Finally, mental health is getting the respect it deserves.

Yesterday, Congress approved legislation that will compel employers and health insurers to provide the same benefits for mental illnesses as they do for physical ones. It hasn’t been an easy bill to pass. For 15 years, the mental health bill has been stuck on the House and Senate floors, where it’s been rewritten several times. Now, almost everyone is behind the legislation, including both parties, the President, businesses, insurance companies and the medical community. And the bill’s advocates are thanking science for transforming the public’s view of mental illness, which led to its passage. Representative Patrick Kennedy praised science for destroying “the myth that this stuff is a choice,” according to a Washington Post article.

The myth may be busted, but that doesn’t mean the legislation is a shoo-in.

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Men once greatly outnumbered women in collegiate athletics—Title IX brought equality. Men currently outnumber women in science—could Title IX have the same effect?

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Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey has served in Congress for a decade, but he’s not your average politico. The physicist is a five-time Jeopardy champion, an inventor of a solar collector, an arms-control expert and a former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. He likes to pop into science conferences so that he can drop terms like “impedance matching” and not catch weird stares.

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If you’re like millions of Americans, summertime means heading to the beach with sunscreen and, of course, beach reading in tow. Along with the latest Grisham novel, you may want to bring along something a bit more serious: the current report by the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative (JOCI). It has all the elements of a good thriller—suspense, high-tech gadgetry, villains—and it can help preserve the marvels of the offshore world for future generations to enjoy.

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While the private sector is making strides toward a paperless office environment, the government appears to be stumbling backward. Last week, the Department of Commerce canceled plans to use handheld devices for door-to-door canvassing during the 2010 census. The devices failed on a surprising number of counts. They could not properly transmit large data files; they did not meet over 400 technical requirements; and they proved too complex for temporary workers to figure out.

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Congress held a hearing yesterday on the potential influence of Second Life and other virtual worlds, complete with a screen that showed avatars following the event from that increasingly popular alternate reality.

A few lawmakers showed off their own avatars, including Rep. Ed Markey, pictured here, and experts talked about the benefits of these virtual world—nonprofits, for example, are using them as a way to raise funds and fight for their causes.

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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.

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Former Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory physicist Bill Foster has been elected to Congress in Illinois. This brings the total number of physicists in Congress to three. While this doesnt necessarily ensure a bright future for science in this country, it will surely help the cause to have more knowledgeable and passionate voices in Washington.

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That was anticlimactic. A little more than a week after announcing that he was considering running for a recently vacated seat in California's 12th congressional district, tech thinker and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig announced yesterday on his blog that he wasn't running after all. The reason is simple enough. A pollster showed Lessig that there was "no possible way" for him to win. And it wouldn't be pleasant.

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Creative Commons founder, free information advocate and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig announced today the formation of an exploratory committee looking in to a potential bid for a U.S. Congress seat. He announced his maybe-decision (with a more finalized announcement coming March 1) today on a new Web site, lessig08.org.

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