Once upon a time in Earth’s history, all life reproduced through cloning. Be it binary fission, budding, spores, fragmentation, or parthenogenesis, every parent produced exact replicas of itself by itself. Everything was very stable, and evolution moved at a glacial pace, restricted to chance mutations with extremely rare beneficial effects.

Then, atleast 565 million years ago, a mutation arose within a species whereby individuals would recombine their DNA with other individuals of the species to produce offspring with a hybrid of their two genomes. This new evolutionary strategy was Sexual Reproduction.

Funisia Fossils and Reconstruction (Earliest Known Species to Reproduce Sexually) credits: Droser lab

Sexual reproduction carried a heavy cost to the species that used it. Individuals of the species would have to locate another member of their species and successfully reproduce, asexual reproduction was much more efficient and required much less energy in comparison. The advantage of sexual reproduction was that the perpetual recombination of genes resulted in increased genetic variation. The perpetual variety in genes increased the likelihood that some offspring would survive plagues, be they viral, bacterial, or parasitic. An asexual species, where all the members are clones, would all get wiped out by a single virus if it could kill just one of them. Sexual reproduction was so successful that nearly all complex life forms use it to reproduce today.

320 million years ago another mutation arose in mammals. Organisms carrying this genetic mutation were incapable of baring offspring themselves, and instead contributed their DNA to other members of the species capable of reproducing offspring. Today we call these mutants “males,” and they are identifiable via the Y Chromosome they carry, which is something of a genetic dead zone in human males, like myself and 50.3 percent of all other homo sapiens. Before the Y chromosome, species like reptiles and fish would become male or female depending on environmental factors.

As a result of many species evolving two genetically individuated genders, a sort of divergent evolution has occurred between the sexes. Depending on environmental factors, males of many species have evolved to grow larger in order to compete with other males. Females have evolved to become better at reproduction, becoming more nurturing both behaviorally and biologically to ensure the survival of their offspring. An additional evolutionary pressure was introduced, sexual selection.

In the animal kingdom, it appears the females are overwhelmingly in control of this aspect of evolution. Females fruit flies have bred their males to be better dancers. Females of many bird species make their males sing for their affections, an act that announces the male’s presence to predators as well. Most impressive is the way female peacocks have bred their males to grow ridiculously burdensome feathers, which require incredible nutritional resources to grow and make them easy prey for predators.

This Fantastic Display Makes Him Easy Prey (An Albino Peacock) Credit: lightgazer

Angler fish exhibit one of the world’s most dramatic examples of sexual dimorphism in order to adapt to the sparsely-populated abyss of the deep sea. Male angler fish are miniscule in comparison to their female counterparts. On the rare occurrence that a male encounters a female in the deep sea, he attaches himself to her, merging their circulatory systems. The male then proceeds to lose his eyes, mouth, and other organs until only his reproductive organs remain, supplying the female with sperm for reproduction and essentially turning her into a hermaphrodite.

Female Angler Fish with Male Credit: Dr Tony Ayling

Sexual Dimorphism in humans is a much more controversial subject. Who’s selecting who in human evolution?

While some traits are obviously a result of each gender’s role:

Male (left) and Female (right) Pelvis Dimorphism Credit: Gray’s Anatomy

It sounds as though human men and women have been selecting each other equally, when we consider some of the mate preferences that have been established:

Studies have also shown that humans have “subconscious” mate preferences (Thornhill and Gangestad 1996). Men generally prefer women with .7 hip-to-waist ratios, small jaws, plush lips, large eyes, and firm, symmetrical breasts. Women, on the other hand, generally have been shown to prefer broad foreheads, large jaws, strong chins, above average upper-body musculature, and a .9 hip-to-waist ratio (Cowley 1996).

There are a many other, less obvious differences of metabolism, subcutaneous fat, and antibodies, which do not settle the debate either way. One of the most hopeful findings in recent years is that men and women may have selected one another for intelligence. Our large brains require a great deal of nutrition to maintain, and can sometimes get us into as much trouble as they keep us out of.

Further Reading:

• Theories on the Evolution of Sexual Behavior.
• Examples of Sexual Selection in nature.
• Aphids switch between sexual and asexual reproduction depending on the season and food supplies. Aphids produced through sexual reproduction have wings in order to help them migrate to other locations where food might be more abundant.

This is my all-time favorite museum exhibit, and it’s only occupies one wall. This takes us from bacteria all the way up to mammals along a chain of increasing complexity. This is the most impressive display of diversity in life on planet Earth there is, and maybe my complete innability to do it justice in photos is why I’m also the most dissappointed in this flickr set.

Hall of Biodiversity

You can see the complete flickr set here, but you really have to see it for yourself.

“At this stage, Mr. Haro, we have exhausted all options,” the doctor was explaining softly. “It’s time to settle your affairs.”

Haro nodded slightly from his prone position, where numerous tubes and wires bound him to the bed, which he now knew he would never rise from again.

He waited for the electrodes to stimulate his diaphragm, inflating his lungs, and spoke through the exhale. “All is settled,” he paused for the inhale. “There is only this matter…” The word faded off as his breath failed him.

The doctor leaned in slightly, “I have several recipients lined up. Your eyes will restore one person’s vision. Your kidneys will save two lives, and your liver will be divided up to save the lives of numerous people. Additional recipients will have their quality of life improved with your other organs.”

“Mr. Haro,” the man in a business suit sitting across the bed, interrupted, and the doctor flashed an angry look. “Your condition may be incurable now, but medical science is potentially only a few years from a cure. I can almost guarantee you would be in stasis for less than a decade. Then you could continue your charitable work, saving millions of lives rather than just the handful your organs will save.”

“Mr. Haro,” the doctor countered, “If you are resuscitated ten years from now, you won’t have the assets to continue your work. Everything you own now will be redistributed according to your will following your death.”

“Only because the courts do not recognize the potential for life. You might be clinically dead, but not permanently dead,” the finely dressed man leaned in and gently squeezed Mr. Haro’s hand. “With the wealth of your estate, we could easily prevent the redistribution of your assets for ten years, and when you are resurrected, we will set an historic legal precedent.”

“What if…” it was the doctor’s turn to lean in now. “What if you do set a precedent? What if everyone stops donating their organs in hope of being resuscitated? You have the opportunity to live on in others.”

“Our company isn’t offering to extend your life metaphorically… as spare parts in other people.”

“I was talking about your ideals.”

A long, cold silence filled the room. “Doctor please…” Mr Haro paused as his lungs inflated again, and he gestured at the salesman. “Remove this demon… from my shoulder…”

Okay, so I’ve officially gone from admiration to mere respect, and now to plain dislike of John McCain. He made my list for the following point about Barack Obama in Tuesday night’s debate:

He voted for nearly $1 billion in pork barrel earmark projects including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?

All I could think was, Oh he did not just go there.

But it’s true. In fact, McCain has previously refered to Planetariums as “foolishness.”

Adler Planetarium, Chicago IL Credit: Shoppingdiva

How can you be against Planetariums??? Planetariums never did any wrong to anybody!!! In fact, just the opposite! Planetariums have coaxed countless young urban minds out of their heads and inspired them with the awe and majesty of the universe. I still have the starmap I got during one of my childhood visits to the Planetarium.

For someone who has to overcome public concerns over his technological illiteracy, John McCain’s calling the Adler Planetarium’s state-of-the-art multimedia system an “overhead projector” is a huge misstep.

Adler Planetarium Projector (Not an Overhead Projector) Credit: Meironke

Maybe John McCain’s thinking of his own childhood visits to the planetarium, when it was just people making shadow puppets with their hands by candlelight. Today’s planetariums are like IMAX on crack. I paid $10 for a 20-minute show at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s planetarium, and it completely blew my mind. I am certain Senator McCain hasn’t been in one of these new planetariums, because, if he had, he wouldn’t be such a grumpy-butt trying to deny the rest of us the pleasure of attending them.

Credit: msmail

This is not the first time McCain has judged science through the filter of his own ignorance. In the first presidential debate, McCain attacked a study of Bear DNA as pork-barrel politics, remarking, “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money.”

Actually, it was evaluating the endangered status of one of America’s largest mammals. Refusing to support science to protect America’s environment undermines McCain’s assertions that he is a Teddy Roosevelt Republican–one of the greatest Environmentalists this country’s history. Teddy created the National Park Service, what’s McCain offering to live up to that legacy?

America’s superiority in science and technology are what has made us the shining example for the world for decades. Planetariums and science education are not foolishness. Somebody needs to tell McCain to stop hating on us Geeks and show some respect.

To quote the textbook Information Science by David G. Luenberger, on the units of measurement for information:

A popular unit is the LOC, representing 20 terabytes, which is roughly the contents of the U.S. Library of Congress when converted to digital form. (Emphasis mine)

That’s right, America has a Library so #$%&ing grandios that Information Scientists refer to it as a unit of measurment!!! Take that rest of the world!

USA! USA!! USA!!!

One Library of Congress = 20 Terabytes Credit: Me (CC Licsenced, please reuse and redistribute)

And, as keepers of the greatest library on Earth, we must accept great responsibility and learn from the past:

History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again.
– Carl Sagan, referring to the Library of Alexandria (formerly greatest library on Earth

Note: I’ve previously written about conceptualizing megabytes, terabytes, pentabytes, etc, and in my free CC-license book The Spiraling Web, characters share bootleg copies of the LOC online. (Did I mention this book is free (as in beer) and free (as in creative commons)?)

When they broke open molecules, they found atoms. When they broke open atoms, they found explosions.

The Large Hadron Collider is an experiment of gargantuan proportions, 26.7 kilometers in circumference and costing 6.4 billion euros. It’s quest: to find Elementary Particles, that is, particles that are not made of other particles. It is an adventure into the mind-bending world of quantum mechanics.

The Standard Model Credit: AAS

There are two basic types of elementary particles, fermions and bosons. Fermions are the building blocks for all matter, while bosons carry the forces by which these particles interact. It’s easiest to understand most of these elementary particles by looking at how they come together to form an atom.

Atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons form the atom’s nucleus, and they are in turn made up of quarks, a type of fermion. There are six different types of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. A proton is made of two up quarks and a down quark. A neutron is made of two down quarks and an up quark. Electrons take up residence orbiting the outer shells of atoms, and are themselves elementary, a type of fermion.

The bosons hold all of this together, carrying the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear. Gravity is why things fall to the ground, and is enforced by gravitons, a type of boson. Electromagnetism is why electrons orbit atomic nuclei, because the electron’s negative charge is attracted to the positive charge held by the protons in the nucleus. The force of electromagnetism is carried by photons.

Which raises a question that puzzled physicists for many years. Why don’t the protons within the nucleus of an atom push each other apart? With each carrying a positive charge, the protons are repulsed by one another electromagnetically, like two magnets pushing each other apart. This is where the strong force comes into play. As we mentioned before, protons and neutrons are each made up of three quarks. These quarks are held together by gluons, which carry the strong force.

As its name implies says, the strong force is very strong; however, it also has a very short range. When protons and neutrons come together in an atomic nucleus, the quarks within the protons bind with the quarks in the neutrons. These strong force bonds between neutrons and protons are more powerful than the electromagnetic repulsive forces between any protons within the nucleus, and hold the atom together.

Bringing It All Together, a Helium Atom Credit: Me Creative Commons License (Please Reuse!) (Click to Enlarge) There’s a layered PSD (Photoshop file format), you can download here

The big G, not shown in the above diagram, is the force of gravity, carried by gravitons:

The Big G

In a previous post I described first the sub-second moments of the big bang, when the four forces split apart and the Universe started on the path of converting energy into matter. We can see this transformation from energy into matter in the creation of new quarks. As quarks cannot exist alone, and must travel in pairs or triplets, the investment of energy creates two quarks simultaneously:

Two new quarks form and bind to the old quarks to make two new mesons according to E=mc2 Credit: University of Oregon

Here’s a remaining problem, if all of these elementary particles combine to form everything we see in the Universe around us, how do elementary particles, which are massless, combine to form matter, which has mass? Physicists hypothesize the existence of the Higgs Boson, a particle that, when combined with other particles, gives them mass. Researchers have been searching for experimental proof that this particle exists at FermiLab and CERN laboratories for 10 years now. The Large Hadron Collider, the largest atom-smasher yet, may finally prove this elusive particle’s existence.

By some accounts there are more than 293 subatomic particles, many of which are combinations of quarks and gluons. The Large Hadron Collider is nearly guaranteed to discover many more as it smashes atoms together, reproducing the Universe’s environment just after the Big Bang, to momentarily recreate the elementary particles that existed in that brief moment of time.

Proton-Proton Collision Credit: CERN

Further Reading:

A terrific summary of the Elementary Particles and Forces encapsulated in Quantum Physics, with lots of illustrations and diagrams.

Wikipedia’s list of elementary particles.

Astute readers will notice I skimmed over the weak force, this was because the weak force works between neutrinos and electrons, an interaction unfamiliar to most people (myself included), and I did not want to complicate things. : )

This has been a year of firsts for me this presidential election season. My first time voting in a primary, first time donating to a political campaign, and my first time ever being this incredibly addicted to the daily news (Honestly, I can’t wait for this to be over so I can stop refreshing the news sites every five minutes to make sure there are no horrible surprises).

So I made a last minute decision to attend the Barack Obama rally in Newport News, Virginia, driving an hour and a half, standing in a line that was 16 blocks long when I got there, and quickly grew as far as the eye could see behind me.

16 Blocks to Get In

Among the many wonderful, positive people I met at the rally was Linda, a surveyor for the CDC, who was attending every rally she could make it to. Linda told me she had contributed to McCain’s campaign in 2000, but that he wasn’t the same man anymore, and that she was throwing all her support behind Barack Obama because she felt this was a crucial turning point in our Nation’s history.

Another woman made the excellent point that she was raising her children to work things out without violence, and she needed a president who represented that principle. Everyone I spoke to wore a great big smile and said they were there to witness history.

Linda

The overwhelming majority of the crowd, myself included, had absolutely no view of the stage whatsoever, but we stood in the heat to hear Obama speak. After eight years of George Bush, I’m desperate for an articulate President. Obama gave a great speech about health care, sound bites from which I would hear on the news all afternoon. I wanted to get a photo of the man, a souvenir of my experience, but that didn’t seem likely.

My (non) View of Obama

After the speech, I hung around, photographing people as they left, all of them beaming with energy. Eventually, the crowed thinned enough that I could approach the stage. I wanted a photograph of at least the setting I where it took place. A large crowd was still swarming there, and I soon realized they were all focused on a single point, with boom mikes hovering over it and all cameras pointed at it.

This, I realized, was Obama, and I merged with the crowd, holding my camera in the air and clicking away, hoping it would capture what I could not see. I followed the crowd as the point of focus moved across the park, and eventually vanished behind a large black curtain and a white tent.

Where’s Obama?

The crowd mostly dispersed, but a group of over a hundred remained, chanting “O-BA-MA!” to the tent. This chant became a series of “Shhhhh’s!” after a campaign worker asked us to keep it down as Obama was giving an interview. : )

I took the opportunity to play “Where’s Waldo?” with my attempted photos. I couldn’t tell if I had gotten any photos of Obama at all (I would later find I had gotten plenty of photos of his forehead). I mostly got a lot of photos of other people’s cameras being held in the air, also trying to get lucky.

Several people said we should all go home, that we were being silly hanging outside his campaign tent hoping to catch another glimpse of history. People were asking each other about the possibility of him coming out again, but no one had any idea. We all seemed to be hanging around, knowing our candidate was just a few dozen feet away, hoping for the encore to a show many of us had actually missed.

And then… W00T! W00T!! W00T!!!

OBAMAAAAAAAAAAA!!! (Click to Enlarge)

Even though he was just a few feet from me, I still had to hold my camera in the air and click away, hoping to get a shot. These were the best ones I got. He came out, ducked under the rope, and walked up and down the crowd shaking hands. The crowd, of course, went wild, and I got what I hope will become another first a month from now: my first time seeing a real-life American President.

I happened to make it on opening day to this exhibit. TGAW, my wonderful adventuring partner, came along with me, pointing out all the most interesting parts of the displays I was too busy taking photos of to notice. I’d been eagerly awaiting the exhibit’s opening since I caught the following enticing glimpse of it months back:

North Pacific Right Whale Eubalaena japonica (Taken several months before the hall opened.)

The Sant Hall is an extremely modernized exhibit for the Smithsonian. It’s not a quiet, static display of old fossils, but a a dynamic, brightly-lit presentation, with videos projected along all the walls. One room presented a video globe showing continental drift, effects of tsunamis, and other features of Earth’s oceans. Neither TGAW nor I could figure out if the globe was animated with projectors on the outside or inside of it.

Leatherback Seaturtle (left) North Pacific Right Whale (right)

A presentation on whales, showing a progression of whale skeletons from their deer-like ancestor, to whales with legs, to our whales today makes one wonder how anyone can reject evolution. Even modern whales have hipbones, and older whales have a pair of tiny, apparently useless back legs.

Dorudon atrox (note the hind legs)

Trilobites! Trilobites! Trilobites! I had no idea there were such biodiversity within this species that, now extinct, was once one of the most populace species on Earth. No wonder flickr has a Trilobite group.

Trilobite Asaphus kowalewskii

Sometimes I get so down into the effort of cataloging everything I see, I end up forgetting the forest around me. Without TGAW, I would’ve missed the absolute coolest part of the exhibit: the GIANT SQUID. Kept in a refrigerated tank, this enormous animal stretches almost the entire width of the exhibit.

Giant Squid

It’s a fantastic modern exhibit, highly recommended. You can see the complete flickr set here.

The complete dismantling of universe Hexonia was a tragic, however necessary evil. It was a series of genocides numbering in the hundreds of billions, but all of the matter within our own Universe was all ready consumed in our ultimate computation.

The question naturally arose, in those brief moments when there was sufficient processing power and memory briefly unallocated to consider it, of why we could not chose a universe devoid of life? But only a universe with similar environmental constants could produce the up and down quarks necessary to interface with our systems. 

In every Universe like our own, life inevitably flourished. Hexonia’s life was too young to understand the dark forces by which its galaxies winked out of existence, one by one. When their universe’s bubble of space-time finally collapsed, there was only our computer to remember them… so long as we could spare the resources.

Hexonia’s streams of quarks were now flowing through the system. Up quarks and down quarks, constituting a binary language of ones and zeros trillions of light years in length. It was enough to last us another hundred billion years, if Moore’s law held true. Only when we come to the end of that computational cycle will we consider the unthinkable once again.

We must continue computing in order to learn what we are computing for.

Science Debate 2008 has posted the two candidate’s answers side by side, and I have taken the time to thoroughly review them. Obama comes out the obvious winner in this debate for consistently demonstrating a clear understanding of the issue and proposing specific policies to handle it. McCain only clearly won on the topic of Space Exploration, where his answer was absolutely fantastic. Obama and McCain did come out equal on several points, and both of them failed on the issue of water.

So here are a comparison of the two candidate’s answers to Science Debate 2008:

1. Innovation: Obama

Clear win for Obama on this one. In concise terms, he outlines his plan to double basic research funding over the next ten years, implement Service Scholarship programs, Teacher Residency Academies, make the R&D tax credit permanent, and provide broadband Internet connections for all Americans.

How will we pay for this? Education pays for itself.

McCain says he will fund, not increase funding, for basic research. He will cut wasteful spending to reallocate it for science and technology, and he will encourage the commercialization of federally funded research (you can read the problem I have with this last concept here.)

2. Climate Change: Tie

The two candidates set practically identical milestones for reducing carbon emissions. Obama correctly covers the international cooperation dimension of the issue, McCain the technological innovation.

3. Energy: Paris Hilton

McCain’s X-prize for plug-in hybrids, 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030, and clean coal technologies are crucial as a short term solution to our impending energy crisis. Obama’s support for the digital smart grid, increasing new building efficiency by 50 percent, extending the Production Tax Credit, and requiring 10 percent of American electricity come from renewable sources by 2012 will put this country on a real road to permanent energy independence.

So Paris Hilton’s plan takes it:

We can do limited offshore drilling with strict environmental oversight, while creating tax incentives to get Detroit making hybrid and electric cars. That way, the offshore drilling carries us until the new technologies kick in, which will then create new jobs and energy independence. Energy crisis solved.

4. Education: Obama

While McCain recognizes the importance of Community Colleges and continuing education in America’s educational health, his only real increase in funding involves a $250 million grant program to expand online education opportunities. While this is nothing to scoff at, Obama’s education policy provides a comprehensive set of solutions, from programs to promote teachers in STEM subjects, a bill all ready introduced to support STEM education, an amendment to the America Competes Act to support summer education, Teacher Service Scholarships, a Teacher Residency Program, and Career Ladders to attract qualified STEM teachers. Obama will also provide Americans a $4,000 American Opportunity Tax Credit to higher education.

5. National Security: Obama

While Obama’s plan to double basic research for the Department of Defense seems like giving even more money to an agency that gets more than enough funding as it is, it is McCain who makes the strongest argument for why Obama’s plan will benefit the American people, when he says, “We are benefiting today from technology that was invented for military use a quarter of a century ago (e.g. the Internet, email, GPS, Teflon).”

If we accept the logic that innovations from military R&D trickle down to the general public, then it is Obama who clearly demonstrates a deep understanding of how to best direct our security research. While Obama wants to correct the management problems at the DHS, accelerate alternative energies to cure our petroleum dependence, restore domestic production of critical defense systems, and enhance connections between researchers and soldiers in the field, McCain, strangely enough, offers no hard details at all.

6. Pandemics and Biosecurity: Obama

Both Obama and McCain adhere to the “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” approach to preventing bioterrorism, which leaves America completely open to attack from homegrown terrorists like Bruce Ivins and Timothy McVeigh. Obama takes a slight edge over McCain on this subject for his plan to work with the international community to contain pandemics, while McCain emphasizes a local community response, which would do nothing to prevent a bird flu pandemic from coming into America.

7. Genetics Research: Obama

McCain acknowledges the potential power of genetics research, and makes a great point about the potential for genetically engineered crops to alleviate hunger in impoverished nations. He also emphasizes the need for oversight of this growing field. In comparison to Obama’s statements, however, McCain’s appear nebulous in their lack of specifics.

Obama recognizes the impact genetics research will have on medicine, agriculture, energy, environmental sciences, and information technology. He has introduced the Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act of 2007 and recognizes the importance of following the recommendations of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee.

8. Stem Cells: Obama

McCain does not specifically state that he will lift the ban on federal funding for stem cell lines beyond what is currently funded and he hopes technology will eliminate the need for embryonic stem cells, while Obama clearly states he will lift the ban and expand federal funding for stem cells.

9. Ocean Health: Tie

McCain demonstrates a clear understanding of the nature of the myriad threats to our marine ecosystems. From invasive species, pollution, agricultural runoff, and over-fishing, he recognizes the multi-faceted approach necessary to preserving our ocean’s health.

Obama demonstrates a clear understanding of the tools at his disposal to effectively implement policies to protect our Oceans. From NASA, the NOAA, NSF, USGS, the Law of Sea convention, Coastal Zone Management Act, National Marine Sanctuaries and Oceans and Human Health Acts are all recognized as part of the arsenal an American President has at his or her disposal for keep our Oceans healthy.

10. Water: Neither

McCain showed a slightly better understanding of the issue. Obama showed a slightly better understanding of the technology to solve it. Neither candidate recognizes the gravity of the situation, which probably the result of it mostly being a state-level issue at present. Wait until two states go to war in the courts over who has the rights to a river, and we’ll see the issue get some real attention.

11. Space: McCain

Obama recognizes the importance of dazzling the world with an American Space Program both human and robotic; however, it is McCain that clearly demonstrates a comprehensive view of the world space race currently underway. McCain gives an excellent overview of the Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and European space programs and what they are accomplishing.

McCain acknowledges that the scientists are highly critical of the scientific value of human space flight, but emphasizes its importance for inspiring Americans to continue supporting the space program. As Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, he has directed legislation to fund space exploration, Earth science, and aeronautics research, as well as legislation to enable the commercial space industry, improve NASA after the Columbia accident, and control costs at NASA. McCain has also asked the Bush Administration to continue the space shuttle program until the Ares/Orion vehicle is ready to launch.

(There was much more to McCain’s plan, which I don’t have the time to include here.)

12. Scientific Integrity: Obama

Both Obama and McCain will restore scientific integrity to the White House. McCain makes the excellent point that government research is funded by taxpayers, and, therefore, taxpayers have a right to that research uncensored and they have a right to an administration that will follow that research. McCain will restore the science and technology advisor to the White House and strengthen the OSTP.

Obama will use information technology to provide an increased level of transparency for the White House and increase participation by American’s in debates surrounding science policies. Obama’s team of science advisors includes several Nobel Laureates. He promises to appoint qualified individuals to science advisory positions, no matter their ideology. He will establish the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and will strengthen PCAST.

13. Research: Obama

Slight edge to Obama here. Both candidates recognize the importance of basic research, but it is Obama who notes that our science agencies “are often able to support no more than one in ten proposals that they receive.” Both candidates will increase funding for basic research, but it is Obama who clearly states he will double basic research budgets over the next decade.

How will we pay for this? Basic research ultimately pays for itself.

14. Health: Obama

Both candidates recognize the disparity between what American’s pay for healthcare and the quality of healthcare we receive in comparison to other countries. McCain feels our pain and hopes technology will ease it. Obama proposes solutions to solve it such as requiring insurance companies to cover preventative medicine, protecting the patient’s right to choose their doctor, and supporting the NIH, CDC, and FDA’s efforts to monitor the health of the American people.