Majikthise

McCain threatened federal official over telescope and lied about it

John McCain threatened a U.S. forest supervisor's job in 1989 and lied about it, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.

At the time, McCain adamantly denied threatening the official, but documents obtained by the Review-Journal cast doubt on the candidate's heated denial:

McCain had already shown a willingness to throw his weight around, according to some involved in the Mount Graham project.

At one point, he targeted Jim Abbott, a U.S. Forest Service supervisor he blamed for slowing progress on the observatory.

 

McCain was alleged at the time to have told Abbott that he would be "the shortest-tenured forest supervisor in the history of the Forest Service" if he didn't help the project move forward.

Federal law prohibits threats that obstruct or impede the work of federal employees.

McCain, when confronted with the allegation in the early 1990s, adamantly denied threatening Abbott and railed against anyone who accused him of misconduct. Abbott later backed McCain's story.

But Gibbons and other GAO investigators charged with examining the scientific fights over the project also reached conclusions about related personal clashes.

An internal GAO memo from 1990 obtained by the Review-Journal refers to McCain's "admitted threat" to the forest supervisor. The memo was designed to remain between the GAO and McCain's office. Its contents have never been made public before.

Ironically, the fight was over the construction of a giant optical telescope in McCain's home state of Arizona.

Ironically, McCain loves to bash earmarks, a more traditional strategy for facilitating pet projects in a legislator's district. He brags, falsely, that he has never asked for earmarks.

He has openly mocked federally funded science projects, including the $4 million the USGS has spent compiling genetic profiles on grizzly populations in Montana.

This episode shows the lengths McCain was willing to go to deliver the kind of federal spending that he would now deride as pork.

[HT: bmaz.]

Palin championed aerial hunting of wolves

As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin teamed up with lobbyist for the hunting industry to champion the aerial hunting of wolves an bears. In 2007, she spent $400,000 of taxpayer's money to propagandize the public about the benefits of shooting wildlife with air supremacy:

The controversy over Palin's promotion of predator control goes beyond animal rights activists recoiling at the thought of picking off wolves from airplanes. A raft of scientists has argued that Palin has provided little evidence that the current program of systematically killing wolves, estimated at a population of 7,000 to 11,000, will result in more moose for hunters. State estimates of moose populations have come under scrutiny. Some wildlife biologists say predator control advocates don't even understand what wolves eat.

State officials stand by their scientific findings on predator control. "Several times over the past several years, our science has been challenged in court," says Bruce Bartley, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. "In every instance it has prevailed." [Salon]

Now an environmental group is taking Palin to task for her record on aerial hunting. Be warned, the ad is graphic, disturbing, and factual:

Aerial hunting is an affront to honorable hunters and animal lovers because it's unsportsmanlike and pseudoscientific.

HPV and cervical cancer

DrPal has a good post explaining the science behind the HPV vaccine.

Gorillas that were missed: 125,000 endangered apes discovered in the Congo

Rejoice friends: Primatologists have discovered a massive number of endangered lowland gorillas in the Congo!

What's funny about tire gauges?

The Republicans have been handing out tire gages with Obama's name on them. This is meant as a joke because Obama pointed out that the U.S. stands to save more energy from keeping the nation's tires properly inflated than it would from offshore drilling.

The tire gauges are supposed to be a joke. I don't get it. Usually, I can reverse engineer jokes even if they don't make me laugh. This one leaves me at a loss. What's funny about an attractive useful gadget that associates your opponent with his own message?

I can see why the Obama campaign would give out tire gage pumps to donors. That would be making fun of John McCain and the emptiness of his offshore drilling promises.

I can imagine the creative brief. Suggested tagline: McCain's plan falls flat. So, remember to check your tires with this Obama tire gage.

Frank Jones at TIME Magazine thought McCain's wisecrack was funny:

Now that many of us have had a good laugh following Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign's use of tire-inflation gauges as weapons of mass distraction against Sen. Barack Obama, can we acknowledge that properly inflated tires could indeed save a tremendous amount of energy?

So can driving at or slightly above the speed limit. Or keeping a vehicle tuned up so it operates more efficiently.

Even though there's a dispute over whether Obama's claim that inflated tires and tune-ups would save more oil than could be extracted by drilling off-shore, it seems indisputable that there could be considerable savings from such relatively easy efforts. [Swampland/TIME]

Can anyone explain the joke as written? Sometimes I feel like I'm from a completely different culture than Republicans and "respectable" journalists. 

HPV vaccination misinformation and bias in Medscape

David Gorski catches Medscape recycling pseudoscience about the HPV vaccine Gardasil and does a characteristically thorough job of debunking these claims.

Suspected anti-science terror attacks at UC Santa Cruz

The homes of two researchers at UC Santa Cruz have been firebombed. Preliminary clues suggest the attacks may have been acts of anti-science terrorism:

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — The police and federal authorities are investigating firebombings at the homes of two researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The attacks, which the university described as “antiscience violence,” occurred nearly simultaneously before dawn on Saturday, just days after the police in Santa Cruz discovered pamphlets in a coffee shop warning of attacks against “animal abusers everywhere.” The pamphlets included the names, addresses and other personal information of several researchers at the university, according to a news release put out on Friday by the university. [NYT]

Only one minor injury was reported, but one explosion forced a researcher to flee through an upstairs window with his wife and two children.

We should wait until all the facts are in before drawing conclusions about the culprits or their motives. Incidents like these can easily be used as an excuse to target innocent but unpopular groups as well as real culprits.

Girls close math gap

 Fifteen years ago, girls trailed boys by 50 points on SAT math scores. Today, the gap is gone:

But a new study, published in this week's edition of the journal Science, shows the gap has disappeared. Researchers looked at standardized test scores of more than 7 million students, ranging from the second grade to high school junior. Whatever gender differences there once existed between girls and boys in terms of math performance are gone.

"The differences are now trivial," said Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin, who led the research. [ABC]

Science Journalism Tracker elaborates:

The news is that analysis of 7 million test scores by researchers at UC-Berkeley and the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison found dramatic trends in recent decades. In the 70s, boys were ahead at all grade levels. By the 80s the girls kept even well into grade school. Now they’re essentially tied, statistically, all the way through adolescence. One doesn’t see many women’s names in the roll of winners of the Fields Medal (sometimes called the Nobel of math) - no obviously female names at all in a quick search just now. Maybe that’s next. Unclear is how much of the gap’s disappearance is due to boys scoring lower and to girls scoring higher. One difference remained. More boys are in the top one percent - but girls still make up one third of these elite scorers.

Watch the ABC video clip. Science subscribers can read the original paper here.

Help a progressive geek kick a creationist's ass in Kansas

Sean Tevis is a progressive geek running for the Kansas House against an  anti-abortion, anti-evolution, pro-censorship, pro-surveillance, anti-gay incumbent. Help him win.
(BoingBoing appears to have overwhelmed his server, so maybe try again later on.)

Is depression killing your brain?

Morgan of 3QD points to a fascinating story about new discoveries that are prompting neuroscientists to rethink what depression is, and how anti-depressants actually work.

We're often told that depression is caused by neurochemical imbalances. The assumption is that Prozac and other antidepressants improve the symptoms of depression by boosting the effects of serotonin (or other key neurotransmitters, depending on the drug). Yet, if that's true, why do anti-depressants take weeks to work, despite altering neurotransmitter levels in mere hours?

More recent research suggests that depression is actually a reversible neurodegenerative disease and that antidepressants actually help the brain to heal and thrive again:

In fact, many scientists are now paying increased attention to the frequently neglected symptoms of people suffering from depression, which include problems with learning and memory and sensory deficits for smell and taste. Other researchers are studying the ways in which depression interferes with basic bodily processes, such as sleeping, sex drive, and weight control. Like the paralyzing sadness, which remains the most obvious manifestation of the mental illness, these symptoms are also byproducts of a brain that's literally withering away.

"Depression is caused by problems with the most fundamental thing the brain does, which is process information," says Eero Castren, a neuroscientist at the University of Helsinki. "It's much more than just an inability to experience pleasure."

This new scientific understanding of depression also offers a new way to think about the role of drugs in recovery. While antidepressants help brain cells recover their vigor and form new connections, Castren says that patients must still work to cement these connections in place, perhaps with therapy. He compares antidepressants with anabolic steroids, which increase muscle mass only when subjects also go to the gym.

"If you just sit on your couch, then steroids aren't going to be very effective," he says. "Antidepressants are the same way: if you want the drug to work for you, then you have to work for the drug." [Boston Globe]

I know several people who decline antidepressants because they consider the drugs to be a mere "Band-Aid solution." If this healing hypothesis of antidepressant action is correct, maybe antidepressants aren't just Band-Aids after all.