Science Education & Policy

Joint Genome Institute Releases Preliminary Soybean Genome Assembly

A preliminary assembly and annotation of the soybean genome, Glycine max, has been made available by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), to the greater scientific community to enable bioenergy research. The announcement was made ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 20 2008 - 10:30am

INCITE Program Doles Out Supercomputer Time

Scientific studies on climate change, energy and alternative fuels are among the 30 projects awarded more than 145 million processing hours on supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory through the Department of Energy's Innovative and Novel Comp ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 20 2008 - 2:57pm

Caffeine Linked To 2X Risk Of Miscarriage

A new study by the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research says that women should avoid caffeine during the first trimester of pregnancy- caffeine equivalent to two cups of coffee per day was linked to a doubled risk of miscarriage compared to women who had ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 21 2008 - 2:55am

2008 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference

Like last year, the North Carolina Science Blogging conference was a hit. I moderated a session on public scientific data with Xan Gregg. Both of our talks were recorded and available here. ...

Article - Jean-Claude Bradley - Jan 21 2008 - 8:50am

Improving Global Warming Forecasts Using... Economics

Climate scientists are teaming up with economics experts to improve forecasting models and assess more accurately the economic as well as environmental impact of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Although there is broad consensus that there will be ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 21 2008 - 5:50pm

Study: Ecological Debt Of Rich Countries More Than Offsets The Economic Debt Of Poor Ones

The environmental damage caused by rich nations disproportionately impacts poor nations and costs them more than their combined foreign debt, according to a first-ever global accounting of the dollar costs of countries' ecological footprints. The stud ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 21 2008 - 9:13pm

Is There Any Value In Federal Dietary Guidelines?

More giving information and less giving direction is the advice of a group at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University mid-way to the drafting of the 2010 nutrition guidelines. For nearly three decades, Americans have become accustomed ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 22 2008 - 4:52pm

Can An EEG See Those "Eureka!" Moments We Have?

Cognitive insight, those flashes of brilliance when a mental breakthrough happens, are widely recognized but very little is known about their constituent cognitive components and underlying neural mechanisms. It is also unclear why trying too hard does mor ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 23 2008 - 12:11pm

Study: Abstinence-Plus Programs Work For HIV Prevention

HIV and AIDS are huge threats to human health. Each day in 2005 around 7,600 people died from HIV-related causes and a further 38.6 million people were living with the disease. Two million of these were living in the high-income countries of North America ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 22 2008 - 7:29pm

Mothers With Fewer Kids: Fertility And Evolution

Researchers at the University of Sheffield writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B have shown that mothers are choosing to have fewer children in order to give their children the best start in life, but by doing so are going against millenia of human ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 22 2008 - 7:40pm