Stanford Collider to Close Early, Cut 225 Staff

This is one of those stories that makes me glad that I’m not in high energy physics. Due to budget cuts in the DoE, a decision had to be made; close the SLAC or close Fermilab’s Tevatron. SLAC got the boot so the Tevatron could have a chance to find the Higgs boson before CERN opens the LHC. Ugh. You can read the article in Nature here.As a grad student, the most horrifying thing about all this is 225 people with unique, useful and specific skills suddenly looking for work. These are folks who are at the hight of their field. It’s only 225 people, but it is a sign of how the US is (at best) exporting scientific talent, particularly in high energy physics.

Anti-Matter Claymation Video

In case you were wondering, this is just one of the things your US 2008 budget didn’t buy.

thanks to Seed Magazine

H. Clinton on Assault on Science

To second that last post, check out this video from August 2007.

Dismal Outlook for Science in 2008

While this did come out in December, I’m just now getting around to writing about it. I’ve talked a lot about keeping the US competitive in science and engineering lately, and indeed the US congress seemed to understand that was important as well. The America COMPETES Act signed in by the president in August was meant to address that very issue.

By the time it came to actually allocate money for 2008 it seems as though everyone forgot about this act. The first budget proposed in November had vast cuts from the plan set out only 3 months earlier. The budget approved on December 19th, was even worse.

You can read all about it in this story published in Nature and this article in Science.

Just to whet your appetite, here is a quote from the Nature article. Michael Lubell, spokesmen for the American Physical Society

“This is probably the worst budget for science that anyone can remember. … It absolutelly devastates and probably wipes out American high-energy physics.”

Gads!

Great Evolution Lecture: horrifying fallout

Thanks to Penguin Burger, I just wasted the last few hours watching one of the best Evolution v. Intelligent Design lectures I’ve ever seen. This is the youtube video. The lecture is about an hour with about the same time devoted to some great questions from a somewhat famous room of folks (I spotted Lawrence Krauss, author of “The Physics of Star Trek”).

The lecture shows the recent history of the intelligent design movement and how, through brilliant P.R., creationism has changed to a questioning and analysis of evolution. If you don’t believe this is actually happening watch this clip of Ben Stein on Bill O’Reilly’s show.

If you want a much shorter video that gives you at least one talking point, you can watch this segment of an interview with Kenneth Miller. He quickly blows one of the central ideas of intelligent design out of the water …with a tie tack. Genius.

Oil Reaches $100 per Barrel: What are we thinking?

I’ve been waiting to post about how I’ve been reading Winning the Oil Endgame. You can download the book for free or buy an actual paper copy.I wanted to wait until I finished the book, or the price of oil hit $100 per barrel. Guess which happened first. The New York Times reports that we are now less than $3 per barrel away from an inflation adjusted all time high in the price of crude ($102.81 in April 1980). If some obstetricians in Tulsa had been a bit more enthusiastic about maternity time tables two and a half decades ago, I wouldn’t be able to say that oil is more expensive now than at any time in my lifetime.The good news is this; oil is now as expensive as it was the last time the US actually payed attention. That is, the price of oil is at the same inflation adjusted value it was during the last period of innovation in the American car industry with regard to fuel economy.

Exxon Trying to Buy Scientific Opinion

Okay, I’m a scientist. I’m trained to be a skeptic. I don’t typically buy into conspiracy theories. This, however, is disturbing. The guardian wrote about this back in February, but I’ve just now seen in. The guardian reports:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Yikes! That, I find disturbing. It also makes me glad that I’m just a spectroscopist. I don’t think that BP is going to try to pay me thousands of dollars to champion a new theory for the spectrum of methane. Perhaps I’m wrong.

Presidential Science Debate

Writers from the Washington Post had an interesting idea; a presidential debate centered entirely on science.  You can read the article here.   The authors propose a debate that mixes presidential hopefuls with distinguished scientists in an attempt to illuminate the public about who actually knows a stem cell from a T-cell and a quasar from a pulsar.  

 

The idea is interesting, but the execution is impossible.  What candidate would sign up for a debate where they can only look stupid.  It’s a pop quiz where the best possible grade is a C.  Moreover, a president’s job is not to be a scientist, but to pick policy and to pick scientific advisors.  

 

I don’t want to bash the idea of a debate too much, but rather to change it.  A round table discussion of current scientific and science policy topics would be excellent.  The Washington Post authors sum things up perfectly with the following. 

 

And yet, three Republican candidates have said they do not believe in it [evolution]. Even George W. Bush believes “the jury is still out on evolution.” That someone this scientifically backward was elected to such a powerful position at such a critical time is perhaps the most astonishing anachronism in modern American political life. Such a thing must not be allowed to happen again. Given all of the scientific challenges that face us, we must elect a president with a basic understanding of 21st Century science. 

Too many scientists?!?!?!

I think this is probably rubbish, but interesting rubbish should always get a close look.  The following article contends that k-12 students are improving in STEM fields and that we are actually producing more STEM university graduates than the job market can handle.  This is VASTY against other conventional wisdom and several other studies.  

 

From Business Week 

James Watson Resigns Amid Enormous Flub

 

I’ve never won a Nobel Prize and, let’s be honest, I won’t. In a staggering misstep, James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the double-helix structure of DNA and 1962 winner of the Nobel Prize, told a sold-out crowd that people of African descent are of lower intelligence than those of European descent. As I white guy who just had to make sure I spelled descent and not decent, I personally take issue with this.