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Sometimes I think that people have an unhealthy obsession with Yellowstone Caldera. Sure, it is big, powerful and the stuff that disaster movies are made, but in terms of a volcanic system that poses a high threat to life/property in the U.S. on a daily basis, it is relatively low.

Over at the blog Nanopublic, Dietram Scheufele, a professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin, has posted a very useful discussion of our Science Policy forum article.Scheufele, one of […]

Obesity is a growing global health problem, and we all know why, don’t we? It’s the fault of corporations that sell corn syrup, and a starkly unequal society (why would […]

As I have skimmed through the Wikileaks documents coming out of San’a and Riyadh I have been asking myself a number of different questions here are three (I promise some […]

In Big Think’s series “How to Write Great Fiction,” 12 celebrated authors give writing tips. Now see how well you know each writer’s work and style.

The outside pressure so many were hesitant to put on the Yemeni government finally seems to have taken a toll. The government announced last night a conditional ceasefire. (The official […]

Often I’ll find myself spending 20-60 minutes a day in a situation where I have some time to kill and my phone. Given the value I get from Twitter (breaking […]

Nicolas Kristof recently wrote a column in the New York Times urging Americans to teach their children Spanish before Chinese. Chinese has become quite the coveted prize for New Yorkers: “Chinese […]

Despite heavy news and advertising attention, and the Obama Administration’s attempts to grow the market for fuel efficient cars through major tax breaks, sales of small-size cars were flat in […]

As I wrote in my past blog entry, “The 1000 Genomes Project Will Help Us Understand Genetic Variations,” it initially cost $3 billion to fully sequence all of the 25,000 […]

Watch Dr. Jacob Lowenstern take about Yellowstone Caldera! It is just like ‘Supervolcano’ but without the destruction.

A firestorm of speculation has been generated by a notice from NASA announcing a major discovery in the field of astrobiology, to be released today at 2 p.m. According to […]

In the late 1970s, Stroustrup applied the idea of “classes” to the C programming language to create a new language that allows for high level abstraction—but is efficient and close […]

Even when you control for cultural differences, lesbians in the workplace still make significantly more money, on average, than heterosexual women.

This week’s theme is epistemological unease in the sciences: Complaints in a number of disciplines that studies didn’t really find the effects they’re reporting. One reason for these worries is […]

AAAS is sponsoring an important event pegged to the Holidays.  Details are below and readers in Washington, DC can register to attend the event at the AAAS Web site. As […]

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.

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 […]

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 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 […]

“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.”

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 […]

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 […]