Begley: Bring On the ‘Reality- Based Community’

It took a while to discern the guiding ideology behind the Bush administration's poisonous science policies. The real problem wasn't tax cuts and war spending, even though the combination did strangle domestic programs so severely that scientists at the nation's premier physics lab were ordered to take unpaid leave, and the government is allocating 13 percent less to biomedical research in 2009 than it did in 2004. Nor was the culprit the sop that Bush offered the religious right in 2001 by banning the use of federal money for research on new lines of human embryonic stem cells, paralyzing the field for eight years and sending some of the nation's most promising young biologists overseas. It wasn't even Bush's refusal to take any action to reduce greenhouse gases, allowing U.S. emissions to grow by 178 million tons during his years in the White House and making the needed cuts that much deeper now. No, Obama and Congress can reverse all of that if they want to. The truly poisonous legacy of the past eight years is one that spread to much of society and will therefore be much harder to undo: the utter contempt with which those in power viewed inconvenient facts, empiricism and science in general.

Hollywood Gets Inside the Minds of Moviegoers (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - "Carl, let me in," whispered actor-director Ben Stiller, grasping at empty air near a sullen teenage boy. "I want to know what makes my little nephew tick."

Journals week in review: science from Nobel Intent

Stem cells and nanoscale carbon take a step closer to being useful, why evolution found the hot chili pepper helpful, and researchers craft an atomically perfect mirror for bouncing helium atoms around. That's all just one week's worth of science.Read More...

5 Ways to Beef Up Your Brain (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Forget where you left your keys this morning? Or maybe you left your umbrella in the office before a rainy evening. Don't worry, it's probably not a sign of Alzheimer's - everyone is a little forgetful now and then. But the prevalence of Alzheimer's and other types of dementia, which slowly deteriorate the brain's capacity to make new memories, retrieve older ones and perform other mental and physical tasks, is on the rise as the baby boomer generation hits retirement age. ...

A crash course in true political science

Daniel Suson has a doctorate in astrophysics and has worked on the superconducting super collider and a forthcoming NASA probe. Now he's heading back to school to take on an even trickier task — getting elected to public office.

Growing number of US scientists are mobilizing for public office

Daniel Suson has a doctorate in astrophysics and has worked on the superconducting super collider and a forthcoming NASA probe. Now he's heading back to school to take on an even trickier task — getting elected to public office.