Science

I was more than a little incredulous when I read that Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) claimed via Twitter to have stumped Energy Secretary Steven Chu with a simple science question. After all, Chu is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, while Barton doesn’t exactly have the firmest grasp of science. And, having witnessed the exchange firsthand at [...]

President Obama is expected to sign an executive order Monday ending the controversial ban on increased federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, The Washington Post reported this afternoon.
The move, long sought by scientists and patient advocates and opposed by religious groups, would enable the National Institutes of Health to consider requests from scientists to [...]

Confirming what many have been saying for years, a new survey finds that teenagers who pledge to forgo sexual activity until marriage were just as likely to engage in premarital sex as those who do not. Adolescents who take the pledge are also less likely than their peers to use birth control or condoms when [...]

President-elect Barack Obama has said he will take a different approach to health, environment and energy agencies.

Add Iowa’s Democratic Gov. Chet Culver to the growing (and bipartisan) list of governors who have received letters containing a mysterious powder this week, according to our sister site, The Iowa Independent.
On Monday, the governors of Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana and Rhode Island received these letters. All laboratory tests of the powder, which some [...]

CNN and The Huffington Post are reporting that President-elect Barack Obama is close to settling on Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his pick for energy secretary.

Some science bloggers are alarmed by predictions in the news that President-elect Barack Obama intends to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
After eight years in which the Bush administration trashed science to favor a political agenda, these blogger are saying that Kennedy would be a most injudicious choice, since [...]

For the last eight years, scientists have accused the Bush administration of tampering with, suppressing or even ignoring scientific findings that conflicted with its policies. Their central question is what could the next president do to restore scientific integrity.

Federal agencies have inconsistent media policies when it comes to allowing scientists to share information with journalists, concludes a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The nonpartisan, nonprofit group issued a “report card” grading 15 federal agencies on their communication policies. Some agencies, it found,  “stifle communication” even if their policies encourage free speech. [...]

At the beginning of this year, we reported on Air France’s plan to go green. Now the airline is joining forces with nine other industry leaders and environmental groups to reduce the industry’s dependency on fossil fuels.