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Bonking in the Name of Science

Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Spook, has a new book debuting this month: Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. To promote her new book, Roach is making the interview rounds. Check out her interview with Katharine Mieszkowski for Salon: Getting it on for science. An excerpt pertaining to sexual arousal in women follows: Edited to add a video of Mary Roach discussing Bonk; be sure to check it out, particularly her remarks on Danish swine sex! Thanks to Steve C. from W.W. Norton for providing the clip. There can be a split between what the sex researchers measure happening in…

Hello, World Science Festival 2010 [2010 World Science Festival Blog]

You may have noticed things look a little different around here. We’ve gussied up for the 2010 iteration of our flagship festival, which officially went on sale last week. There are still a few bugs we’re ironing out on the site (please bear with us!) and a couple of exciting programs yet to be announced, but the important thing is that tickets are now on sale. And if previous years are any indication (2008 and 2009), you may want to hurry to reserve your seats. Tickets tend to sell out very quickly. There’s a LOT to be excited about this year. Let's see, where to begin... Legendary…

Lead Poisoned Workers in Alaska: Miners Beware!

The State of Alaska's Department of Health and Social Services recently released a report on work-related lead poisoning over the last 12 years (1995-2006).  I was shocked to read that 94 percent of the workers (289 men) with blood-lead levels above 25 ug/dL were employed in the mining industry.  A follow-up story by Elizabeth Bluemink of the Anchorage Daily News reports that most of the adult blood-lead laboratory results came from the Red Dog lead-zinc mine near Kotzebue, Alaska.  Although there is no MSHA standard to protect miners from lead poisoning, Teck Cominco Alaska Inc. has some…

I am Eagle! I am Eagle!

In the lucid 1960's, the futurist Stewart Brand began a public campaign for NASA to release a satellite image of the whole Earth taken from space, an image which was at the time only rumored to exist. Brand, forever the "big-picture" thinker, noted that "this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum," would serve both as a potent symbol for humanity and as a firm kick-start for a legitimate environmentalism movement. With the rapid progress of the Apollo program, NASA eventually did release such an image -- though whether this was due to…

iPhone Sausage Making

Mac Users Guide Flickr Photostream As a technophile, I do love my iPhone and iPod as portable portals to new media, the web and entertainment. But everything comes at a price. I was reminded of this, starkly, by a brilliant commentary by Mike Daisy, featured recently on NPR's This American Life. That sausage may be delicious, but few of us want to be reminded of how it came to be. So it goes for iPhones, even for something as mundane as to how their screens are cleaned in the factory. From This American Life broadcast, "Mr. Daisy and The Apple Factory:" Mike Daisey performs an excerpt…

Hello, World Science Festival 2010

You may have noticed things look a little different around here. We’ve gussied up for the 2010 iteration of our flagship festival, which officially went on sale last week. There are still a few bugs we’re ironing out on the site (please bear with us!) and a couple of exciting programs yet to be announced, but the important thing is that tickets are now on sale. And if previous years are any indication (2008 and 2009), you may want to hurry to reserve your seats. Tickets tend to sell out very quickly. There’s a LOT to be excited about this year. Let's see, where to begin... Legendary…

What's new at HuffPo? Disease promotion, that's what.

I can't tell if it is a trend yet, but it seems there has been a bit of a decrease in the outright quackery published in the Huffington Post lately. But that doesn't mean it's disappeared, and the poor quality of the writing more than makes up for the decreased quantity. Case in point: Why We Overreacted to an Ordinary Flu, by Philip Slater, a sociologist with no medical education (a point that becomes evident very quickly). For example: In an online newsletter recently some mad housewives were sharing tips on how best to triple-wash and triple-sterilize their countertops. What on earth…

Netroots Nation recap

I know it's been a week since I got back from Netroots Nation, so this is a rather belated report, but I have a good excuse. I was on the road for 4 weeks before NrN, and it's taken me a little while to get caught up again. Netroots Nation was awesome. It'll be in Las Vegas next year, and should be even better. It'll be the 5th year, returning to the scene of the first convention, back when it was called YearlyKos. They put on a great conference, and it's a great time. Next year it's the weekend before my birthday, which should be extra-fun. This year was more subdued than last year,…

Cattle genetic variation & evolution

There are some papers out on the genome of the domestic cow out right now. ScienceNews has an overview: Two competing research teams have cataloged the "essence of bovinity" found in the DNA of cattle, but not without disagreement on some essential points. Reporting online April 23 in Science and April 24 in Genome Biology, the two groups compiled drafts of the bovine genome, identifying genes important for fighting disease, digesting food and producing milk. I don't see the Genome Biology paper on the site yet, but there are two in Science. First, The Genome Sequence of Taurine Cattle: A…

Can CDC get a life?

When I started talking about this with friends and colleagues several months ago they thought I was quite crazy. But then they've thought that for a long time. It's mainly a source of amusement. I hope. Anyway. What I was talking about is using the online virtual world, Second Life, for public health purposes. Second Life (SL) is a "3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents." Over 1.3 million have logged on in the last 60 days. You participate by constructing a 3D representation of yourself called an avatar. If you are an old geezer like me, there is a pretty steep…

A 'spirituality' query

I recently got a short email interview on the subject of science and spirituality. Now I should warn you: "spirituality" is one of those words that sets my teeth on edge and triggers a reflexive reach for my kukri. It's an empty buzzword that some people use as a placeholder for "deep feelings of connectedness to the universe", but that I read as "mindless blithering; brains on the fritz", so I respond to questions like that with an immediate rejection of the premise. The writer seemed like a nice person, though, and the questions are well-intentioned, so after barking out my answers I…

Nurturant is not Coddly!

I wrote this on September 21, 2004, as a reaction to the misunderstanding of Lakoff's term "Nurturant Parent". Slightly edited (eliminated bad links and such). Discussions of Lakoff's theory are going on in several places in the blogosphere, including on DailyKos and many other places...just Google it and you'll be floored. Spend some times reading the comments - there is some good thinking there. There is something happening in these discussions that really bothers me. There is a number of people, including some who claim to have read "Moral Politics", who object to the use of family-based…

ACSH Attacks Animal Science on Carcinogens

By Ruthann Rudel and Dick Clapp Two recent papers by Ruthann Rudel and Julia Brody published in the journal Cancer compiled a list of 216 chemicals shown to cause mammary gland tumors in animal studies and presented a comprehensive state-of-the-science review of environmental factors in breast cancer.  When such important studies are published, itâs typical for the chemical industry or its surrogates to attack them. In this case, Elizabeth Whelan, president of the industry-backed American Council on Science and Health, fired off a response that questioned whether findings from animal cancer…

Science, Art, Education, Communication

The September 2007 issue of JCOM - Journal of Science Communication - (issue 3, volume 7) is online.: Next issue will be online on the 18th December 2008. There are several articles in this issue that I find interesting and bloggable. Contents: EDITORIAL - The better you know, the better you make your choice. The need for a scientific citizenship in the era of knowledge by Pietro Greco: Martin W. Bauer is right, two evolutionary processes are under way. These are quite significant and, in some way, they converge into public science communication: a deep evolution of discourse is unfolding,…

Nurturant is not Coddly!

I wrote this on September 21, 2004, as a reaction to the misunderstanding of Lakoff's term "Nurturant Parent". Slightly edited (eliminated bad links and such). Discussions of Lakoff's theory are going on in several places in the blogosphere, including on DailyKos and many other places...just Google it and you'll be floored. Spend some times reading the comments - there is some good thinking there. There is something happening in these discussions that really bothers me. There is a number of people, including some who claim to have read "Moral Politics", who object to the use of family-based…

Video and Slides from AGU Panel: Re-Starting the Conversation on Climate Change

Slides and synchronized video of the presentations from the AGU panel "Re-Starting the Conversation on Climate Change: The Media, Dialogue, and Public Engagement Workshop" are now online. Below I link to each of the presentations highlighting key themes or conclusions and the minute mark in the video. Mass Media and the Cultural Politics of Climate Change Max Boykoff, Ph.D. University of Colorado-Boulder Mass media serve vital roles in the communication processes between science, policy-makers and the public. This presentation reviews contextual factors as well as journalistic pressures…

The ACA marketplace is beginning to stabilize. But it can’t withstand federal sabotage.

There was always an assumption that the Affordable Care Act would need time to find its sea legs. That’s why it included measures to shield insurers from the potential profit losses that inherently come with offering millions more people better health coverage at more reasonable prices. Insurers operate on profit margins and the ACA took that into account, for better or for worse. But it’s still been a rocky road for insurers. (Insert argument here for single-payer health care, but that’s a different story.) On the patient side, with 20 million more Americans insured and growing accounts of…

Cult of the Purple Cow

No, it's not another spoof religion like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and it's not a real religion for people to get outraged over. The title refers to my college alumni organization-- Williams uses a cow as the unofficial mascot, and the school colors are purple and gold, so little purple cows are all over everything. But as Kate has noted many times, there's a certain cult-like air surrounding Williams alumni (she only married into the cult). It's sort of hard to explain what I'm talking about, but possibly the best example is the story of the Alumni Review. Many colleges and universities…

Praxis #1

Welcome to the first experimental issue of the newest science blog carnival - Praxis. Why experimental? Because we still have to see where to set the boundaries. If it is "Life in Academia", then pretty much everything on science blogs is eligible and the effect is diluted. If we narrow it down to one topic, e.g., Open Access publishing, then there will not be sufficient posts and sufficient interest to keep the carnival alive. We'll have to define a happy middle. We want people to find each other here - folks that write about the business of science, about publishing and Science 2.0,…

One Meaning of Martin Luther King Day

You'll hear a lot today about Martin Luther King and race. But what you won't hear nearly as much about, particularly from conservatives, is his views on economic justice. I think that his views on race were inseparable from his economic views which were based on a universal call for justice and equality for all. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine): My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of the sanitation workers and their…

The Obama Plan - Part I

We're starting to hear about how Obama intends to implement healthcare in this country. President Barack Obama says he's open to requiring all Americans to buy health insurance, as long as the plan provides a "hardship waiver" to exempt poor people from having to pay. Obama opposed such an individual mandate during his campaign, but Congress increasingly is moving to embrace the idea. In providing the first real details on how he wants to reshape the nation's health care system, the president urged Congress on Wednesday toward a sweeping overhaul that would allow Americans to buy into a…

When the outbreaks occur, they'll start in California, 2014 edition

Countering the misinformation regularly promulgated by the antivaccine movement, be it antivaccinationists who are completely off the deep end, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the crew at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, or that epitome of the Dunning-Kruger effect mixed with an annoying self-absorption and coffee klatch vibe (that is when it's not a wine party), The Thinking Moms' Revolution, or from seemingly more "reasonable" antivaccine advocates like pediatricians Robert "Dr. Bob" Sears or Dr. Jay Gordon. The reason is simple. Vaccines save lives. They prevent children from…

ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Stacy Baker

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Stacy Baker, everyone's favorite Biology cyber-teacher, to answer a few questions. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? I'm a high school biology teacher. I've taught general, honors, and advanced placement biology for the past four years.…

The Washington Post's war on Gore, continued

Correction: My post a few days ago implied implied that the Washington Post celebrated Gore's Nobel by publishing four items repeating the falsehood that a judge found nine errors in the movie. This was wrong. I missed their editorial on the Nobel Prize where they also took a swipe at Gore: His movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," about the effects of climate change, was a box-office hit and an Oscar winner. That achievement is impressive and important, notwithstanding factual misstatements and exaggerations such as the "nine significant errors" in the film cited by a British judge Wednesday. No…

Using language to achieve the appearance of legitimacy for quacks

The whole concept of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM), the former of which "complements" science-based medicine with quackery and the latter of which "integrates" pseudoscience-based with science-based medicine. The reason I start out by saying this is to emphasize that CAM/IM is all about using language to persuade that pseudoscience is actually science-based. It's far more about marketing than accurately communicating concepts. In CAM, everything is "holistic," and doctors "care for the whole patient," while "Western medicine" is "reductionistic…

No, Virginia, cancer care in Europe doesn't suck, contrary to what a recent paper implies

The U.S. is widely known to have the highest health care expenditures per capita in the world, and not just by a little, but by a lot. I'm not going to go into the reasons for this so much, other than to point out that how to rein in these costs has long been the proverbial political hot potato. Any attempt to limit spending or apply evidence-based guidelines to care runs into a buzz saw of criticism. Indeed, most of the resistance to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), otherwise known in popular parlance as "Obamacare," has been fueled by two things: (1) resistance to the…

Occupational Health News Roundup

It didn’t make a lot of headlines, but a new presidential executive order could be a big deal for workers' rights and safety. On July 31, President Obama signed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order, which requires federal contractors to disclose prior labor violations and prohibits contractors from forcing workers into arbitration to settle workplace discrimination cases. The National Law Review explains the order in detail. According to writers Dwight Armstrong and Nisha Verma, the order applies to federal contracts valued at more than $500,000 and could affect a substantial…

Student guest post: Unintended Consequences

Student guest post by Naomi Kirschenbaum Although we can never know, there are estimates in the range of 15,000 displaced pets in the wake of 2005 Hurricane Katrina.  Many of the dogs found their way to shelters and homes in our community around the Monterey Bay in California.  As a local veterinarian the most notable observation I saw was how it “seemed” that so many were heartworm positive.  Six years later we have a published study finding a 48.8% prevalence of heartworm in these dogs. This story is an example of a few important lessons.  First, how things seemed to me, in my clinical…

Oh no, not another giant predatory flightless bat from the future

Readers in the UK might be aware of Primeval, an ITV drama series featuring a time portal that connects the present day with the past. The main premise of the series seems to be that various animals from the past - including a pareiasaur, a gorgonopsian, dodos, a mosasaur, pterosaurs and some giant arthropods - wander through the portal and get into various japes and scrapes in the present. I've cleverly managed to miss the entire series, so I'm not exactly the best person in the world to be talking about it. But due in part to the fact that I'm currently horribly ill, Will and I were in…

Two decades after welfare reform, more deep poverty and fewer college degrees

Two decades ago, President Bill Clinton signed the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” (PRWORA) and heralded the end of “welfare as we know it.” The law lived up to that promise, but the outcomes for families who depend on it have been problematic. "If the goal of welfare reform was to get rid of welfare, we succeeded," the University of Wisconsin’s Timothy Smeeding told Vox’s Dylan Matthews. "If the goal was to get rid of poverty, we failed." (A bit of background: PRWORA replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC,  with Temporary…

Vice Magazine and the Stockholm Sluice

My blog has so far landed me one paid writing assignment, and today I got a copy of the mag where it was published. Sort of. Vice Magazine is a wannabe-controversial fashion mag. Its June issue has a glue-huffing teen boy on the cover and there are web-cam boob pics inside. You get the picture. They commissioned me to write two 700-word pieces on a three-day deadline back in March. The topic was polluted places in Stockholm. I spent about one day's work on the job and they paid me peanuts after I nagged them. But it was fun to do a bit of real journalism. Only they threw one of the pieces out…

Retread: Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions?

Apparently, Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions? was so popular that it gets a retread. Despite the original being published in 20133, we're now being told that Researchers have for the first time tied a group of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil, and their products to specific increases in greenhouse gases, global warming and sea level rise. A study published Thursday in the journal Climatic Change concludes that since 1880, 90 of the largest carbon producers are responsible for up to 50 percent of global temperature rise,…

WATN: Force X from outer space

In my Where are they now? review of 2014, I unforgiveably forgot the sensation of the year, Force X from outer space. Its worth reviewing, because (a) its not quite dead yet (or perhaps more accurately its proprietors haven't yet given up hope of revivifying it) and (b) the original played out for so long that most people lost track of the errors. If you've no idea what this is about - and you care - or if you need a refresher, then its probably best to go off and read The Notch-Delay Solar Theory because that helpfully lists all the drivel in one place, rather than the smeared-out-over-…

The Evolution of Imprinting

The phrase "genomic imprinting" has come to refer the turning off of a gene (a particular instance of a gene on a particular chromosome duplicated across the cells in a body) so that the gene is not expressed at all, with the turning off of the gene not caused in the body in question, but rather, during the previous generation by a process happening in the soma of one of the parents. A maternally imprinted gene is passed on to junior, but will not be expressed in junior. a paternally imprinted gene is passed on to junior, but will not be expressed in junior. Typically (as far as we know) a…

Childhood cancer chemotherapy pioneer, Dr Charlotte Tan, dies at 84

Actinomycin D was the first antitumor antibiotic isolated from Streptomyces parvallus cultures by the lab of 1952 Nobel laureate, Dr Selman Waksman, at Rutgers University. However, it took a young Chinese physician and the confidence in her by a future US Surgeon General for this natural product drug to positively impact the lives of children with cancer. An unusually engaging Boston Globe obituary by Gloria Negri caught my attention this week that announced the death of pediatric oncology pioneer, Charlotte Tan (Hsu), MD, of pneumonia on 1 April in Brookline, MA. Dr Tan's 1959 paper in…

Livin' In A Mycelial World

Mushrooms and their mycelium are quiet allies that are essential for our healthy existence. They are enigmatic, have a sense of humor, and socially as well as spiritually, bond together all that admire them. They have much to teach us. -Paul Stamets If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self a part of nature's larger whole. -Terrence McKenna   A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my kitchen table, having coffee, when I suddenly noticed a new development in my bonsai…

Gun Ownership, Gun Control, Rights, and Responsibilities.

Rob Knop just wrote an article arguing against new gun control laws. He did this hours after someone went nuts at Virginia Tech and shot a whole lot of people. He did so in the full knowledge that many people would find this to be an incredibly insensitive time to make such an argument. He was right that it is an insensitive time to make the argument, and he was also right in his belief that it is at times like this that it is most important to make such arguments. Rob's basic point is that we - both as people and as a society - tend to react to tragedies like this by demanding that the…

Pinkoski explains the Trinity

It's been a little while since I last brought up Pinkoski, so maybe you can handle another dollop. When I got his creationism comic book, I also picked up another, titled "Christian SF", which promised to be the first in a series of comics containing science fiction stories with Christian themes. Oh, it is bad. Ignoring the Christian content completely, it is a major rip-off. It contains all of two stories, each given only 3 or four pages, which barely set up the premise and then stop cold, telling you to buy Christian SF #2 to find out what happens. The first is titled "Who is the model…

Don and Deirdre Imus deliver a hunk a hunk o' burnin' stupid about vaccines and autism (with apologies to Elvis)

Someone sent me a transcript of part of the appearance of Deirdre Imus on her husband's radio show that's been making the rounds in various discussion groups. I'm glad I don't listen to the show, as this segment might have made me take a baseball bat to my radio, if I had enough neurological function to do so after being exposed to the toxic, intelligence-sucking effects of her black hole of ignorance. If you think her two Huffington Post articles that I deconstructed a while back were bad, just listen to her on Imus. Truly, it is hard to do so without losing some brain cells, but give it a…

Snakes on a Muppethugging Plane! (Monday Pets)

This past weekend, I was searching around the interwebz looking for something interesting to write about for Monday Pets. Lately, Monday Pets has been somewhat cat- and dog-heavy, so I was looking for something a bit different. I asked on twitter if there were any requests or recommendations. Friend of the blog Dave Munger responded: "What about snakes?" What about snakes indeed? There are many parallels between myself and Indiana Jones, but one big one is that we both hate snakes. Another similarity is whenever I travel by plane, I leave a series of red dashes to mark my path. We both look…

Confirmed: Sarah Hershberger's family has fled

It figures. Whenever there's a holiday or a break where I'm not paying as much attention to the blog as usual, something always seems to happen regarding a story I'm interested and have been blogging about. Remember Sarah Hershberger? She's 11 year old Amish girl who developed lymphoblastic lymphoma, underwent one round of chemotherapy, suffered highly unpleasant side effects from the second round of chemotherapy, and then refused to undergo further chemotherapy. Her parents, distressed at her suffering, decided not to make her continue her therapy. They also see that her cancer has shrunk (…

Zika virus, drug discovery, and student projects

It's well understood in science education that students are more engaged when they work on problems that matter.  Right now, Zika virus matters.  Zika is a very scary problem that matters a great deal to anyone who might want to start a family and greatly concerns my students. I teach a bioinformatics course where students use computational tools to research biology.  Since my students are learning how to use tools that can be applied to this problem, I decided to have them apply their new bioinformatics skills to identify drugs that work against Zika virus. We don't have the lab facilities…

Relief and trepidation on healthcare

Like millions of others, I was hugely relieved to get the news early Friday morning that three Republican Senators had joined 48 of their Democratic and Independent colleagues to vote down the third Republican proposal to take healthcare away from millions of people. Now’s a good time to think about how we got here and what comes next.   The Affordable Care Act For much of 2009, Democratic members of Congress spent months negotiating with Republican colleagues and one another on the legislation that would eventually become the Patient Protect and Affordable Care Act. Over many hours of debate…

The Best Way to Study: Practice Tests

I remember when I was studying for Step I of the medical Boards. Step I is the first of three very large tests that you have to take to become a doctor. This first test comprises everything you learn in the first two years of medical school, and it can in theory include the pathology and physiology of anything that can go wrong with the human body. Most people take at least 6 weeks of continuous time to study for it. Sufficeth to say it is a lot to learn. Numerous techniques are employed by medical students studying for the Boards. There are the readers who attempt to reread every one…

Re the VA AG's War on Science: Should Grant Reviewers Consider This?

For those who haven't heard rightwing extremist Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has subpoenaed all of the documents related to climatologist Michael Mann's state-funded research while Mann was at the University of Virginia (italics mine): In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli's office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann's receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann-- now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State-- was at UVA between 1999 and 2005. If Cuccinelli…

Pseudonymity, Blogging, and Journalism Versus Marketing

ScienceBlogling Matt Nisbet throws down the gauntlet about anonymity: Much of the incivility online can be attributed to anonymity. And with a rare few exceptions, if you can't participate in a dialogue about issues without using your full name and true identity, then what you have to say is probably not that valuable. It's a silly argument for many reasons (some people should be treated with incivility; they've earned it), but there are a couple points I haven't seen mentioned (Drugmonkey has a very good response). But ultimately, the decision to be anonymous boils down to why one blogs. I…

Caution: OSHA brakes for lobbyists

Breathing asbestos fibers kills workers. It's as simple as that. Not everyone who breathes asbestos gets an asbestos related disease but enough do that it is a real risk. So you don't want to work with asbestos without taking precautions and you can't take precautions if you don't know you are working with asbestos. Asbestos started being used in brakes in the early years of the auto industry, where it replaced leather and metal brake shoes that frequently went out of adjustment. When autos moved from two-wheel brakes to four wheel brakes in the 1920s the market became huge. In the 1930s we…

Interview with The Tweeting Chancellor, Holden Thorp of the University of North Carolina

Welcome to the latest instalment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the world of higher education and scholarly publishing. This time around it's a bit different with the circumstances being a little unusual. Last week I did a back-of-the-envelope tweet about the Twitter habits of senior academic administrators and my experiences creating a list of those administrators. The uses of social networks in education is an area that really interests me and the habits of those senior administrators was something I'd been wondering about. Well, my old blogging buddy Stephanie…

Why should data be released under the CC0 waiver...

...Instead of a different Creative Commons license, such as CC-BY? Or just with normal copyright restrictions? (You can get an explanation of CC0 here: it implies relinquishing all rights and essentially means releasing something into the public domain.) A good question, one that I attempted to answer as part of my Exploring Open Science session at Brock University several weeks back. While I was talking about the importance of Open Data within the Open Science movement, one of the audience members very properly pressed the point of why it's important for data to be open. I think I gave…

Innovation and STEM Outreach to K-12 Students Headline AT&T's Return as Major Sponsor!

As its new corporate slogan - "Rethink Possible" - suggests, AT&T is known for its long history of continually exploring new ways to reinvent itself through technological innovation, educational outreach and community involvement. The global telecommunications leader is bringing this same spirit to the 2nd USA Science & Engineering Festival in its return as a major Sponsor! Get ready for a bevy of excitement when AT&T assumes key roles in next year's event, including serving as the official host of the Festival's high-profile Nifty Fifty speaker engagements where four of its…