AAAS Meeting Explores Ways to Improve Ethics Panels that Oversee Social Science Research

The ethics boards that oversee federally funded studies involving human subjects have become part of the research landscape since the 1970s. But some researchers in the social and behavioral sciences complain that the boards—established in response to abuses in biomedical research—too often take a heavy-handed approach toward survey research and other social science projects that pose minimal risk, if any, to those who participate.

By AAAS, USA.

Technology Policy Resource.

Scientists-Turned-Reporters Find "a Real Sense of Accomplishment" as AAAS Media Fellows

Tim De Chant, who is working toward his doctorate in environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley, has written for a well-regarded campus science magazine that appears once a semester. But that did not prepare him for the deadline intensity of a big city newspaper.De Chant is among 14 science and engineering students, most of them working on doctorates, who were selected to participate in this year's AAAS Mass Media Fellowship program. De Chant spent his summer at The Chicago Tribune, where he quickly had to adjust to the pace of daily journalism. Soon after he arrived, he was assigned to cover a morning briefing at the Field Museum on the scanning of a 2,200-year-old mummy with new X-ray technology. He returned to the office by 11:30 a.m. and wrote a piece that was posted on the Tribune's web site by 2:00 p.m. and published in the next morning's paper.

By AAAS, USA.

Technology Policy Resource.