Scientific American launched its e-Book program this summer, starting with The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. Each month, we add new titles selected from the most relevant issues facing science today. For October, our newest e-Book reminds readers that politics makes strange bedfellows. This maxim becomes even more vivid when politics is put under [...]

Congressional staffers, federal agency senior personnel, non-profit leaders and scientific organization executives joined Scientific American Editor in chief Mariette DiChristina at a recent reception to celebrate the magazine’s special issue on cities. “Celebrating cities in many ways is celebrating what is best in us,” DiChristina told the crowd as she kicked off the evening honoring [...]

I was going to let the demise of Muammar Gaddafi pass without comment—after all, what does the murder of this tyrant have to do with science, right? But a bizarre essay in The New York Times on October 26, “Dictators Get the Death They Deserve,” by the historian Simon Windbag—I mean Sebag—Montefiore, has pushed my [...]

Homosexuality is a lifestyle choice. Or so religious conservatives would have us believe. But liberalism is in our genes. Or so researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University would have us believe. Yes, the inevitable has happened. Just before Election Day—surely not a coincidence—scientists report an association between liberal political views [...]

In the United States, a significant amount of scientific research is funded through governmental agencies, using public money. Presumably, this is not primarily aimed at keeping scientists employed and off the streets*, but rather is driven by a recognition that reliable knowledge about how various bits of our world work can be helpful to us [...]

For scientists, doing science is often about trying to satisfy deep curiosity about how various bits of our world work. For society at large, it often seems like science ought to exist primarily to solve particular pressing problems — or at least, that this is what science ought to be doing, given that our tax [...]

It is probably no surprise to my regular readers that I get a little exercised about the science wars that play out across the U.S. in various school boards and court actions. It’s probably unavoidable, given that I think about science for a living — when you’ve got a horse in the race, you end [...]

There’s been a lot of buzz in the science blogosphere recently about the Research Works Act, a piece of legislation that’s been introduced in the U.S. that may have big impacts on open access publishing of scientific results. John Dupuis has an excellent round-up of posts on the subject. I’m going to add my two [...]

If the question posed in the title of the post seems to you to have an obvious answer, sit tight while I offer a situation in which it might be less obvious. We recently discussed philosopher Karl Popper’s efforts to find the line of demarcation between science and pseudo-science. In that discussion, one of the [...]

It’s not just scientists who think science is up to something important. Even non-scientists are inclined to think that scientific knowledge claims have a special grip on our world, that they are likely to give us information or insight that will help us move through that world more successfully. But scientists and non-scientists alike recognize [...]

Sometimes I feel like Alice in Wonderland, staring into distorting mirrors. The ongoing fight over Plan B has again precipitated this disquieting feeling. There is such a disconnect between some stated outcomes that are claimed as being desirable and actions that don’t support that. In this case, probably most people would agree that elective abortions [...]

32 deaths. 461 cases…and counting. Unless you live under a rock, you probably know about the nationwide outbreak of an unusual fungal meningitis caused by Exserohilum rostratum, a plant fungus. The outbreak is now linked to a single pharmacy in Massachusetts, New England Compounding Center (NECC), which compounded a variety of drugs used for injection, [...]

In my last post, I focused on flaws in the medical device approval process. The Union of Concerned Scientists’ “FDA at a Crossroads” meeting also covered problems with drug approval. This is perhaps no better illustrated than by the disappointing decision by Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius’ to deny the emergency contraceptive, Plan B, over-the-counter [...]

Last week, I and some 200 other attendees of the Global Trends 2030: U.S. Leadership in a Post-Western World conference got a thought-provoking look at the current “megatrends” leading to four possible futures for the world some 10 to 15 years from now. Cutting across all of them is the disruptive influence of emerging technologies—which [...]

Republican Party leaders in the House of Representatives will decide whether Representatives Lamar Smith of Texas, James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin or Dana Rohrabacher of California will succeed Ralph Hall, also of Texas, as chair of the House Committee. Because of term limits, Hall cannot continue heading the group, which has jurisdiction over energy research, NASA, [...]

In 1993, Americans elected the first physicist to Congress: Vern Ehlers, a Republican from Michigan. Just six years later, former assistant director of Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey, joined him. And in 2008, Fermilab physicist and Illinois Democrat Bill Foster joined them, only to lose re-election in 2010 before [...]

Storm-ravaged New Jersey could set off a tempest of its own on Election Day if the state lets constituents vote via e-mail and fax, cautioned a group of legal, technology and election experts during a press conference on Monday. These experts are challenging N.J. Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno’s executive order issued late last week that [...]

How do you know that a real-live human being is behind the past 14 weeks of blog posts exploring the individual questions posed to presidential candidates by ScienceDebate.org? Because people make mistakes. Last week I inadvertently posted the vaccine answers to the analysis about rare earth elements. Thanks to sijodk for politely pointing out the [...]

With just over a week left in this year’s presidential election, all eyes are focused on Ohio, Florida and a few other battleground states. Many of the themes that kept cropping up in this year’s live debates–China, the economy  and regulation–can also be found in the next-to-last of the 14 ScienceDebate questions, on the rare [...]

If you blinked you missed the fact that President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney dealt with a few science issues in the Town Hall debate this week at Hofstra University. So, for a change of pace from our ongoing weekly look at one of  ScienceDebate.org’s 14 questions about the “Top American Science Questions,” I’ve [...]

No matter who is elected president of the United States on November 6, there are bound to be new cuts to next year’s federal budget. The question is whether they will be really really big or just sort of big. Congress can avoid the really, really big (and semi-random) cuts during its lame-duck session between [...]

The earth is about 9,000 years old, according to U.S. House Representative Paul Broun, who is also a physician and member of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the House of Representatives. “There are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really [...]

This week’s look at the ScienceDebate answers provided by Gov. Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama focuses on their replies to a question about the health of our oceans and coastlines. Two areas in particular—declining fisheries and pollution—were highlighted for special consideration. Of course, the oceans also play a major role in driving weather systems [...]

As SCOTUS debates the constitutionality of Proposition 8 and DOMA this week, Facebook users all over the nation have become part of a burgeoning social media trend. Supporters of marriage equality have been changing their profile pictures to the icon on the left, a version of the Human Rights Campaign logo designed specifically to indicate [...]

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. – William Shakespeare, Hamlet According to a poll from the Pew Research Center that has come out just in time for this week’s historic decisions on marriage equality, we should all be concerned. As it turns out, there’s a tremendous amount of bias [...]

In honor of the big decisions occurring this week in SCOTUS regarding the constitutionality of Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act, I am re-posting a slightly edited version of this piece from the archives of my WordPress blog. This was originally posted in June 2011, shortly after New York legalized same-sex marriage. You [...]

Rob Portman, Republican senator from Ohio and one-time contender for Romney’s would-be VP slot, announced on Friday that he has reversed his very public stance against gay marriage. As the well-known conservative stated in an Op-Ed piece on Friday, he now believes that “if two people are prepared to make a lifetime commitment to love [...]

The Atlantic featured a captivating fantasy in its November issue about a scenario to assassinate the U.S. president in 2016 by using a bioweapon specifically tailored to his genetic makeup—a virus that targeted the commander in chief and no one else. A great plot for a Hollywood thriller. But will we really see four years [...]

This post is really a question. Over the past few years, ever since the climate change debate, well, heated up, the words “skeptic” and “denier” have been thrown around on countless websites and blogs, usually accompanied by much frothing at the mouth. This has left me wondering; is there anything bordering on a consensus among [...]

Energy efficiency sounds like a good idea on multiple fronts; mitigating global warming, reducing dependence on foreign oil and saving money. Conservatives and liberals may disagree about the first reason, but you would expect both of them to enthusiastically embrace energy efficiency based on the other two reasons. Yet we find attitudes toward energy efficiency [...]

It’s been said many times. Curiosity-driven research with no immediate application or goal is what has primarily led to science’s greatest discoveries as well as our high standard of living. It is what has led to the ascendancy of American science during the twentieth century. If you want great discoveries to happen, the recipe is [...]

The 1960 Presidential election, in which Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts squared off against Vice President Richard Nixon, would usher in a new era in Presidential politics, thanks to the growing prevalence of television ownership. The so-called “Great Debates” – four of them – would be the first ever televised Presidential debates, and some [...]