Peanut butter for non-allergic babies may reduce later allergies: http://t.co/6ZWc1ItSnD #BehindTheHeadlines pic.twitter.com/WOJzabsYWS — NHS Choices (@NHSChoices) February 25, 2015 How do I know it’s OK? This often goes through my mind when I’m writing about science. The mere fact that I’m a scientist doesn’t give me authority...
Sometimes, the best valentines are those that arrive late, long after the roses have withered and the chocolates have been consumed. At around the same time that I started high school, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft blasted off on its journey to the outer planets. Thirteen years...
I recently found out that over 95% of the electricity produced by BC Hydro comes from hydroelectric sources, which floored me. I grew up in Alberta, where the majority of power comes from coal and natural gas, so my concept of electricity sources doesn't include water, except...
Conferences are great places to hang out if you're a scientist. The buzz of knowledge fills the air, and it’s often the only chance you get to brainstorm with like-minded enthusiasts in your field. By the end of the conference, you are high on knowledge...
We were curious about this question, and we decided to take the opportunity presented by the annual meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science and the first conference of the newly formed Citizen Science Association, which both took place in San Jose last week and this weekend. We put together a short survey and tweeted/blogged/Facebooked it to the attendees and our followers: to you laypeople, this is what's known as a "convenience sample" (convenience sampling is the reason so much basic research is done on university students). We figured a few thousand people keen on advancing science generally and citizen science in particular would be a great way to find people who had supported science crowdfunding.
The response, unfortunately, was not what we'd hoped. We had seven responses, with one respondent giving reasons for supporting science via crowdfunding. A huge thank you to those who participated. While we sure won't be publishing any papers with these responses (and that was never the plan anyway!), we can talk about the data points we got—and for those who are keen to learn more, we've added some links at the end.