The politics of science is about more than just funding and science-based policy decisions: governments, and in particular the US Federal Government, are into science education in a big way, whether you like it or not. In fact, it's hard to see how the US government can avoid being in the science education business, even if it's not setting national standards for local schools: when people want to know about swine flu, they turn to the US Centers for Disease Control; the major science agencies, the NSF, NASA, NIH, DOE, are obligated (sometimes by law) to explain to the public how billions of dollars of research funds are being spent, and many of the US national parks have visitor centers that explain the science behind the parks' impressive natural wonders.

In the last few days I indulged in a rather technical description of the checks I made on DZERO's evaluation of the significance of their observation of Omega_b particles. In those occasions I did not discuss either what the Omega_b is, nor what is its relevance, nor the details of how DZERO collected a small but significant sample of events characterized by the production of that ephemeral particle.

LAS VEGAS, May 19 /PRNewswire/ --

- Spirent Data Center Testing Solutions Deliver the Industry's Only Unified Layer 2-7 Test Architecture for High Performance Virtualized, Eco-Friendly Networks

"We have the habit, as humans, of only thinking that what we see is real", began Neil Tyson.  Our job as astronomers is to 'turn something invisible and make it real'.  His premise: space weather is important to study, but scientists also have to step up their game in communicating why this is important.

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke at the 3rd Space Weather Enterprise Forum today.  As an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, part of his job is "when the universe flinches and the reporters come to knock on my door" it's "because there is a hunger" for science.

LAS VEGAS, May 19 /PRNewswire/ --

- Spirent's Award Winning Solutions, Services Mitigate the Risk of Migration to New, Advanced Data Centers

HUNTINGTON BEACH, California, May 19 /PRNewswire/ --

- FireScope Business Service Management (BSM) Selected As Winner In Enterprise 2.0

FireScope announced today that Network Products Guide, the industry's leading publication on information technologies and solutions has named FireScope Business Service Management (BSM) a winner of the 2009 Product Innovation Award. The prominent award recognizes innovative and groundbreaking products that are bringing essential and incremental changes as well as raising the bar for others in all areas of information technology.

Georg, over at Lattice Points noted a piece about open science in Physics World:

The adoption and growth of scientific journals has created a body of shared knowledge for our civilization, a collective long-term memory that is the basis for much of human progress. This system has changed surprisingly little in the last 300 years. Today, the Internet offers us the first major opportunity to improve this collective long-term memory, and to create a collective short-term working memory — a conversational commons for the rapid collaborative development of ideas.

NEWARK, New Jersey, May 19 /PRNewswire/ --

- Online survey asks participants about plans for transforming their Lotus Notes and Domino platform in exchange for periodic summaries and a complimentary copy of the final report so they can compare their plans to their peers

Binary Tree announced today the call for participation in the Benchmark Survey on Transforming the Domino Platform. This online survey will enable participants to compare their plans for transforming their Lotus Notes and Domino platforms with that of their peers with periodic summaries of the responses as well as a complimentary copy of the final benchmark survey report.

SEATTLE, May 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Telnic Limited (http://www.telnic.org), the registry operator for the new communications-focused .tel top level domain (TLD), today announced at the International Trademark Association (INTA) Annual Conference, the release of a free tool enabling webmasters, web designers and web hosts to integrate .tel technology directly into the 'contact us' pages of their existing websites, making them 'live'.

AMSTERDAM, May 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics (Euronext: AMT), a leader in the field of human gene therapy, today issues it's business update for the first quarter of 2009, summarizing material events that took place during the quarter and providing an update on the cash position.

Q1 2009 material events:

- Preparation of preregistration clinical trial with Glybera(TM) in Canada - Data indicating that Glybera lowers pancreatitis incidence significantly - Good progress in research and development for other pipeline projects - CEO Dr. Ronald Lorijn stepped down