"The American public likes science, but thinks that its achievements are less important than they were a decade ago. That's according to telephone surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science." - Tanath from Bookmarklet

There's an indictment of our education system if there ever was one... - Christopher A Carr

Sounds like science needs to hurry up and crack the secret of FTL travel. - Brian Chang

That may not be possible. Chris++ - Tanath

man, this is sad. - laura

I don't know if the poll result is really an indictment of anything; the podcast headline is a bit misleading. "In 1999, 47 percent of those polled said that scientific advances were among the most important U.S. achievements. Today, only 27 percent think so." In the past 10 years, what big scientific advances have we really had? Maybe there were some, but I sure can't name any off the top of my head. We're always making incremental progress, sure, but if you're going to phone up some random people and ask them about the "most important U.S. achievements," in a period when we've just elected our first African-American president, among other things, I'd imagine that anyone responding would be a little hard-pressed to name a scientific advance in recent memory that ranks in our most important achievements, even if the prompt technically allows them to go back through all of U.S. history - most people just aren't geared to think back that way. - Brian Chang

What? No big scientific advances? How about the human genome project for starters? The LHC (yea it fucked up, but it'll be back)? Discovering water on Mars? Realising how bad global warming really is? Discovering RNA interference? Reprogramming skin cells into embryonic-like stem cells? The first petaflop computers? - Science has been progressing at an immense rate in the past 10 years, and will continue to do so. It's a shame people are missing out on this stuff... - laura

What laura said. - Christopher A Carr

Was the human genome project in the past 10 years? For some reason I thought it was a little bit earlier. In that case, maybe it is an indictment of our educational system - I was in college studying chemistry when most of these things happened apparently, and I'll be damned if any of my professors said anything about them, other than global warming. Granted, maybe they did say something but nobody listened to them because we were all trying to figure out our impossibly hard homework problems. - Brian Chang

the human genome project lasted from 1990 to 2003 - Mike Chelen

Oi! You beat me to the answer Mike (wanted to look up the starting date first, was only 7 after all..). @Brian - I suppose it depends a lot on who you spend your time with and are influenced by. I didn't take any particular notice of scientific developments until the third year of my undergrad degree, when I finally met someone who would follow the news and want to discuss these things. Wasn't until then that I realised just how much I love the stuff. The problem is, I bet more people would find scientific developments fascinating if they were exposed to them more. Why have a sports section at the end of the daily news? Why not a science section? If things get reported at all, they're usually blown out of proportion - and that in turn just gives scientists a bad name.. /end of rant. - laura

Agreed, Laura, most of what I see in the news these days is overhyped science in the vein of, "Eating bread gives you cancer!" (this was an actual headline back when I was in high school - turned out the experiment consisted basically of scientists force-feeding lots of bread, 24/7, to lab mice until they got cancer - more bread in a short timespan than any human being would actually want to eat). I think a lot of people (I'm most definitely guilty of this at times) also have a "What does it do for me RIGHT NOW?" attitude when it comes to scientific advance - they'll see things that are a big deal from the science perspective, but then look around and see that it's not yet affecting their lives (e.g., reprogramming skin cells into embryonic-like stem cells - it's cool, but it's not growing them new organs yet), and will discount the importance of them until such time that something actually comes of it. - Brian Chang

Yea, I guess the lack of imminent effects of most scientific disoveries makes the whole thing seem a bit too abstract to care at times (I must admit, I'm totally ignorant of anything outside the life sciences myself). personally. I like thinking about the possibilities though, or just get off on the coolness factor despite a lack of personal benefits. Regarding the original theme of the post I just think it's shocking that so few people know (or care to know) anything about science. I guess I don't know shit about football, but for some reason that strikes me as a lesser crime... And it's especially frustrating to see a relative decline in the interest in science. Guess people have become somewhat disillusioned since so many questions still remain unanswered. After all, scientists are not the new 'demi-gods in white' (sry, german phrase - but so well-fitting) that people might expect them to be. - laura

Part of the reason people follow sports so easily is that they've got a well-developed infrastructure for reporting that is based in narrative -- there's good evidence in cog sci that we think in those terms fairly naturally -- this is an area that science as an industry has not often invested time in. Non-scientists will follow a story -- it needs good guys and bad guys, a compelling conflict, and some sort of foreseeable resolution (remember the reporting on the space race?). Narrative plot structure, though something individual scientists experience, doesn't jibe well with how science gets published -- or reported. There's great narrative-based science stuff for kids (see the blog I.N.K. http://inkrethink.blogspot.com/) but the approach doesn't follow us into adulthood. It could be that if scientists wish to be part of the "national" conversation, they will need to re-think how to show off their human sides -- how to write the narrative of discovery back into how the public consumes science. Blogs are doing this to some extent, but blogs are found b/c people go hunting for them. NatGeo, Hist, and Dis also do a decent job by popularizing/animating science concepts. But I think there's room here for scientists to begin telling their own stories, and do so more compellingly than the 300 character, often smart-ass "about me" statements generally found on social sites. - Mickey Schafer