While we have immensely enjoyed being a part of Scienceblogs, we’ve decided together that it is time to move on. Our tremendous thanks go out to Seed for hosting The Intersection since 2006 where we’ve been honored to share the network with such an esteemed community of bloggers–many of whom have become good friends.

While we’re excited to join Carl, Phil, and Sean, it is a bittersweet decision as we will miss the Sb ‘family’ tremendously. Of course, we will never be far–the blogosphere has no boundaries after all–and the discussion grows larger and more interesting every day…

The Intersection at Discover will maintain its archive of posts and comments, growing as we continue to explore the intersections of science, politics, and society. We’re also preparing to announce some exciting new projects so stay tuned! Most of all, as we make this transition, the blog will become the central clearinghouse for discussions relating to our new book, Unscientific America, which we’re very proud of and which hits this June/July.

Thanks to sciblings, readers, and Scienceblogs for years of support and friendship! Please update your feed, bookmarks, links, and blogrolls with our new address
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection and come visit us as we settle in!

Discover The Intersection 3.0

Today we’re pleased to announce that the website for the event featuring the full schedule is now available here. Tickets are going fast so we encourage readers to take a look at the agenda and register soon.  We hope to see you there!

The Origins Symposium will inaugurate the new Origins Initiative at ASU, which will be a University-wide transdisciplinary endeavor supporting research building on key areas of strength at ASU including: the origin of the universe, origins of stars and planet, the origins of life, human origins, origins of consciousness and culture. It will focus on specific topics and different times, and also build transdisciplinary bridges. A key component of Origins will also involve public outreach and education, as well as exploring new paradigms for undergraduate education.

As we’ve announced, our new book due out this Spring will be entitled Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.

We’re in the final stages of editing the manuscript and will be able to say more about its content very soon, but for now, we’re excited that we can finally show you the cover…

Climate change, the energy crisis, nuclear proliferation–many of the most urgent problems of twenty-first century require scientific solutions. And yet Americans are paying less and less attention to scientists. For every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science; 46 percent of Americans believe that God, not evolution, created life on earth; the number of newspapers with science sections has shrunk from ninety-five to thirty-three since 1989. The disconnect between the scientific community and American culture grows wider every day.

In Unscientific America, journalist and best-selling author Chris Mooney and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum explain how corporate interests, a weak education system, science-phobic politicians, and hyperspecialized scientists have created this dangerous state of affairs. They also propose a broad array of initiatives that could reverse the current trend and lead to the greater integration of science into our national discourse–before it is too late.

It’s no coincidence that our forthcoming book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is due out at around the fiftieth anniversary of C.P. Snow’s famous lecture entitled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” As Chris explained last week at Science Progress, Snow’s delineation of the broad disconnect between the scientific and humanistic ways of thinking has resonated powerfully across the last half century, and describes a problem that’s very much still with us. And with that we reveal a bit more about a theme of our narrative–as we’ll continue to do over the coming months–but in the mean time, we’re asking for your help…

During our research we came upon a particular passage from John De La Mothe’s ‘C.P. Snow and the Struggle of Modernity,’ describing the coat of arms Snow personally designed and we’ve spent the past weeks unsuccessfully searching for a copy of that image:

Snow’s concern with the mediation between the spheres, and with the potential of the individual, is symbolically reflected in his heraldic device. Designed by himself and his wife on the occasion of being made Lord Snow of Leicester in 1964, it depicts a crossed pen and telescope, which was deliberately chosen by Snow to suggest the relationship between science and literature. It also depicts a motto that Snow held as being deeply meaningful at a personal level and key to anyone’s view of the struggle of modernity. That motto reads: Aut Invenian Viam aut Faciam (I will either find a way or make one).

We traced the correspondence regarding the image to Snow’s archives at
the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.  However,
with the help of some excellent librarians, have only been able to come up with
more references. No copy of the actual coat of arms has been located among
the collection.

But surely C.P. Snow’s armorial bearings are out there… somewhere.  We need your help.  If you, or someone you know, may have information that will lead us to it, please contact Chris or Sheril by email or reply in comments.

What are readers’ greatest hopes for 2009?

from The Intersection

Sheril and Chris

As the rhetoric from the campaign trail demonstrates (remember the ad with John McCain at the wind-turbine factory?), nobody is against renewable energy. But no amount of green talk can change the fact that our economy is dangerously fossil-fuel based and foreign-energy dependent. The reasons are numerous, and in some cases notorious. Congress is hamstrung by pork-barrel politics and regional interests (e.g. West Virginia coal). We still don’t have a federal equivalent to the laws in more than half the states mandating a minimum level of renewable energy. Perverse incentives abound: Utilities, for example, make more money the more electricity they sell, so (with few exceptions–see “Your Electric Bill at Work”) they have little reason to promote conservation. Plus, energy issues are complex and technical, which makes it hard to figure out what our best options are–solar, nuclear, clean coal? Hydrogen fuel cells or plug-in hybrids?

These are the roadblocks and bottlenecks you know. But then there are the ones you don’t, many of which involve what can only be termed our gross national mismanagement of scientific resources.

You can read the full piece now available online, in which we call for a science research and development project to give intellectual heft to the “green jobs” revolution. The point is much similar to the one that Andrew Revkin makes on his blog today, when he asks whether chemists and engineers are on the green jobs list. Our answer–they’d better be; and moreover, isn’t it strange how little is being directly said about science in a national conversation that is, after all, about research and innovation?

One other point–in the Mother Jones piece we propose a National Energy Education Act, to parallel the National Defense Education Act passed in the 1950s following the launch of Sputnik. We want to credit this idea to the Breakthrough Institute, which originally came up with it, and apologize that the article didn’t note this.

You can read the full Mother Jones article here.