Science News - by Morgan Bell

This country features a massive science infrastructure, supported by well over one hundred billion dollars annually in federal funding and sporting a vast network of government laboratories and agencies, the finest universities in the world, and innovative corporations that conduct extensive research. Thanks to such investments, we built the bomb, reached the moon, decoded the genome, and created the Internet. And yet today the United States is also home to a populace that, to an alarming extent, refuses to accept either the fact or the theory of evolution, the scientifically undisputed explanation of where our species came from; is in dangerous retreat from childhood vaccines, one of medicine's greatest advances and the savior of a million lives per year by the end of the 20th century ; has become politically divided over the nature of reality itself, such that college educated Democrats are now more than twice as likely as college educated Republicans to believe that global warming is real and human caused ; and stands on the verge of allowing us to fall behind other nations, like India and China, in the race to lead the world in science in the 21st century.

"Journalists that understand science are basically an endangered species."

[Chris Mooney] "...explains how Republicans have manipulated the inherent uncertainty in science to ensure that Congress rarely hears any consensus opinion that may damage a Bush policy. Using methods and strategies pioneered by the tobacco industry, Republicans put forward contrarian scientists who say what the Republicans want to hear."

""Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas," said Dr. Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif.""