On the Record

“You have to have an immediate effort to reduce greenhouse gases. Anything else is a fig leaf and a joke.”

US Senator John McCain urges his colleagues to tackle global warming in a highly contentious bill on energy policy.

“We cannot evade a liberalization of research on embryonic stem cells.”

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder argues that his country must relax its stem-cell policy in a speech at the University of Göttingen.

“This is a whitewash. They took all of our science and reversed it 180 degrees.”

In the Los Angeles Times, Erick Campbell protests that the government altered a report he helped to write on the impacts of grazing. The retired biologist says it was the cattle industry, not the environment, that benefited from the edits.

Number Crunch

A UK survey, released this week, found that many children wouldn't take science at all if they didn't have to. Why?

79% of British schoolchildren think scientists are clever.

7% think scientists are cool.

Source: OCR exam board

Scorecard

Sting fever

Japanese women are clamouring for the chance to spend a night with the jellyfish at Fujisawa's aquarium. The experience is said to relieve stress.

Slick move

Philip Cooney, the White House official who altered climate-change reports, returns to the oil industry with a new job at ExxonMobil.

Speech for the stars

NASA astronaut delivers the first-ever congressional testimony from space, showing lawmakers a surefire way to rise above partisan politics.

Milking it

We feel it in our bones: sales of calcium tablets are set to soar. A ten-year study has shown that the mineral can prevent premenstrual syndrome, although no one knows why.