[blahblahblah]

"Your expectation that you will understand it without the necessary background is misinformed and frankly amusing. That being said, the popular press is there to do exactly that; contact your favorite media source and ask that they cover more advances in "science". They get paid to do this sort of work for you."

The problem is that the people assigned to cover science for the mainstream press generally don't understand what they are writing about and, I strongly suspect, because they operate under constant deadline pressure they never even read the scientific literature. They just interview the scientist who did the research and interview another scientist in the field for another perspective and report the most interesting "sound bites" from those two interviews along with a bunch of horribly naive (and often flatly wrong) conjectures about what it all means. You can't really blame them. They're journalists. Most of them majored in journalism, English literature, political science, or history in college and probably never took a science course above the 100-level at any time in their entire undergraduate program. What we need is more Richard Dawkinses, Michio Kakus, and Carl Sagans - academics who take on the task of explaining science to non-scientists. The way you get that is by creating the funding apparatus to make it happen. Academics are quite sensitive to the priorities of funding agencies - they rapidly become very interested in research topics for which funding exists. :) If funding exists for a professorship focused on enhancing the public understanding of science, there will inevitably be plenty of academics competing to fill that position.

[eykanal]

I agree with this, but given that there's barely funding for research itself now, this task has fallen to nonprofits. Hopefully they can do a good job of it.