As the worldwide financial crisis accelerated, the presidential candidates focused on saving what is left of the US economy. The nearest reference to science matters in the 7 October debate came from John McCain who, following in the footsteps of the late Democratic Senator William Proxmire, criticized Obama for the Democrat’s attempt to earmark “$3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?”

The “overhead projector” is actually the instrument that re-creates the night sky in the Adler Planetarium. “To clarify,” Adler officials said in a press release about McCain’s statement, “the Adler Planetarium requested federal support – which was not funded – to replace the projector in its historic Sky Theater, the first planetarium theater in the Western Hemisphere. The current projector, a Zeiss Mark VI, is 40 years old and is no longer supported by the manufacturer.

“Science literacy is an urgent issue in the United States,” Adler officials said. “To remain competitive and ensure national security, it is vital that we educate and inspire the next generation of explorers to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math. Senator McCain’s statements about the [planetarium’s] request for federal support do not accurately reflect the museum’s legislative history or relationship with Senator Obama.”

More about the “Adler incident” can be found at the Cosmic Log, a website maintained by Alan Boyle, who covers science for MSNBC.

Grizzly politics

In the first debate, McCain had ridiculed a bear DNA study that is being sponsored by the US Geological Survey as a comparatively inexpensive way to gather data on bear population dynamics and sizes. The study is of grizzly bears in northwest Montana and, it has found, through DNA tests of tufts of hair and other traces left by the bears in the rugged terrain, that the grizzly population is doing well.

Is nuclear waste too hot to handle?

Obama and McCain both reiterated their support for an expansion of nuclear power at the debate. While Obama’s support for new nukes has been conditioned upon a resolution of the nuclear waste disposal issue, he did not mention that caveat at the debate.

Science calls the candidates

The market meltdown coincided with (and overshadowed) the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prizes. But Martin Chalfie, a biology professor at Columbia University who shared this year’s chemistry Nobel, immediately rushed to add his name to the list of 61 Nobel laureates who had endorsed Obama in September.

The American Institute of Physics (parent of Physics Today) and the American Physical Society were two of more than 70 scientific, business, and higher education organizations calling on the next president to support a comprehensive, multi-agency, basic research energy strategy.

And to add a little international perspective to how the collapse of the global economy is affecting science, paleontologist Richard Leakey warned that the worldwide credit crisis will be “just devastating” to scientific research as endowments lose income and companies cut their donations to science.

“With the investment portfolios being hit as hard as they’ve been hit in the last few weeks, particularly the last few days, I would have thought there would be a very dramatic reduction in available funds for research in all sorts of countries,” Leakey said in a report carried by the Associated Press.

Leakey, speaking at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock on Wednesday, said, “It’s more worryful for people who are losing their homes, it’s more worryful for people who are losing investments for the children’s futures, but we’re also very worried as scientists.”

David Kramer