LONDON, March 22, 2012 - Two new surveys conducted among 2,500 adults and 400 teachers show what is really on the minds of those concerned about education; the need to teach about pets in schools.

89% of adults, 78% of primary teachers and 70% of secondary teachers believed it is important to teach responsibility using pets and most adults thought it was more important to teach younger children how to care for pets than it was to teach them about sex education or money management.  Isn't that going to cause a fight with the 'teach kids to have sex at younger ages' lobby, though? It's Big Pet versus Big Condom for the mindshare of 8-year-olds.

Climate change is a polarizing science policy debate the likes of which humankind has never witnessed before. Even President Obama's science advisor John Holdren never dreamed up this kind of doomsday scenario when he was writing books with the king of doomsday predictions, Paul Ehrlich. Women in the workforce, CFCs, acid rain, islands of garbage - nothing from past cultural debates compares to the scariness of rolling drought and melting glaciers.  What to do? On one side we have people who insist a world where elites have energy and others do not must be implemented right now.

Time is relative, of course, but we still hate to be late for appointments.  So there has always been research on making our keeping of time a little more accurate.

A new clock tied to the orbiting of a neutron around an atomic nucleus could have such unprecedented accuracy that it neither gains nor loses 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years - basically, you wouldn't have needed to reset your watch yet even if you had been around at the beginning of the Universe.

A study by Indiana University researchers on "coregasm" says it has confirmed anecdotal evidence that exercise can lead to female orgasms.

Good news for health clubs everywhere? Maybe.  But it's been darn hard to pin down reliable data on it.  It makes the media rounds - and of course, this site - every few years.

Food stamps are not food stamps now, they are the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits - and record numbers of Americans are receiving them.