[Special Issue News] Australia: First, do harm reduction
Shortly after the AIDS epidemic surfaced in Australia, an aggressive effort began to prevent the spread of HIV in people who inject drugs. The harm reduction movement that evolved provided clean needles and syringes to users, as well as opiate substitutes like methadone that are not injected. A medically supervised injecting center also opened in Sydney—the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere—where people receive clean needles and syringes and legally use their drugs. HIV never got a serious foothold in this extremely vulnerable population, and Australia's harm reduction strategies eventually spread to nearby ...
Source: Science: This Week - July 10, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Science Magazine (mailto:soleditor at aaas.org) Tags: Australia Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The bond breaker
Many chemists strive to be grand architects, building imposing molecular edifices with dozens or even hundreds of atoms, bonds twisting this way and that. Not Roy Periana. He has spent his career focused on just one bond, a link between a carbon and a hydrogen atom in a molecule of methane, the main component of natural gas. Working with colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida, Periana has come up with a new way to tweak this bond. If he can perfect his technique, it would give chemists a cheap, efficient way to convert natural gas to methanol and other key starter materials for the petrochemical i...
Source: Science: This Week - June 27, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Robert Service Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Hunting a climate fugitive
Will the rise of natural gas from shale help curb climate change – or contribute to it? That's the question researchers are asking as shale gas begins to replace coal as the fuel of choice for generating electricity. The good news is that burning gas creates less CO2 per unit of energy than coal or gasoline. So the gradual shift could reduce emissions, buying time for the development of new, cleaner energy technologies. The bad news is that leaks from natural gas wells, pipelines, and tanks may be spewing more methane—a potent warming gas—into the atmosphere than once estimated. Such "fugitive emissions" have inspire...
Source: Science: This Week - June 27, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Eli Kintisch Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Searching for life in the deep shale
For energy developers, the geological formation known as the Marcellus Shale represents a rich new source of natural gas. For environmental engineer Paula Mouser and geochemist Shikha Sharma, it represents a potentially rich source of new microbes. The two researchers are part of a pioneering effort to explore what is living in the deep layers of rock—and how the gas drilling boom might affect long-isolated ecosystems. "Next to nothing is known about the biodiversity of shale deposits," says Simon Malcomber of the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., which is funding the work. And scientists aren't the only o...
Source: Science: This Week - June 27, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Elizabeth Pennisi Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Will fracking put too much fizz in your water?
There's little question that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, techniques have helped spark a boom in shale gas production in the United States. Along with the benefits, however, have come concerns. One big one: the potential to harm water quality. Although fracking typically targets geological formations that are more than a kilometer down—far deeper than most drinking water wells and aquifers—many communities worry that their drinking water could become contaminated with methane or drilling fluids. Fracking opponents point to widespread complaints of contamination near gas wells. But industry advocates claim that th...
Source: Science: This Week - June 26, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Erik Stokstad Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Rethinking the Global Supply Chain: The information highway gets physical
Researchers hope to apply features of the Internet to improve how goods are shipped around the world. The eventual adoption of the Physical Internet, they say, promises greater efficiencies for companies, at lower cost to consumers and with a smaller carbon footprint.
Author: Jeffrey Mervis (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - June 5, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Mervis Tags: Rethinking the Global Supply Chain Source Type: research
[News of the Week] This Week's Section
Follow the links below for a roundup of the week's top stories in science, or download a PDF of the entire section.
Random SamplesAround the WorldNewsmakers (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - May 29, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Science Magazine (mailto:soleditor at aaas.org) Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Science of Inequality: Tracking who climbs up—and who falls down—the ladder
It's not easy to keep track of who is moving up and down the economic ladder in the United States. Researchers have gotten a glimpse from surveys, but they could learn a lot more about intergenerational mobility if they could also tap into the massive amounts of information that government agencies already collect about residents for other purposes.
Author: Jeffrey Mervis (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - May 23, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Mervis Tags: The Science of Inequality Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Science of Inequality: While emerging economies boom, equality goes bust
Longitudinal surveys, better cross-sectional data, and renewed attention from scholars have exposed extraordinarily high levels of inequality in developing countries. In many parts of the world, the gulf between rich and poor is widening, overturning some predictions about the relationship between development and inequality. A tour of emerging economies shows that people in different countries react to these dispiriting trends in highly varied—and often unexpected—ways.
Author: Mara Hvistendahl (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - May 23, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Mara Hvistendahl Tags: The Science of Inequality Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Science of Inequality: Can disparities be deadly?
Poverty, disease, and early death clearly travel together, but does the size of the gap between the rich and the poor itself help make people sick? Controversial research explores whether inequalities in the distribution of income, and the psychological stress of being low-ranked, can contribute to higher rates of illness and mortality.
Author: Emily Underwood (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - May 23, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Emily Underwood Tags: The Science of Inequality Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Science of Inequality: Physicists say it's simple
The basic inequality that plagues economies the world over may have a simple explanation—according to econophysicists. Pick a country and you'll find multitudes earning next to nothing, a few raking in plenty, and a distribution between the extremes that falls exponentially as income increases, they claim. That distribution arises from an analogy to the concept of entropy, a measure of disorder in a physical system such as a gas, econophysicists argue. If so, then just as a gas evolves to a state of maximum entropy, random churning in the economy ensures that the income distribution tends to this inequitable form.
Author...
Source: Science: This Week - May 23, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Adrian Cho Tags: The Science of Inequality Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Science of Inequality: Tax man's gloomy message: the rich will get richer
For decades, experts have assumed that as capitalist economies grow, they reduce the income gap between rich and poor. That view has dominated academic thinking for 6 decades—but it's a "fairy tale," claims French economist Thomas Piketty. A group of researchers led by Piketty has put together a unique resource on income flows in more than 20 nations, called the World Top Incomes Database. Piketty says it demonstrates that over the long term, owners of capital inevitably acquire an outsize share of national income and wealth.
Author: Eliot Marshall (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - May 23, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Eliot Marshall Tags: The Science of Inequality Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Science of Inequality: Our egalitarian Eden
For more than 90% of human history, our species has lived as egalitarian hunter-gatherers. How did our ancestors keep inequality in check? Research on existing hunter-gatherer societies suggests that scattered resources, few possessions, and customs such as sharing meat and exchanging arrows keep these societies equitable.
Author: Elizabeth Pennisi (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - May 23, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Elizabeth Pennisi Tags: The Science of Inequality Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Science of Inequality: The ancient roots of the 1%
Researchers long blamed farming for the rise of inequality. They hypothesized that agriculture led to the production of surpluses and elites who controlled those surpluses. Now, archaeological and ethnographic analyses suggest that some ancient hunter-gatherers may have accumulated wealth by taking control of concentrated patches of wild foods. In this view, it is the ownership of small, resource-rich areas—rather than farming itself—that fosters inequality.
Author: Heather Pringle (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - May 23, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Heather Pringle Tags: The Science of Inequality Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Science of Inequality: A world of difference
Data show why inequality is a hot topic around the world. In the United States, the top 20% of earners take home a whopping 51% of income, and the share of income going to the top 1% has ballooned in the past 30 years, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the World Top Incomes Database. Yet U.S. incomes are more equal than those of many countries, such as South Africa and Brazil, while Norway and Sweden are bastions of equality, as shown by data prepared especially for Science by researchers at the Luxembourg Income Study Center.
Author: Emily Underwood (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - May 22, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Emily Underwood Tags: The Science of Inequality Source Type: research
