Recently in Commentary and opinion Category

Nature: In a Nature opinion column, Ryan Meyer, a science integration fellow at the California Ocean Science Trust in Oakland, discusses the revamping of a government agency's strategic plan. For the past 20 years, the US Global Change Research Program has spent more than $30 billion on climate change studies. Although the program has improved our understanding of climate systems, Meyer writes, it has been less successful at providing decision makers with useful information. So the program has added three more objectives: to inform decisions, to sustain assessments, and to communicate and educate. Meyer points out that problems may arise regarding the reallocation of funds among the new priorities and that there may be tradeoffs between the increasing complexity of climate models and the need of policymakers for simplicity. Nevertheless, he applauds the program administrators for "taking such an important conceptual step in the right direction."

Nature: Although China is second only to the US in number of scientific papers produced, the quality of its research needs to improve, writes Peng Gong of Tsinghua University in China and the University of California, Berkeley. In his Nature opinion piece, Gong maintains that the problem is due in part to Chinese culture, which has been heavily influenced by the philosophies of Confucius and Zhuangzi, who encouraged isolation and self-sufficiency. Consequently, Chinese academics and institutions tend not to collaborate, which leads to repetition and redundancy as investigators purchase similar pieces of equipment and do similar types of data processing. And because everyone wants to lead, no one steps up to fill supporting roles. Gong recommends several steps to resolve those problems. The Chinese educational system must begin to nurture the scientific spirit and encourage curiosity. Also, Chinese research institutions and government agencies should divide projects among people with different specializations. Finally, Chinese scientists should be encouraged to participate in international projects, and outstanding foreign scientists should be invited to work in China.

Nature: Although it has long been assumed that the US favors applied over basic science, the opposite turns out to be true, writes Daniel Sarewitz for Nature. Over the past 15 years, agencies that serve public goals rather than advance science—the US Geological Survey, for example—have experienced minimal budgetary growth. Yet, over the same period, government funding for research doubled, with most of that money going to the National Institutes of Health and NSF. Sarewitz claims the funding allocation may be because advocacy for research funding comes mostly from the high-prestige frontiers of science and the institutions associated with such research. Nevertheless, addressing social problems, such as preventing and preparing for natural disasters, is just as important. To ensure that the scientific enterprise continues to meet challenges to public well-being, he says, science advocacy should seek a balance between the fundamental-science agencies and the mission agencies that link science to the public good.

BBC: Michael Blastland writes in BBC’s Go Figure column about a whimsical unit of radiation exposure: the BED, or banana equivalent dose. Originating sometime in the mid 1990s, the BED is defined as the radiation dose a person would absorb by eating one banana. Bananas, like most organic material, contain a certain amount of radioactive isotopes. Blastland contends that converting radiation exposure to bananas, instead of the current SI unit of sieverts, is a useful exercise for several reasons. He feels that measuring in bananas conveys to the lay person the ordinariness of radiation and that it brings home the point that it isn’t radiation itself that’s the problem but how much one is exposed to at a time. He writes, “By talking bananas, Go Figure doesn't mean to trivialize the health risk of radiation…. But the way we measure things can change how we think about them.”

Science: In an editorial for Science, Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) spells out the dichotomy that exists between those who insist that the federal government should scale back science funding because it’s ineffective and wasteful and those who believe that government funding of science can drive the economy forward. Holt sides with the latter; he emphasizes that science has proven to be a smart investment, albeit one whose benefits may not be tangible for a long time. In a recent interview on NPR, Holt delves further into what he calls “a kind of pessimism” that has set in in America today, where people have given up on the idea that the next generation will be better off than the current one and are instead lowering their sights and tightening their belts. He laments that “all the talk in Washington has been about cutting.” Although Holt acknowledges that science research will probably suffer its share of cuts in the next budget, he maintains that “investment in research makes good economic sense in the short term … but even more in the long term, in what it brings to our quality of life and our economy.”

Canberra Times: In a humorous op-ed piece for Australia's Canberra Times, Nicholas Stuart contends that politicians' behavior is governed by quantum mechanics. Like electrons and other subatomic particles, politicians have duality in that they can hold two apparently contradictory positions at the same time. What's more, thanks to the uncertainty principle, those positions can be impossible to pin down.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research argues that deeply discounted tuition fees for in-state students do not serve the interests of his state or his university. Low in-state fees deprive the university of much-needed funding while high out-of-state fees make the university financially reliant on a minority of students. The reliance on out-of-staters, writes Pielke, "creates incentives to favor their admission. That is contrary to the very purpose of in-state tuition, which is to favor Colorado residents." Pielke favors replacing the current tuition fees of $7700 for in-staters and $29 000 for out-of-staters with a single fee of $14 000.

Guardian: The International Space Station has not been popular among scientists, who see it as a costly, ineffective venture. An editorial in a British newspaper takes a contrary view. While conceding the station's expense, the Guardian's editors argue that

to declare that it should never have been built is to miss the point. It has been occupied for more than 10 years: a high-rise apartment in which humans can practise long-duration survival in microgravity; a gymnasium in which there is no up or down; an observation platform beneath which the planet turns every 90 minutes; the limitless universe beyond. Any future journey to the moon, or Mars, will build on lessons learned aboard the ISS. It is the costliest project ever undertaken: the challenge now is to make it truly valuable.

Science: In an Issues & Perspectives column, guest contributor Kathy Weston looks back on her career as a molecular biologist and on her decision to leave a tenure-track position at the University of London. Weston frankly acknowledges her own failings, especially her lack of confidence. In retrospect, she wishes she had found a mentor, and "taken more scientific risks, gone for bigger stakes, and thought harder about direction." As for the system, she writes,

It failed too, I think. Scientists are judged almost entirely on research output, measured by papers published in the most prominent journals, and grants are not awarded unless your work is competitive at the highest level. Trying to run a lab full time with small children at home is very likely to result in a drop in research productivity or quality, and yet little allowance is made for those of us, mostly women, who find ourselves in this situation.

Spectator: James Delingpole, a conservative writer, blogger, and climate-change skeptic, was interviewed last week for a BBC TV documentary called Science Under Attack. His interviewer was Paul Nurse, a Nobel laureate and the current president of Britain's Royal Society. From Delingpole's point of view, which he describes in a recent blog post for Spectator magazine, the interview was a setup. He writes

Using a crude but effective mixture of appeal to authority ("Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel Laureate, President of the Royal Society, speaks from on high…"), judicious editing, and a cynical, dishonest narrative in which climate-change sceptics are bracketed with violent anti-GM protestors and people who think Aids isn’t caused by HIV, this programme sought not to understand the science behind global warming but merely to smear those who dissent from the true faith.

Chronicle of Higher Education: In a commentary in the Chronicle, Art Padilla, who heads the department of management, innovation, and entrepreneurship at North Carolina State University (NCSU), recounts the history of the Research Triangle, a zone of science and technology R&D centered on Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and NCSU. The Research Triangle was founded in the 1960s, but began to flourish after the state government chose to support and invest in the zone during the financially troubled 1970s. Faced with greater financial challenges today, other states can learn from the Triangle's history. Padilla asserts

The region's successes and attractiveness are not due to chance. What we see today in the Triangle, including the economic vibrancy and opportunities for young people, reflects choices made decades ago by educational, business, and political leaders. What we will see in the future—and what our grandchildren will inherit—depends on the choices we make now.

Nature: Writing in today's issue of Nature, tropical forest expert Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds in the UK exhorts his fellow climate scientists to be more assertive in rebutting inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise bad reporting on climate change. Lewis begins his opinion piece as follows:

When science hits the news, researchers often moan about the quality of the coverage. A sharp reminder of the issue rolls round this month—the anniversary of the global media frenzy over the release of e-mails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, UK. So what should scientists do when reporting quality falls off a cliff? Earlier this year, I was seriously misrepresented by a newspaper and thrown into a political storm. Rather than take it lying down, I set the record straight. It has been an odd journey, and I think there are lessons for how we scientists should deal with the media.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The latest entry in the Chronicle's Manage Your Career column contains advice on how to write an effective cover letter for an academic job. Given that writing papers and grant applications is so important in academia, it's not surprising that would-be professors should take extra care over their cover letters. The column's author, Rob Jenkins, is an English professor at Georgia Perimeter College. He asserts:

Assuming your materials arrive on time and you're actually qualified for the job, an effective cover letter can do more than any other part of the application to help you secure a coveted interview.

Rolling Stone: President Obama is interviewed by Jann S. Wenner for the cover story of the 15 October issue of Rolling Stone magazine. During the interview, which was posted online Wednesday, Obama discusses a wide range of topics, including the Tea Party, the economy, and the Gulf oil spill and its aftermath. In the area of science, he makes a strong statement on energy and climate change: “One of my top priorities next year is to have an energy policy that begins to address all facets of our overreliance on fossil fuels.”

If that describes you, fine. It's your choice. The important thing is to realize that you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. You'll need to work harder than your colleagues to accomplish as much.

Try sharing an iPad. It connects you to your physical and intellectual surroundings, rather than alienating you. Assuming your collaborator returns the iPad, you have executed a very different kind of exchange, one that seems oddly democratic and intimate, the same way you might share an album of family photographs. Only now imagine a doctor and patient sharing an MRI, an accountant and client reviewing a balance sheet, a choreographer and dancer discussing a dance notation.

Phronesisaical: Cheryl Rofer and Molly Cernicek wonder if innovation can be encouraged at the US national laboratories. Could too much paperwork and splitting research groups into too small a team be stifling innovation?

The theory at the national laboratories once was that those doing non-weapons research could be called upon to work on weapons if the situation demanded. That was the bargain that Rofer signed on for in 1965, the height of the Cold War. And there was a flow of ideas between the two kinds of work. Laser isotope separation would provide uranium for weapons or civilian reactors. Geology served both hot dry rock and containment of underground nuclear tests. Genetics investigated the damage radiation caused.

The two kinds of research are almost completely separate now at the national laboratories. And that does not bode well for increasing innovation nor for recruiting future nuclear weapons stewards.

NPR: Astrophysicist Adam Frank asks:

The Babylonians didn't do it. The Romans didn't do it. The Chinese of the Tang Dynasty didn't do it. The Persian Empire didn't do it. For 50,000 years of human cultural evolution it didn't happen. For 6,000 years of civilization it didn't happen.

Then, in the space of a mere hundred years, we manifest pathways to utter ruin not once but twice. We have managed to put the entire project of civilization up for grabs first through nuclear arms and then through the twin perils of climate change and resource depletion.

How did this happen?

NYTimes.com: If you listen to climate scientists—and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should—says Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

In Character: Christine Rosen has written the following essay on whether society is taking technology and development for granted, compared to the early part of the industrial age.

Visiting the Paris Exhibition in 1900, the American writer Henry Adams saw something so remarkable he compared its influence to that of the Virgin Mary. It was a hall filled with early power generators known as dynamos. Watching them at work, he "began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross," he wrote in The Education of Henry Adams. "The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring." Adams wondered if he should pray to it.

guardian.co.uk: Physicist Vlatko Vedral explains to Aleks Krotoski why he believes the fundamental stuff of the universe is information.

The Daily Telegraph: Royal Society president Martin Rees celebrates 350 years of one of the UK's greatest institutions and looks towards the changing nature of scientific publishing.

WSJ.com: Steven Weinberg has declared that the Obama administration's new approach to NASA's future is a positive development because the "manned space flight program frequently masquerades as science, but actually crowds out real science at NASA, which is all done on unmanned missions."

Weinberg writes:

Soon after Mr. Bush's [2004] announcement [of the "Vision for Space Exploration"] I predicted that sending astronauts to the moon and Mars would be so expensive that future administrations would abandon the plan. This prediction seems to have come true. All of the brilliant past discoveries in astronomy for which NASA can take credit have been made by unmanned satellite-borne observatories, and there is much more to be done.

By studying the polarization of cosmic microwave radiation, we may find evidence of gravitational waves emitted in the first fraction of a second of the big bang. By sending laser beams between teams of satellites, we should be able to detect gravitational waves directly from collisions between neutron stars and black holes. By correlating the distances and velocities of many galaxies, we should be able to explore the mysterious dark energy that makes up most of the energy of the universe.

He adds that any "argument for using astronauts to service satellite observatories is now out of date" because the new research tools "are not in low Earth orbits like Hubble, but at L2."

Weinberg closes with this: "The only technology for which the manned space flight program is well suited is the technology of keeping people alive in space. And the only demand for that technology is in the manned space flight program itself."

NPR: Genetically modified food, vaccines, and synthetic biology are all hot-button issues. But they shouldn't be, according to guest Michael Specter, author of the new book Denialism. He argues that the scariest threat is not science itself, but the reluctance to discuss it.

guardian.co.uk: Says Dylan Evans:

The UK terror threat has been raised from "substantial" to "severe"—but what on earth does this actually mean?

The official explanation—that an attack is now "highly likely" rather than merely "a strong possibility"—does not make things any clearer.

Given that the threat level had stood at substantial since last July until this weekend's announcement, and there were no terrorist attacks during this period, we can infer that "a strong possibility" indicates an attack has a probability of less than 1% per day. But how much greater is the probability now that an attack is "highly likely"? Would it be 2% per day, or 5%?

The obvious solution to this problem is to dispense with verbal labels entirely, and to express risk estimates in numerical terms. This is not a new idea; more than a century ago, William Ernest Cooke, government astronomer for Western Australia, argued that weather forecasters should attach numerical probabilities to their predictions.

The idea is often rejected, however, on the grounds that it would be too complicated for most people to understand. This is rubbish. US National Weather Service forecasters have been expressing their forecasts of rain in numerical terms since 1965, and over the years they have got better and better at it. If weather forecasters can do it, why not the rest of us?

The Observer: Says Robin McKie:

On Wednesday last week, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, apologized for including, in the organization's fourth assessment report of 2007, the claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. In fact, it will take at least 300 years for global warming to take its toll.

Given that the IPCC's 2007 report had won the panel a Nobel peace prize that year (shared with Al Gore), the error looks egregious, particularly to those who reject the idea that the billions of tonnes of carbon we pump into the atmosphere could possibly have an impact on our climate. Now, every word and line of IPCC's work is being scrutinized by these skeptics in their search for further climate calumnies. If they are lucky, they may even stumble on one or two.

The prospect, not surprisingly, causes many climate change scientists to squirm. Indeed, such is their discomfort that many now argue it is time for a total reorganization of the IPCC, an organization that is now more than two decades old and whose operations are beginning to creak suspiciously.

Related Link
China's change on climate change

WSJ.com: Adam Keiper, editor of the New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, expresses his personal view about the history of nanotechnology.

On 29 December 1959, Richard P. Feynman gave an after-dinner talk at an annual American Physical Society meeting, entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom."

One attendee later told science writer Ed Regis that the puzzled physicists in the room feared Feynman meant that "there are plenty of lousy jobs in physics."

Feynman said that he really wanted to discuss "the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale." In short, a half-century ago he anticipated what we now call nanotechnology—the manipulation of matter at the level of billionths of a meter.

Some historians depict the speech as the start of this now-burgeoning field of research. Yet Feynman didn't use the word "nanotechnology" himself, and his lecture went for years almost entirely unmentioned in the scientific literature until the 1980s (Editor's note: Physics Today referred to it in 1979).

The story of how his talk was forgotten and then, decades later, inserted into the history of nanotechnology is worth understanding less because of what it tells us about the past than because of what it hints about the future, a future in which billions of dollars in research and development funds are at stake.

Related Physics Today article
Microscience: an overview

Nature: A lack of coordination in Arctic research funding leaves scientists without the support they need for fieldwork. John England outlines how Canada can set things right, and show leadership in the north.

The New Yorker: In the summer of 2008, the journal Nature published a short, illuminating essay that tracked the global migration of scientific research over the centuries, as empires rose and fell.

The center of world science, for instance, was in France in 1740, before it moved to Germany, then Britain, and, later, America, carrying with it, in each case, a major dimension of global leadership.

The authors discovered that great shifts in global scientific leadership follow a clear pattern: “Each former scientific power, especially during the initial stages of decline, had the illusion that its system was performing better than it was, overestimating its strength and underestimating innovation elsewhere. The elite could not imagine that the centre would shift.”

Related Link
China: The end of the science superpowers Nature

The Guardian: The health dangers from nuclear radiation have been oversold, stopping governments from fully exploiting nuclear power as a weapon against climate change, argues a professor of physics at Oxford University.

Wade Allison does not question the dangers of high levels of radiation but says that, contrary to scientific wisdom, low levels of radiation can be easily tolerated by the human body.

Most scientists who have responded disagreed with Allison's conclusions, but his comments have highlighted the lack of understanding of how the body deals with low doses of radiation, a crucial issue given it is increasingly used in modern medical procedures such as scanning and cancer treatment.

Nature News: The conclusion that our planet is warming thanks to human activity must not be forgotten amid discussion of research ethics, say climatologists Hans von Storch and Myles Allen.

In a recent survey of US citizens conducted by electronic media company Rasmussen Reports, 49% of 1,000 respondents said that they have "very closely or somewhat closely" followed news reports about the CRU e-mail leak, and 59% find it "very likely or somewhat likely" that, in order to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, some scientists have falsified research data. The Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet asked its readers—beginning on 21 November, just after the first publication of the CRU e-mails—if they considered the climate change threat to be oversold, and 51% of the almost 65,000 respondents thought so. After years of communication, researchers have to face the fact that a large body of public opinion still does not trust the evidence presented to them by the scientific community.

The Guardian: The Copenhagen climate talks were a disaster says Mark Lynas in the Guardian.

That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait...

...All this raises the question: what is China's game? Why did China, in the words of a UK-based analyst who also spent hours in heads of state meetings, "not only reject targets for itself, but also refuse to allow any other country to take on binding targets?" The analyst, who has attended climate conferences for more than 15 years, concludes that China wants to weaken the climate regulation regime now "in order to avoid the risk that it might be called on to be more ambitious in a few years' time".

This does not mean China is not serious about global warming... But China's growth, and growing global political and economic dominance, is based largely on cheap coal. China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to.

The BBC also lists reasons for the failure of the talks in a piece called "Why did Copenhagen fail to deliver a climate deal?"

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: The belief that the US is the only declared nuclear power that isn't modernizing its nuclear arsenal is fast becoming an article of faith in nuclear weapon policy circles, says Kingston Reif in the Bulletin.

From this belief arises a dangerous argument: US allies and adversaries are adding new nuclear weapons and capabilities, while Washington is allowing its nuclear forces to atrophy. Opponents of President Barack Obama's nonproliferation and disarmament agendas are using this idea as a way of undermining his plans, alleging that by not modernizing, the US is in danger of being surpassed by Russia and China. Yet these arguments are specious and misleading.

By narrowly defining "modernization" as the production and deployment of new warheads and delivery vehicles, an inappropriate standard is set by which to judge the health of a nuclear arsenal. What matters far more than the age of warheads and other equipment is whether a country has a reliable, credible deterrent. Viewed in this light, the US cannot be said to be falling behind: Washington takes continual steps to ensure that its arsenal remains dominant, and indeed, its nuclear arsenal remains second to none.

Nature: Discussion needs to be open about how exploitation of Earth's internal heat can produce earthquakes, says Domenico Giardini, so that the alternative-energy technology can be properly utilized.

Institute Matters: With the public controversy over hacked e-mail messages from climate scientists, scientific integrity has, for some people, been put deeply in question.

Arguably the fundamental issue boils down to something described in a comment from the late Richard Feynman. He spoke of

"a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked.... Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.... If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it."

This quotation (from his lecture, Cargo Cult Science) appeared the other day in a Wall Street Journal letter to the editor from someone who sees it as a reminder of what climate scientists have forgotten. What I think, however—despite the lapses revealed in the hacked messages—is that it shows what climate scientists have remembered.

Science works the same in all its fields. If the integrity of science in general weren't assured to a very high degree—in the laboratory, in scientific publications, and in the practical consequences to which science leads—then neither the critics of climate scientists nor the rest of us could be using transistors, lasers, optical fibers, or pharmaceuticals. We couldn't fly with only a one-in-a-million chance of mishap, and our bridges and skyscrapers could fall down, and polio would still be feared.

Science is by its very nature an exploratory, trial-and-error venture which is also--sooner or later in every case--a self-correcting exercise. Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Lysenko's failed agricultural theories of the 1930s and 1940s and, more recently, such concepts as polywater, cold fusion, and human clones are examples of scientific pronouncements that were eventually proven wrong or fraudulent by the step-by-step process of examination, review, and repetition.

It's true that scientists are human and that the science enterprise can suffer from the frailties of any other human endeavor. I would rather think that scientists are less susceptible than are people in other professions by jealousies, excessive ego, and the desire for fame and fortune.

But these human faults do also affect scientists, which means that science sometimes suffers. Nevertheless, science recovers quickly because of its well-proven correction mechanisms that apply universally across disciplinary, political, and cultural boundaries.

The current attack on the integrity of climate science is based on the proposition that this particular field somehow operates with a special, deep disrespect for the skepticism principle that Feynman advocated in the comment quoted above.

I don't believe it.

H. Frederick Dylla

H. Frederick Dylla is the executive director of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today. The views expressed here are the personal views of the author.

Scientific American: Says Lawrence M. Krauss:

The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped.... It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation....

.... Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by observation and experiment, gets thrown out like yesterday’s newspaper. One doesn’t need to debate about whether the earth is flat or 6,000 years old. These claims can safely be discarded, and have been, by the scientific method.

What makes people so susceptible to nonsense in public discourse? Is it because we do such a miserable job in schools teaching what science is all about—that it is not a collection of facts or stories but a process for weeding out nonsense to get closer to the underlying beautiful reality of nature? Perhaps not. But I worry for the future of our democracy if a combination of a free press and democratically elected leaders cannot together somehow more effectively defend empirical reality against the onslaught of ideology and fanaticism.

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.