Despite being in use for almost 20 years with no health or safety issues, controversy continues to surround genetically modified crops and their regulation.

Bruce Chassy, a professor emeritus of food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believes that after thousands of research studies and worldwide planting, "genetically modified foods pose no special risks to consumers or the environment" and are over-regulated.

Given the enormous increase in government funding and control of science and technology in the U.S. during the last few decades, it is surprising that more attention isn't paid to the policy decisions that drive the enterprise, said Daniel Sarewitz, 
Arizona State University
co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) at the AAAS meeting in Boston. What appears to be missing from the equation, he added, is a focus on outcomes. 

Sarewitz has commented for more than 20 years on science policy, dating back to his time working on Capitol Hill as a staff member for former Democratic congressman George E. Brown, Jr., and has written numerous articles and books on this subject. 

The world produces a lot of food, but it is not produced equally. Agriculturally rich areas like American and Europe can fret about whether natural or synthetic toxins are on their food, and how much water a toilet flush should be, while a billion people elsewhere have inconsistent diets.

Paul Ehrlich, legendary doomsday prophet, now has a new concern that will kill the planet if it is not addressed - equal rights for women. 

Why are physicists thick-skinned but biologists run for the hills when the comment trolls invariably appear?  It may help to be arcane and complex - it's harder to troll hard sciences. Everyone feels like they know some biology but good luck to casual readers trying to debunk rare B_s decays in a high energy physics paper.

Here's a good way to standardize education across the states without enraging powerful education unions and the US Department of Education: get rid of real standards.

In a bit of pedagogical brilliance, California has decided to forgo algebra I, even for 8th graders, if they are not 'ready'.  And it will work, because with President Obama's killing of No Child Left Behind, despite its proven benefits in minority education and bringing parity to female math students for the first time in history, test scores (which determine money) will be based on an 'alternative' test that doesn't use algebra.

At the start of this year, a controversial feature of President Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA) went into effect.

Under the ACA, medical devices companies will have to pay new tax of 2.3% on gross sales. While medical devices companies have opposed the tax, saying it will hurt research and development activities, proponents of ACA say, of course, that more taxes will be good for them. In progressive economics, companies such as Hologic Inc. and St. Jude Medical Inc. will get more customers due to their higher taxes and that will boost sales of medical devices.  

President Obama, who was going to heal the Earth in his first term, didn't do much of that but he put climate change back on the table in his second inaugural address and a new national poll says public support for regulating greenhouse gas emissions is with him - just not with the ways he tried in his first term.

What happens when thousands of scientists do decades of research and taxpayers spend spend $15 billion on a scientifically validated site for nuclear waste storage but those science conclusions conflict with the anti-science beliefs of a president and his key ally in the Senate?

The moribund western economy has not doomed global health care just yet. Donations to health projects in developing countries are holding steady, according to a new paper from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. 

After reaching a historic high during the Bush presidency and with previous commitments allowing it to climb to $28.2 billion by 2010, developing nation health funding dropped in 2011 and stabilized in 2012, say the findings announced today at the Center for Global Development and published online as part of the fourth annual edition of IHME's financing series, Financing Global Health 2012: The End of the Golden Age?