“The intensity of this reorganization will depend, unsurprisingly, on the magnitude of warming.”

researchers seek to predict future impacts of global warming on marine life by examining how the oceans were affected during times of substantial temperature change in the distant past.

Extrapolating from those records, the researchers predicted that even moderate climate change will cause significant disruptions, with local extinctions and species migrations occurring three times more frequently than today.

More severe warming will have a major impact on marine life, with significant disruptions occurring across 50 to 70 percent of the world’s oceans, the authors concluded.

The impacts cannot fail to affect life on land, given the ocean’s role in supporting human populations

“When the temperature of the environment changes, animals and plants change in abundance locally or may move to new locations if the habitat is suitable,”

“These movements ultimately affect the food web and ecology, and if they are rapid, the food web may become uncoupled.”

humans “rely upon the ecosystem services that the interconnected web of life creates.”

“Regards the rubbish archive project [an interactive exhibition examining waste in the context of climate change], xxx and I have some concerns on this exhibition particularly as it creates an opportunity for NGOs to talk about some of the issues that concern them around Shell’s operations.”

museum acknowledged its relationship with Shell, but maintained that it did not cave to any external pressure regarding the exhibit

also rejected evolution and instead believes in "intelligent design,” according to Discover magazine.

Pope Francis says evolution does not contradict church doctrine.

India is getting hotter as humans continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. With these increases in heat, the report — produced by 1,250 international experts and approved by every major government in the world — said with high confidence that the risk of heat-related mortality would rise due to climate change and population increases, along with greater risk of drought-related water and food shortages.

“Attribution of events to climate change is still emerging as a science, but recent and numerous studies continue to speak to heat waves having strong links to warming climate,”

extreme heat events “have become as much as 10 times more likely due to the current cumulative effects of human-induced climate change.”

Mann said that as climate change threatens to worsen as more carbon is emitted into the atmosphere, heat events once considered extreme would become relatively common. He noted that India’s nearly unprecedented deadly heat wave is occurring at current global warming levels of just 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit — so heat waves occurring under the “business as usual” global warming scenario that sees average temperatures rise 7 to 9 degrees by the end of the century would be much, much worse

The impacts of climate change are widely expected to be more harmful in poor countries than in their fully developed counterparts.

He just doesn't believe they're that old. And he's quite the fossil lover.

We all have the same evidence, and it’s just a matter of how you interpret it,”

“There’s no dates stamped on these things."

Just, you know, isotopic dating, basic geology, really shoddy stuff like that.

the science of dating fossils is not shaky -- at least not on the order of tens of millions of years of error -- so this fossil and the rocks around it really do give new earth creationism the boot.

But this can go down as one of the best examples ever of why it's downright impossible to convince someone who's "opposed" to evolution that it's a basic fact: If you think the very tenets of science are misguided, pretty much any evidence presented to you can be written off as fabricated or misinterpreted.

scientific community is thrilled and grateful for the find, and the University of Calgary will unveil the five fossils on Thursday.

It's an important point in Earth's evolutionary history, because new species were popping up all over to make up for the ecological niches dinos left behind.

Ironically, Nernberg's contributions at the Creation Science Museum are almost certainly what scientists have to thank for the find

one in eight high school biology teachers advocate for creationism, even though it's unconstitutional,”

many teachers are interpreting the Louisiana Science Education Act as allowing such unconstitutional and scientifically-misleading lessons.”

appeals to “a Christian audience as well as a scientific audience,"

“For the scientific community, it presents something that they can take to the laboratory and test for themselves.

Those with a “biased” mind might find the book “controversial," he added

there's already a focus of crime in local television news but of that crime African Americans tend to be over represented compared to their actual crime rates. So I began to think, well if this is going on, if we're seeing a lot of negative stereotypes within the news media, what are the lasting impacts of that over time?" 

Implicit Association Test to approach the question to determine if there may be an unconscious bias at play. The Implicit Association Test is a word association test

"You actually have images of African Americans and Caucasians flashed on the screen with words that you have to sort. Sometimes good words will be sorted with African American, sometimes good will be sorted with Caucasian and same with bad. What you find is generally people who are bias, it takes them longer to pare what good is supposed to be with African American than good with Caucasian. So that gets a hidden connection in the mind where negativity is generally associated with African Americans and positivity generally associated with being Caucasians."

“Since my debut on television in 1979, I have been an eyewitness to the many changes in technology, society, and how we communicate. I am one who embraces change, and celebrates the higher quality of life we enjoy now thanks to this progress.

I realize the instant communication platforms we enjoy now do have some negatives that are troubling. Just a few examples in recent days…”

“This is a lenticular cloud. They have always been around, and quite frankly aren’t that unusual (although it is an anomaly to see one away from a mountain range). The one thing that is different today is that almost everyone has a camera phone, and almost everyone shares pictures of weather events. You didn’t see these often in earlier decades because technology didn’t allow it. Lenticular clouds are nothing new. But, yes, they are cool to see.”

This age of misinformation can lead to dangerous consequences, and promote an agenda, he warns.

“The Houston flooding is a great example. We are being told this is unprecedented’… Houston is ‘under water… and it is due to manmade global warming. “Yes, the flooding in Houston yesterday was severe, and a serious threat to life and property. A genuine weather disaster that has brought on suffering.

this was not ‘unprecedented.’ Flooding from Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 was more widespread, and flood waters were deeper. There is no comparison.”

“Those on the right, and those on the left hang out in ‘echo chambers,’ listening to those with similar world views refusing to believe anything else could be true

“Everyone knows the climate is changing; it always has, and always will. I do not know of a single ‘climate denier.’ I am still waiting to meet one.

“The debate involves the anthropogenic impact, and this is not why I am writing this piece. Let’s just say the Houston flood this week is weather, and not climate, and leave it at that.”

Spann lays much of the blame on the mainstream media and social media “hype and misinformation.”

“They will be sure to let you know that weather events they are reporting on are unprecedented,’ there are ‘millions and millions in the path,’ it is caused by a ‘monster storm,’ and ‘the worst is yet to come since these events are becoming more ‘frequent.’

“You will never hear about the low tornado count in recent years, the lack of major hurricane landfalls on U.S. coasts over the past 10 years, or the low number of wildfires this year. It doesn’t fit their story.

never let facts get in the way of a good story…. there will ALWAYS be a heat wave, flood, wildfire, tornado, tyhpoon, cold wave, and snow storm somewhere. And, trust me, they will find them, and it will probably lead their newscasts

“So to see the horrendous bias that went on against the Yes campaign before the referendum – to see the BBC used as a political cudgel against a legitimate democratic movement – really broke my heart.”

“BBC Scotland is terrified of class. I can’t remember their last big working-class drama. You can have working-class comedies, but drama? Nooo, even if it’s the criminal class, they get better suits and live in nicer houses,” he said.

“We disagree, however, with his assessment of our news coverage during the referendum and in particular his belief that we were deliberately biased, a view which was publicly rejected by the leader of the Yes campaign, and a former head of news at BBC Scotland, Blair Jenkins

“Holding all political leaders to account – no matter which party they represent – is one of the cornerstones of impartial journalism. It is what our audiences rightly expect and what we will continue to uphold.

"As you all know, I went through a really fun time the last 15 months with lots of different people investigating me too, right?"

"There is a bias," Christie insisted

all of that happened last January was, 'Oh, by the way, ... I have a private email server and all my emails were on this private server and I deleted a bunch of them, but they were only personal, and you're going to have to take my word for it cause the servers gone."

not the first time the governor suggested media bias was to blame for the fallout of the George Washington Bridge lane closure controversy.

December 2013, a month before the now infamous "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email from a top Christie staffer was revealed, Christie brushed off questions about the lane closures during a Statehouse news conference

"I know you guys are obsessed with this, I'm not. I'm really not. It's not that big a deal," Christie insisted. "Just because press runs around and writes about it, both here and nationally, I know why that is and so do you, let's not pretend it's because of the gravity of the issue. It's because I am a national figure and anything like this will be written a lot about now, so let's not pretend this is some grave thing."

Christie signaled in New Hampshire he's intent on pressing Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential race, on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya that's been a lighting rod for Clinton critics just as the governor declared during a recent trip here that he's done "apologizing" for the Bridgegate scandal

"I don't think there's been nearly enough questions asked about this," Christie said. "We need to ask a lot more questions about Benghazi. We need to get to the bottom of what happened because it does matter, madam secretary."

their “conditioning has been conditioned,” and marginalized groups are often left to pick up the pieces in the wake of brutality and/or neglect by those in positions of power, trust and influence.

tackles media bias (pdf) and how it indiscriminately pathologizes communities of color for mass consumption.

“Implicit bias impacts the way black communities are treated across practically all sectors of life in America, from courtrooms to doctors’ offices,

“The media is no different, whether it be the use of pejorative terms like ‘thug’ and ‘animal’ to describe protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore, or the widespread overreporting of crime stories involving black suspects in New York City.”

Media bias not only negatively impacts black America’s relationship with law enforcement and the judicial system (pdf) but also extends to how African Americans are perceived in society at large.

“Television newsrooms are nearly 80 percent white, according to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, while radio newsrooms are 92 percent white,”

“The percentage of minority journalists has remained between 12 and 14 percent for more than a decade.”

This lays the groundwork for an intrinsically racist media structure that, according to The Atlantic’s Riva Gold, means “news organizations are losing their ability to empower, represent, and—especially in cases where language ability is crucial—even to report on minority populations in their communities.”

researchers are coalescing around the need to rethink the placement process itself.

Some are calling for statewide policy changes, others are pushing individual schools or systems to look at their own practices and improve upon them

Nearly 70% of community college students are placed into remedial courses each year. Many of these students are from low-income and minority backgrounds, both of which are still highly underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, fields

recommend colleges incorporate student goals and motivation into their placement decision and acknowledge the realistic math needs of various degree programs.

Yet, placement tests are almost universally skewed to measure how well students know algebra.

“The way that math placement is done right now hurts a lot of students.”

a key recommendation for colleges is to step up professional development with advisors and help them guide students through appropriate course sequences for their end goals

In many places the advisor-to-student ratio is too high to allow for proper guidance

Placement tests must evaluate the range of skills, however

Single standardized tests are easy to administer and cheap to interpret, but they don’t seem to work for placement

The exercise was designed to find the perceived boundaries between colors, the researchers said

scientists showed different people the same colors, but this time they asked them to find the "best example" of a particular color.

researchers showed participants colored squares, and asked them to select the best match on the color wheel. In a fourth experiment, another group of participants completed the same task, but there was a delay of 90 milliseconds between when each color square was displayed and when they were asked to select the best match on the color wheel.

This tendency to lump colors together could explain why it's so hard to match the color of house paint based on memory alone, the researchers said

categories are indeed important in how people identify and remember colors.

participants who were asked to name the colors reliably saw five hues: blue, yellow, pink, purple and green

"Where that fuzzy naming happened, those are the boundaries"

only 26.6 percent of U.S. scientists are women, the 10th worst showing below No. 1 Japan with 12 percent women scientists.

Latvia, at No. 58, had the highest proportion, with 51.8 percent women scientists.

But change is on the way

Iran had the best showing in this category, at No. 60, with women representing 67.3 percent of college science majors.

“We will read in Genesis and them [sic] some supplemental material debunking various aspects of evolution from which the students will present,”

A teacher at Caddo Parish schools wrote a newspaper column saying that her job is to present both evolution and creationism.

God made science,” wrote fifth-grade teacher Charlotte Hinson.

“pushing her twisted religious beliefs onto the class,” another praised biology teacher Michael Stacy because he “discussed evolution and creationism in a full spectrum of thought.”

state law, passed in 2008, allows science teachers to introduce supplemental materials to “critique” scientific theories – lessons on creationism are still illegal under federal law.

schools are also violating prohibitions on teacher-led prayer in school.

She identifies herself as having just started her second postdoc in the lab of the adviser trying to look down her shirt. A postdoctoral researcher already has a Ph.D., and frequently has her own funding, but does not yet have a permanent position or the institutional affiliation and (relative) job security that goes with it

Postdocs rely on the forbearance of an adviser who gives them lab space (and usually some other resources), an institutional affiliation, and, one hopes, some mentoring in how to succeed as a member of their scientific community.

terrible advice

postdoc wants an adviser that engages her as a scientist, someone committed to helping her gain both the competence and the confidence to become a full-fledged colleague in the scientific community. These are not goals that are fostered when the adviser regularly tries to look down the postdoc’s shirt.

Huang’s column suggested that, because workplaces are part of life, they are also places where we ought to expect people’s libido to influence their behavior. She wrote, “the kind of behavior you mention is common in the workplace.”

postdoc may have more power than a graduate student, she has significantly less power than her adviser, especially given the importance of networking in building one’s scientific reputation, establishing future collaborations, and locating a permanent position.

Huang offered her opinion that the adviser in question had not crossed that legal line. On that basis, Huang argued that even though leering is inappropriate workplace behavior, the postdoc should “put up with it, with good humor if you can.”

It matters not a whit whether the behavior rises to the level of unlawful sexual harassment. It

Telling this early career scientist to grin and bear unprofessional behavior from her adviser, rather than doing something to mitigate it, leaves her stuck in a professional relationship where it may never be possible to engage the adviser’s scientific interest without concerns about engaging his carnal interest

It will be hard to get mentoring without wondering if there are unspoken strings attached.

It will be hard for the postdoc to believe her adviser sees her as a colleague — or for her to see herself as one

So “Bothered” probably doesn’t want to confront her adviser in a way that comes across as accusing, and she should almost certainly have back-up from someone else in her scientific community with enough power to protect her

If it doesn’t look like there’s a reasonable way to ask the adviser to stop without repercussions, the postdoc’s confidants can help her develop an escape plan so “Bothered” can receive the mentoring (and salary and benefits) she needs without the hassle of an adviser’s unprofessional behavior.

“the church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re really good at, which is … theology and morality.”

“When we get involved with political and controversial scientific theories, I think the church is probably not as forceful and credible.”

"Plans to scrap the requirement for academy sponsors to consult with school communities, including parents, could result in a faith based education being imposed on parents and young people against their wishes.

"Given England's religiously diverse population – around half of which self-identify as non-religious, any increase in the proportion of religiously designated or faith ethos schools is likely to impede parents' ability to secure an education that doesn't run counter to their beliefs.

"Forcing a religious ethos on young people through their education would in many cases disrespect their parents' wishes and be at odds with principles of fairness and equality.

the academisation of local authority controlled schools would increase the risk of faith-based organisations gaining greater control over school curriculums, admissions arrangements and employment practices – leading to even greater discrimination in our education system than already exists.

Do the larger religious (or anti-religious) implications of a scientific theory make it inadmissible for instruction in public schools? They shouldn't.

just because we're declaring the teaching of evolution to be constitutional doesn't mean we that it has no connections to religion

while it may sound odd to hear that we can (sometimes) declare something constitutional to teach in public schools even though it touches upon religion, there's good legal precedent for such a finding.

a government policy establishes religion if its "principal or primary effect" is one that "advances or inhibits" religion.

the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion

a government policy is unconstitutional if it has a "primary" or "principal" effect that advances (or inhibits) religion. However, in light of this second part, the Supreme Court has also developed a legal doctrine called the "incidental effects" or "secondary effects" doctrine which says that government law or policy may have "secondary" or "incidental" effects that touch upon religion and not violate the Establishment Clause.

Secondary effects that touch upon religion are not constitutionally fatal.

the Court held in Lynch v. Donnelly that "not every law that confers an indirect, remote, or incidental benefit upon [religion] is, for that reason alone, constitutionally invalid"

if government aid "is allocated on the basis of neutral, secular criteria that neither favor nor disfavor religion, and is made available to both religious and secular beneficiaries on a nondiscriminatory basis," then any effects upon religion are merely incidental.

evolutionary biology is based upon science, when we teach it as a science, the primary effect is to advance scientific knowledge.

a scientific theory like evolution does speak to ultimate questions about origins, which are also addressed by religion

it certainly touches upon religious questions. But when we discuss Darwinian evolution strictly on a scientific level, any effects upon religion are "secondary" or "incidental" compared to their primary effect of advancing scientific knowledge.

if creation science were a scientific theory, it could have been taught because any its touching upon religion would have been a secondary effect

approach was also followed in Crowley v. Smithsonian Institution, where a federal judge rejected arguments that Smithsonian exhibits on evolution established "secular humanism" because the "impact [on religion] is at most incidental to the primary effect of presenting a body of scientific knowledge"

Because evolution is based upon science, any effects upon religion would not bar its teaching.

[I]f a theory has scientific value and evidence to support it, its primary effect would be to advance knowledge of the natural world, not to advance religion

ultimate goal of schools is to educate students. Where a theory has scientific value and supporting evidence, it provides a basis for knowledge. Whether it coincidentally advances religion should not matter.

one can legally justify teaching evolution while being sensitive to the fact that it has larger implications that touch upon the religious beliefs of many Americans.

best of both worlds. It allows science to be taught in the science classroom while respecting the beliefs of people who have religious objections to evolution.