I have spent the better half of the past six months trying to understand one thing: how can you effectively present primary scientific literature to the general public? Is this even possible?

[...] last year I was involved in organizing a student directed seminar concerned with covering the seminal work of my field over the past 30 years. Three of us canvassed resident professors, professional researchers, and professors and grad students across the world (literally) asking them for their top 20 articles.

I was blown away: more than half of these papers had become nearly obsolete (nearly obsolete, simply because their work was in of itself worthy of admiration for its brilliance). Why? You guessed it - a few key assumptions proven to be incorrect.

How do you explain to someone the relative magnitude of these assumptions? I’ve often caught myself saying, “Well, 10% …

Carbon dioxide did not cause the end of the last ice age, a new study in Science suggests, contrary to past inferences from ice core records.

“There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change,” said USC geologist Lowell Stott, lead author of the study, slated for advance online publication Sept. 27 in Science Express.

“You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages.”

Deep-sea temperatures warmed about 1,300 years before the tropical surface ocean and well before the rise in atmospheric CO2, the study found. The finding suggests the rise in greenhouse gas was likely a result of warming and may have accelerated the meltdown – but was not its …

With our publications on Islam we experience a lot of prejudices and generalizations on both sides. There is a need to clarify the terms used in this discussion.

We want to make a clear distinction between what we call “moderate Muslims” and “radical Islamists and Jihadists.” We expect that visitors and immigrants who come voluntarily to our European countries accept our culture and its framework, which is characterized by democracy, pluralism, equal rights, no discrimination because of gender, race and religion, freedom of speech and free media, the partition of power and the partition of state and religion.

I think that moderate Muslims can accept these principles without losing their identity. The majority of our population is ready to integrate these people.

On the other hand, we have to fight against the radical Islamists and Jihadists who want to abolish our constitution, our laws …

While figures of authority across the globe are used to people complying with their wishes, in Liverpool the reaction is more likely to be a simple but disruptive “Why?”
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/theatre/2007/09/what_scouse_culture_means.html

One of the major concerns today is the rise in global temperatures, which are generally thought to be caused by the release of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. As a result, a growing proportion of the political agenda is occupied by the challenge of implementing policies and strategies in time to mitigate the possible consequences of global warming.

A key element in assessing climate change is the powerful computer simulations used to demonstrate how complex, interacting forcing agents influence the evolution of the climate system. Although the models are built around a long-accumulated understanding of the underlying physical processes and dynamics – and are compared with historical and contemporary observations – there are still many aspects that are less well understood. There is, therefore, a range of views about the reliability of using these models to make credible projections of our future climate.

At the [Institute of Physics] …

As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.

Long-lived chloride compounds from anthropogenic emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are the main cause of worrying seasonal ozone losses in both hemispheres. In 1985, researchers discovered a hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic, after atmospheric chloride levels built up. The Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1987 and ratified two years later, stopped the production and consumption of most ozone-destroying chemicals. But many will linger on in the atmosphere for decades to come. How and on what timescales they will break down depend on the molecules’ ultraviolet absorption spectrum (the wavelength …

Today’s Washington Post story was replete with pompous and absurd proclamations – the pompous being the Danish Environment Minister claiming that she and her ilk “are getting a bit impatient, not on our own behalf but on behalf of the planet.” The condemnations of the US included “unusually blunt language” about how the rest of the world are waiting for the US to act, and that it is the US resistance to adopting a particular approach to addressing emissions that jeopardizes the climate.  Not China, India, Mexico and 155 countries representing the vast majority of emissions seeing theirs skyrocket; certainly not the EU....

Regardless, yesterday’s vulgar display prompted me to tally the comparative, real emission increases in US and EU, given I have heard the counter “well, in percentage terms, but…” when I point out that EU emissions are increasing faster than the US’s under any modern baseline …

On what started as a normal Saturday night one week ago, residents of a small, remote Peruvian town saw a bright light streak across the sky, heard a resounding bang and suddenly found themselves at the center of a media frenzy.

Initial suspicions of an airplane crash quickly spiraled into widespread reports that a meteorite had plummeted to Earth and left a smoking, boiling crater whose supposedly noxious fumes were reported to have sickened curious locals who went to peer at the hole.

Despite doubts expressed by geologists that the crater was actually caused by a meteorite and firm explanations that a meteorite would not even emit fumes and that the “sickness” was likely a case of mass hysteria, numerous onlookers far and wide were fascinated by the idea that this event could be some real-life “Andromeda Strain” (the 1969 novel by Michael Crichton), where a …