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NYTimes.com: The controversy over the direction and temperature of the US climate has existed for hundred of years.

Benjamin Franklin understood climatic forcing factors better than anyone, surmising in a 1763 letter to Ezra Stiles that "cleared land absorbs more heat and melts snow quicker."

Franklin, later surmised (correctly) that a prevailing haze over parts of North America and northern Europe was associated with the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland in June 1783, and was possibly the source for the exceptional chill experienced in the winter of 1783-84 in the colonies.

In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson opined in his "Notes on Virginia" that "both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged."

Noah Webster quarreled with Jefferson, insisting that he relied too heavily on the memories of "elderly and middle-aged people" for his observation that the climate had moderated, a debate that was not resolved in Jefferson's favor for years until more meticulous climate observations had been made.

Says meteorologist Ben Gelber:

Now we have satellites monitoring high-latitude snow cover, thinning sea ice and deep-layered atmospheric temperature increases, coupled with ground observations revealing the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro (85 percent ice loss since 1912) and many other glaciers.

The wealth of data now at our disposal, enhanced by high-resolution computer models that pioneer climatologists would have craved, has, curiously, not turned down the thermostat on the centuries-old global climate change debate, quite likely because the stakes are so much higher.

After the slow-burning evolution of hominins in Africa, our ancestral populations erupted out into Eurasia in a geological eye-blink, spread into the Americas by way of the Bering land bridge (sea levels being somewhat lower during the ice ages) and finally reaching even the remotest islands of oceania around twelve thousand years ago.

Today we're ubiquitous. Even our pre-industrial ancestral cultures...occupied a slew of geographical environments that put cockroaches to shame.

So you'd think that, to a first approximation, the Earth is inhabitable by human beings. And this tends to colour our approach the prospects of finding extrasolar planets that might be hospitable to human life.

"Actually," says Charles Stross, "I think this is not quite the case. In fact, to a first approximation, from the perspective of prospective interstellar colonists, the Earth is uninhabitable."

That we could imagine otherwise bespeaks a profound cognitive bias on our part (and a degree of relativism: because when all's said and done, the Earth is a lot less hostile than, say, the surface of Venus or the cloud base of Jupiter).

Why is the Earth uninhabitable? To find out, read the entire column.

Nature: Science communication today remains firmly wedded to its print origins says Cameron Neylon in Nature and yet there are opportunities that could "allow scientists to wire their research and publications into an interactive data web."

...Beyond ease of delivery, we take very little advantage of the potential of the World Wide Web to transform the way we store and transfer knowledge. We rarely take the opportunity to update material with new data, or to provide a record of how a document or data set has changed.

...Very few companies worldwide have both the expertise and resources to take on the task of stitching [scientific data] together. So it is with great interest that I have watched Google develop its product, Google Wave.

Neylon points out that Google Wave documents can use automated agents that can "look through your paper checking for Protein Data Bank codes or gene names, for example, and putting in links to the [associated] databases."

These agents can also help create a dashboard in your inbox to monitor and control instruments in the lab.

Google Wave also has version control, that notes every change to a data or record collection.

"This would allow a reader to step through an analysis to see where conclusions have come from, and would make detecting fraud —or honest mistakes—much easier," he says.

I, Cringely: Information technology reporter Robert X. Cringely asks why academic education hasn't faced the price drops other industries connected to IT have faced:

MIT has all its lectures available for viewing for free over the Internet. Why hasn't some entrepreneur yet leveraged this amazing act of generosity? Some little school could outsource its entire physics department, for example, using MIT lectures and a single professor in-house. My physics department had only 2.5 professors (the .5 was the department chair who drove a cab on the side) and we didn't have the benefit of MIT video.

There is enough good material available for free online right now that it would be easy to create a virtual university (WikiVersity?) with the only thing missing being the granting of degrees. It's that whole "degree from MIT" thing that allows that school not to worry about sharing its lecture bounty, because in the education system lectures are viewed as worthless unless they lead to a degree.

Why is that?

NYTimes.com: Updated 9/14/09: Lawrence M. Krauss, the director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University asks in the New York Times:

The most challenging impediment to human travel to Mars does not seem to involve the complicated launching, propulsion, guidance or landing technologies but something far more mundane: the radiation emanating from the Sun's cosmic rays. The shielding necessary to ensure the astronauts do not get a lethal dose of solar radiation on a round trip to Mars may very well make the spacecraft so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive.

There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?

Update: Krause also appeared on NPR's Science Friday to discuss some of the ideas in his editorial in more depth.

Nature: Giovanni Bignami reflects on the people who persuaded him that we must send humans beyond Earth's orbit to inspire public and political support for science.

Washingtonpost.com: When it comes to space, we've outsourced the jobs to machines says Howard McCurdy in the Washington Post.

In his famous 1945 article anticipating communications satellites, Arthur C. Clarke opined that humans would need to operate the orbital switching stations. Wernher von Braun, who proposed a large space telescope, was sure that astronauts would be stationed nearby. For nearly every outpost in space, from spaceships and space stations to lunar colonies and Martian research bases, we thought humans would be there. We were wrong.

We did not anticipate the incredible advances in machine technology that the second half of the 20th century would bring. Technologies such as remote sensing, digital imaging, solid-state electronics, electric power generation, space communication and computer capacity reduced the costs and improved the capabilities of robotic spacecraft dramatically. We don't need technicians to change the film in space telescopes—the telescopes don't use film—and we don't need astronauts to maintain communications satellites.

Salon.com: The experience of CERN in having to counter widespread but baseless public concerns about black holes consuming the Earth is, more broadly, the experience of science in our culture today, say Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Science is simultaneously admired and yet viewed as dangerously powerful and slightly malevolent—an uneasiness that comes across repeatedly in Hollywood depictions.

As science-fiction film director James Cameron (Aliens, Terminator, Titanic) has observed, the movies tend to depict scientists "as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains."

That's not only unfair to scientists: It's unhealthy for the place of science in our culture—no small matter at a time of climate crisis, bioweapon threats, pandemic diseases, and untold future controversies that will surely erupt as science continues to dramatically change our world and our politics.

To begin to counter this problem, though, we need to wake up to a new recognition: Fixing the problem of science education in our schools, although very important, is not the sole solution. We also have to do something about the cultural standing of science—heavily influenced by politics and mass media—and that's a very different matter.

NYTimes.com: Spaceflight is now embedded in our culture, so much so that it is usually taken for granted—a far cry from the old days when the world held its breath for Alan B. Shepard Jr and John Glenn and watched, transfixed, the scene at Tranquility Base. That was then; no astronauts today are household names. Yet space traffic is thick and integral to the infrastructure of modern life.

John Noble Wilford looks back to the early days of spaceflight in which he wrote what he calls "the greatest story of my career 'Men Land on Moon."

Photos about the Moon can be found in their media blog, or track the history of the Apollo 11 mission in real time at WeChooseTheMoon.org, a web site that is re-creating the entire Apollo 11 trip as it happened.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: President Barack Obama recently spoke of the importance of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), as has every president since Lyndon B. Johnson who signed the treaty in 1968.

Yet all presidents to a lesser or greater degree have weakened the treaty, through lax enforcement, by carving out exceptions for certain countries, or by just ignoring it.

We have come to the point now that North Korea, which signed the treaty in 1985, is now mocking it. And in all the discussions over a possible Iranian bomb, no one seems to think the treaty's 90-day withdrawal clause would be much of a hurdle if Tehran decided to leave the NPT.

If President Obama really wants to strengthen the treaty, a good—and necessary—place to start is to make it much more difficult for any of the 189 member states to leave the NPT, say Henry Sokolski and Victor Gilinsky.

It is at odds with the NPT's purpose to allow a country to import or develop technology under the treaty's cover and then walk out to make bombs. At a minimum, before legally exiting the treaty, a country should have to clear its NPT obligations by returning whatever it got from others based on the understanding that it was a good-faith treaty member.

Times Online: Ever since the industrial revolution, science has driven the global economy. As a scientific nation, the UK is, by most indicators, second only to the US. But this is not fully reflected in our economic strength, so where have we gone wrong?

In these tough times, we are refocusing on how best to harness this strength to our national advantage. Political responsibility for nurturing our academic talent and for unlocking its economic benefit now rests with a single “super-ministry”: the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and particularly in the hands of Lords Mandelson and Drayson.

It seems clear in retrospect that this country was precariously overdependent on its financial sector; so the new ministry's aim should be to ensure that our science and engineering strength enables us to emerge from the downturn with a more diversified economy. There should plainly be special boosts for sectors ripe for exploitation—via, for instance, the Technology Strategy Board. But is important that long-term prospects—and the strength and breadth of the UK's academic base—should not be jeopardised.

The Observer: It is 40 years since the words, "The Eagle has landed," sent a thrill around the world. The Apollo moon missions were to herald a new dawn of space exploration, of lunar bases, manned missions to Mars, and more. But in the decades since—and after the shuttle disasters—America's appetite for interplanetary flight dwindled. The Moon landings marked not the beginning, but the end, of our space dreams, argues Robin McKie.

Science: The fundamental rationale for the tenure system has been to promote the long-term development of new ideas and to challenge students' thinking says Dan Clawson from the University of Massachussetts Amherst, Amherst, MA. Proponents argued more than 60 years ago that tenure is needed to provide faculty the freedom to pursue long-term risky research agendas and to challenge conventional wisdom. Those arguments are still being made today and are still valid.

However, a 30-year trend toward privatization is creating a pseudo–market environment within public universities that marginalizes the tenure system. A pseudo–market environment is one in which no actual market is possible, but market-like mechanisms (such as benchmarking and rankings based on research dollars, student evaluations, or similar attributes) are used to approximate a market.

The Guardian: We must shake off this inertia to keep sea level rises to a minimum

Björn Lomborg's claim that sea levels are not rising faster than predicted are unfounded and used by those wanting to downplay climate change

It would be foolhardy to venture technological predictions for 2050. Even more so to predict social and geopolitical changes. The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.

But there are some trends that we can predict with confidence. There will, barring a global catastrophe, be far more people on Earth than today. Fifty years ago the world population was below 3 billion. It has more than doubled since then, to 6.7 billion. The percentage growth rate has slowed, but it is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050. The excess will almost all be in the developing world where the young hugely outnumber the old.

If population growth were to continue beyond 2050, one can't be other than exceedingly gloomy about the prospects. And the challenge of feeding such a rapidly growing population will be aggravated by climate change...

Last week, Obama was mired in the gritty business of trying to coax Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, and the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, into a more cooperative relationship and a more determined fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Administration officials did not sound sanguine about the prospects, and the White House meeting might well have left Obama yearning for a more promising long-term strategy to keep the Taliban away from nuclear weapons.

Yet even as the allure of disarmament grows, the obstacles seem as daunting as ever. Going to zero, as the nuclear cognoscenti put it, is a deceptively simple notion; just about everyone who knows nuclear weapons agrees it would be wickedly difficult to achieve.

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps (read more).

The Washington Times: Amid news of tough economic reports, government bailouts and excessive executive bonus packages, the last thing our country needs is more wasteful spending. But there's one government investment that has long proved its worth, priming the pump on innovation while contributing greatly to our overall economic strength - America's space program.

Nature: President Barack Obama's appointment of academic scientists and economists to positions of high authority in his administration has created the sort of excitement in universities and among researchers that has not been seen for eight years. Certainly, after George W. Bush's grudging agreement to a constricted program of stem-cell research and his politicization of scientific findings about the environment, Obama's choice of prominent scholars is a breath of fresh air.

Yet before the country's, or indeed the world's, academics become too excited about the latest professors at the White House, they would do well to recall that US presidents have repeatedly turned to academic stars for advice during the past century, with mixed results. That academics have an imperfect record as presidential advisers is not to doubt that their expertise has considerable value. But no one should assume that an impressive academic track record guarantees good policy. Far more important is an ability to remain independent and offer advice based on sound evidence.

Education is one of the most important topics to Americans. As a nation we devote huge resources to educating our children, local school boards and state government last year spent over $800 billion on education. At the federal level, the Department of Education's budget last year was just over $57 billion. This represents substantially more money than the nation spent on national defense in all its aspects including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, national intelligence, and the department of homeland security.

In fact, the national average secondary schooling expenditure per child in the United States is third in the world, behind only Switzerland and Finland and well ahead of Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China.

Yet, by all objective measures, American students are significantly lagging in almost every area to their foreign counterparts. Math, Science, even language testing scores lag significantly behind other modern industrialized nations.

Equally troubling is the decline in college graduates in engineering, mathematics, and science.

During the 20th century, there were two significant periods of growth in the training of American engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. The first was World War II and its immediate aftermath. Certainly we would rather not expand our capability based on a war, and the circumstances of the GI bill may not be applicable. The other period of expansion was shortly after Sputnik and the decline started with the end of Apollo. Is there a lesson here?

If you really want students to learn, they must be interested; more than that students must be excited, they must be inspired.

We need inspiration, [and] what NASA has provided in the past, NASA can provide again: inspiration.

Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists since he came to the US at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory.

Among Dyson's gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics.

Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination's ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. "You point Freeman at a problem and he'll solve it," Goldberger says. "He's extraordinarily powerful." Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate.

Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

This deserves celebration, but it should also serve as a wake-up call to the European Union. When comparing ourselves with the recalcitrant Bush administration, it wasn't hard to look good. Europe could justly claim to be leading the world with its sound scientific basis for policies on such vital matters as climate change, food, water and energy.

But burgeoning new economies abroad and flagging prospects in the United States have changed everything. And as opportunities pull immigrants home, the lumbering U.S. immigration bureaucracy helps push them away

Time: As I report on climate change, I come across a lot of scary facts, like the possibility that thawing permafrost in Siberia could release gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or the risk that Greenland could pass a tipping point and begin to melt rapidly. But one of the most frightening studies I've read recently had nothing to do with icebergs or mega-droughts. In a paper that came out Oct. 23 in Science, John Sterman — a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Sloan School of Management — wrote about asking 212 MIT grad students to give a rough idea of how much governments need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by to eventually stop the increase in the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. These students had training in science, technology, mathematics and economics at one of the best schools in the world — they are probably a lot smarter than you or me. Yet 84% of Sterman's subjects got the question wrong, greatly underestimating the degree to which greenhouse gas emissions need to fall. When the MIT kids can't figure out climate change, what are the odds that the broader public will?

But it is mistaken to claim that global problems will be solved more quickly if only researchers would abandon their quest to understand the universe and knuckle down to work on an agenda of public or political concerns. These are not "either/or" options – indeed, there is a positive symbiosis between them.

We need basic, fundamental research for a whole raft of reasons. It is the bedrock on which technology is based. But its applications can't be foreseen, even by the pioneers who open up new fields – not even by people of the calibre of great pioneers like Faraday or Rutherford.

The Washington Post: Almost 70 years ago, as Germany invaded France, President Franklin D. Roosevelt received an urgent visit from Vannevar Bush, then chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics and formerly vice president and dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Science: A group of distinguished former government officials (Mark Schaefer, D. James Baker, John H. Gibbons, Charles G. Groat, Donald Kennedy, Charles F. Kennel, David Rejeski) argue in Science magazine that organizational changes must be made at the federal level to align the public institutional infrastructure to address the unprecedented environmental and economic challenges in the decades ahead such as climate change.

The most pressing organizational change that is required they say, is the establishment of an independent Earth Systems Science Agency formed by merging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Science Progress: Mounting evidence suggests that looming institutional shortcomings are eroding the ability of the so-called “science pipeline” to produce a healthy future national science infrastructure—and unless we shift the traditional paradigm rapidly, the consequences could be dramatic.

Two recent studies underscore this point: One, from the National Institutes of Health, reports that the current generation of young scientists may be turning away from careers in research due to funding issues and the need for institutional change. Concurrently, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ new report, “ARISE: Advancing Research In Science and Engineering,” concludes that early-career researchers face greater challenges today than ever. The continual and grueling search for funding, the Academy suggests, fosters overly conservative decisions about laboratory research directions, which in turn impede the impact of government-funded science and thwart the careers of younger talents.

OSTA Bridges: Norman P. Neureiter reminisces over his years working in science and technology sectors, and the impact government policies have on research and development. He ends with:

The US is admired throughout the world – even in the most hostile countries – for its science and technology. Much of our current leadership position has come from scientists born outside the US; and as the international science community continues to grow around the world and in many countries, and the interest in science and engineering careers among US students declines, it is increasingly important that we maintain close cooperative ties with those international communities and continue to attract the best and the brightest from around the world. The US Government must do everything possible to facilitate such cooperative relationships – with appropriate funding, creative initiatives, international leadership, more student exchanges, and new visa and export control systems that truly protect our vital security interests while maintaining our great national legacy of openness and freedom of inquiry. For a long time the US has been the shining scientific city on the hill for much of the world. We need to make sure that the light of US science and technology continues to shine

London Review of Books: John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books reviews a series a books on global warming and ends his review with the following paragraphs:

The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse. If we do that we may find that we develop the technologies that China and India will need. If we can show that it is possible to cut carbon output dramatically without trashing our economy – well, that might be the single most important thing we could do, far outweighing the actual impact of our emission reductions.

We know all this, but whether any of it will actually happen is a different question. It is easy for politicians to stick wind turbines on their houses and ride bicycles, but effective action on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western electorates are willing to pay it. One per cent of global GDP is 600 billion dollars, most of which would be paid by the developed world. The idea is that by paying it now we would be keeping the world’s economy on track so that by 2050 the developed world would be 200 per cent richer and the developing world 400 per cent, while our emissions decline by 60 to 90 per cent and theirs increase by 25 to 50. (One problem is that 17 per cent of that growth in developing world emissions has already been used up.) The promised economic growth is jam tomorrow; we would be paying for it today, in the form of increased taxes and lost jobs. These things are all real to voters in ways that climate change perhaps is not. Are people going to give things up in the present in order to prevent things that computer models tell them are going to happen in 25 years’ time? If they – we – aren’t, then we’re heading for breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic.

Science: The U.S. military has more to gain than lose by working with Chinese scientists on fundamental research. So says the Pentagon's former director of basic research, William Berry, in arguing for the removal of obstacles to scientific cooperation between the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and China despite the military rivalry between the two countries.

Berry, now a researcher at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., writes with colleague Cheryl Loeb in a working paper published by his center last week that collaborating with Chinese researchers at a time of rapid growth in China's science and technology investment will help DOD stay on the cutting edge of materials, biotechnology, energy sciences, and other disciplines relevant to long-term U.S. security interests.* It would also help the U.S. military learn more about China's scientific capabilities, says Berry, who was wowed by a visit to Shanghai's Fudan University last fall. As first steps toward fostering these links, the authors want DOD to encourage its program managers and scientists to travel to Chinese universities, establish a liaison office in China, and sponsor visits by Chinese academics to U.S. institutions.

Salon.com: Deniers continue to insist there's no consensus on global warming. Well, there's not. There's well-tested science and real-world observations.

San Francisco Chronicle: Hiding behind the faux skirts of public safety, the Pentagon has blasted one of its own spy satellites out of the sky. This provocative act is bad policy and bad politics.

For background see also An Errant Satellite Is Gone, but Questions Linger (New York Times)

Related news picks links
Broken spy satellite hit by US missile
North Canada, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans likely path of spy satellite debris
Experts query Pentagon’s explanation for shooting down spy satellite

San Francisco Chronicle: Two years ago, the National Academies published the seminal study on U.S. competitiveness entitled "Rising Above the Gathering Storm." The study identified major shortcomings in U.S. investments in basic scientific research as well as in math and science education for our youngsters. The suggestions contained in this study were immediately picked up by the Democratic House Leadership as their competitiveness strategy and later by President Bush in his State of the Union message under his American Competitiveness Initiative. Legislation in the form of the America Competes Act was passed in the House and Senate in 2007, and it appeared the United States was finally going to move forward after years of neglect to increase investment in math, science and basic research. All parties agreed that our competitiveness in the 21st century was at stake and we needed to act.

International Herald Tribune: A new era in U.S.-India cooperation was unveiled at the White House in July 2005 when President George W. Bush told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that he would work to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India, despite over a quarter century of disagreements between the two countries over nuclear issues.

Nature: 50 years after the appointment of the first presidential science adviser, the White House is flooded with scientific information. Roger Pielke Jr suggests how the next administration might develop ways to use it best.

Wired: How nonconformity, not rote learning, unlocked his genius.

The New York Times: Americans who read the papers or watch Jay Leno have been aware for some time now that there is a slim but real possibility — about 1 in 45,000 — that an 850-foot-long asteroid called Apophis could strike Earth with catastrophic consequences on April 13, 2036. What few probably realize is that there are thousands of other space objects that could hit us in the next century that could cause severe damage, if not total destruction.

The New York Times: After years of spending our nation’s space budget building an orbiting space station of questionable utility, serviced by an operationally expensive space shuttle of unsafe design, NASA has set a new direction for the future of human spaceflight. Once again, we have our sights on the Moon ... and beyond. We are finally, bodily, going to make our way into space, this time to stay.

The Boston Globe: There is now a broad consensus in this country, and indeed in the world, that global warming is happening, that it is a serious problem, and that humans are causing it. The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded there is a greater than 90 percent chance that greenhouse gases released by human activities like burning oil in cars and coal in power plants are causing most of the observed global warming. This report puts the final nail in denial's coffin about the problem of global warming.

Salon.com: Burned by 2004, I've been doing my best this time around to avoid the echo chamber of lefty blogs telling me what I want to hear about the possibility of Democrats taking control of Congress. But when the Wall Street Journal starts predicting a blowout, the siren song gets hard to resist.

The New York Times: A report last month by the National Academy of Sciences documents widespread bias against women in science and engineering and recommends a sweeping overhaul of our institutions says Margaret Wertheim. The reason is not academia bureaucracy, but more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed physics, astronomy and mathematics as inherently male.

However, Cathy Young in the Boston Globe writes that maybe the findings of the National Academy of Science report could be explained by the make up of the panel's members.

Says Young:

Ultimately, the report is a missed opportunity. It could have addressed the personal and family choices women could make to maximize their career potential, or looked at the factors in the high achievement of Asian-American women in science. (Asian-Americans are virtually ignored in all the talk of minority women in science.) Instead, it upholds an orthodoxy of female victimization. Women, and science, deserve better

The Independent: James Lovelock, the inventor of the microwave oven and the Electron Capture Detector, a useful instrument for measuring atmospheric trace compounds in the field, answers questions from the public on nuclear waste, the environment, and the links between science, lobbying, and politics.

James Lovelock wikipedia entry

Personal web site

The Washington Post: In regard to nuclear proliferation and arms control, the fundamental problem is clear: Either we begin finding creative, outside-the-box solutions or the international nuclear safeguards regime will become obsolete.

Salon.com: As Al Gore, the former Vice President's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," is receiving critical attacks from the Competitive Enterprise Institute over the quality of the science in the movie. salon.com asks some leading climatologists to review the movie for scientific accuracy.

Their biggest surprise: that Gore could present the science in an accurate way without putting everyone in the audience to sleep. The scientists only dispute one technical point on Gore's use of ice core samples but on the whole, "Given the fact that this was a film intended to bring the message to the lay public, I think it was excellent," says John Wallace, a climate scientist at the University of Washington.

Related story
A review of the movie at realclimate.org

The Guardian: Do scientists have responsibility towards deciding what happens to the applications of their research? asks Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society. Rees provides examples of how scientists involved with the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs try to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, and lower tensions during the cold war. He also points out that scientists themselves sometimes restrict specific areas of research because of concerns over the potential for developing weapons either through a "Hippocratic oath", or through moratoriums (such as the 1975 "Asilomar declaration" by molecular biologists).

Rees says:

Such a "voluntary moratorium will be harder to achieve today: the academic community is larger, and competition (enhanced by commercial pressures) is more intenseTo be effective, the consensus must be worldwide. If one country alone imposed regulations, the most dynamic researchers and companies would migrate to another that was more sympathetic or permissive. This is happening already in stem cell research...

...Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical. More than that, they should foster benign spin-offs, but resist dangerous or threatening applications.

Nature: Chris Patten, chancellor of the Universities of Oxford and of Newcastle in the UK, recently gave a speech to the Academy of Technologies in Paris, France in which he calls for caution in the establishment of a European Institute of Technology, modeled on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Will the EIT be a real institution or a "virtual body, promoting yet more networking?" he asks. Patten claims that Europe doesn't need a new institution, just better funding of some of the existing universities and research institutions.

The New York Times: Paul Krugman writes that scientists and anyone considering of running for office on a platform of dealing with climate change, need to be more pro-active in dealing with the manipulation of data by opponens of global warming. If their opponents misrepresent their data, they should call it scientific fraud "pure and simple" says Krugman.

The Courier News: Mention the words "particle physics" and most people begin to go cross-eyed. But the study of this arcane subject has led scientists around the world to a greater understanding of how the universe is formed, what is inside an atom and what new particles are out there in space. For years, brilliant American scientists have dominated the field of particle physics and the investigations into the nature of matter, space, energy and time — the very origins of the universe itself.

The New York Times: Other industrial democracies are reshaping their immigration policies to invite the skilled immigrants that the US turns away.