Free Republic

As baby boomers retire, aerospace and engineering companies in the Antelope Valley need an influx of new workers - homegrown, if possible. Like creosote, mesquite and other native plant species, Antelope Valley residents have an easier time putting down roots in the dusty Mojave Desert, home to Plant 42 and Edwards Air Force Base. "From an employer's perspective, we see much higher rates of turnover when we recruit young engineers from anywhere east of California," said Michael Huggins, chief of the Air Force Research Lab at Edwards. "They're not used to the desert environment and they're away from home." Using...

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity". As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction. All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality". Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public...

Sen. Hillary Clinton said Friday that if elected president she would work to reverse "a very insidious campaign against science" waged by the Bush administration on issues such as stem cell research, global warming and human evolution. Visiting the future site of a science education center that's being billed as the world's most environmentally friendly museum, Clinton argued that the executive branch has put ideology over evidence at the expense of the nation's health and economic viability. "Scientists have been muzzled. Information has been taken off government-sponsored Web sites. The leaders of our country have dismissed scientific research and advancements,"...

...the kapok tree now is upsetting an idea that biologists have clung to for decades: the notion that African and South American rainforests are similar because the continents were connected 96 million years ago. Research by University of Michigan evolutionary ecologist Christopher Dick and colleagues shows that kapok -- and perhaps other rainforest -- trees colonized Africa after the continents split when the trees' seeds traveled across the ocean... said Sam Scheiner, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research. "In order to plan for and mitigate global climate change, we need to understand the history...

A computer simulation of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks supports a federal agency’s findings that the initial impact from the hijacked airplanes stripped away crucial fireproofing material and that the weakened towers collapsed under their own weight. The two-year Purdue University study, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, was the first to use 3-D animation to provide visual context to the attacks, said Christoph Hoffmann, a professor of computer science and one of the lead researchers on the project. “One thing it does point out… is the absolute essential nature of fireproofing steel structures,” Hoffmann told The...

Main Site: with activities for kids Lockheed Martin Inspires Central Florida Students to Pursue Technical Careers During National Engineers Week 2006 ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Lockheed Martin's Central Florida businesses will support local activities to promote math and science education for students during National Engineers Week, February 19-25. Through fun hands-on activities, students will learn about engineering and engineering careers.excerpt...General Dynamics Hosts Student Events for National Engineers WeekARLINGTON, Va., Feb. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, a business unit of General Dynamics (NYSE: GD - News), is sponsoring events nationwide during National Engineers Week beginning Feb....

"In Aug., 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million tax-payer funded study.  It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed.  Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from 'mental rigidity,' 'dogmatism,' and 'uncertainty avoidance,' together with associated indicators for mental illness."  (B.K. Eakman, Chronicles, Oct. 2004, pp. 28-29)   As usual with leftists, the true meaning of their words is couched in deceptive code.  When the deceptions are peeled away we discover that ''dogmatism''...

[...] Today, Souvaine chairs the Tufts University computer science department, which has more female professors than male. But few younger women have followed in her generation's footsteps. Next spring, when 22 computer science graduates accept their Tufts diplomas, only four will be women. Born in contemporary times, free of the male-dominated legacy common to other sciences and engineering, computer science could have become a model for gender equality. [...] When Tara Espiritu arrived at Tufts, she was the rare young woman planning to become a computer scientist.[...]The same men always spoke up, often to raise some technical point that meant...

WASHINGTON - Soil tests indicate that a soft, spongy layer of swamp peat underneath the 17th Street canal floodwall was the weak point that caused soil to move and the wall to breach during Hurricane Katrina, an engineer who has studied the data says. "The thing that is remarkable here is the very low strength of the soils around the bottom of the sheet pile" base of the floodwall, said Robert Bea, a geotechnical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who examined the test results. Bea is a member of the National Science Foundation team that is studying the...

Two teams of researchers, working separately thousands of miles from each other but both defeating incredible odds, have made stunning finds in frozen Antarctica -- so stunning that the National Science Foundation calls their discoveries evidence of a lost world. The researchers found what they believe to be the fossilized remains of two species of dinosaurs previously unknown to science. One is a 70-million-year old quick-moving meat-eater found on the bottom of an Antarctic sea, while and the other is a 200-million-year-old giant plant-eater that was found on the top of a mountain, reports Reuters. The lost world in which...

WASHINGTON - The voice of science is being stifled in the Bush administration, with fewer scientists heard in policy discussions and money for research and advanced training being cut, according to panelists at a national science meeting. ... Rosina Bierbaum, dean of the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, said the Bush administration has cut scientists out of some of the policy-making processes, particularly on environmental issues. "In previous administrations, scientists were always at the table when regulations were being developed," she said. "Science never had the last voice, but it had a voice." Issues on global...

Public release date: 13-Dec-2004 [ Print Article | E-mail Article | Close Window ] Contact: Margaret Hopkins mhopkins@ist.psu.edu 814-865-7888 Penn State Method ranks impact of computer and information science funding agencies, institutions & individuals The National Science Foundation tops all national and international agencies for funding research that makes the most impact in computer and information science, according to Penn State researchers in the School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). The researchers have developed a new method which can automatically extract and identify acknowledgments of funding agencies, institutions and individuals in papers available on the Internet and indexed on...

WHAT'S NEXT In mint condition, the knee is a biomechanical marvel, an intricately linked interaction of bones, ligaments, tendons and cartilage that produces smooth, stable motion. But as professional athletes and weekend exercisers know only too well, the knee is also a classic weak spot, vulnerable to damage and slow to heal. Strengthening it after injury or surgery may require hours on the bulky machines of a hospital or gym. Now a mechanical engineer at Northeastern University has devised a small portable device that people may be able to strap onto their knees to rehabilitate them as they walk around...

[Snip]In the mid-1980s, the National Science Foundation warned that the nation would soon lack enough scientists and engineers to fill the necessary posts in academe -- a forecast that turned out to be wildly inaccurate. Instead, over the past decade, thousands of frustrated researchers have labored in postdoctoral positions at low wages because they could not find jobs in academe or industry.[Snip] Current data suggest that the new predictions may fare no better than earlier ones. In fact, contrary to prevailing wisdom, which fixes blame on poor training in science and mathematics from kindergarten through the 12th grade, record numbers...

THERE IS BOTH good news and bad news in the flurry of reports describing the decline of American preeminence in science. Falling numbers of scientific papers and prizes, as well as the relative drop in levels of funding and students, provide evidence of this decline. The good news is that it means other governments across the globe have begun investing heavily in basic scientific research. It also means that foreign companies have been investing in research and development, creating opportunities that make more people want scientific careers in their countries. More research anywhere creates more possibilities for innovation everywhere. Yet...

U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences By WILLIAM J. BROAD Published: May 3, 2004 The United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation, according to federal and private experts who point to strong evidence like prizes awarded to Americans and the number of papers in major professional journals. Foreign advances in basic science now often rival or even exceed America's, apparently with little public awareness of the trend or its implications for jobs, industry, national security or the vigor of the nation's intellectual and cultural life. Advertisement "The rest of...

Two teams of researchers, working separately thousands of miles from each other but both defeating incredible odds, have made stunning finds in frozen Antarctica -- so stunning that the National Science Foundation calls their discoveries evidence of a lost world. The researchers found what they believe to be the fossilized remains of two species of dinosaurs previously unknown to science. One is a 70-million-year old quick-moving meat-eater found on the bottom of an Antarctic sea, while and the other is a 200-million-year-old giant plant-eater that was found on the top of a mountain, reports Reuters. The lost world in which...

Americans are about to be reminded again how much they need sleep — and sleeping pills. A new effort appears to be developing to expand the use of sleeping pills, which because of their potential for abuse have long had a reputation as being in some ways more dangerous than the insomnia they are meant to treat. Some sleep experts say newer pills are safer than the ones that once caused deaths from overdose. Moreover, some say, there is growing evidence that insomnia is a serious medical condition, not just a nuisance. "Slowly, we are beginning to identify that insomnia...

Any discussion of a permanent return to the Moon (RTM) must be centered on two overriding questions: “why?” and “how?” The answers to each of those questions are interrelated. If we go for the wrong reasons we will fail. If we go for the right reasons and do it the wrong way, we will fail. And if we don’t go at all, then we will have failed in a way that will send ripples down through the ages. There are many different answers to “why?” They include: far side observatories to seek life on other worlds; studies of Earth’s history...

AP • New York Times • CBS • MSNBC • AP Medical • MSNBC Space New Network to Link U.S., Russia, China   Dec 23, 10:10 AM (ET) By JIM PAUL CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) - Soon scientists in the United States, China and Russia will be able to collaborate in cyberspace over a new high-speed computer network that includes the first direct computer link across the Russia-China border, developers say.The network, expected to go online next month, will ring the Northern Hemisphere, connecting computers in Chicago with machines in Amsterdam, Moscow, Siberia, Beijing and Hong Kong before hooking up...