[X] My Assistant

[tfisher]

Try this science literacy quiz. Have fun with question 7. I wonder what it says about science literacy in the U.S. when the researchers can't even get it correct!

[CosmicRocker]

Well, I took some solace for our species from the fact that the histogram was skewed toward the right, rather than toward the left.

I'm not sure that you can complain too much about the Mars question. I mean, when the choices for recent Martian discoveries are water, platinum, mold, or plants, the process of elimination makes it an easy choice for even the uniformed. It would have been easy to make the question more difficult, but I don't think the author of this quiz wanted to zero in on the few of us science enthusiasts who are in the top percentile.

The overall survey results were very interesting.

A substantial percentage of scientists also say that the news media have done a poor job educating the public. About three-quarters (76%) say a major problem for science is that news reports fail to distinguish between findings that are well-founded and those that are not.

Of course, that is not very surprising, considering the fact that most journalists and reporters these days have no awareness of scientific reality whatsoever.