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What are the three most important things the next U.S. president needs to do for science? To cut through the jargon and find an answer, we bring you the DISCOVER Science Policy Project, in which we give a group of the country’s most celebrated scientists and thinkers the chance to state their views. All past responses can be found here.

WALTER WILLETT
Epidemiologist and nutrition expert

Support more research on alternative, sustainable energy sources, transportation, and food production. In the long run, this is crucial for the quality of life of Americans.

Commit more research funding to translation of existing knowledge into practice. We know what should be done to prevent most of the major diseases that burden our population, but we often don’t know how to do this most effectively or efficiently.

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A few weeks ago, we recounted a debate between atheist posterchild Christopher Hitchens and Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, a prominent physicist and theologian. In the wake of around 20 requests for visual proof of what went down, we also promised to post a video of the debate once it became available. Cut to today, when, via the Templeton Foundation, you can watch the event in its entirety here.

Related:
God 0, Atheism 2: Hitchens Eats Another Religious Figure for Lunch

Additional Coverage of the Debate:

Newsweek
The Daily News
Vanity Fair
The National Review Online

Voter fraud can happen more easily than we think (along with just about every other form of election fraud). In the past few weeks, the McCain camp has been hammering away at the voter fraud issue, specifically targeting the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a nationwide advocacy group that has made recent headlines for its vigorous campaign to register new voters—the vast majority of which happen to be poor or working class, and Democrats.

For the $16 million ACORN has poured into the 2008 campaign, the agency has achieved some impressive results: The tallies indicate that it added 1.3 million new voters to the rolls. Of course, whether those 1.3 million registrations actually correspond to 1.3 million human beings is under investigation. In Las Vegas, investigators raided an ACORN office and seized documents based on claims of registration fraud, and authorities in other states are also taking a closer look at the agency’s practices. Allegations are flying around that ACORN employees filled out hundreds, or possibly even thousands of registration cards with fake names, or the names of prison inmates. One man is facing questioning for allegedly registering to vote 10 to 15 times through ACORN (though assuming all the registrations were for himself, and he only votes once, his actions are hardly a crime).

Cue the self-righteous blustering about the perilous state of democracy, which have been countered with charges that the investigations are really just a means of disenfranchising minority voters.

Meanwhile, ACORN is rushing to restore its reputation with a PR blitz including a press release that states the following:

According to [voting rights] experts, spreading fears of fraudulent voting—which happens less often in the U.S. than death by lightning—is done to discredit voter registration efforts and justify restrictive laws that place additional barriers to full participation for all Americans.

For the record, around 90 people per year are killed by lightning in the U.S. Investigators are looking into at least 2,100 possible bogus voter applications in Indiana alone—not to mention thousands more in Ohio, Michigan, and Nevada. So there goes that theory.

But how often does voter fraud [as opposed to the alleged registration fraud] really occur? And if ACORN did in fact fudge registrations, what are their chances of actually getting away with casting fraudulent votes?

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What are the three most important things the next U.S. president needs to do for science? To cut through the jargon and find an answer, we bring you the DISCOVER Science Policy Project, in which we give a group of the country’s most celebrated scientists and thinkers the chance to state their views. All past responses can be found here.

ALAN STERN
Planetary science researcher, former Associate Administrator of NASA

Set an integrally scientific and technological course forward. Mr. President, challenge the nation to lead the world and show by example how science and technology can transform the twenty-first century as deeply and successfully as it transformed the 20th century.

Act as an evangelist for a more scientifically literate public that is better able to evaluate issues such as global change, technology solutions to energy policy, evolution, and gene therapies. Too often our society devalues scientific literacy in the public. Yet with the wide array of public policy issues demanding scientific and technological solutions, our leaders must encourage a broader scientific literacy.

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Everyone is losing this year. Whether it be the Lehman CEO or the evicted homeowner or the aging employee with a napalmed 401K, no one—not even the supercalifragilistamega-rich— is coming out of this unscathed. But given the present and future of across-the-board pain, it’s worth looking at which industries and interests should be salvaged, or at least partially shielded from damage.

Famed paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey is already on the offensive, telling reporters during a speech the University of Arkansas at Little Rock that the economic crisis would be “just devastating” to scientific research. He fears that as the philanthropists, foundations, corporations, and governments that fund scientific research watch their coffers empty, money for grants, endowments, and other research efforts will fizzle. Starting in 2009, donations for research and exploration will be “hugely hit,” he predicts.

Environmental researchers and activists are already worried that climate work could be tossed aside in favor of more immediate (but not necessarily less worrisome) concerns. It’s not a stretch to predict that other scientific fields will be hit as well—and that the halting or delaying of research could be as big an aggregate loss as the mortgage crisis and Dow immolation combined.

Related:

Reality Base: High Gas Prices = Good; High Gas Prices = Bad
RB: Lose Your House, Lose Your Vote, Lose Your Self-Esteem
RB: DISCOVER’s Science Policy Project

So we’ve been driving a lot less, which is good. We’ve also been shifting attitudes about oil as a resource and adjusting our lives to consume less of it, which is even better. And we’ve been lavishing more time and attention (and money) on alternative energy, which is best of all.

But now oil prices are plummeting as fast as they rose, and analysts are worried that all those silver linings will be ripped out and tossed aside. As the economy grinds to a halt and the government doles out $700 billion checks, Time’s Bryan Walsh wonders if alternative fuel initiatives—and, for that matter, any climate change legislation—might be shoved to the back of the line behind our bubbling economic woes.

Even if the gas price dip is temporary and/or U.S. consumption habits remain changed, the credit and spending slashes that are already underway could put the kibosh on funding for many alt-energy projects, as Walsh points out. Plus there’s the matter of gas prices as a source of political leverage: The Warner-Lieberman bill, Congress’ first real attempt to pass cap-and-trade legislation, was defeated when Republicans throttled it with the charge that carbon caps would lead to even higher oil prices.

Granted, when world markets are bouncing up and down like bungee jumpers and phrases like “global economic meltdown” are standard fare in the headlines, there’s no guarantee that the price of oil (or the price of anything) will stay where it is. And it’s too soon to write off Americans as “entitled saps” who’ll toss the Prius they bought when prices hit $4 a gallon and buy a Hummer as soon as the number is back down to $2.50. But as with just about everything in the modern world, we really have no clue how the oil mess is going to pan out. So we may as well do the best we can—and “greening the bailout” is as good a place as any to start.

• In the wake of its banking decombustion, Iceland heads back to an economy based on fishing—at least, for another 50 years or so.

• Should water be priced according to its market value? Vote today in The Economist’s water poll.

• Morality police or no, 25 percent of teenage girls have received the HPV vaccine.

• Nuclear energy gets a PR boost.

• Some how, pork seems a little less porky when it’s going to green energy.

• The Top Ten Biggest Nobel Prize shafts.

• Doctors and drug companies: How deep does the rabbit hole go?

• And finally, perhaps the best graphic representation so far of this week’s financial wreckage.

By now, word has gotten out that the mortgage crisis could have a detrimental effect on voting: In losing their home addresses, subprime victims may become ineligible to vote under certain state laws if they fail to update their voter registration information. If this happens, says University of Missouri law professor S. David Mitchell, the psychological impact on those who were, essentially, administratively disenfranchised could be severe.

Mitchell, who has studied the effects of disenfranchisement on felons and minorities, found that stripping people of their voting rights “undermines citizenship and relegates individuals to second-class status.” Whether or not someone planned to vote or has ever voted doesn’t matter—it’s the right to vote that glues together the “social contract” we implicitly make by agreeing to live under society’s laws. Remove that glue, and you wind up eroding not only the person’s psychological status, but also the health and stability of his or her community.

So there you have it: Administrative fine print is leading to the erosion of society. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could figure out how to solve all this with a mouse click?

The 2008 election will be one for the history books. But it may also be one for the psych texts, with its revealing look inside how politics brings out the basest, most reptilian impulses in the depths of the human mind.

We know that affiliation with a political party or group goes deeper than just your thoughts on abortion or free markets—how you cast a ballot is even rooted in neuroscience. And more research is being done concerning the impact of past leaders’ race and gender on our psyche from childhood on. Plus the gallons of mud slung, not to mention the race-baiting, finger pointing, and infighting, are enough to provide behavioral psychologists with research fodder for decades.

Meanwhile, reporters from all over the campaign trail are bewailing the seeming total lack of rational thought that goes into many voters’ ballot-casting decisions.

Well, as the New Scientist reports, we may be asking a little too much of humanity when we expect every voter (or even a plurality) to form an opinion of the candidates based on carefully-reasoned and factually-grounded analysis of their positions and backgrounds. In other words: Our brains just aren’t built that way.

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What are the three most important things the next U.S. president needs to do for science? To cut through the jargon and find an answer, we bring you the DISCOVER Science Policy Project, in which we give a group of the country’s most celebrated scientists and thinkers the chance to state their views. All past responses can be found here.

WALTER BENDER
Former executive director of the MIT Media Lab

Promote more risk-taking within government funding agencies: Industry has all but given up on research of any kind except marketing research, and for the most part, universities are slipping into a mode of incrementalism, because that is the safest way to secure funding.

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Ever since the U.K. military figured out that the sonar from submarines royally messes with whales, activists across the pond have been rushing to halt Navy exercises that may disrupt—though exactly how much, no one really knows—the marine mammals.

As they so often do, things got litigious when both the California Coastal Commission and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the Navy in separate lawsuits to stop its use of sonar during 14 training exercises off the Southern California coast. Lucky for the whale-savers, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (which is known for siding on the path of the less mighty) agreed with them, and smacked the Navy with restrictions on its sub exercises.

Now enter the Supreme Court, which this week heard the case on appeal. As with just about every human endeavor that harms the environment, the sonar use necessitates a balancing act between our needs—in this case, for a military that’s sharp and ready for, say, a second Pearl Harbor—and the needs of everything else.

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For all those climate change activists celebrating (rightfully, in our view) the steep gas price increase as a means of forcing U.S. drivers to stop guzzling fossil fuels, here’s more good news: As the Climate Progress blog notes, Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer miles, or 3.6 percent less, in July 2008 than July 2007, putting 2008 on track to hit the largest dip in vehicle-driven miles since 1983. Which, from a glass-half-full perspective, means that all those potential fuel emissions are staying out of the air … or, from a glass-half-empty view, that we’re careening towards the end of civilization as we know it. Which in and of itself would probably be good for the Earth—if not so good for us.

Image: iStockphoto 

What are the three most important things the next U.S. president needs to do for science? To cut through the jargon and find an answer, we bring you the DISCOVER Science Policy Project, in which we give a group of the country’s most celebrated scientists and thinkers the chance to state their views. All past responses can be found here.

STEVEN NISSEN
Cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, innovator

Restore funding at the National Institute of Health. For many years, the NIH budget has remained essentially flat. This means that, in inflation adjusted dollars, actual expenditures have decreased.

Avoid government intrusions on the academic independence of scientists.

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Given the historical magnitude and importance of the 2008 election, it’s no surprise that the event has been prompting plenty of artistic interpretations. Obama has inspired prints and been the subject of numerous collaborations, while New Hampshire’s Currier Museum of Art is cashing in on the trend by selling t-shirts, magnets and pins with Warhol-inspired images of the two candidates.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles-based artist Kim Abeles had a slightly more incisive idea to illustrate each candidate’s commitment to emissions reduction: Make portraits with pollution. To create her prints, Abeles placed stencil images of each candidate on top of sheets of opaque glass, then left them on the roof of her studio in downtown L.A. Obama, who has proposed an 80 percent emissions reduction, was left out for nine days, while McCain, who promises a 60 percent reduction, was out in the air for 18 days (all lengths of time were based on Abeles’s estimation of the difference in emissions levels that the two would tolerate).

When she took the prints down and removed the stencils, the images revealed themselves in all their smog-catching glory. The depth and colors offer a pictorial comparison of the pollution each candidate would leave in the atmosphere.

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What are the three most important things the next U.S. president needs to do for science? To cut through the jargon and find an answer, we bring you the DISCOVER Science Policy Project, in which we give a group of the country’s most celebrated scientists and thinkers the chance to state their views. All past responses can be found here.

DANIEL HILLIS
Computer scientist, inventor, and author

Look at any list of the most important “American” scientific accomplishments and you will see that they are in large part the accomplishments of immigrants. Our strength in science and technology is, and always has been, based on our willingness to welcome and support scientists from other nations. We need a president who will lead us back to our historical position of openness and generosity.