politics

If a man walks into a bar….who laughs? Liberals or conservatives? Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, and Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College, looked into just that question in a recent Boston study. The two came up with a list of 22 jokes – conventional, quirky, corny, clever, etc. – and tracked the reactions of about 300 people who were asked to rate the jokes on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious).

Energy is the blood that runs through our economy: the highway miles paved with crude, the kilowatts of coal, those tentative first heartbeats of large-scale wind and solar. America famously uses more energy than any other country—measured either per capita or in total—and conservation measures aside, our rising standard of living will mean that we will consume even more in the future.

Energy is the blood that runs through our economy: the highway miles paved with crude, the kilowatts of coal, those tentative first heartbeats of large-scale wind and solar. America famously uses more energy than any other country—measured either per capita or in total—and conservation measures aside, our rising standard of living will mean that we will consume even more in the future.

The technological dominance of the United States may soon go the way of the dollar. Our statistical snapshot shows that government spending on pure research—the kind of investment that pays off big, but only after decades—is in decline. Our schools educate the world, but students increasingly return home with their advanced degrees. Most discouraging, the U.S. now imports more high-tech goods than it exports.

See the stats!

Just as the 1960 election was the first to be truly shaped by the television medium, this year's presidential throwdown will go down as the first that was undeniably shaped, and perhaps even decided, by technology. From the very beginning, the news media, the pundits, the public, and the candidates themselves have engaged tech in ways and to levels that simply weren't possible before now. As a technology enthusiast, it's been thrilling to see things like blogs, widgets, Twitter feeds, Facebook, and text messaging enter the mainstream political lexicon.

Fifty years ago last month, NASA opened its doors. The launch of Sputnik the year before had rattled the United States’ faith in its technological superiority and pushed it to assert itself as the leader in space. In the decades since, that dominance has scarcely been challenged.

Good morning, Senator (or should I say "President-elect"?), and congratulations. You talked during your campaign about using the Internet to engage with regular folks, and surely you did. So did your opponent. The last time I checked, the two of you had amassed about two million friends between you on Facebook and MySpace, and another few hundred thousand followers on Twitter and YouTube.

Late last year, as the presidential primary campaigns heated up, a grass-roots group of scientists and citizens addressed the candidates: “Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S.

Last Friday the Obama campaign made a big move in courting the country’s nerds, geeks and overall science-friendly voters. First the campaign announced that 61 Nobel laureates in science signed a letter supporting Obama’s election, then the campaign unveiled a new science policy centered on increased funding and an emphasis on math and science education.

Say what you will about Bill Gates, but the Microsoft chairman is undoubtedly a valuable spokesman for science and technology education in this country. Speaking before the House of Representatives' Committee on Science and Technology yesterday, Gates reiterated comments he made last year; telling lawmakers that the U.S. needs to revamp its education program, and make it easier for qualified foreigners to work here. Otherwise, he warned, U.S. companies will not have the science and engineering talent they need to compete on the global scale.

Here's a mildly reassuring fact from today's AAAS news briefing on nuclear forensics: There are no known cases of a finished nuclear weapon being stolen or sold on the black market. But raw nuclear materials are a different story. In the past fifteen years, more than 1,300 cases of nuclear trafficking have been registered. Anita Nilsson of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a member of today's panel, said that most of these cases were "innocent," but some are anything but. The 400 grams of weapons-ready plutonium seized at the Munich airport in 1994?

The idea that a presidential debate focused on science will advance the cause of science "is more magical thinking than scientific," according to a new essay by David Goldston in the journal Nature. Momentum around such a debate has been growing since December, when a grassroots, nonpartisan group called Science Debate 2008 started a petition that called for a "public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Medicine and Health, and Science and Technology Policy." The petition now has many thousand signatories [full disclosure: they include both myself and the editor-in-chief of Popular Science, a.k.a. my boss].

On page 13 of the introductory pamphlet A Brief Guide to Alcoholics Anonymous, the organization's famous 12 steps begin as such: We admit we are powerless over alcohol—that our lives have become unmanageable. Although President Bush maintains that he quit the sauce on his own, without the help of AA, he is evidently familiar with their directives, for on Tuesday night in his State of the Union address, Bush admitted that we have a problem: global warming.