conversation-starting feature on the so-called “decline effect,” the tendency across scientific fields for a new and exciting finding […]
If you’re not a computer programmer, the name Bjarne Stroustrup might not mean that much to you. The creator of the coding language C++ isn’t exactly a household name. But […]
It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.” I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth).
Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay.
Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.
Where is the geographical midpoint of Europe? The question is straightforward enough, but the answer isn’t.
Why are Republicans trying to block ratification of the new START? The original START—short for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—was proposed by President Reagan to limit the number of strategic nuclear […]
This holiday weekend, many in the science community are focused on the launch of “rapid response” coordination to provide faster, more accurate details about climate science to journalists and decision-makers. […]
Remember The Who, talkin’ ’bout their generation? Maybe to a 20-year-old guy in the 1960s, the idea of wanting to die before getting old sounded pretty cool. But, you would […]
“Telling the history of art without the history of gay people is like telling the history of slavery without mentioning black people,” says David C. Ward, curator of Hide/Seek: Difference […]
Yesterday, Howard University hosted a panel discussion on “The Poetry of Science” featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins. Among subjects, Tyson and Dawkins discussed the prospects for life on […]
I’m still playing catch-up from the field trip, but there is a pile of news – mostly research-related rather than new eruptions – so I thought I’d whip up a […]
Long week. I gave two exams, so I get to look forward to an exciting weekend of grading. Yup, that is the part of the job that is likely the […]
Chances are you have probably never heard of the stem cell tourism industry. This nascent yet growing industry consists of clinics and practitioners in China, Mexico, and Germany who promote […]
Powell’s water-based states, or How the West wasn’t won
Since its invention in 1859, the escalator has been the most widely used mode of non-vehicle urban transpiration, ubiquitous everywhere from airports to shopping malls to subways. It is estimated […]
“If u really r annoyed by the vocabulary of the text generation, it turns out they were doing it in the 19th century—only then they called it emblematic poetry, and it was considered terribly clever.”