Tanath

There's an indictment of our education system if there ever was one... - Christopher 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... more... - 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 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.... more... - 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... more... - Brian Chang