How much do students learn about climate change? An in-depth study of introductory biology textbooks from the last 50 years and implications for the education system
That isn’t the only shift. Researchers surveyed introductory biology textbooks from the last 50 years and found that the amount of information about climate change grew compared to the amount of space devoted to solutions. The work was published in December.
Furthermore, the median position of sections about climate change moved from the last 15% of pages in the 1970s — when many scientists first became convinced that the planet was warming — to the last 2.5% in the 2010s. Landin says controversial topics are put at the end in order for teachers to not have to teach them.
Textbook content might not be a reliable guide to how much students are learning about climate change, says Eric Plutzer, a political scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park who has surveyed how public-school teachers in the United States cover climate change2. Instructors could be spending more time on climate change than textbooks indicate, he adds.
Evidence for a collective birthing of whales and other pre-historic reptiles during COVID-19: Rats with ear implants stimulate the brain and learn to recognize music
Rats with ear implants receive stimulation in the brain region that’s linked to alertness to learn to recognize music. The finding could explain why cochlear implants work almost immediately for some people but can take years for others. The implants contain an electrode that converts sounds into electrical signals and feeds them directly into the auditory nerve. Researchers caution that stimulating the alertness region of the brain could be dangerous in humans — it regulates our fight-or-flight response — so the approach is a long way from helping people.
Large measles outbreaks, centred mostly in four cities, mean India is set to miss its self-imposed deadline of eliminating the disease by 2023. The country had persistently low immunization rates before the COVID-19 swine flu outbreak. Between 2019 and 2021, only 56% of children received both doses of the measles vaccine by the time they were 3 years old.
There are more than 100 individual adults and embryonic or newborn individuals that were found in a Nevada fossil graveyard. The finding supports the theory that the prehistoric marine reptile migrated to sheltered waters and gathered in groups to give birth, as some whales do today.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04573-9
How Human Respiratory Epidermology Can Be Learned with Artificial Human Embranes: A Case Study of Scoliosis
The scientific workforce around the world had a rough year. Academic workers in the United States and the United Kingdom have gone on strike. PhD students demanded increases in stipends because of rising costs of living. Major funders, including the US government, pushed open-access science further to the forefront. And science continues to wrestle with a fundamental question: what’s the best way to measure researcher performance?
Artificial human embryos allow scientists to watch how a lump of tissue lengthens and segments to form a spine. The embryo surrogates are created from pluripotent stem cells, which differentiate into embryonic structures when exposed to chemical signals. The researchers were able to model human congenital spine diseases such as scoliosis by disrupting the artificial spine’s development.