Americans get quite a bit of information from the Internet, and if recent surveys are any indication, they also seem to spend quite a bit of time browsing around the web as part of their day. This 42-page report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project released in November 2006 confirms that Americans also tend to use the Internet as a way to research various scientific subjects and related news items. The report was jointly conducted with the assistance of the San Francisco-based Exploratorium, and revealed that fully 40 million Americans use the Internet as their "primary source of news and information about science." The report contains a number of other interesting findings, including the observation that 87% of online users have used the Internet to look up the meaning of a scientific concept, answer a specific science question, or check the accuracy of a scientific fact. The report will certainly be very useful to science educators and those concerned with information science and related topics.
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