FiveThirtyEight: Science & Health

When New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt asked about a thousand attendees at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2011 to identify their political views with a show of hands, only three hands went up for “conservative or on the right.” Separately, a survey of more than 500 social and personality psychologists published in 2012 found that only 6 percent identifi

Last week saw a major development in how the Environmental Protection Agency plans to engage with scientific evidence. On Friday, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt gave The Daily Caller an exclusive interview and said he would soon end the agency’s use of what he called “secret science” — research whose underlying, raw data sets are not released publicly.

Happy Equal Pay Day! (Or, as I like to call it, Women’s New Year.) Today is the day that marks roughly how far into 2018 women had to work to earn a salary equal to what men got the year before.

The questions that kids ask about science aren’t always easy to answer. Sometimes, their little brains can lead to big places that adults forget to explore. That is what inspired our series Science Question From A Toddler, which uses kids’ curiosity as a jumping-off point to investigate the scientific wonders that adults don’t even think to ask about.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

The questions that kids ask about science aren’t always easy to answer. Sometimes, their little brains can lead to big places that adults forget to explore. That is what inspired our series Science Question From A Toddler, which uses kids’ curiosity as a jumping-off point to investigate the scientific wonders that adults don’t even think to ask about.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

If an animal is smart enough, should we treat it like a human? An abstract question, but one that found its way into a courtroom recently. A case bidding for consideration by the New York State Court of Appeals sought to extend the legal concept of habeas corpus — which allows a person to petition a court for freedom from unlawful imprisonment — to cover two privately-owned chimpanzees.

I was in the car with a friend recently when she pulled up to a stoplight, picked up her phone and replied to a text. I gave her the side eye.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

The U.S. Energy Information Administration released its 2017 Annual Energy Outlook on Thursday. The report models possible futures for energy-related statistics over the next 34 years — including the price of wind power, the amount of energy used by an office building, or the total amount of energy consumed in the United States.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

When President Obama took office in 2009, the U.S. was in trouble — 50.7 million people were uninsured, the largest number in history. Mortality rates were on the rise, even as health care spending grew faster than the nation’s economy.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

It’s time once again to dole out FiveThirtyEight’s Data Awards, our annual (OK, we’ve done it once before) chance to honor those who did remarkably good stuff with data, to shame those who did remarkably bad stuff with data, and to acknowledge the key numbers that help describe what went down over the past year.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share