Free Republic

he past few days, the Internet has been filled with commentary on whether the National Science Foundation should have paid for my study on duck genitalia, and 88.7 percent of respondents to a Fox news online poll agreed that studying duck genitalia is wasteful government spending. The commentary supporting and decrying the study continues to grow. As the lead investigator in this research, I would like to weigh in on the controversy and offer some insights into the process of research funding by the NSF. My research on bird genitalia was originally funded in 2005, during the Bush administration. Thus...

A physicist in South Africa claims to have created a new superconducting state of matter at room temperature. Johan Prins of the University of Pretoria observed the superconducting state in experiments with diamonds that had been doped with oxygen (Semiconductor Science and Technology 18 S131).Diamond is a semiconductor and Prins has long been interested in using n-type diamond as a "cold" cathode to replace the "hot" cathodes found in television tubes and many other devices. Moreover, he believes that the results of his experiments on n-type diamond surfaces - made by exposing the diamond to energetic oxygen ions - can...