Ugh! I don’t know why today–more than 15 years after I first heard madness spew from his mouth–I can still get ticked off by Pat Buchanan. The right wing firebrand has spouted awful, racist, xenophobic and backward ideas since before I was born. Most of them are beyond the purview of this blog.

But, yesterday, he wandered into my territory. While discussing the so-called “birthers” with Chris Matthews on the show “Hardball,” Buchanan stated that the birthers’ misbegotten notion that Barack Obama is not a native-born citizen of the U.S. (and thus has no legitimate claim to its…

Last week, the blogosphere played host to a pretty lively flame war between two high-profile science communicators: PZ Myers and Chris Mooney. The subject: Are scientists partly responsible for the widespread ignorance of science that Mooney (along with his partner in blogging and book-writing Sheril Kirshenbaum) document in “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future?“

Well, are they? The answer is probably, yes. Scientists don’t freely offer easy-to-digest sound bites on their work, and are sometimes media shy to the point of just not wanting to talk about it…

Yesterday’s Science Times was largely devoted to the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which launched on July 16 and on July 20 supplied the world with the indelible images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon’s surface and the “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” quotation. Owning its distinction as the only American paper with a dedicated weekly science section, the Times went all out for the occasion: There are reflective pieces from staff science writer Dennis Overbye and movie critic A.O. Scott, a profile of a still-active conspiracy theorist…