From Wired
By Alexis Madrigal

Mysterious, glowing clouds previously seen almost exclusively in Earth’s polar regions have appeared in the skies over the United States and Europe over the past several days.

Photographers and other sky watchers in Omaha, Paris, Seattle, and other locations have run outside to capture images of what scientists call noctilucent (”night shining”) clouds. Formed by ice literally at the boundary where the earth’s atmosphere meets space 50 miles up, they shine because they are so high that they remain lit by the sun even after our star is below the horizon.

The clouds might be beautiful, but they could portend global changes caused by global warming. Noctilucent clouds are a fundamentally new phenomenon in the temperate mid-latitude sky, and it’s not clear why they’ve migrated down from the poles. Or why, over the last 25 years, more of them are appearing in the polar regions, too, and shining more brightly.

“That’s a real concern and question,” said James Russell, an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University and the principal investigator of an ongoing NASA satellite mission to study the clouds. “Why are they getting more numerous? Why are they getting brighter? Why are they appearing at lower latitudes?”

Nobody knows for sure, but most of the answers seem to point to human-caused global atmospheric change.

Read more Glowing Clouds

From The Seattle PI
By Dan Rather

Coincidences of the calendar don’t have much real significance, but they do play a role in our national mythology. The most prominent of these, known to students of history, are the deaths within hours of one another of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams — the lead author and advocate, respectively, of the Declaration of Independence.

The date they died? July 4, 1826 — the 50th anniversary of the declaration.

It was interesting to note, this week, a coincidence that had gone less noticed: the shared bicentenary birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. At first glance, these two men would seem to have little to do with one another. But what connects the American of humble birth and the son of a prosperous English doctor, the Great Emancipator and the groundbreaking scientist, is the world we live in today. Both these men played a profound role in shaping modernity, and the historical forces each set in motion reverberate still, 200 years after their births.

The Civil War over which Lincoln presided stands as such a stark dividing line that historians speak of antebellum America as a distinctly different place. Emancipation is the most obvious difference between what came before and after, but it is far from the only one. Modern warfare, our national identity, our continent-spanning geographic unity and our conception of presidential powers — to name a few items on a long list — all follow a trajectory traceable back to that war.

So complete was America’s transformation under Lincoln that some speak of it in biblical terms, casting the Civil War as a redemptive scouring akin to Noah’s flood, or the Crucifixion. This last notion was reinforced by another coincidence — that Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on Good Friday, a fact seized upon by countless preachers across the land as they prepared their 1865 Easter sermons.

Read more Coincidence

From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

Jane Lubchenco’s tenure at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be a good place to gauge how much lost ground can be reclaimed for science. Her appointment by President-elect Obama to run the administration will be particularly interesting since NOAA is under the Department of Commerce, which will have many lobbyists surely fighting any environmental regulations that come from scientific assessments. It will be challenging because even though the Obama administration is science-friendly in appointments, research funding remains questionable because of the recession.

Lubchenco, a marine scientist at Oregon State, has been president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Council for Science and was on the Pew Oceans Commission and the National Science Board under President Clinton. In 1995, she warned that a proposed massive congressional cut in nondefense science funding “has very profound implications for the future of the country.” She told the Oregonian newspaper, “The consequences are likely to be a massive dismantling of a research system that has served us very, very well.”

In 1997, evidence of global overfishing, coastal development and pollution was so profound that a panel of marine scientists that included Lubchenco proposed that 20 percent of the world’s oceans be designated as marine preserves. Only one-quarter of one percent of ocean surface was under protection. Lubchenco, who by then was warning of “ecological tsunamis” in the oceans, said the level of existing protection was “a drop in the bucket, especially relative to the magnitude of the changes that we humans are causing.”

It was no surprise that she was a critic of a Bush administration that denied for eight years the magnitude of human impact on the planet. In 2003, when the Pew Oceans Commission said overfishing and the degraded conditions of America’s rivers and coastlines constituted a “crisis,” Lubchenco said, “We have squandered their natural bounty.” She added, “The system is broken. It’s not working for the fishermen; it’s not working for the fish.”

Read more Science

From Wired
By Brandon Keim

Republican presidential nominee John McCain would criminalize a promising branch of stem cell research, according to a statement issued by the candidate’s campaign. Though such legislation would probably not survive Congress, he might extend President Bush’s much-criticized limitation of embryonic stem cell research.

“I read the statement as a bad omen for stem cell research under a McCain administration,” said George Daley, a leukemia researcher at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

The McCain campaign responded on Monday to questions about stem cell research posed by ScienceDebate2008, a nonpartisan science advocacy group.

In his statement, McCain at first claimed to support ESC research. However, he said “clear lines should be drawn that reflect a refusal to sacrifice moral values and ethical principles for the sake of scientific progress” — a qualification that disturbed many scientists and bioethicists with its ambiguity.

McCain also took a harder line than the Bush administration with somatic cell nuclear transfer, better known as therapeutic cloning — a cutting-edge process that could some day provide personalized embryonic stem cell therapies. Though currently legal, McCain would outlaw the technique.

The new stance is an abrupt reversal for the Arizona senator. As recently as 2007, McCain appeared to favor embryonic stem cell research more strongly than most of the Republican party, especially its most religiously conservative members. “I believe that we need to fund this,” he said during a presidential candidates’ debate in May 2007.

Read more Right Turn

From Wired
By Brandon Keim

America asked Barack Obama about science, and Obama answered.

“This is the first time we know of that a candidate for president has laid out his science policy before the election at this level of detail,” said Shawn Otto, CEO of ScienceDebate2008.

A 38,000-member coalition of scientists, engineers and concerned citizens, ScienceDebate2008 pushed Presidential candidates to attend to science — an area that is vital to America’s economy and touches on nearly every important political issue, but is generally neglected during elections.

Though unable to convince Obama and John McCain to engage in a full-blown science debate, ScienceDebate2008 winnowed 3,400 member-submitted questions down to 14 key challenges facing candidates and the country. Some, such as clean energy and stem cell research, are familiar from past elections. Others, such as water security and the systematic politicization of science, are new.

Obama’s answers were released on Saturday and balance lofty rhetoric with policy-wonk detail — not only on energy issues, which are a central part of his platform, but relatively esoteric issues as science education, bioterror and genetic privacy.

“I thought they were very substantive for this point in the campaign, and surprisingly detailed,” said Otto.

Obama also appears to appreciate the process of science: he promises across-the-board doublings of basic research budgets, and pledges to reverse the ideologically motivated science-skewing that has thrived under the Bush administration.

Read more Answers

From Wired
By Brandon Keim

Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin wants creationism taught in science classes.

In a 2006 gubernatorial debate, the soon-to-be governor of Alaska said of evolution and creation education, “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

(Read about Palin’s views on ANWAR and polar bears on our sister blog, Threat Level.)

Asked by the Anchorage Daily News whether she believed in evolution, Palin declined to answer, but said that “I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class.”

“I’m not going to pretend I know how all this came to be,” she said.

The battle between evolution and creationism — specifically, Christian creationism — in U.S. classrooms dates back to the 1925 Scopes trial, when a Tennessee court banned the teaching of evolution. Since then, state and federal courts have repeatedly rejected so-called creation science in public schools, calling it religion rather than science.

The latest courtroom defeat came in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, when the superficially religion-neutral theory of intelligent design was classified as religious creationism. The Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that teaching creationism violated the separation of church and state.

Nevertheless, pro-creationism education initiatives driven by Christian conservatives have flourished, and defenders of evolution — and, more broadly, scientific integrity — worry that Palin’s pick will give momentum to this church-over-state push.

Read more Creationism

From The Raw Story
By Stephen C. Webster

According to a federal agency report released Thursday, a “new phenomenon” known as thermal expansion was directly responsible for the mysterious collapse of World Trade Center 7 on Sept. 11, 2001.

This study, posed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology — a federal scientific agency which promotes technical industrial standards — marks the first ‘official’ government theory on the collapse.

The building’s demise occurred some seven hours after the twin towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, and has been the source of numerous conspiracy theories key to the “9/11 Truth” movement, most of which argue that the symmetrical, seven-second collapse was brought about by a controlled demolition.

Dr. Shyam Sunder, director of Institute’s building and fire research laboratory, oversaw the government’s three-year research efforts. The report aims to disprove the controlled demolition argument.

However, Richard Gage, founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and a member of the American Institute of Architects, doesn’t believe a word of the theory.

His group, which has swelled to over 400 architectural and engineering professionals, immediately responded to the Institute’s claim in a press conference.

“Tons of [molten metal] was found 21 days after the attack,” said Gage in an interview with a Vancouver, Canada television station. “Steel doesn’t begin to melt until 2,700 degrees, which is much hotter than what these fires could have caused.”

Read more New Phenomenon

From AlterNet
By Terrence McNally

“It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.” Barack Obama finally said it.

Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right’s stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them — and us — unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.

American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy, and their parents are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution; roughly 30 to 40 percent believe in each. Their president believes “the jury is still out” on evolution.

Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on “The Colbert Report.” Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn’t actually list the commandments.

This stuff would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.

In the 2004 election, nearly 70 percent of Bush supporters believed the United States had “clear evidence” that Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda; a third believed weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; and more than a third that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion, according to the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. The political right and allied culture warriors actively ignore evidence and encourage misinformation. To motivate their followers, they label intelligent and informed as “elite,” implying that ignorance is somehow both valuable and under attack. Susan Jacoby confronts our “know-nothingism” — current and historical — in her new book, The Age of American Unreason.

Read more Anti-Intellectualism

From TruthDig
By Marie Cocco

Congress is known for leaving business unfinished, but rarely is a task left undone for more than four decades.

The tobacco industry is a prolific donor of campaign funds and a lobbying titan. So the federal government has left it mostly alone since the 1964 surgeon general’s report declared that cigarette smoking causes disease and death.

“This is the only consumer product that, when used as intended, kills people,” says Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “And it is unregulated.”

Until, one can hope, right now.

Before departing for its August break, the House of Representatives passed the first-ever comprehensive tobacco regulation bill. It gives the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco by, among other things, cracking down on marketing to children, mandating dramatically stronger health warnings on every pack, and requiring that the warnings be larger than they are now. Most significantly, the government would ban use of words such as light and mild that are meant to fool smokers into thinking there is such a thing as a safe, or safer, cigarette. It would prohibit sweet flavorings now used to make smoking seem palatable, though it wouldn’t go far enough in reducing the use of menthol flavors, favored among African-American smokers.

And for the first time, tobacco companies would have to disclose to the government just what is in cigarettes. Right now, Myers says, there are more than 60 known cancer-causing agents in cigarettes, but most information on them is held privately by the industry. “The FDA doesn’t even know what is in there,” he says. The legislation, Myers believes, “takes the decisions about what might be in cigarettes away from the tobacco industry … and turns them over to the scientists.”

Read more Regulating

From The Dissident Voice
By Tom Burghardt

Operating with little ethical oversight, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been tapping cutting-edge advances in neuroscience, computers and robotics in a quest to build the “perfect warfighter.” Dovetailing precisely with other projects to “dominate” the urban “battlespace” of global south and “homeland” cities, DARPA researchers are stretching moral boundaries where clear distinctions between “human” and “machine” are being consciously blurred. (see “Simulating Urban Warfare” and “America’s Cyborg Warriors“) As the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics warns,

The right of a person to liberty, autonomy, and privacy over his or her own intellect is situated at the core of what it means to be a free person. This principle is what gives life to some of our most well-established and cherished rights. Today, as new drugs and other technologies are being developed for augmenting, monitoring, and manipulating mental processes, it is more important than ever to ensure that our legal system recognizes and protects cognitive liberty as a fundamental right. (CCLE, “Frequently Asked Questions,” September 15, 2003)

Not only is the right to “liberty, autonomy, and privacy” being undermined by militarizing the life sciences, but the legal system itself is ill-equipped to deal with advances–and emerging threats–to “cognitive liberty” as America’s corporatist surveillance state seek new means to elicit compliance and control over individuals as biological science is securitized under the rubric of “national security.” In Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense (Dana Press, 2006), bioethicist Jonathan Moreno lays out a frightening scenario where various Pentagon agencies with DARPA leading the charge, have been funding neuroscientific and biological research in the following areas: Mind-machine interfaces, also called “neural prosthetics.” Living robots” whose movements can be controlled via brain implants. Research has successfully been carried out on “roborats” and “robodogs” for mine clearing and other dubious purposes. “Cognitive feedback helmets” that provide commanders or their medical surrogates the ability to remotely view an individual soldiers’ mental state. MRI and fMRI technologies for what has been called “brain fingerprinting” as an interrogation tool or airport screening for “terrorists.” So-called “non-lethal” pulse weapons and other neurodisruptors for deployment in global south or “homeland” cities as “riot control” tools. “Neuroweapons” that use biological agents to stimulate the release of neurotoxins.

Read more Neuroscience