By Joel Shurkin, Inside Science -- The notion that Earth’s climate is changing—and that the threat to the world is serious—goes back to the 1980s, when a consensus began to form among climate scientists as temperatures began to rise noticeably. Thirty years later, that consensus is solid, yet climate change and the disruption it may cause remain divisive political issues, and millions of people remain unconvinced.

A new book argues that social scientists should play a greater role in helping natural scientists convince people of the reality of climate change and drive policy.

In the early days of food labeling and regulations, it was just about mandating honesty. If you go to buy mayonnaise, you shouldn't have to wonder if it is mayonnaise (1), and then labels became a marketing distinction.

Better ingredients meant a better product and that appealed to people who cared about higher quality or superior health for their families. 

More recently, labels have become a way to promote self-identification with a world view - you could show you are more ethical and care more about your children and the developing world, and even the whole planet, if you buy a special label.

Osteoporosis, a disease of progressive bone loss, affects 70 percent of the U.S. population older than age 50 - about 50 percent of women and 20 percent of men. These individuals are at risk for fragility fractures, a break that results from a fall, or occurs in the absence of obvious trauma, and most commonly seen in the wrist, the upper arm, the hip, and the spine.  

People who sustain a fragility fracture are at a higher risk for future fractures and face increasing treatment costs. According to a new study, anti-osteoporotic therapy, a treatment intended to increase bone mineral density and slow or stop the loss of bone tissue, can decrease the risk of subsequent fractures by 40 percent.  

A course on critical thinking has generated a new proposal to remove sources of bias in research and improve confidence in published studies.

Social science research got a black eye recently when the authors of several studies were shown to have manipulated data. But the more prevalent issue in the social sciences today is not actual fraud, but subtle and usually inadvertent bias that skews the conclusions of studies and often makes them unrepeatable.

Pioneering new research sheds light on the impact of climate change on subglacial lakes found under the Greenland ice sheet.

A team of experts, led by Dr Steven Palmer from the University of Exeter, has studied the water flow paths from one such subglacial lake, which drained beneath the ice sheet in 2011.

The study shows, for the first time, how water drained from the lake - via a subglacial tunnel. Significantly, the authors present satellite observations that show that a similar event happened in 1995, suggesting that this lake fills and drains periodically.

The study, called Subglacial lake drainage detected beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet is published in the journal Nature Communications.

If there were humans on the Moon - would we see the settlement lights from the Earth? For instance during a thin crescent Moon - could we see the lights of civilization in the parts of the Moon in darkness? 

It's a fun question to answer I think, so let's give it a go.

We can work it out backwards from the brightness of the full Moon.

Looking out on the lunar surface from inside a Moon city, frame from the 1965 Russian film Luna

(You can get this article as a kindle ebook)

Though activists want to retreat into the past and have less energy available for the public (which will impact the poor) a more progressive approach is to look to science and the future - but that will only work if there are stable policies in place.

Oddly, this progressive thinking is coming from energy corporations rather than environmentalists. A group of electricity corporations are creating a picture of a future high-tech energy mix that would help nations meet climate-related CO₂ reduction pledges and the expanding demand for electricity.

Children's self-esteem is linked to the behaviour of who is considered the most powerful parent within the household, new University of Sussex research suggests.

The study of English and Indian families living in Britain is the first to assess the impact on a child's wellbeing of the household power structures that exist within different cultures.

Psychologists interviewed 125 English and Indian families living in West London.

They found that English children whose mothers displayed more negative parenting traits - such as detachment, intrusiveness, lax enforcement of discipline, and controlling behaviour - reported lower self-esteem. But, for Indian children, the father's behaviour had more of an impact.

One of biology's long-standing puzzles is how so many similar species can co-exist in nature. Do they really all fulfill a different role? Massive data on beetles now provide strong evidence for the idea that evolution can drive species into groups of look-a-likes that are functionally similar, according to a study by an international consortium of scientists led by Wageningen University, Netherlands.

Cigarette smoking and heavy alcohol use cause epigenetic changes to DNA that reflect accelerated biological aging in distinct, measurable ways, according to research presented at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) 2015 Annual Meeting in Baltimore.