From Vlatko Verdal, Five Books
The quantum information theory professor says there is nothing distinctly novel that was brought to philosophy by quantum mechanics. The key tenet is this randomness that is at the core of our interaction with the world: there is an element that you can never make more deterministic. And, of course, randomness as a way of looking at the world has existed for a long time. He chooses books on quantifying the universe.
Your first book is Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality? by Alastair Rae. This is a completely popular book about quantum physics: there is not a single equation in there, I think. What he does is to go through all the major ways in which we try to understand quantum physics, all the major interpretations. It’s extremely good in that he writes in a very objective way and it’s very difficult to tell which one he supports. It’s very passionately argued as well, and it’s a beautiful exposition, very philosophical. I think it’s the best, probably my favourite, popular account of all the things we argue about on the fundamental side of quantum physics.
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From Lucas Laursen, Science
Climbing one of the world’s biggest granite walls is different from climbing trees, as National Park Service botanist Martin Hutten discovered while dangling from a cliff in the spray of Vernal Falls high above the Yosemite Valley. Hutten apprenticed in the logging industry before he started graduate school, so he new how to climb trees. “I could trust myself to a rope,” he recalls, “but I’d definitely never hung off a cliff or collected [samples] from a cliff.”
So when Hutten — who is seeking a Ph.D. in forest ecology at Oregon State University, Corvallis — and his fellow park rangers needed help surveying the park’s lichen, they enlisted experienced rock climbers. Over 2 weeks in 2007 and 2008, those volunteer climbers helped collect 394 lichen specimens. This year, the researchers are asking volunteers to help with other parts of their biodiversity survey, such as counting birds from the valley floor.
Hutten’s project is one of many worldwide in which volunteers help scientists collect data in ways that range from mundane to vital. Such help, although voluntary, is not free. Recruiting volunteers, finding appropriate ways for them to contribute, training them, keeping them motivated, and ensuring the quality of the data they collect requires time, money, and management expertise.
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From Colin Macilwain, Nature News
Spending on science is one of the best ways to generate jobs and economic growth, say research advocates. But as Colin Macilwain reports, the evidence behind such claims is patchy.
President Barack Obama says it. Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), says it. University and research leaders elsewhere are saying it, too. The number one current rationale for extra research investment is that it will generate badly needed economic growth.
“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” said Obama, addressing the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC last year. Getting down to the details, Collins has recently cited a report by Families USA, a Washington DC-based health-advocacy group, which found that every US$1 spent by the NIH typically generates $2.21 in additional economic output within 12 months.
“Biomedical research has generally been looked at for its health benefits, but the case for it generating economic growth is pretty compelling,” says Collins. In Britain, senior scientists have called on the government to support science as a means of helping the economy out of recession. Heeding such arguments, governments in Germany, Sweden, Canada and Australia, as well as the United States, have increased research spending as part of stimulus packages designed to aid their struggling economies.
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From Stefany Anne Golberg, The Smart Set
The final episode of The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey begins not in the sea but in the sky. Sideways, we soar though the clouds, glimpsing a solitary island below, far into the Pacific. As always, we hold our breath in anticipation. A couple of years before “Clipperton: The Island Time Forgot” first aired, Jacques Cousteau gave his son and trusty costar Philippe a PBY seaplane named Flying Calypso, after Cousteau’s famous boat, Calypso. It was a fatherly gesture to a son who lived in his father’s shadow. The plane was meant to distinguish Philippe, whose true love was flight.
Eventually, we land. A menacing army of poisonous crabs mans the shoreline. The camera pans to a couple of rusted shipwrecks and some abandoned shacks, which are now perches for some booby birds. “Human beings have come and gone, leaving mute evidence of their troubled presence,” the narrator intones. This is what the remote island has to offer: some intimidating crabs, a flock of booby birds, the wreckage of failed attempts at civilization. In the final episode of The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey, the story of man and the story of nature will intertwine; melancholy, futile, but beautiful all the same.
Then, music! That triumphant theme song that trumpets, WE ARE ALL GOING ON AN ADVENTURE AND IT’S GOING TO RULE! Dah dah dah dah daaah! That music represents everything the whole world loves about Jacques Cousteau. It’s what we will blast on June 10, when we all grab a bottle of champagne and toast Jacques Cousteau on what would have been his 100th birthday.
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From Edward A. Wasserman and Mark S. Blumberg, American Scientist
The basic argument of intelligent design was famously set forth in the watchmaker analogy of William Paley in 1802: The complexity and functionality of a watch imply a watchmaker; analogously, the complexity and functionality of living things also imply a designer, albeit one vastly more potent than a mere watchmaker. This argument rests on a simple analogy between the design of human artifacts and the design of natural forms. For the analogy to work, we must first accept that we design our inventions with purpose and foresight. On this point, most evolutionists and creationists agree. What distinguishes these two camps is that, when accounting for the origin of living things, proponents of intelligent design summon a divine creator, whereas evolutionists credit natural selection. Thus, evolutionists share with creationists the same understanding of design; they differ only in how they invoke it.
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From John Tierny, The New York Times
The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard.
This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments at universities, participants would be given before-and-after “attitudinal surveys” and would take part in “interactive discussions or other activities that increase the awareness of the existence of gender bias.”
I’m all in favor of women fulfilling their potential in science, but I feel compelled, at the risk of being shipped off to one of these workshops, to ask a couple of questions:
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From John Horgan, Scientific American
Scientists are on the verge of building an artificial brain! How do I know? Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute said so right here on ScientificAmerican.com. He wrote that the goal of reverse-engineering the brain—which the National Academy of Engineering recently posed as one of its “grand challenges”—is “becoming increasingly plausible.” Scientists are learning more and more about the brain, and computers are becoming more and more powerful. So naturally computers will soon be able to mimic the brain’s workings. So says Sejnowski.
Sejnowski is a very smart guy, whom I’ve interviewed several times over the years about the mysteries of the brain. But I respectfully—hell, disrespectfully, Terry can take it—disagree with his prediction that artificial brains are imminent. Sejnowski’s own article shows how implausible his prediction is. He describes two projects—both software programs running on powerful supercomputers—that represent the state of the art in brain simulation. On the one hand, you have the “cat brain” constructed by IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha; his simulation contains about as many neurons as a cat’s brain does organized into roughly the same architecture. On the other hand, you have the Blue Brain Project of Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
To Read More….
Image from Popular Science
From Jordan Manalatas, Daily Bruin
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, what then are we to make of Dr. Craig Venter’s recent stab at God? La Jolla’s own mad scientist and crew might just give the Big Guy a run for his money, raising all sorts of moral crises, ethical dilemmas and plumbings of faith.
Team Venter shook the scientific world last week with its announcement of the first successfully synthesized self-replicating bacterium. The bacterium in question – a chimeric copy of Mycoplasma mycoides, genomically synthesized and injected into a recipient cell – has a new nickname (Synthia) and an even louder reputation (the first synthetic life form).
Like Mary Shelley’s pithy Prometheus, our Dr. Venterstein has done what was once the sole domain of the gods – that is, creating new life. A product of synthetic genomic engineering, Synthia is perhaps the first creature since Jesus to lack proper earthly parents.
The DNA she bears was not written by God or nature, but by our Craig and his cronies at the J. Craig Venter Institute, on a computer. Somewhere in her genome lie some James Joyce quotes and an e-mail address, coded in the language of life itself.
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From Victoria Gill, BBC News
Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA.
The researchers constructed a bacterium’s “genetic software” and transplanted it into a host cell.
The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species “dictated” by the synthetic DNA.
The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms.
Some also suggest that the potential benefits of the technology have been over-stated.
But the researchers hope eventually to design bacterial cells that will produce medicines and fuels and even absorb greenhouse gases.
The team was led by Dr Craig Venter of the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Maryland and California.
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From Siri Carpenter, Science
What makes it possible for people to love, hate, help, or betray one another? How do we decode facial expressions? How do we understand and regulate our own emotional experiences? How do we separate the self from the other, make moral judgments, or decide how much money to save for retirement? What causes some people to turn to religious extremism, heroin, or politics? How does the brain fail those with social deficits such as autism?
Questions like these sit at the junction of our social, emotional, and biological realities, and they drive the young but rapidly growing field of social neuroscience.
Until a few years ago, the idea that science could elucidate the neural foundations of social phenomena as complex as love, friendship, and trust “just basically seemed ludicrous,” says Janine Simmons, chief of the National Institute of Mental Health’s (NIMH’s) program for affect, social behavior, and social cognition. Such “big questions” motivate many scientists to study neuroscience or psychology, she says — but soon they realize that the ability to address such questions is limited by technology. “It’s just recently that people have not been laughed at for taking on these more complex questions,” she says.
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From John Tierney, The New York Times
Long before “sustainable” became a buzzword, intellectuals wondered how long industrial society could survive. In “The Idea of Decline in Western History,” after surveying predictions from the mid-19th century until today, the historian Arthur Herman identifies two consistently dominant schools of thought.
The first school despairs because it foresees inevitable ruin. The second school is hopeful — but only because these intellectuals foresee ruin, too, and can hardly wait for the decadent modern world to be replaced by one more to their liking. Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. Have you read Julian Simon’s “The State of Humanity”? Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World”? Gregg Easterbrook’s “Sonic Boom”?
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From Terry Newell, The Huffington Post
The difficulty during last year’s Copenhagen Climate Summit in reaching agreement on how to address global warming reflects the contentious political environment on even scientific issues. While worrisome to many, there is an even more troubling lack of agreement right here in America on the core scientific question: is global warming real? While 72% of Americans still think global warming is taking place (Washington Post-ABC News Poll, November 2009), that’s down from 80% a year earlier. Among Republicans, only 54% believe global warming is happening, down from 76% in 2008. Last year’s revelation that some British scientists “massaged” their data for a published paper on the topic has been used by some (who have labeled it “Climategate”) to cast doubt on the entire record of scientific research on global climate change.
Can we no longer trust science and scientists? In a December ABC News -Washington Post poll, 40% of respondents said that they could “trust the things that scientists say about the environment” only “a little or not at all.” Sixty-two percent said that there is “a lot of disagreement” among scientists “about whether or not global warming is happening,” a figure far in excess of the disagreement that actually exists.
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From Ewa Hess and Hennric Jokeit, Eurozine
Today, the neurosciences enjoy a similar prestige as psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, write Hennric Jokeit and Ewa Hess. Despite the immense costs for healthcare systems, the fear of depression, dementia and attention deficit disorder legitimises the boom in neuro-psychotropic drugs. In a performance-driven society that confronts the self with its own shortcomings, neuroscience serves an expanding market.
Today, the phenomenology of the mind is stepping indignantly aside for a host of hyphenated disciplines such as neuro-anthropology, neuro-pedagogy, neuro-theology, neuro-aesthetics and neuro-economics. Their self-assurance reveals the neurosciences’ usurpatory tendency to become not only the humanities of science, but the leading science of the twenty-first century. The legitimacy, impetus and promise of this claim derive from the maxim that all human behaviour is determined by the laws governing neuronal activity and the way it is organised in the brain.
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From John Richard Schrock, University World News
The number of women taking courses in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the STEM subjects, has been increasing since 1966 according to a new report. But another study, on boys’ academic responses to new video games, establishes a cause-and-effect relationship that could partly explain the decline in male academic achievement.
Women students in higher education now outnumber men in most countries, except Japan and Turkey. In the US, this has skewed the ratio among the sexes in terms of those who graduate: the proportion of males earning degrees has dropped to 43% while that for women has increased to 57%.
Women students have long dominated the humanities, with men still the majority in STEM. But while women have traditionally prevailed in professions such as nursing and teaching, veterinary and medical schools are now experiencing a flood of women students.
To Read More…
Today the Science Newsletter will be re-launched – marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Science Community. The newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.
It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Science Community.
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The Second International Conference on Science in Society
The 2010 Science in Society will be held at the Carlos III University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain from 11-13 November.
Plenary Speakers
- Dr. Matthew Stanley, New York University, New York, USA
- Dr. Fernando Broncano, Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain
- Dr. Javier Echeverria, Instituto de Filosofía of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain
- Jesus Zamora-Bonilla, UNED, Madrid, Spain
- Javier Moscoso, CSIC, Madrid, Spain
- Jimena Canales, Harvard University, Boston, USA
- Javier Ordonez, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://science-society.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. To submit a proposal, see: http://science-society.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. Please note that if your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options or to register for the 2010 Science in Society Conference, see: http://science-society.com/conference-2010/register/.
Themes
Accommodation
http://science-society.com/conference-2010/accommodation/
Activities and Extras
http://science-society.com/conference-2010/activities-and-extras/
Accommodations are now available for the 2010 Science in Society Conference. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information. 
From Daniel Rourke, 3 Quarks Daily
A face to face encounter, devoid of the warm appeal of flesh. The eyes are glass, a cold blue crystal reflects the light in a way real eyes never would. A muzzle of hair, perhaps taken from a barbershop floor or the hind quarters of an animal. The painted scalp 
peeks through the sparse strands: there is nothing here one might caress with fumbling fingers, or, a millennia ago, pick between to lovingly tease out a louse or mite. The figure balances uneasily on stumps for legs. Its waxen surface bears no resemblance to skin. It is a shade saturated of living colour. In another shortened limb the figure holds a wooden spear, with a plastic point designed to take the place of the authentic stone tip. Under its beaten brow this creature forever stands. He is a spectacle, a museum attraction. He is not human, he is ‘other’. He is not man, he is Neanderthal.
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From Peter Forbes, The Guardian
Francis Collins was appointed director of the National Institutes of Health (equivalent of the Medical Research Council) by President Obama in August 2009. He is the Pete Seeger of molecular biology. When he has made a great discovery he writes a song about it. And the connection is not just a matter of uplifting songs: Collins is a geneticist, but his spiritual, emotional and political inheritance comes from Roosevelt’s New Deal (his parents worked with Eleanor Roosevelt), folk music and God, just as much as from Darwin, Mendel and Crick.
The cover of The Language of Life carries Obama’s endorsement: “His groundbreaking work has changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease.” His is a brilliant appointment, albeit controversial among some scientists: Collins is the highest-profile scientist and public administrator who is also a proselytising Christian. His previous book, The Language of God, contains both the most concise exposition I have read on why evolution is demonstrable fact and a moving account of his religious conversion from early atheism to strong belief. This stance has brought him into conflict both with Richard Dawkins and with Christian groups in the US. But, as right-wing attacks on evolution and global warming science broaden into a generalised anti-science movement, Collins is an important figure – someone who can wrong-foot people who have polarised attitudes.
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From Tom Siegfried, Science News
For better or for worse, science has long been married to mathematics. Generally it has been for the better. Especially since the days of Galileo and Newton, math has nurtured science. Rigorous mathematical methods have secured science’s fidelity to fact and conferred a timeless reliability to its findings.
During the past century, though, a mutant form of math has deflected science’s heart from the modes of calculation that had long served so faithfully. Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos. Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot.
It’s science’s dirtiest secret: The “scientific method” of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing.
To Read More…
From Juli Weiner, Vanity Fair
Today, Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia, respectively. According to the Huffington Post, “the agreement would require both sides to reduce their arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons by about a third, from 2,200 now to 1,550 each.” The deal was a bona-fide diplomatic victory: “The presidents agreed that the new treaty marks a higher level of cooperation between Russia and the United States in the development of new strategic relations,” said a statement issued by the Kremlin, as reported in The New York Times.
But are 1,500 nuclear weapons any less capable of completely destroying the world than 2,200 nuclear weapons are? VF Daily checked with two Columbia University nuclear physicists to see what difference, if any, 700 nuclear weapons makes.
Gustaaf Brooijmans, experimental high-energy particle physicist, thinks 1,500 nuclear weapons are more than enough to devastate the planet, although annihilation isn’t a sure bet:
To Read More…
From Hartosh Singh Bal, Open Lounge
From Newton to Einstein, understanding gravity has been the holy grail of physics. Professor T Padmanabhan of the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, spoke to Open of the work for which he was awarded the 2009 Infosys Prize for the Physical Sciences.
Q Gravity is the force we are most familiar with, yet it remains the most mysterious. What makes it so?
A We are familiar with two force fields in day-to-day life: electromagnetism and gravity. The first deals with charged bodies and unlike gravity it can be both attractive and repulsive; so it doesn’t increase just because you add more and more material, because matter on the whole is electrically neutral. Gravity, on the other hand, is always attractive, which means that its effect is accumulative. As a result, gravitational systems have a tendency to collapse as they get more and more massive, and there is an inherent instability to gravitational systems. Moreover, if you consider the implications of Einstein’s formula E=Mc2, energy and mass are interrelated, so even energy exerts gravity, and in turn the gravitational field of matter also exerts gravity. As a result, gravity is the only non-linear classical force and is very difficult to work with.
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From Zach Zorich, Archaeology,
If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative. 
The first studies of Neanderthal DNA focused on the genetic sequences of mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that convert food to energy within cells. In 2005, however, 454 began a collaborative project with the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, to sequence the full genetic code of a Neanderthal woman who died in Croatia’s Vindija cave 30,000 years ago. As the Neanderthal genome is painstakingly sequenced, the archaeologists and biologists who study it will be faced with an opportunity that seemed like science fiction just 10 years ago. They will be able to look at the genetic blueprint of humankind’s nearest relative and understand its biology as intimately as our own.
In addition to giving scientists the ability to answer questions about Neanderthals’ relationship to our own species–did we interbreed, are we separate species, who was smarter–the Neanderthal genome may be useful in researching medical treatments. Newly developed techniques could make cloning Neanderthal cells or body parts a reality within a few years. The ability to use the genes of extinct hominins is going to force the field of paleoanthropology into some unfamiliar ethical territory. There are still technical obstacles, but soon it could be possible to use that long-extinct genome to safely create a healthy, living Neanderthal clone. Should it be done?
To Read More…
From Veronique Greenwood, Seed Magazine
Long after Steven Strogatz had become a professor at MIT and Cornell, he was still writing letters to his high school calculus teacher, Don Joffray. The two started swapping word problems and logic puzzles when Strogatz, who studies chaotic systems, was in college. Their jovial mini-treatises form the body of Strogatz’s most recent book, The Calculus of Friendship.
But they always managed to keep a certain distance from each other, demonstrating, perhaps, the natural reserve for which mathematicians are known. Mr. Joffray, as Strogatz still refers to him, sent his congratulations on Strogatz’s engagement in a brief preface to a calculus problem, but Strogatz’s reply makes no acknowledgement. When he heard from secondhand sources that Joffray’s son had died, Strogatz wondered why Joffray never mentioned it, but never brought it up. After thirty years of omissions, it took a string of tragic events to bring their friendship into three dimensions.
Seed editor Veronique Greenwood spoke with Strogatz about the nature of friendship, why math isn’t about right and wrong, and how an elliptical swimming pool helped launch his teaching career.
To Read More…
From Samuel Arbesman, Boston.com
When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.
But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.
Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.
To Read More…
From Samuel Arbesman at Boston.com
When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.
But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.
Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.
These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.
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www.ScienceinSocietyConference.com
Matthew Stanley teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He holds degrees in astronomy, religion, physics, and the history
of science, and is interested in the connections between science and the wider culture. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A.S. Eddington, which examines how scientists reconcile their religious beliefs and professional lives. Currently, he is writing a book that explores how science changed from its historical theistic foundations to its modern naturalistic ones. Professor Stanley is also developing a project on science in war, and he is part of a nationwide effort to use the humanities to improve science education in the college classroom. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, the British Academy, and the Max Planck Institute.
From Paul Walman, The American Prospect
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama warmed the hearts of progressives when he promised to change “the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.” And when he got into office, he took a number of steps that demonstrated his sincerity. 
He abolished George W. Bush’s restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research and announced that he was “directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making.” His Department of Energy — run by Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu — is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on exploring innovative new energy sources under its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), modeled on the Defense Department’s DARPA. Obama also increased spending for the National Science Foundation. And he just announced a $250 million public-private partnership to improve math and science teaching.
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From Janet Maslin, The New York Times.
“I always say that electricity is a fantastic invention,” the British economist Michael Lipton once told Michael Specter, whose bristling new book, “Denialism,” explores the dangerous ways in which scientific progress can be misunderstood. “But if the first two products had been the electric chair and the cattle prod,” Mr. Lipton continued, “I doubt that most consumers would have seen the point.”
Here is what they would have done instead, if Mr. Specter, a staff writer for The New Yorker and former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, correctly captures the motifs that shape the stubbornly anti-scientific thinking for which his book is named: they would have denounced electricity as a force for evil, blamed its prevalence on venal utility companies, universalized the relatively rare horrific experiences of people who have been injured by electrical currents and called for a ban on electricity use.
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From Kurt Andersen, Vanity Fair.
Among the defining attributes of now are ever tinier gadgets, ever shorter attention spans, and the privileging of marketplace values above all. Life is manically parceled into financial quarters, three-minute YouTube videos, 140-character tweets. In my pocket is a phone/computer/camera/video recorder/TV/stereo system half the size of a pack of Marlboros. And what about pursuing knowledge purely for its own sake, without any real thought of, um, monetizing it? Cute.
And so in our hyper-capitalist flibbertigibbet day and age, the new Large Hadron Collider, buried about 330 feet beneath the Swiss-French border, near Geneva, is a bizarre outlier.
The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, cern, is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours. It’s also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, punctuated by shopping-mall-size subterranean caverns and fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs.
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From Natalie Angier, New York Times.
Circling my way not long ago through the Vasily Kandinsky show now on display in the suitably spiral setting of the Guggenheim Museum, I came to one of the Russian master’s most illustrious, if misleadingly named, paintings: “Several Circles.” 
Those “several” circles, I saw, were more like three dozen, and every one of them seemed to be rising from the canvas, buoyed by the shrewdly exuberant juxtapositioning of their different colors, sizes and apparent translucencies. I learned that, at around the time Kandinsky painted the work, in 1926, he had begun collecting scientific encyclopedias and journals; and as I stared at the canvas, a big, stupid smile plastered on my face, I thought of yeast cells budding, or a haloed blue sun and its candied satellite crew, or life itself escaping the careless primordial stew.
To Read More…
