The phrase was coined by Republican operative Michael Steele on Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention, and -- in perhaps the convention's only spontaneous development -- chanted during the speeches of Rudy Giuliani and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

As the governor of Alaska, Palin has supported drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Increased domestic oil production -- which Democrats say will produce more environmental damage than energy benefits -- is the closest thing this Presidential race has to an environmental controversy, a proxy for battles over climate change and the influence of the oil industry.

Nevertheless, hearing thousands of voices raised as one to call for drilling -- baby! -- was flat-out weird. And, to be snarky for a moment, I was less than impressed at the time it took for conventioneers to synchronize their chanting. (Maybe the Democrats wouldn't have done any better, but the Republicans definitely left their rhythmically gifted delegates at home.)

So get cracking with your software, and send your audio remixes to me. (Videos should go on YouTube). The winner will receive my very own copy of How to Fossilize Your Hamster: And Other Amazing Experiments for the Armchair Scientist, along with other exciting swag excavated from Wired.com office sediments. We might even throw in a drill bit.

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WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

After three months of mostly expected results, the Mars Phoenix Lander has a genuine puzzle on its hands, err, probes.

The mission's recent confirmations of water ice in the soil and water vapor in the air have led the NASA scientists to reason that a certain kind of water, not quite liquid, but not frozen either, is likely to reside in the Martian soil. Thin films of these water molecules could act as tiny oases for microbial life on the otherwise arid planet.

"They are the most likely habitat that we're going to get to in the foreseeable future," said NASA Ames Research Center's Aaron Zent, the lead scientist for the probe being used to look for unfrozen water. 

The prospect of unfrozen water in subzero temperatures was raised by observations in terrestrial permafrost regions that enough water can exist under those conditions to support life.

Back when the Phoenix was preparing to land, Edward Young, an astrobiologist at UCLA, explained how liquid water could develop in subzero temperatures.

"You can get water that's liquid because of the pressures along [soil] grain boundaries," Young told Wired.com. "It's sort of like when an ice skater puts their blade against the ice. It's a pressure effect."

But there's one problem: So far, the conductivity probe -- which can detect tiny concentrations of water -- has only found arid Martian soil.

Continue reading "Phoenix Lander Searches for Martian Microbial Oases" »

With the political candidates all talking about energy independence and the rapid changes that they'll bring to the nation's industries, I wanted to point you to a freelance feature I wrote about California's ethanol-importing infrastructure.

Built around California's decision to change the formulation of its gasoline to include ethanol as an anti-smog additive, my takeaway from this 3,500 word feature -- crowdfunded through Spot.Us -- is that making even small changes to the infrastructure we've built over the last 50 years will be immensely difficult.

In particular, people working in clean tech tend to forget that there is a whole legacy fuel distribution infrastructure -- the midstream, it's called -- that is built from steel and concrete. It won't topple as easily as the old media distribution outlets have in the Internet age.

As one of my main sources, a young Berkeley-trained engineer told me, "Everybody is excited about cleantech and having some wiz bang widget, but it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about algae or jatropha biodiesel or switch-grass cellulosic ethanol. None of it matters unless you can get it to market.â€

With tight oil supplies and climate change concerns rightly driving investment into new fuels and transportation modes, it's worth taking a look at what had to happen so that Californians could start putting a billion gallons of a new fuel into their gas tanks.

So, regardless of what you think of ethanol, if you're interested in pipelines and rail terminals, exurban towns and storage tanks, check out the article: Changing Locomotion in Midstream.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

A patch of DNA once regarded as "junk" may hold the key to upright walking and opposable thumbs.

When the DNA was spliced into mice, it activated genes in their thumbs and big toes.

Known as HACNS1, the sequence is located in a genomic stretch ignored by early geneticists. Many of these seemingly non-functional sequences have since been found to regulate gene activity.

After comparing the human genome to chimpanzees', researchers noticed that HACNS1 had accumulated 16 variations since we split six million years ago -- an impressive number, given the near-identical genetics of our species. They added it to mice, and -- voila! -- see the picture above.

So perhaps HACNS1 is what allowed human beings to develop tools and civilization -- and car insurance and bombs. Let's just hope the scientists didn't let any of those mutant mice escape.

Human-Specific Gain of Function in a Developmental Enhancer [Science]

Image: Gene expression (blue) in mice possessing the HACNS1 gene enhancer, courtesy of Yale University.

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WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

An entire class of experimental drugs, which were meant to treat immune system disorders, have an unexpected bonus feature: they are excellent painkillers.

In a paper that is jam-packed with surprises, Osamu Irie and Marzia Malcangio, researchers at Novartis, explained that gumming up an enzyme called Cathepsin S has been regarded as a surefire way to calm hyperactive parts of the immune system. But an astute observation led them to believe that plugging the biological molecule with an inhibitor could have other benefits as well. 

While doing some genetics work, they noticed that injured rats with nerve damage produce a ton of the protein in their spinal columns, and wondered if a drug that could block it would prevent pain. They did some quick tests, and learned that a chemical, called LVHS, could shut down the enzyme and act as an analgesic in animals, but it is not fit to become a medication.

Their report, which appeared on the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry website last week, describes two chemicals with impressive stats. They can be taken orally, remain in the body long enough to be effective, and don't seem to be toxic.

Early on in their study, Irie and Malcangio realized that the experimental drugs would not work on mutant forms of the enzyme. So when it came time to test them on animals, they hand picked lab rats without the mutation -- an elegant example of personalized medicine -- for critters!

The scientists did not suggest that their favorite chemicals will be tested on humans, but they did indicate that both will be useful tools to answer a burning question: How do substances that fiddle with Cathepsin S block pain signals?

Image: Brooks Elliott / flickr

New software could recognize you by your signature gait by analyzing the movements of your shadow from aerial videos.

The technique, developed by Engineer Adrian Stoica at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and reported by New Scientist, solves one of the long standing problems of aerial reconnaissance and spy satellites-- how do you recognize a person when you can only see the top of their head and shoulders?

Kevin Spacey's performance in The Usual Suspects nothwithstanding, it is hard to disguise your gait, which is why the technique is so powerful. In fact, using a person's gait for positive biometric identification is being studied in a number of places.

In a speech last month to a security conference in the UK, Stoica explained that by using shadows you can read the length and rhythm of someone's gait and do an identification, even from above. He has written software that isolates the shadow from video, and adjusts for time of day and camera angle to deal with elongated and foreshortened shadows. Stoica shot video from the top of a six story building to test out his software and was able to get usable gait data on his subjects.

Now going from six stories to satellites in low Earth orbit is probably a stretch. The best commercial low Earth orbit satellite (GeoEye- launching this Sunday to power better Google Maps) will have 41 cm resolution. The best known military spy sat can see at least down to 10 cm (though who knows what classified hardware can do). GeoEye is also only taking stills as it flies over, not the kinds of video footage that Stoica was using. To do that, you might need to go up to geostationary orbit which is much farther out and according to one expert, just wouldn't have the resolution. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying overhead, on the other hand, might work just fine for this.

Either way, you may want to practice skipping from place to place when it is sunny out.

Shadow analysis could spot terrorists by their walk [New Scientist]

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Image courtesy of cool Flickr user Heydee

Wired Science's new first video podcast will lead you on a behind-the-scenes tour of the rebuilt California Academy of Sciences. The lead-off piece focuses on the actual construction of this amazing 410,000 square-foot building.

We look at some of the bizarre Big Engineering challenges that go into putting the world's deepest coral reef tank, a rainforest biodome, and a planetarium all under the same roof. One teaser: how did a Dubai hotel almost jeopardize the building of the Academy's aquarium tanks? To find out, check out the video.

Every week, Wired Science will bring you videos on the latest in green tech, health, science, bioethics and space exploration.

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, too, so check us out there.

The future of cancer drug development may be targeting pathways rather than single genes and their products.

Two new and unprecedentedly detailed analyses of pancreatic and brain cancers found dozens of mutations, but only a few were present in any given tumor. That could explain why gene-targeting cancer drugs have been so hard to develop: Even if a drug is successful, it will only affect a fraction of all tumors.

However, these varied mutations appear to influence only a few cellular pathways -- cause and effect cascades of enzymes and signals that go haywire in cancer cells. Some scientists say that chemicals capable of disrupting pathways, whether at a cancer-implicated gene or somewhere else altogether, are far more promising than the current generation of gene-targeting cancer drugs.

"Virtually all drug development over the past ten years has focused on targeted therapies directed against individual genes or gene products," said Bert Vogelstein, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute cancer researcher and co-author of the studies, both published today in Science. "It's going to be even more difficult than previously expected to derive real cures from such therapies."

Continue reading "A New Pathway For Cancer Research" »

Another huge chunk of Canadian ice has broken from the its island anchor and is now adrift in the Arctic ocean.

This time it was the Markham Ice Shelf, previously located along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island, which was an important habitat for ice-loving microbial life.

"There are so many major changes, it almost boggles the mind when you look at how fast this region is changing," said Derek Mueller, who studies the ice shelves at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. "We're entering into a new reality if this keeps continuing."

At 19-square miles, about the size of Manhattan, the Markham ice chunk sounds big, but it's a relative piker in the scheme of ice shelf calvings. In 2005, a 25-square mile ice shelf took off into the Arctic. And just earlier this year, the Antarctic Wilkins Ice Shelf lost a 160 square-mile chunk of ice.   

Still, the newest ice shelf break-up is yet another example of the changes that a warming world is bringing to the polar environments.

Mueller said the situation for Markham's neighboring ice shelves as increasingly dire. He described the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf as being "on life support" and poised for collapse within the next couple of years. The Serson Ice Shelf has lost 60 percent of its ice. In total, the ice shelves in the area lost more than 80 square miles of ice. Those chunks of ice are now adrift in the Arctic, as pictured to the right. The dirty-looking piece of ice at the upper right used to be part of the Markham.

The ice floating in the Arctic ocean is disappearing as well. Sea ice loss this year is the second-greatest recorded, only trailing last year, continuing "the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent," according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

"The most important thing to note about it in the big picture, these patches of unusual shelf ice have been there for 4,500 years, and they are choosing this year to break up and drift away," said Ted Scambos, an ice shelf scientist with the National Snow and Data Center who was not directly involved with Mueller's research. "That tells us that the events going on in the arctic are very unusual, at least in the space of the last few thousand years."

Taken together, Earth's northern polar region is undergoing a rapid, drastic transformation with possibly devastating consequences for life in the area.

"These ice shelves are habitat for life. That's what's not very well known out there -- that ice can be habitat-- and that there are ecosystems that depend on ice for survival," Mueller said. "If the ice shelves are vulnerable to climate change, those ecosystems are as well."

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

After centuries of giving humanity little more than nicotine and death, the tobacco plant may be the wellspring of a revolution in gene therapy.

Scientists are using a modified tobacco virus to deliver delicate gene therapies into the heart of diseased cells, with the potential to treat most cancers, viruses and genetic disorders.

The tobacco mosaic virus, which plagues the plant but is harmless to humans, is hollowed out and filled with "small interfering RNA" molecules, or siRNA, which some scientists consider to be the most significant development in medicine since the discovery of vaccines.

The virus' tubular shell provides a safe way to slip the delicate siRNA drugs into cells, serving as both a protective coating and a Trojan horse.

"This tobacco mosaic virus is literally a nano-sized syringe," says William Bentley, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Maryland, who is leading the study of the virus.

Bentley's team has successfully hollowed out the virus and filled it with siRNA, and then used it to slip the frail substance into all sorts of cells, from kidney tissue to cancer. The researchers have proven that the tiny capsules provide adequate protection, and that they release their payloads once inside -- hitting their target genes right on the mark.

The short, double-stranded RNA molecules known as siRNA can program cells to destroy disease-causing proteins. Their molecules turn on a cell's own built-in disease-fighting mechanisms. They can be programmed for a wide range of ailments -- from cancers to viruses -- and because they use the cell's own defense mechanisms, they produce minimal side effects.

In addition to treating cancers and genetic disorders, siRNA could prove useful against a variety of rare diseases that have, and always will be, overlooked by big pharmaceutical companies -- the long tail of disease.

Continue reading "Tobacco Could Hold the Key to Revolutionary Gene Therapy" »

I joked yesterday that no genetic link has been found to the funky robot dance. Could I have been wrong?

My remark came in a review of overhyped coverage of a genetic mutation that in men appears linked to the quality of their romantic relationships. Dozens of stories attributed couples' woes -- even infidelity, though the study didn't ask about cheating -- to defects in the "monogamy gene."

The researchers themselves warned against applying the findings too quickly and too broadly: of less interest than the gene itself were the neurological pathways it hinted at. Focusing solely on the gene was a bit ridiculous -- and that's even more evident in light of the the many behaviors to which the gene, called AVPR1A, has been linked.

There's autism, as I mentioned yesterday; and -- conveniently listed by the Gene Expression blog -- there's memory, eating, musical memory, cooperative behavior and creative dance. So maybe I was too quick to dismiss a genetic link to the funky robot. Maybe that's why couples founder: men are genetically ill-equipped to dance; combine this with an inability to remember that special song, and put your local divorce lawyer on speed dial.

Video: Courtesy of Ninjapooper. This couple is clearly doomed for genetic reasons.

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WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Ever wonder what it would be like to lie out on the surface of Mars and watch the clouds go by?

Well, now you can get a taste of it. Earlier this week, Mars Phoenix posted a video of the clouds going by on Mars. These clouds are made of water ice-- just like ice-crystal cirrus clouds here on Earth.

As northern summer ends on Mars, water vapor from the north pole comes down to lower latitudes making clouds, frost and even fog possible. That is what we are starting to see at the Mars Phoenix landing site. The video is a stream of 10 photos taken over a ten minute period during the afternoon; the clip "accelerates the motion" (good for those of us with short attention spans).

      Click on image above to play movie.

It's not clouds quite at the level of Hurricane Gustav, but the little clouds could help future Martian visitors to feel a little more at home, looking up and seeing some good old fashioned water clouds floating by.

Ice Clouds in Martian Arctic [NASA JPL]

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Video courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Paul Rothemund, a researcher at Caltech, can make just about anything by folding DNA into complicated shapes -- as if he were practicing origami. 

He uses sophisticated software to examine the stringy molecules, and identify points at which they can be kinked or pinned in place with smaller strands. He mixes those shorter compounds, which he calls staples, with the longer ones, and then they arrange themselves into amazing patterns.

This February, in Monterey, California he gave an amazing talk about those experiments. Today, that lecture became available on the TED conference website. It was not his first time speaking at the legendary gathering.

During his presentation, he showed animations of DNA molecules entangling with one another and forming complex patterns -- from smiley faces to counting machines.

As impressive as that may be, Rothemund stressed that his research isn't about making gadgets.

"What it's really about is taking computer science, and looking at big questions in a new light," he said. "Trying to understand how biology can make such amazing things."

This may be your last chance to tell the federal government whether Medicare should pay for a cutting-edge personalized medicine service.

Last year, the FDA announced that a genetic test might help doctors avoid a common catastrophe -- giving their patients an excessive dose of warfarin. Half a million people start taking the anticoagulant drug each year, and many of them -- over 10 percent -- wind up in the hospital with serious internal bleeding because they've overdosed.

By checking two genes, doctors may be able to make a better decision about how much warfarin is right for each patient.

In theory, the genetic test could save healthcare providers a fortune by cutting down on costly emergency room visits. But many doctors are not convinced that the tests are necessary; some say that handheld gadgets like the Roche CoaguChek system, which allow them to constantly monitor their patients' blood, are more useful.

Of course, in a perfect world, physicians would use both tools to aid their decisions. The Department of Health and Human Services wants the public to tell them whether the genetic test is worthwhile. To get some feedback, the agency has posted a survey on its website, and the deadline to respond is tomorrow.

If Medicare starts paying for the procedure, the burgeoning field of personalized medicine will turn a major corner. Private insurance companies might follow the government's lead, and offer reimbursements for the evaluation. But the biggest benefit of a change to the healthcare policy will be massive amounts of data. Once a huge cohort of senior citizens has received some pharmacogenetic services, there will be a large body of evidence that individualized treatments are better than a one-size-fits-all approach to medicine.

If you want to weigh in on this tremendously important issue, visit the Health and Human Services website and post a comment.

Photo: Tonka beans are a natural source of coumarin, the precursor to warfarin, which is used as both a medication and rat poison. Credit: mecredis / flickr.

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Citizen scientists have helped astronomers identify more than 900,000 galaxies.

Galaxy Zoo, a tool conceived and launched last July by an international team of physicists, harnesses humans' natural pattern-recognition skills to determine whether never-before-seen images of galaxies taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are elliptical or spiral.

It's clearly helpful to run a distributed program on a 150,000-strong human brain cluster, but what's in it for the everyday people paging through galaxy images? Two of the site's founders suggest that it's the spirit of exploration.

"An attractive feature of the project was that these galaxies had literally never been looked at before with the human eye – so people really felt that they were helping with original and unique contributions," write two founders of the site, Chris Lintott, a physicist at the University of Oxford, and Kate Land, in Physics World.

The huge reams of data that astronomers' tools create have provided several opportunities for at-home scientists to help their professional counterparts. The first of these projects, Stardust@home, leveraged NASA fans to look for interstellar dust impacts in comet images, and inspired the creation of Galaxy Zoo.

Since the site launched last July, more than 50 million individual galaxy identifications have been made. Multiple amateur astronomers have to ID each galaxy before scientists swoop in to make the final determination.

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WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

Russia's power play in Georgia could have ramifications that extend all the way to the International Space Station.

Currently, Russia has agreed to transport U.S. astronauts to the ISS through 2011, but some lawmakers are worried about what would happen after that if relations between the two countries deteriorate.

Last week Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) joined the call of three other Republican senators including John McCain (R-Arizona) asking President Bush to stop NASA from taking any actions for a year that would preclude extending the Space Shuttle.

The U.S. ticket on the Russian Soyuz is tied to the Iran, North Korea, Syria Nonproliferation Agreement, one part of which bans payments to Russia in connection with the ISS (.pdf) unless Russia is taking steps to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and other weapons technology. A waiver for this part of the agreement runs out in 2011.

Without a new waiver, U.S. astronauts would be stuck without a ride from 2011 until a new human vehicle is ready around 2015. NASA needs the waiver approved this year to get a Soyuz by 2012 because the Russian spacecraft take three years to build. Many think that this waiver will be harder to get given Russia's recent actions.

But extending the Shuttle is not the answer. It would not remove the need to keep a strong relationship with Russia because NASA will still need two Russian Soyuz vehicles a year to provide emergency escape vehicles for the station. [UPDATE 9/3: without these vehicles astronauts would be limited to just two week 'visits' to ISS vs. continuous presence. The United States needs Russian engineering support for the Russian modules that are connected to the U.S. modules. Also, the ISS would likely not be able to go up to a six person crew, this is dangerous because it would not allow the United States to keep its agreements with their other international partners, including Europe and Japan- not a good way to earn their trust before asking them to get involved in NASA's next project]. Prolonging the Shuttle program may be a giant leap backwards for developing next-gen spacecraft.

Resuscitating the Shuttle might not even be possible.

As former Space Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale points out in his NASA blog, "The horse has left the barn" when it comes to keeping the Shuttle flying. Hale will be the first to tell you that he is the biggest shuttle hugger there is, but even he thinks that it is too late to "just keep flying" the Shuttle. There are only enough parts, including external tanks, to get NASA through the flights they have manifested, with a few spares.

According to Hale, NASA, for better or worse, began closing facilities and ending contracts with "Mom and Pop" space suppliers four years ago. Going back now and trying to pull those people out of retirement or back from their career transitions to go back to making Space Shuttle parts will be expensive and risky, if it is even possible. Getting a production line back up takes time and money and it will be a while before the products are space-worthy again, which would still leave a gap in U.S. access to space.

Still at the request of the White House, NASA is going back now to run the numbers and provide them with estimates of how much getting all these suppliers back online would cost. Given NASA Administrator Mike Griffin's clear and unwavering message that they will retire the Shuttle in 2010, their actions to make that happen, and the need to divert Shuttle funds to next generation vehicles, it is not hard to see that NASA is not hot on the idea of extending Shuttle. However the boss asked for the numbers, so they will give them to him.

Wayne Hale's Blog: Shutting down the shuttle [NASA]

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Image, Shuttle landing at night in 2001, Courtesy NASA

On Saturday afternoon, Hurricane Gustav looked like a juggernaut, packing 150-mile-per-hour winds and headed straight for New Orleans.

But by the time it made landfall west of New Orleans as a Category 2 hurricane, Gulf Coast emergency managers could breathe a sigh of relief as the city's levees held.

Forecasters and government officials, with the 2005 Katrina disaster looming in memory, feared a much worse outcome, but they don't celebrate the half-rebuilt New Orleans infrastructure just yet.

"The conditions of New Orleans were just barely Category 1," said Chuck Watson of Kinetic Analysis Corporation, which models hurricane damage for the energy industry and world governments. "If the storm had been 10 or 15 miles to the east, right now we'd be talking about how New Orleans had just been destroyed."

Over the weekend, forecasters were expecting landfall winds of more than 160 miles per hour. In the National Hurricane Advisory sent out at 2 p.m. Pacific time on Saturday, the forecasters were talking about Gustav strengthening into a Category 5 storm. In response, mass evacuations began in New Orleans and other areas of the Gulf Coast.

Atlantic hurricanes typically move westward, making landfall anywhere from Florida to the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. They strengthen by drawing heat from the Gulf's warm surface waters and are weakened by running into land. In Gustav's case, Cuba helped slow the storm. But there are other, less obvious weather conditions that can affect a hurricane's intensity.

Continue reading "Hurricane Gustav Post-Mortem: 'The Bullet Dodged Us'" »

The answer's in his genes.

Or so women are encouraged to think by coverage of a new study on genes linked to arginine vasopressin -- a hormone that's found in mammals, helps bodies retain water, and has been linked to mate stability in prairie voles.

Swedish men with variations in DNA next to the gene responsible for vasopressin sensitivity are generally more likely to have marital problems -- and less likely to be married in the first place -- than those without the variations.

According to the researchers, the results suggest that the "influence of AVP on pair-bonding in voles may be of relevance also for humans," although the "relatively small effect size ... clearly does not mean that this polymorphism may serve as a predictor of human pair-bonding on the individual level."

Nevertheless, journalists rushed headlong into the "divorce gene." "Whether a man has one type of gene versus another could help decide whether he's good 'husband material,'" announces HealthDay News. "Marriage problems? Husband's genes may be to blame," says a Reuters headline writer. "Marital woes can often be attributed to men's genetic make-up," declares Agence-France Press. "What if you could tell whether a man is husband material just by peering at his genes?" wonders  New Scientist.

Continue reading "Male Monogamy Gene? Not So Fast" »

Earth may be in the midst of the greatest extinction ever, according to a new mass extinction scoring system.

"The current extinction resembles none of the earlier ones, and may end up being the greatest of all," write Istanbul Technical University researchers A. M. Celal Sengor, Saniye Atayman and Sinan Ozeren.

Their system, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, attempts to quantify those periods when more than half of all species disappeared. In addition to the current mass extinction, this has happened at least five times: the End Ordovician, Late Devonian, End Permian, End Triassic and End Cretaceous. The latter -- marking the end of the Age of Dinosaurs -- receives the most attention, but scientists have been unable to decide which extinction was most significant.

That debate may finally be settled, though the answer is unsettling.

"If unchecked, the current extinction threatens to be the greatest killer of all time," write the researchers.

Continue reading "Latest Extinction is the Greatest" »

America asked Barack Obama about science, and Obama answered.

"This is the first time we know of that a candidate for president has laid out his science policy before the election at this level of detail," said Shawn Otto, CEO of ScienceDebate2008.

A 38,000-member coalition of scientists, engineers and concerned citizens, ScienceDebate2008 pushed presidential candidates to attend to science -- an area that is vital to America's economy and touches on nearly every important political issue, but is generally neglected during elections.

Though unable to convince Obama and John McCain to engage in a full-blown science debate, ScienceDebate2008 winnowed 3,400 member-submitted questions down to 14 key challenges facing candidates and the country. Some, such as clean energy and stem cell research, are familiar from past elections. Others, such as water security and the systematic politicization of science, are new.

Obama's answers were released on Saturday and balance lofty rhetoric with policy-wonk detail -- not only on energy issues, which are a central part of his platform, but relatively esoteric issues as science education, bioterror and genetic privacy.

"I thought they were very substantive for this point in the campaign, and surprisingly detailed," said Otto.

Obama also appears to appreciate the process of science: He promises across-the-board doublings of basic research budgets, and pledges to reverse the ideologically motivated science-skewing that has thrived under the Bush administration.

On the Friday preceding Obama's answers, John McCain announced the vice presidential nomination of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin -- a global warming skeptic with a poor environmental record and sympathy for public creationism education. According to Otto, McCain has not yet answered.

Continue reading "Obama Answers Your Science Questions" »