The challenges facing America's future technological and scientific growth

16% of US science teachers are creationists

Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. And, although almost all teachers also taught evolution, those with less training in science – and especially evolutionary biology – tend to devote less class time to Darwinian principles.

US courts have repeatedly decreed that creationism and intelligent design are religion, not science, and have no place in school science classrooms. But no matter what courts and school boards decree, it is up to teachers to put the curriculum into practice.

"Ultimately, they are the ones who carry it out," says Michael Berkman, a political scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

But what teachers actually teach about evolution and creationism in their classrooms is a bit of a grey area, so Berkman and his colleagues decided to conduct the first-ever national survey on the subject.

'Not shocking'

The researchers polled a random sample of nearly 2000 high-school science teachers across the US in 2007. Of the 939 who responded, 2% said they did not cover evolution at all, with the majority spending between 3 and 10 classroom hours on the subject.

However, a quarter of the teachers also reported spending at least some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. Of these, 48% – about 12.5% of the total survey – said they taught it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species".

Science teaching experts say they are not surprised to find such a large number of science teachers advocating creationism.

"It seems a bit high, but I am not shocked by it," says Linda Froschauer, past president of the National Science Teachers Association based in Arlington, Virginia. "We do know there's a problem out there, and this gives more credibility to the issue."

Better training

When Berkman's team asked about the teachers' personal beliefs, about the same number, 16% of the total, said they believed human beings had been created by God within the last 10,000 years.

Teachers who subscribed to these young-Earth creationist views, perhaps not surprisingly, spent 35% fewer hours teaching evolution than other teachers, the survey revealed.

The survey also showed that teachers who had taken more science courses themselves – and especially those who had taken a course in evolutionary biology – devoted more class time to evolution than teachers with weaker science backgrounds.

This may be because better-prepared teachers are more confident in dealing with students' questions about a sensitive subject, says Berkman, who notes that requiring all science teachers to take a course in evolutionary biology could have a big impact on the teaching of evolution in the schools.

Original article posted here.

More good news: Your cell phone may kill you

Mobile phones 'more dangerous than smoking'

Brain expert warns of huge rise in tumours and calls on industry to take immediate steps to reduce radiation

By Geoffrey Lean

Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take "immediate steps" to reduce exposure to their radiation.

The study, by Dr Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet published of the health risks.

It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.

Earlier this year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advises its people to minimise handset use, and the European Environment Agency has called for exposures to be reduced.

Professor Khurana – a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers – reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.

He admits that mobiles can save lives in emergencies, but concludes that "there is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours". He believes this will be "definitively proven" in the next decade.

Noting that malignant brain tumours represent "a life-ending diagnosis", he adds: "We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation." He fears that "unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps", the incidence of malignant brain tumours and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically.

"It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking," says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. Smoking kills some five million worldwide each year, and exposure to asbestos is responsible for as many deaths in Britain as road accidents.

Late last week, the Mobile Operators Association dismissed Khurana's study as "a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual". It believes he "does not present a balanced analysis" of the published science, and "reaches opposite conclusions to the WHO and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews".

Original article posted here.

Bad law, Bad moon rising

Update Linking to copyright music posted elsewhere online without permission can be illegal, an Australian appeals court ruled Monday.

The issue before a three-judge panel at the Federal Court of Australia was whether Stephen Cooper, a retired policeman who ran the now-defunct site MP3s4free.net, was legally allowed to post links to mostly copyright MP3 files hosted on other servers. Cooper does not appear to have hosted any copyright music on MP3s4free.net.

Upholding a single judge's ruling from last summer, the appeals panel agreed that linking runs afoul of Australia's copyright laws, handing a victory to Universal Music Australia and the other major labels that brought the suit in 2004.

"A principal purpose of the Web site was to enable infringing copies of the downloaded sound recordings to be made," Judge Susan Kenny wrote in her opinion. "The fact that the Web site also carried a warning that some downloading could be illegal did not lessen the force of the invitation."

Cooper, a resident of the state of Queensland, had argued that he had no power to prevent illegal copying because users could "automatically" add links to the site without his control. He likened his site to Google's search engine as a mechanism for pointing users to other sites--an analogy that one judge deemed "unhelpful," in part because Google was not designed exclusively to facilitate music downloads. The opinion also noted that even the search giant is not always free to link to everything it wishes.

Furthermore, Cooper's "deliberate choice" to set up the site in such a way that he couldn't restrict access to copyright files when he could have designed it otherwise rendered him guilty of authorizing copyright infringement, the judges said in a multipart opinion.

This is not the first time that linking to illicit material has been deemed illegal. In 2001, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled that a news organization could be prohibited from linking to software that can decrypt DVDs. "The injunction's linking prohibition validly regulates (2600 Magazine's) opportunity instantly to enable anyone anywhere to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted movies on DVDs," the appeals court said. A Dutch court in 1999 reached a similar conclusion.

The Australian judges also agreed with an earlier court ruling determining that E-Talk, the company that hosted the MP3s4free site, and Comcen Internet Services, E-Talk's parent company, had also broken the law because they did not do enough to stop Cooper from committing copyright violations.

"Rather than withdrawing hosting of Mr. Cooper's Web site, or otherwise placing pressure on Mr. Cooper to stop his Web site (from) being used for the predominant purpose of copyright infringements, E-Talk sought to achieve a commercial advantage from advertising on Mr. Cooper's Web site," Judge Catherine Branson wrote.

The court did overturn a guilty verdict against Comcen employee Chris Takoushis, saying there was no evidence to suggest that Takoushis had the authority to personally terminate Cooper's site--or compel his employer to do so.

Sabiene Heindl, general manager of an Australian company called Music Industry Piracy Investigations, hailed the court's decision as a victory for Australian record labels.

"Internet service providers have an important role in ensuring that wholesale music copyright infringement is not taking place on their networks, and this judgment sends a clear message to the industry that operators are at risk of being held liable if they are doing the wrong thing," Heindl said in a statement.

Attorneys for Cooper were not immediately available for comment.

As previously reported, Music Industry Piracy Investigations first suspected Cooper's site of piracy in December 2002 and raided his premises as part of a broader sweep of Internet file-sharing sites in 2004.

According to the Australian investigators, Cooper's site recorded a total of 191,296,511 hits to the site, with 7,081,899 unique visitors, between November 2002 and October 2003. During that same time, 1.97 terabytes of data were downloaded from the site.

Original article posted here.