Terri Whitehouse December 2nd, 2007

A group of scientists sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid encouraging them to discontinue federal funding of abstinence-only sex education. Some highlights:

Withholding lifesaving information from young people is contrary to the standards of medical ethics and to many international human rights conventions...Governments have an obligation to provide accurate information to adolescents and adolescents have a right to expect health education provided in public schools to be scientifically accurate and complete.

The large-scale Mathematica evaluation of the Section 510 program, released in April 2007, found no measurable impact on increasing abstinence or delaying sexual initiation among participating youth or on other behaviors such as condom use…One of the few measurable impacts of the programs was a decrease in adolescent confidence regarding the ability of condoms to prevent HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

A spring 2005 longitudinal study by Bruckner and Bearman found that abstinence pledgers, when compared to non-pledgers, experienced similar rates of sexually transmitted infection. Pledgers did delay sexual intercourse for a limited period, but when they did start having sex, they were less likely to use condoms. They were also less likely to seek reproductive health care compared to non-pledgers.

Importantly, the emphasis on abstinence-only programs and policies appears to be undermining critical public health programs in the U.S. and abroad, including comprehensive sexuality education and HIV prevention programs.

We also note that a December 2004 Congressional report on federal abstinence programs from the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Government Reform - Minority Staff found that 11 of the 13 most frequently used curricula contained false, misleading or distorted information about reproductive health - including inaccurate information about contraceptive effectiveness, purported health risks of abortion, and other scientific errors.

We would note that all of the mainstream organizations of health professionals that focus on the health of young people have strongly criticized federal support for current abstinence programs. These include the American Public Health Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and the Society for Adolescent Medicine. We have also attached the weblinks to the policy statements from each of these groups.

The full letter, along with valuable links to sources, can be found at RH Reality Check.

And, while we’re on the subject of pound foolishness, WIC funding is in danger of being cut.

• Anti-Science Agenda , Children , Economy , Education policy , Families , General Knowledge , Government Inefficency , Health Care , Middle Class , Science , Sexuality
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Terri Whitehouse September 5th, 2007

Dan Klepal, in today’s Courier-Journal reports on gubernatorial candidate Steve Beshear’s plan to create economic growth and educational attainment within Kentucky:

“My goal is to double the number of degree-holders by the year 2020,” Beshear said, adding that would bring the total to about 800,000. “To do this, we must make higher education more affordable.”

Beshear, a former lieutenant governor and attorney general, also has a plan to keep college graduates in the state. It’s called the Kentucky First Scholarship Program and would forgive one year of state loans for every year a graduate works in Kentucky.

The program would cost about $27 million in its first year, a Beshear spokeswoman said.

Those state loans would be granted only after all other available assistance — such as scholarships, grants and student loans — are used. The program would apply to all students, whether from Kentucky or out of state.

Though some data suggests that Kentucky is experiencing a “brain gain,” there is a general consensus that the state, along with others in the region, ranks quite low when it comes to education. Poverty here remains high. (More on reasons why here.) Meanwhile, our sitting governor advocates phony science and appeasing his fellow neocon hypocrites above making real progress in the state.

• Anti-Science Agenda , Creationism , Economy , Education policy , Ernie Fletcher , Evolution , Gubernatorial race '07 , Intelligent Design , Kentucky , Rural America , Science , Steve Beshear
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Matt Gunterman August 14th, 2007

For the most part, posts at Team DitchMitchKY only deal with science when the issue is Republicans and fundamentalist Christians opposing the advancement of knowledge in the name of cheap political ploys or personal superstitions, but this article from Space.com is just too fascinating to let go without noting.

Notice the title. I’ll entitle my next reflection on John David Dyche “Hot Gas on Earth Mimics Intelligent Life,” and feel quite justified now. It was only a theory until today.

Hot Gas in Space Mimics Life
By Ker Than

Electrically charged specks of interstellar dust organize into DNA-like double helixes and display properties normally attributed to living systems, such as evolving and reproducing, new computer simulations show.

But scientists are hesitant to call the dancing dust particles “alive,” and instead say they are just another example of how difficult it is to define life.

Plasma life

The computer model, detailed in the Aug. 14 issue of the New Journal of Physics, shows what happens to microscopic dust particles when they are injected into plasma.

Plasma is the fourth state of matter along with solids, liquids and gases. While unfamiliar to most people, plasma is the most common phase of matter in the universe. It’s everywhere: Stars are luminous balls of plasma, and diffuse plasma pervades the space between stars. Plasma forms when gas becomes so hot that electrons are stripped from atomic nuclei, leaving behind a soup of charged particles.

Past studies on Earth have shown that if enough particles are injected into a low-temperature plasma, they will spontaneously organize into crystal-like structures.

The new computer simulations suggest that in the gravity-free environment of space, the plasma particles will bead together to form string-like filaments that then twist into corkscrew shapes. The helical strands resemble DNA and are themselves electrically charged and attracted to one another.

The computer-modeled plasma particles can also divide to form two copies of the original structure and even “evolve” into more stable structures that are better able to survive in the plasma.

“These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” said study team member V.N. Tsytovich of the Russian Academy of Science.

Is it alive?

Nevertheless, Tsytovich’s colleague and study team member, Gregor Morfill of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, is hesitant to call the plasma particles alive.

“Maybe it’s a question of upbringing,” Morfill said in a telephone interview. “I would hesitate to call it life. The reason why we published this paper is not because we wanted to suggest this could evolve into life, but because we wanted to start the discussion … once more of what exactly do we mean by life.”

Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, also was cautious in calling the particles alive. “The facts are, we still don’t have a good definition of what ‘life’ is,” Shostak told SPACE.com.

Shostak points out that while most high-school biology textbooks include as requirements for life the ability to metabolize and reproduce, it’s easy to think of things that break these rules. Fire, for example, reproduces and metabolizes, but most people would not say it is alive; and mules, which are clearly alive, can’t reproduce.

“We still stumble on what it means to be alive, and that means that these complex molecules are in a never-never land between the living and the merely reacting,” Shostak added.

If the particles were considered alive though, Shostak said, it would completely overturn another common assumption about life.

“We’ve always assumed that life was a planetary phenomenon. Only on planets would you have the liquids thought necessary for the chemistry of life,” he said. “So if you could have life in the hot gases of a star, or in the hot, interstellar gas that suffuses the space between the stars, well, not only would that be ‘life as we don’t know it’ but it might be the most common type of life.”

• Science
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