This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

I think we all agree that there is a crisis even in our society about how we use science.

We all know about climate change denial on one side,

but there's also all the issues about opposing GMOs or anti-vaccination.

Lucy Jones, she's a seismologist and a policy advisor on earthquake risk.

She spoke February 17th at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement

of Science in Washington, D.C.

And what we are seeing here is there is a significant part of society that doesn't understand how the scientific process works

and looks at scientific information as something you get told to believe because the scientists said it's true.

And then if you're going to believe that authority figure, there's several others that you could turn to as well.

So what to do? In 2016, she founded the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society, which tries to get the

public and policy makers to use scientific information to improve the resiliency of their

communities. And here's a briefency of their communities.

And here's a brief portion of her talk

proposing solutions to the problem of the gap between scientists and society.

We need to look at science education for the broader public more focused on process rather than results.

And this is another place where the internet has really changed things.

You know, when I was in school, if you want to learn those facts, you've sort

of had to get it from the teachers or, you know, and learn enough to be able to go out and start

doing research. Now if you want a result, you can get it on your computer right away. What we need to do is not be teaching kids for instance that you know dinosaurs evolved into chickens but rather how to recognize that the connection between dinosaurs

and the avian species website is more reliable than one that tells us we descended from

visitors from Mars.

...