Science & Society

The American Chemical Society is not new to disliking New Media - like all businesses, they would like to be self-perpetuating and that means people have to give them money for memberships and get a…

Lunch Hour Lectures have been running at University College London since 1942.  It's terrific to know that even at the height of World War II, British citizens wanted to learn about the latest…

The National Academies (the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine) announced the recipients of their 2010 Communication Awards today. Part…

Population growth has been uneven in a country in a society and in the world. Global earth has to support 8 billion people in coming years starting from 1 billion only not so long ago. The world…

Maurice Allais won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1988.  So why is he of interest here?  His Telegraph Obituary is headed: Maurice Allais, who died on October 9 aged 99, was a Nobel Prize…

A Fake Smithsonian Exhibit The integrity of the Smithsonian Institution hinges on disseminating knowledge in an objective, thorough and fair manner. Like the freedoms that our forefathers included in…

Publishing is evolving and, of the big publishers (The Lancet, Cell, etc.), no one is more forward-thinking than Elsevier.    They recently announced Article-Based Publishing, their new way…

What is on the mind of all the physicists all over the world right now? Quantum Gravity? Global warming? No. It is the same that is on the mind of all the other scientists in academia, too. Impact…

Since China becomes ever more important also for academia and science, here insights into difficulties that are not widely mentioned. I started with the language barrier, and there were points that…

Is the name Andre Geim familiar to you?  If you are in science, you know him because he just won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on graphene with Konstantin Novoselov at the…