The spiral of scientific culture and cultural well-being: Brazil and Ibero-America.

The set of factors, events and actions of mankind in the social processes dedicated to the production the dissemination, the teaching and the publication of scientific knowledge constitutes the conditions for the development of a particular type of culture, quite commonplace in the contemporary world, which may be called scientific culture. In this article, we intend to present the representation of the dynamics of this area of knowledge in the form of a spiral: The Spiral of Scientific Culture. Also, we introduce the term cultural well-being--the kind of comfort, other than the social well-being, which has to do with society's relationships with the technosciences, involving values and attitudes, habits and information, and presupposing an actively critical participation on the part of that society in the totality of these relationships.

Reporting on health-related research in two prestigious Brazilian newspapers.

Objectives: The dissemination of health-related news through newspapers can influence the behavior of patients and of health care providers. We conducted a study to analyze the characteristics of health-related research published by two leading Brazilian newspapers.

Method: We retrospectively evaluated health-related news published in the electronic versions of the newspapers Folha de São Paulo and O Estado de São Paulo over a period of three months (July through September, 2009).