The advent of the global information society and a myriad of other rapidly changing variables are presenting many new and unique challenges for the twenty-first century workforce, and perhaps the most pressing of these challenges is actually meeting the needs for qualified workers to fill the positions in emerging and growing fields. One such…

Since the dawn of the atomic age, the United States and every other nation that has chosen to use nuclear power have created hazardous substances that have the capacity to outlast human civilization, and possibly even the human species, and the potential to devastate the environment. The management of these substances that make up what has been…

This book examines the complex and varied relations between educational institutions and societies at war. Drawn from the pages of the "Harvard Educational Review," the essays provide multiple perspectives on how educational institutions support and oppose wartime efforts. As the editors of the volume note, the book reveals how people…

Scientific and pedagogical comments about the fundamental physical concept of energy are made. In particular, we argue for an historical presentation of this concept because its essential justification is the research, conscious or not, of a characteristic quantity of a system whose fundamental property is to be conservative. Some delicate issues…

The emerging energy situation in the United States puts chemical engineering at the forefront of the large research and education effort that will need to be undertaken during the next 20 years. Chemical engineering undergraduates and graduate students will need to be literate on energy alternatives and the interconnection of technology,…

The 2005 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded 60 years after the first atomic bombs fell on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people; the peace prize raises the hopes of those working to rejuvenate global efforts to prevent the spread and development of nuclear arms. This article profiles the International Atomic…

The hydrogen economy is a technological bluff in its implied assurance that, despite the accelerating pace at which we are depleting the remaining half of our fossil fuels, our energy future is secure. Elementary thermodynamic considerations are developed to show that a hydrogen economy is about as feasible as a perpetual motion machine. Hydrogen…

In the past two years, every magazine on the newsstands has featured nanotechnology. The articles usually speak of nanotech as the latest emerging platform technology that will substantially transform the material and social world, just as electricity and nuclear science did previously. What is usually not mentioned in these articles is reference…

This paper reports on a student summer project performed in 2006 at the University of Frankfurt. It is addressed to undergraduate students familiar with the basic principles of relativistic quantum mechanics and general relativity. The aim of the project was to study the Dirac equation in curved spacetime. To obtain the general relativistic Dirac…

Recently, the significance of learners' informal reasoning on socio-scientific issues has received increasing attention among science educators. To gain deeper insights into this important issue, an integrated analytic framework was developed in this study. With this framework, 71 Grade 10 students' informal reasoning about nuclear energy usage…

Studies of reactions to nuclear facilities have found consistent male/female differences, but the underlying reasons have never been well-clarified. The most common expectations involve traditional roles--with men focusing more on economic concerns and with women (especially mothers) being more concerned about family safety/health. Still, with…

Online dialogues can meaningfully engage a diverse audience and provide a method to both educate and interest the public in complex environmental and social issues. This article discusses a series of e-dialogues conducted for the Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Canada in which the public engaged in discussions concerning the risk and…