When the latest harvest of white-tailed deer during a six-week hunting season in western Montana was half the five-year average, wildlife managers looked around for causes and culprits. Some speculated that the usual suspects — wolves and mountain lions — harvested the deer before Montana hunters could. Other possibilities also were no surprise: little snow on the ground and relatively warm temperatures. No mention was made of the genital abnormalities wildlife rehabilitator Judy Hoy has documented over the past 15 years in several species. She suspects a chemical contaminant is ... Read More
Admire Her Body, Hamper Her Brain?
March 15, 2010 • By • 10 Comments
Guys, here's something to consider the next time you ogle an attractive woman: Your desirous gaze may be reducing her capacity to think. That's the startling implication of a research paper titled "My Body or My Mind," recently published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. It suggests some women who are objectified by men internalize this perception and think of themselves as "a sexual object to be scrutinized." For reasons that are not entirely clear, this process appears to undermine their cognitive ability. Psychologists Robin Gay and Emanuele Castano of the New School for ... Read More
New Agency Puts Clean Energy on Front Burner
March 14, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The job of developing really big clean-energy initiatives is perhaps beyond the capacity of the private sector. Lacking any assurance that radically different new products will be accepted by consumers, the market provides few incentives for companies making money from their current products to take the risk to research radical new energy concepts. And needless to say, companies that don’t have successful products on the market are not likely to have the money to invest in big ideas. Plus, government priorities don’t include developing saleable products for market. However, countries ... Read More
Where Terror Suspects Should Be Tried
March 14, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
When President Bush first announced his intention to try suspected terrorists by military commissions back in November 2001, criticism rightfully (and necessarily, given the absence of any actual cases) focused on their procedural shortcomings. Over the intervening eight-plus years, many, but certainly not all, of these procedural issues have been redressed, most recently through the adoption of the Military Commissions Act of 2009 late last year. This leads many observers to question whether there is still any substantive basis to object to the use of this forum to try those affiliated ... Read More
U.S. Challenged for High-Tech Global Leadership
March 13, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
The United States remains the world's high-tech leader, but other nations are catching up, the National Science Board warned in two recent reports. Science and engineering research is becoming a global enterprise, as more nations develop research capabilities and international collaborations grow in importance, the board said. U.S. corporations are contributing to the shift by conducting an increasing amount of their research and development abroad. The board — which advises the president and Congress on science matters — urged the federal government to take several steps to enhance ... Read More