I’m going to admit that I’ve been procrastinating on fulfilling this reader request for a while now. As any of you who are writers can attest, the hardest things to write about are those that you know a lot about and those that you know very little about. The sweet spot is somewhere in between,…
In an interview with the Texas Tribune, Texas’s junior US Senator made a notably odd remark. On the global warming alarmists, anyone who actually points to the evidence that disproves their apocalyptical claims, they don’t engage in reasoned debate. What do they do? They scream, “You’’re a…
NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of Kristin Dow and Thomas E. Downing's The Atlas of Climate Change: Mapping the World's Greatest Challenge (University of California Press, 2011). The preview consists of thirteen full-color spreads with information on warning signs, polar…
This month on Friday Flicks, I bring you the third and final 2015 NCSE Friend of the Planet Award winner, Greg Craven. You might be familiar with Greg, who rocketed from mild-mannered high school science teacher to YouTube celebrity in a matter of weeks with his video, The Most Terrifying…
While exploring Israeli politicians’ views on evolution, and the similar rate at which the US and Israeli public rejects evolution, I wondered how the Israeli public would compare with Jews in the US. It seems more apt to compare the 5.4 million US Jews to the 6.1 million Israeli Jews (or 8…
Strange to say, but it wasn’t until May 2012, when he spoke at a conference marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Edwards v. Aguillard that the Stanford Constitutional Law Center and NCSE organized, that I met Ron Numbers in person for the first time. Without any ado, we quickly fell…
When educators tell me about the challenges they experience in teaching climate change, what they lament is not the complexity of the material, or the political pushback, but rather the depressing nature of the topic. The implications of climate change are enormous, the obstacles…
I first learned about science historian Naomi Oreskes in 2004, when she published a paper in Science documenting the scope of the scientific consensus behind climate change. She and her research assistants surveyed the scientific literature to that date, categorizing which papers…
Scientists and science educators of all stripes — students, postdocs, faculty, and full- or part-time science communicators — are invited to enter the Fifth Annual Evolution Video Competition, sponsored by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the…