Science

In what could be an encouraging sign of change in the long-standing shortage of Americans preparing for "clean energy" careers, the subject is suddenly hot on college campuses across the nation -- a surge of interest largely stimulated by the specter of global warming.

The nation's largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change. Chamber officials say it would be "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" -- complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.

The ongoing debate over whether religion and science comfortably coexist got more ammunition this month, and on both sides of the argument. This ammunition took thought-provoking forms -- a foundation dedicated to exploring provocative questions, a letter written in 1954 by Albert Einstein and a Vatican astronomer who said it's OK to believe in space aliens. Let's start with Einstein. The letter was sold at auction in London on May 15 for $404,000. Einstein, writing a year before his death to philosopher Eric Gutkind, said, "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

"Science has become much less cool," journalist Chris Mooney writes in "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future" (July 2009, Basic Books). Mooney, author of the 2005 bestseller "The Republican War on Science," and his coauthor, Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine scientist at Duke University, seek to explain how Americans have come to minimize science when, they say, we need it most -- as global warming, advances in genetics and the possibility of climate engineering lie in our future.

In Japan, the country that gave the world innovations like instant noodles and the Sony Walkman, science has always been seen as a profession that is supposed to produce something useful. The Japanese celebrate the tinkerers and technicians, the no-nonsense types who built the postwar economic dynamo. Pure scientists, cloistered away in underfunded labs and pursuing their dreamy theories, have never caught the national imagination. They just aren't practical enough.

Scientists have devised a way to determine roughly where a person has lived using a strand of hair, a technique that could help track the movements of criminal suspects or unidentified murder victims. The method relies on measuring how chemical variations in drinking water around the country show up in the hair of people who drink the water.

“Mad Men,” season premiere, AMC, July 27. The premise: It's 1963, and Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a 36-year-old creative director for Sterling Cooper advertising agency, needs a physical. He visits his regular physician, whom he hasn't seen in "quite some time," acknowledging that he has a high-tension job and that he consumes five alcoholic drinks and two packs of cigarettes per day. The doctor discovers that Draper has high blood pressure.

Science historian Dan Lewis opened the green cloth cover of "The Origin of Species," Charles Darwin's classic work on evolutionary biology, and flipped to Page 20. And there, in the 11th line of text, was the telltale typo: "Speceies." That misprint marked the book as one of the 1,250 copies originally published in London in 1859.

AROMATHERAPY -- the use of plant oils to improve well-being -- sounds lovely, doesn't it? How wonderful if a whiff of lavender could make you feel drowsy, or a little dab of rosemary oil could relieve muscle pain. There's certainly a plausible biological basis for the idea that scents can have a direct effect on the body. On the yucky side, for instance, nothing makes me nauseated more quickly than the odor of those "air fresheners" that taxi drivers hang in their cabs.

Please investigate hypnosis for weight loss. GWEN H.\o7 Compton --- \f7The product: You're getting sleepy. Very sleepy. But are you also getting skinny? Hypnotherapists across the country are staking claim to the multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry. Through websites, newspaper classifieds, radio spots and local TV ads, they pitch waist-reducing therapy sessions and slimming CDs. Some even offer to hypnotize clients over the phone.