Check out the Globe's coverage of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

Science dazzles us, science bewilders us, science touches everything and everyone — from life-saving medicines to technologies so blended into day-to-day existence that they seem nearly as natural as drawing breath. More than in any other nation, the American lifestyle and economy is driven by research and scientific innovation. Lose that edge, scientists warn — lose that obsession with discovery — and we may lose the very restless, questing quality that has made the United States, for all its warts, the most innovative and prosperous place on earth. A fundamental aim of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, is to show that science isn’t just weird stuff happening in a lab somewhere. It’s the neverceasing quest to explain our world and inhabit it more comfortably