Very interesting (and sad article) about how China is going to overtake the U.S. in science within the next two years.

bbc.co.uk

Look at the projected rates and past rates of the US papers and China papers produced in the scientific arena.

I feel that it is in part a direct result of a war against science by social conservatives all over the media and in the general culture.

Of course, most social conservatives apparently question the validity of actual data and graphs, so I’m pretty sure they’ll not even believe it if they happen to even see it or care about it, because they think for some reason that it goes against their “faith” to listen to scientists or something.

(One caveat: I do not necessarily subscribe to the hypothesis presented in the article which states that produced papers alone qualify as whether or not a country is leading in the sciences. For certain, the contributions of the United States are still far ahead in many scientific areas which China has yet to master or even delve into. However, the decline of the output is surely a bad sign, and I am almost certain that the hysteria against scientists has at least a small part to play in this effect.)