10 years ago, on November 2nd, humans climbed into a room, suspended on an average of 229 miles above the Earth, traveling at roughly 17,0000 miles per hour. The International Space Station stands as one of mankind’s greatest scientific achievements. It engenders the cooperation of dozens of countries spanning the bounds of language and politics.

It is a symbol of what we accomplish together. It is startling beautiful.

It’s accomplishments like this that inspire. 41 years ago we first landed on the moon. Mankind walked on the surface of another object in space. It’s almost hard to hold in your head that we actually did this, moreover something this country alone has successfully accomplished. That inspiration produced a generation of engineers, scientists, and thinkers like no other in history. They developed the theories and technology that has allowed mankind to orbit the Earth for 10 consecutive years.

Perhaps it’s all this that makes me feel wretchedly sick when I tune back into the petty partisan bickering, and short sightedness that’s been the major news for the past year during this especially vitriolic election period.

Unless you are into science, REALLY into science you may not hear, see, or read the absolute moronic way science gets misinterpreted, misunderstood, and misused by politicking. Whether it’s the Virginia Attorney General on his witch hunt against climate change science, Presidential ‘hopefuls’ that think humans walked with the dinosaurs, or any number of base ignoramuses that think it’s noble to block essential medical research due to their latest superstitious interpretations of 2,000 year-old writings, some days it’s enough to totally sap my will to enjoy life.

And then a video like this comes along. Turn off your cell phone. Turn up the speakers. Here’s 15 minutes of some of the most inspirational stuff I’ve seen and listened to in a long, long time.

I saw the blurb go out over Twitter. Someone had scanned in a science book from Bob Jones University. I figured I’d take a look at the travesty once I got home and already PZ Myers had an increadible blog posting about it. Really, go read it.

The amount of ignorance in these books is jaw-dropping.

And people are graduating from these places with degrees.

I am at a loss at how they function in the work place having graduated without learning anything – actually worse, with learning the wrong thing.

Now, in the comments section of PZ’s post there is an apologist trying his hardest to spin this positively – that the book in question was revised in 2008. That really doesn’t make up for the fact that this is how ‘science’ was taught at BJU for years and years (and who knows what idiocy the book preaches now).

It just makes the future Theocratic States of America an even more frightening thought – we couldn’t even sustain a power grid under these morons at their current university educationed levels.

The White House has kicked off the White House Grand Challenge on the future of science policy in the United States.

As a part of its efforts to introduce fully open government, the White House is reaching out to the at-large scientific community to discuss America’s national scientific and technological priorities.

Through AAAS, and our new Expert Labs program, the Obama administration wants to draw on the collective wisdom of scientists everywhere in deciding which scientific and technological challenges should be the focus of policy initiatives in the coming years.

This also includes the science lovers out there, not just professionals, so chime in!

You can tweet, post on Facebook, or email them an idea that should be pursued.

Think big!

The National Science Foundation released its annual report of scientific literacy among Americans. Not surprisingly America as a whole received a failing grade. As reported in Science News:

The section, which was part of the unedited chapter on public attitudes toward science and technology, notes that 45% of Americans in 2008 answered true to the statement, “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” The figure is similar to previous years and much lower than in Japan (78%), Europe (70%), China (69%), and South Korea (64%). The same gap exists for the response to a second statement, “The universe began with a big explosion,” with which only 33% of Americans agreed.

The current furor isn’t over that the numbers are pitifully low – rather that this section was omitted from the final report. Why was it removed?

The board member who took the lead in removing the text was John Bruer, a philosopher who heads the St. Louis, Missouri-based James S. McDonnell Foundation. He told Science that his reservations about the two survey questions dated back to 2007, when he was the lead reviewer for the same chapter in the 2008 Indicators. He calls the survey questions “very blunt instruments not designed to capture public understanding” of the two topics.

I think Jon Miller has a quote appropriate response:

“I think that is a nonsensical response” that reflects “the religious right’s point of view,” says Jon Miller, a science literacy researcher at Michigan State University in East Lansing who authored the survey 3 decades ago and conducted it for NSF until 2001. “Evolution and the big bang are not a matter of opinion. If a person says that the earth really is at the center of the universe, even if scientists think it is not, how in the world would you call that person scientifically literate? Part of being literate is to both understand and accept scientific constructs.”

Miller, the scientific literacy researcher, believes that removing the entire section was a clumsy attempt to hide a national embarrassment. “Nobody likes our infant death rate,” he says by way of comparison, “but it doesn’t go away if you quit talking about it.”

I think this is very reflective of the current push by evangelical Christians in this country to conflate science and religion  - which is demeaning and undermining to both. The results are a populace that understand neither which is clearly reflected in this poll.

Countries and cultures that succeed and progress  are forward-looking, scientifically literate (for that time period) and able to critically think and examine issues.

When we, as a country, score this low on questions that form the foundations for almost every single scientific field in existence in which direction do you think we are headed?

The American Museum of Natural History has put together a phenomenal video of the known Universe. Visually awesome.

Space Shuttle Discovery Launch, STS-26 D-58 in September of 1988. The first shuttle mission to resume after the Challenger disaster in 1986. Photo courtesy of NASA.

The sadder news to come out of the State of the Union speech is the cutting of support for NASA’s Ares rocket program, which was set to replace the Shuttle program. This means no foreseeable plans for getting us beyond low earth orbit (think international space station).

The last manned mission to the moon took place on December 7, 1972. It’s been almost 38 years since we’ve walked on the surface of another stellar body. And now it may well be at least a decade more before something is in place to rectify this – much less blasting off.

For me this is utterly depressing. We had the technology, the training, and the will to get off this world and begin exploring another. A generation later we won’t even be moving people out of Earth’s gravity. The last Shuttle launch is this September – and that’s it. No Shuttle program and no alternative.

NASA’s budget for the past decade has ranged from 0.9 to  .05% of the total Federal budget of the United States. Comparing those numbers to the amount of science and knowledge we’ve acquired from NASA’s programs is bit mind-boggling. Astronomy and NASA’s work has not only helped develop and refine tech that we use daily but it also explores  fundamental questions like, “Where do we come from?” (our varied atoms originally come from supernova), and “What will happen to our planet and solar system in the epochs to come?”

On the brighter side we do have amazing unmanned missions from NASA producing reams of data that will keep people busy for years to come. We have robot spacecraft hurtling towards Pluto, rovers exploring Mars, and even the twin Voyager spacecraft launched more than 30 years ago continue to send data back about the furthest reaches of our solar system.

There are also private ventures looking to the stars, Space-X being one of the most visible and successful. Also companies like Google, which offers the X Prize, to encourage private development of spaceflight (both manned and unmanned) may fill the void in much the same way private funding did in early Earth exploration by sending boats across the globe in search of new business opportunities. Of course there is also Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic. Though it’s only aiming for low earth orbit, it’s still a start.

Apollo 15 mission, 1971. Look, we're on the moon! 39 years later we can't do this... Photo courtesy of NASA.

While all that evokes a glimmer for the future, a nice alternate route – it is still entities trying to merely reach low earth orbit with some sort of consistency. NASA did that and went well beyond… decades ago. We seem trapped by indecision (moon base or no moon base), a lack of will (people might die in those contraptions), and now more than ever a lack of funds.

Some experts think the Ares rocket program was the wrong direction to go in. Subsequently this budget cut is  good news to them – it’s money not spent on something that just wasn’t going to work in the first place. Even if this is true, it does little to rectify the lack of a  plan ‘B’ for NASA.

What is the goal to shoot for now? In what can we place our expectations, hopes, and dreams when it comes to space exploration? There is something so tangible and exciting about manned exploration that can never be replaced by sending a robotic spacecraft into the void or nearest orbiting object. Physically being there is more than a technological triumph, it’s a triumph of the spirit and curiosity that not only makes us what we are but drives us to do even greater things.

Given the state of things, to what do we now tilt toward?

The Boston Globe put together a very neat page comparing photos from NASA’s moon landings to the photos taken by the LRO. You get a nice ground view comparison of what the astronauts saw and the top down view from the LRO.

It’s a breathtaking collection.

Photo courtesy of NASA (note the Earth in the upper right corner).

There are two frustrating issues in science journalism today. First, with the decline of newspapers and print media, most science writers for the press have been long sent packing to save money. In their place was stuck… well just about anybody else that could write. This has led to both a decline in the understanding of what is being reported, and an over-sensationalizing of things that end up muddling the story.

The second, and perhaps worse item is the ridiculous notion that ‘both sides’ of a story should be reported on where on one side you get the expert or scientist and on the other side you get the loud wacko.  It’s basically akin to doing an interview with a historian of the holocaust and then giving five minutes to a holocaust denier. One has credence, the other has insanity. In the end, this style of reporting does nothing but give delusional people a soapbox and, for the public, give the appearance of there being equal importance of both angles.

So in this spirit I give you a good article from USA Today on vaccines. Here’s another one from the Baltimore Sun on autism. Give it a whirl. Then compare it to this report from ABC News (it’s a video). So if you can spot what I’m talking about.

Not everyone has the time, energy, or desire to chase down this stuff. You’d think you could rely on reporters to… get it right. When they don’t, cranks like Jenny McCarthy take the spotlight and spread misinformation based off of their own anecdotes. But the plural of anecdote is not evidence. Anecdotes do not make studies. Given the fallibility and bias of human memory, using anecdotes in place of good science and studies is plain stupid and, as can be seen by the anti-vax movement, harmful in the least and deadly at the worst.

The only fix I see are real science reporters and journalists calling out bad articles and bad reporting and embarrassing the hell out of the idiots who publish the  wharblgarble.

XKCD never fails to amaze me. In addition to being one of the funnier web comics I find on the internet (and having spawned numerous internet memes itself), I have yet to find one that is smarter. The author has an almost Sagan-like ability to take complex science and make it understandable to the layman. In other words, awesome. So here we have a fundamental part of astronomy and the key to how we not only get objects off the planet, but to other planets and beyond.

Make sure you click on the image to get the super-large version so you can read the text and really understand how gravity wells work.

The best one I can think of that puts it all into perspective:

Here’s to hoping you have a peaceful and relaxing weekend.