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A non-profit watchdog reported that the AAAS has received millions of dollars per year from the federal government. The AAAS publication "Science" is reviewing 2,600 of its own articles for possible "exaggeration."A top international science journal funded by the federal government recently acknowledged that thousands of its published research papers may contain misleading language.More than 2,600 of the papers from "Science," the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and one of the world's top academic journals, were examined in depth by another research journal, "Scientometrics." It found in a study that from 1997 to...

Burnt toast can expose people to more pollution than if they were standing at a busy road junction, a study has claimed. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found burnt toast was especially harmful and the safest way was to “go for gold” – allowing the bread to turn a light gold colour. The team of experts built a mock-up of a three-bed house and equipped it with monitors to assess how everyday activities impacted on air quality. Roasting and frying can also prove to be toxic, the research found. Researchers in the US found the least harmful...

Scientists from San Diego and a dozen countries around the world are gathered at the University of San Diego this week to share their latest research. Among some of the major topics at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference are climate change, heat waves and ocean acidification. Geophysicist Peter Ward, who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey for nearly three decades, discussed warming global temperatures during his Wednesday session. "There's a very interesting correlation between warming and volcanism at the end of the last ice age," Ward said. He said the past two years of record warmth...

WASHINGTON — Was the resurrection of Jesus Christ an anti-scientific event? This question was discussed at a March 13 conference on science and religion hosted by The American Association for the Advancement of Science's Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion.At the end of a panel on "Science Engagement in Congregations," an audience member who identified himself as a rabbi said "the elephant in the room has not been discussed," which he identified as, "that the fundamental basis of Christianity is a violation of nature."He began his remarks by recalling another event he attended at a Presbyterian church. An audience member...

In its new report on the risks from human-caused climate change, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) sets climate science back rather than “advancing” it. The report, counterfactually titled “What We Know,” is more an account of what the scientific community thought it knew about a decade ago than an up-to-date telling of current understanding. Not surprisingly, the group ignores the fact that climate science is moving in a direction that increasingly suggests that the risk of extreme climate change is lower than has been previously assessed. Instead, the AAAS continues to play up the chance of...

http://www.timesofisrael.com/for-first-time-us-academic-group-boycotts-israel/ For first time, US academic group boycotts Israel In unanimous vote, Association for Asian American Studies slams professors for being ‘deeply complicit’ in Israeli crimes By Raphael Ahren April 25, 2013, 11:36 pm 22 The Association for Asian American Studies decided to boycott Israeli academic institutions, reportedly becoming the first US academic institution to do so. At its annual conference in Seattle last week, the group’s general membership unanimously voted in favor of a resolution that accuses Israeli universities of supporting the occupation and systematic discrimination against Palestinian students, among other charges. “Whereas the Association for Asian American Studies...

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit challenging the Obama administration’s funding of stem cell research. The lawsuit, filed by Boston biological engineer James L. Shirley, asserted that the funding violated a 1996 law prohibiting federal taxpayer money from supporting work that harms an embryo. The Obama administration policy allows research on embryos that were harvested long ago through private funding ... ... The Court of Appeals overruled him, and (Judge Royce) Lamberth said Wednesday he is bound by the higher court’s ruling and dismissed the case. The White House hailed the ruling as a “victory for research and...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A climate change study that projected a 2.4 degree Celsius increase in temperature and massive worldwide food shortages in the next decade was seriously flawed, scientists said Wednesday. The study was posted on the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was written about by numerous international news agencies, including AFP. But AAAS later retracted the study as experts cited numerous errors in its approach. "A reporter with The Guardian alerted us yesterday to concerns about the news release submitted by Hoffman & Hoffman public relations," said AAAS spokeswoman Ginger Pinholster in an...

Note: Photo included. "White House Science ‘Czar’ Tells Students: U.S. Can’t Expect to Be Number One in Science and Technology Forever" SNIPPET: "The Obama administration’s top science and technology official, who has argued for the economic de-development of America, warned science students last Friday that the United States cannot expect to be “number one” forever. “We can’t expect to be number one in everything indefinitely,” Dr. John P. Holdren said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Holdren is director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and chairs the President’s Council of Advisors...

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was intended to put the climate change debate to rest. After all, it was supposed to provide irrefutable evidence of global warming. Instead, some errors in methodology and data have reinvigorated the opposition. What’s a beleaguered global warming scientist to do? How about a new approach, such as one with a ‘Hollywood touch’? Some in the general scientific community see the erosion of public confidence in global warming science spilling over to other branches of science as well. Because of this, many scientists recognize that there needs to be a new approach...

First Draft of the Neandertal Genome Sequence Released by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D.* The highly anticipated initial draft assembly of the Neandertal genome was announced at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in the United States and at a European press conference.1 This genomic milestone involves approximately 3 billion bases of ancient human (Neandertal) DNA sequenced so far, which is the same amount of DNA contained in one set of human chromosomes or a single genome coverage. This is a major event in the booming scientific field referred to as “paleogenomics,” a discipline that...

It looks like president-elect Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor. Holdren is a professor of environmental policy at Harvard and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As Ron Bailey points out, he has been an activist on the ecological left and no friend of free markets. Perhaps more striking is his activism well beyond his own academic specialty, arguing, for instance, that scientists have a responsibility to advance the cause of the elimination of all nuclear weapons and seeking controls on population growth. And he didn’t say all this in the...

ST. LOUIS—The first humans to spread across North America may have been seal hunters from France and Spain. This runs counter to the long-held belief that the first human entry into the Americas was a crossing of a land-ice bridge that spanned the Bering Strait about 13,500 years ago. The new thinking was outlined here Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The tools don’t match Recent studies have suggested that the glaciers that helped form the bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska began receding around 17,000 to 13,000 years ago, leaving very little...

Experts Convened by AAAS Call for Voter-System Research and Reform, Warning of Broad Vulnerability A panel of top experts on election technology and administration warned Tuesday that the American system of voting is broadly vulnerable to error and abuse, and called for a crash-course of study and reform to make results more reliable and to promote better access by voters, especially those who have historically encountered serious impediments to exercising their right to vote. In findings released after a weekend conference convened by AAAS, the 18-member panel concluded that research into new voting technology and the behavior of voters, election...