"Anti-science" or "cautious" ... how you regard skeptics of positions that are ethically or scientifically subjective is often a matter of how you already believe.   If you are a Republican concerned about the ethical implications of human embryonic stem cell research, whole books can be written on how Republicans hate science.   But if you are in astronomy and have watched every program started during the Bush years get gutted since Democrats took control of Congress, you might think Democrats hate Congress(1) more.  In reality there are legitimate issues involved and it is up to policy makers to navigate them.

Two days ago I wrote here about the projected reach of Higgs boson searches of the Tevatron experiments, discussing what can be seen by CDF and D0 if they combine their analyses results, after improving them as is today thought possible to do. The reach was shown as a function of the integrated luminosity, which allows one to infer what can be done if the Tevatron stops running in 2011 or, as is being proposed, it continues for a few more years.

Oil fields are highly specific ecosystems - they contain no oxygen and the temperature, pressure and salinity are often high, which makes them home to a very particular community of bacteria.

Geert van der Kraan, a doctoral student who received his Ph.D. from TU Delft on the subject, says using bacterial changes as a biomonitoring tool in oil fields can be a way of keeping tabs on the state of the oil field itself - and increase its yield.