Brian Brown: National goals are precisely what keep people feeling lost and apathetic.

Zachary Crippen: Manned space isn’t on the agenda, nation-building has lost its appeal, and huge government programs are hardly conservative. But there are upsides to national goals.

“As long as one is a Naturalist, ‘Nature’ is only a word for ‘everything’. And Everything is not a subject about which anything very interesting can be said . . . .” C.S. Lewis, Miracles

With high unemployment and a shortage of high-tech degree holders, President Obama wants more students in the hard sciences. But what is he really asking of them?

Last week I attended a conference on environmental regulation that reminded me how difficult it is to balance the demands of science with the demands of politics. Science gives us a set of standardized methods and tools to help us to understand the physical world. Using these methods and tools, we add to the body […]