Friday, March 13, 2009
The Fermi National Laboratory announced today that the Higgs boson is not
all that heavy. If it was, the Tevatron would have found it. It must be
down in the underbrush with all the other debris from proton-antiproton
collisions. That means there's going to be a lot of sorting out to do
before it can be identified with certainty. This makes it less likely that
FermiLab will win the race to the Higgs.
Along with the rest of the scientific community, we were elated by
President-elect Obama's early choice of Harvard physicist John Holdren to
be presidential science advisor, and Oregon State marine biologist Jane
Lubchenco to head NOAA www.bobpark.org/WN08/wn121908 . But it is now mid-
March and neither has been confirmed by the Senate. An anonymous hold has
been placed on both nominations. It's widely rumored that Bob Menendez (D-
FL) is using the "hold" to wring concessions on an unrelated issue; others
say it's David Vitter (R-LA) for purely ideological reasons related to
Holdren's pro-environment stance. We have no way of knowing. The Senate
custom of allowing individual senators to delay confirmations with an
anonymous hold is starkly undemocratic and exposes the nation to
unnecessary risk. We have serious scientific issues to resolve.
In a strict party-line vote, all 34 Republican Senators all voted to ban
embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning in Georgia, and all 22
Democrats voted against the ban. An initial version of the bill defining
an in vitro fertilized egg as a person was dropped along with criminal
penalties. The final bill states that embryos can't be created in vitro
for the the purpose of generating new stem cell lines.
Acknowledging that the bill was imperfect, which is an understatement, the
president signed a $410 billion measure to fund most government agencies
through September. The bill included some 8,500 projects inserted by
individual lawmakers. As usual scientists and academic institutions
participated in the pig out. Having promised to eliminate earmarks in his
campaign, the President paid a political price for signing. Earmarks
constitute less than 2% of the discretionary federal budget and many of the
projects may be valuable, but if they are we can't tell because they've not
gone through a review process.
Homeland Security is soliciting sources to look (or sniff) into human odor
as an indicator of deception. It's not totally crazy. Sweat due to
nervousness comes from different glands than sweat due to exertion, and has
a stronger odor. But this has the same flaw as the polygraph. It's not
clear whether liars or innocents will be more nervous.
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