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© All stories 2000-2005 unless otherwise noted. Click titles to access full story.

Never judge a group by its cover story. That may be the moral of a new study about morals in journalism.

Despite the journalistic travails of Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, The New Republic's Stephen Glass and syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams, "journalism is one of the most morally developed professions in the
country," says University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism professor Lee Wilkins.

Questionable acts of commission-fraud, plagiarism, and deliberate deception-have recently scandalized The New York Times and wrecked the journalism careers of Times reporter Jayson Blair and former New Republic writer Stephen Glass.
Journalistic omissions may be just as potent and deceiving. When reporters know the whole truth and only report select facts, they can mislead their readers, damage the reputations of their subjects, and hurt their own credibility.
In recent issues of Discover, Publisher's Weekly, the Christian Science Monitor, and other well-regarded magazines, some of the world's best science journalists misled readers by omitting important facts about research reported by scientists John Moffat, João Magueijo, and a best-selling book on the speed of light.

Here at the turn of the 21st century, it is common to observe that journalists have become more famous and powerful than the politicians they cover. It is less well known that journalists once were politicians, some of them among the most prominent candidates, officeholders and party operatives in the nation.

So begins The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2003, University of Virginia Press), University of Missouri history professor Jeffrey Pasley's eye-opening examination of the critical role printers, editors and their newspapers played in the political life of early America.

Mixed news on the newspaper front
St. Louis Journalism Review, January 2004

The news about newspapers wasn't good in the months before 9/11 when the authors of a highly publicized critique gave U.S. newspapers failing grades in a host of readership areas.

"Newspapers used to do things better," said study co-author and University of Illinois communications professor Kevin Barnhurst. "They engaged readers better. They invited people into politics better. They presented multiple voices better. They encouraged argument better. They told stories better."

Once the foremost instruments of democracy, newspapers may now be shortchanging democratic principles, explained University of Missouri (MU) journalism professor Betty Winfield.

A changing code of ethics may be to blame for the public's largely negative perception of journalists, University of Missouri (MU)-Columbia researchers claim in a new study.

"All modern American literature," Ernest Hemingway wrote, "comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
Nothing as good, and perhaps nothing as good that is as flawed.
"In form and style Huckleberry Finn is an almost perfect work," wrote literary critic Lionel Trilling. "Only one mistake has ever been charged against it -- that it concludes with Tom Sawyer's too elaborate game of Jim's escape."
Why Twain may -- or may not -- have misfired with his literary magnum opus remains a question scholars have tackled for years but never resolved.
"This question is an urgent and meaningful one that critics would like to answer," said University of Missouri-Columbia literature professor Thomas Quirk, a nationally known Mark Twain expert.
Twain historian Carl Freiling from Ashland, Missouri may have the answer. With an elegant and simple theory, Freiling also raises "many big questions," said Duke University literature professor and Twain scholar Louis Budd.

When Tyrannosaurus Press Roamed the States
The World and I July 2003

Anyone who thinks the press is biased--either toward the right or left--should read historian Jeffrey Pasley's carefully crafted and lucidly written The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic.

Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and National Public Radio have nothing on the journalist politicians of colonial America, who openly proclaimed their partisanship, tyrannized opposition candidates, and insisted on the freedom of speech we take for granted today.

The boundless nature of digital information has troubled the recording industry for several years and may pose new and perhaps equally troubling developments for journalism.

Unfettered by the traditional barriers journalists impose on headlines with typesetting, paper, and
editorial decisions, public information officers now routinely post press releases as bona fide "news" at many popular and widely read Internet news outlets. This practice is particularly widespread in
science journalism, where institutional press releases that simplify complex scientific milestones frequently dictate the headlines.

Montgomery, Alabama attorney Fred Gray, Sr. has long championed civil rights. When authorities arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white person, Gray was her defender. When 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. led a boycott of those same buses and faced legal action, 25 year-old Gray was the lawyer at his side.

But Gray has also long championed an African-American icon of a different sort -- a man who almost single-handedly brought black history to museums, schools, and public institutions around the nation -- sculptor Isaac Scott Hathaway.

Hathaway left a valuable, significant -- and before now -- undiscovered part of his artistic vision at Douglass High School in Columbia, Missouri: a bust of the hero that first inspired him, abolitionist and newspaper editor Frederick Douglass.

By accepting large settlements attached to confidentiality clauses, attorneys may have been complicit in repeated cases of child molestation. If these settlements, estimated to have cost one billion dollars, were indeed 'hush money,' the plaintiff's bar is reduced to a sophisticated shakedown racket with as much dirt on its hands as any petty blackmailer who conspires, for a price, to cover up a crime.

Effective Illegality
Tort litigation is wiping out lawful products by rendering them "illegal"
Los Angeles Daily Journal of the Law February 8, 2000
The current onslaught of product liability suits directed at the tobacco and firearms industries poses a serious question in the annals of modern jurisprudence, a question that both the business and legal communities must eventually answer: when does the manufacture and distribution of a legal product become "effectively" illegal?

Recapturing lost youth -- How Boomers Powered the Tech Boom
Dayton Business Journal and Boston Business Journal November 2000
Hundreds of crazy e-businesses have received billions of dollars in angel, first- and second-round financing over the past half decade, only now to face extinction. It's hard not to wonder why this incredible wealth transfer occurred in the first place, assuming that most of the money came from seasoned business executives, professionals and institutions. After all, hundreds of sound business plans have been turned away by the venture types who have eagerly financed so many brainless e-commerce schemes.

Illegal Status Can Kill Legal Product
National Law Journal April 17, 2000
An onslaught of product liability suits can make the manufacture and
distribution of a legal product "effectively" illegal. And effective
illegality, as in the cases of asbestos, breast implants, the Dalkon
shield, or Primatene asthma pills, can bring about the end of a
product.

Peter Angelos has helped to effectively outlaw products from asbestos to breast implants and only the vast deep pockets of the tobacco industry have prevented him from doing the same to cigarettes. Now
this high priest of the mass tort has his sights set on the wireless telecom industry, with damage claims that will run into the billions.

Great Hush
The legal system shouldn't allow criminals to buy their way out of justice
Los Angeles Daily Journal of the Law May 29, 2002 (print only)

Reporters aid, abet legal opportunists
Columbia Tribune December 17, 2000
Dimpled chads, pregnant chads, "chads in the third trimester." The very physical existence of these tiny strips of ballot paper is a metaphor for the trivial pursuit our legal and journalistic professions now find themselves abiding in the public eye.

The 2000 Election Crisis and the Business-Government Ideological Divide
Liberty July 2001 (print only)
A polarization has become increasingly evident in the American body politic that has reached its zenith with the 2000 presidential and legislative elections. While manifested by an almost even split between Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the Administration, this divide runs deeper.

It's a split that Ayn Rand clearly discerned, and one that Amity Shlaes, columnist for the Financial
Times, recently wrote about.

Are We Home Alone In the Universe?
published by Hispanic Magazine
Is there life on distant planets? Is an intelligent being watching over us?
Is the truth out there -- somewhere?
Speculation about these big questions made the X-Files a cultural phenomenon. Trying to answer them using real science has made the career of Cuban-born astronomer Guillermo González colorful and controversial.
A research professor of astronomy at Iowa State University, González is a leader in the new and burgeoning field of astrobiology—the “highly interdisciplinary study,” he explains, “of life in the universe: its origin, distribution, and destiny.”

TORONTO PHYSICIST John Moffat, who has made a career of questioning the cosmos, faces a vexing question himself. Does he feel vindicated, people ask, now that his controversial theory about the speed of light is finally getting the recognition it deserves? The soft-spoken, 70-year-old Moffat might answer with a resounding "yes," if not for a painful irony -- while publicity is shining on his theory, the media are lavishing credit on another scientist.

New Wrinkle in Hawking's Black Hole Theory
Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking has been backpedaling recently on the idea that nothing can escape the limitless gravitational pull of black holes -- collapsed, dark stars. He now claims that some information can break free of their once-thought inescapable "event horizons."
Hawking's new theory may be old hat to MIT engineering professor Seth Lloyd, an expert in quantum information, who claims that black holes allow so much information to escape that they might make viable quantum computers.

A medieval Islamic argument for a "caused creation" may be
scientifically testable, claims an Argentine astronomer.

"Caused creation" implies a "creator," an implication of the Kalam
Cosmological Argument (KCA), popularized by philosopher William Lane
Craig.

"The Kalam Cosmological Argument is perhaps the most solid and widely
discussed argument for a caused creation of the universe," said
Gustavo E. Romero, head of the group for relativistic astrophysics and
radio astronomy at the Argentine Institute for Radio Astronomy in
Buenos Aires.

Stephen Hawking: God may play dice after all
Famed physicist presents divine-snowball theory for start of universe
published by WorldNetDaily

Despite an aging Albert Einstein's famous comment, "God does not play dice with the universe," renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking and his academic collaborator Thomas Hertog now suggest that God did roll the dice at least once – at the moment of creation. Like that familiar wizened sage atop the highest peak, God cast that first die down a mountain of potential energy where, according to Hawking and Hertog, it rolled like a snowball, growing, expanding and inflating into the universe we know today.

Serpentine black holes may be slithering across the cosmos
published by MensNewsDaily

Snakes in the gas -- cosmic gas -- may be slithering across the heavens, physicists recently told ScienceNewsWeek. With undulating event horizons and slippery disappearing acts, serpentine black holes called "black strings" may soon steal the spotlight from their famous black hole brethren. Long considered too unstable to exist, black strings are beginning to emerge from a shadowy realm -- newly characterized extra dimensions in space.

The Politics of Science
published by Science and Spirit Magazine
"There exists an endless tension between politics and science," said Jack Sommer, Knight Distinguished Professor of Public Policy Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. With that simple statement, Sommer crystallized what has become a hot-button issue of late, with politicians on both sides of the aisle hurling accusations at each other ranging from the disingenuous use of science to flat-out lying.

European Science Finds Funds Frozen
published by Science and Spirit Magazine
In recent months, European newspapers have repeatedly warned that global warming will eventually submerge parts of the continent under rising floodwaters. But it's a chillier reality dogging Europe in the here and now: a transcontinental "cash freeze" in the sciences that has tempers rising from Austria to Spain. According to recent news reports, European science is "under fire," "underfunded," and "on shaky ground."

Sowing the seeds of peace
published by Science and Spirit Magazine
The Peace Prize may be the only Nobel lacking a research angle, but fellows at a little-known government-sponsored think tank believe research is a cornerstone of the peace process. Flying well under the radar of an American public increasingly concerned with news of its country making war is the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) -- a federally funded, publicity-shy, 1984 congressional creation with a single guiding mandate: nonviolent conflict resolution.

Sir David King, the chief science adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, appears ready to tone down a controversial statement on climate change he made last month in Science (9 January, p. 176).
But it took a forgetful press aide to bring the matter to light.

Moral Leaders Now More than Ever
published by Science and Spirit Magazine
Politicians seeking higher office this year will need two things to be effective leaders: moral principles and common sense notions of right and wrong. The theory comes from scholars who research the guiding principles of leadership. Americans, sickened by failures of leadership like those exposed by the recent corporate fraud and Catholic Church sex abuse scandals, could hardly disagree.

UC Davis: Using Information to Conquer Cancer
published by Synthesis a UC Davis Cancer Center Publication
Cancer research has created an arsenal of diagnostic, prognostic and treatment strategies, putting powerful tools in the hands of clinicians. But another mighty weapon - information - resides in the laptops, notebooks and minds of cancer investigators everywhere. For all of this data to be of real benefit, however, it has to be shared.

The Solomons’ Decision
published by Science and Spirit Magazine
Leaving the safety net of insurance companies behind, a husband and wife
take their medical practice into their own hands—and think they have made the wise choice.

Can Prayer Slow Alzheimers?
published by Science and Theology News
Going to church may not only be good for the soul, but good for the mind as well, say Canadian and Israeli researchers who found that religious practice may slow the insidious progress of Alzheimer's disease.

Researchers Suggest That Universal ‘Law’ Governs Tumor Growth
by Mike Martin
Journal of the Natl Cancer Inst
May 21, 2003; 95: 704-705

Modeling the growth and development of tumors with specialized software, mathematics, and biologic data is a burgeoning area of cancer research. Biological scientists seeking to model nature have increasingly turned to "fractals"—jagged geometrical arrays that never simplify or smooth out, no matter how close you look at them. Fractals and tumor modeling have recently merged in a simple and ingenious "universal growth law." Originally formulated for normal organisms, this growth law may also apply to benign and metastatic tumors.

Stories below by Mike Martin published by The Medical Post of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Math model shows cancer is a DRAG
A mathematical equation derived from simple rules governs the transformation of normal cells into malignancies, says an international research team that has used the equation to build a model of cancer progression.

Medicine from Charlotte's Web
Two strikingly different natural materials -- spider webs and pig ligaments -- point the way to the next generation of artificial tendons, researchers say.

Fibrinogen strands spun into bandages
By spinning strands of the blood-clotting protein fibrinogen 1,000 times thinner than a human hair, biomedical engineers at Virginia Commonwealth University here may have created the perfect bandage.

New device suggests blood flow could one day power pacemakers
Using nanotubes, scientists here have invented what they see as the precursor to an arterial turbine-a device that would use flowing blood to generate enough electrical charge to power a
pacemaker.

Underwater technology gets under your skin
Submarine technology used to explore the murkiest recesses of the ocean floor is making subcutaneous examinations of internal organs easier. Specifically, British physicians and surgeons are using the once
top-secret technology to scan obese patients and study 3-D images of the beating heart.

C’mon, you can trust me
published by Science and Theology News
With digital dollars that move every second between numbered accounts — not through human hands — society has become obsessed with trust. To study the concept, economists are unlocking the role of trust in financial transactions, while neurobiologists have located centers of the brain responsible for trusting cooperation. Psychologists, meanwhile, now believe that happiness, altruism and mood-elevating neurochemicals all enhance trust behaviors.

An Unintelligent Decision?
published by Science and Spirit Magazine
The Smithsonian Institution's decision to show a controversial film recently had scientists calling on the august national repository to censor itself and cancel a sponsored screening of "The Privileged Planet."

Faith Comes in Shades of Gray
published by Science and Spirit Magazine
To believe or not to believe: That's the question behind humanity's relationship with an unseen God. While anthropologists have produced volumes in answer to half of the conundrum -- in what do we believe -- University of Missouri anthropology professor Reed Wadley and religion researcher Angela Pashia have found that the other half -- what forces and values make us shake our heads in disbelief -- has been left largely unexamined.

Psychologist questions why we speak well of the dead
published by Science and Theology News
Better dead than Red. Better dead than look bad. Live free or die.
Indeed, as author Stephen King wrote in his novel Pet Sematary, “Sometimes, dead is better.” But better dead than …alive? When it comes to reputation and moral character, dead is better, said University of Arkansas psychology professor Jesse Bering.

Philosopher saw divinity in the grind of daily life
published by Science and Theology News January 2005
Langdon Gilkey — a giant of 20th-century Christian philosophy — died Nov. 19 of meningitis in Charlottesville, Va. He was 85.

Gilkey’s ideas on humankind’s quest for meaning closely paralleled those of Jewish psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.

Neurotheologians convene at Kansas City conference
published by Science and Theology News December 2004
Are we wired for spirituality? We may be, said Michael Winkelman, an Arizona State University anthropology professor who organized the neurotheology section of this year’s Society for the Scientific Study of Religion annual conference.

A Call to Reconcile Islam and Science
published by Science and Spirit Magazine
Half a world away, there’s a raging debate between academic scholars and religious fundamentalists about how to reconcile modern science with Muslim doctrine.
Recent editorials in mid-East newspapers shed light on a side of Islam not often highlighted in the West since September 11 -- a side where the teachings of Mohammed are considered a mandate to create rather than a call to destroy. Shorter version here

Social welfare influenced by religious participation
published by Science and Theology News December 2004
More welfare can mean less religion, Anthony Gill announced at the 55th annual Society for the Scientific Study of Religion conference. Gill, a political science professor at the University of Washington, asked, “Does government welfare spending depress the level of religious participation?”

Study surveys spirituality’s sweet sixteen
published by Science and Theology News September 2004
   Sixteen basic human needs motivate people to embrace religion, claims a new study that introduces a psychological theory of personal religious experience.
  “Previous psychologists tried to explain religion in terms of just one or two overarching psychological needs” — fear of death and guilt, for instance — said Steven Reiss, the theory's creator, and a professor of psychology and psychiatry at OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY.
  “But religion is multi-faceted — it can't be reduced to just one or two desires,” he said.

Class Warfare
published by Science and Spirit Magazine

How best to teach children about life's origins is a bone of contention in more and more states.
Advocates of competing theories are finding no room for compromise.

   At the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), the reports come in so fast and so furious these days, they are now referred to simply as “flare-ups.”
   The “flare-ups” come from both intelligent design (ID) and creationism. In both cases they challenge the notion—and current law—that evolution, and only evolution, should be taught in science classes.
   But they employ very different strategies.
   And more vexing for all those involved in the three-sided issue—ID, creationism, and evolution—it appears that finding common ground when it comes to teaching our children about their origins is a long shot at best.

New faith research shows how religions evolve
published by Science and Theology News

Faith - the concept of belief without need of proof that has forged empires, fomented wars and shaped much of human history - may exhibit important biological traits, scientists associated with a well-known think tank recently said.

These traits, such as evolution, mutation and natural selection, have now been modeled for the first time.

Cosmologists catch glimpse of the beginning
published by Science and Theology News

The boundless, all-encompassing notion of eternal existence without beginning or end may not be so eternal after all, according to a paper presented at a recent cosmology symposium. A trio of renowned cosmologists - including Alan Guth, whose theory of inflation remains the best explanation yet for the size and structure of the universe - wrote the paper, presented at The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England.

Reducing Andrew Newberg
Using hightech imaging techniques to observe changes in brain function that occur during meditation and deep prayer, University of Pennsylvania radiology professor and neurological imaging specialist Andrew Newberg has sought to expand our understanding of God by showing how our minds move beyond the self and open to the divine.

The World's Most Mysterious Manuscript is a Hoax
At least that’s the conclusion reached by British researchers who have finally decoded the so-called Voynich Manuscript, a book with lavish illustrations of astronomy, astrology, alchemy, cosmology, herbal remedies … and infamously indecipherable text.

British Museum Takes on Taboos
(scroll down)
The Dana Centre—a new British museum—wants to showcase science by tackling taboos. From Galileo to Galois, taboos have tethered history’s greatest minds like the slings of Lilliput. Often rooted in religion, taboos also prevent the rest of us from seeing science for all of its forbidden—and forbidding—beauty.

From Big Brother to Big Blogger?
(scroll down)
From the blogosphere: An Orwellian tale about
radio transmitters implanted beneath the skin that Internet bloggers
suggest may be the "dawn of the human bar code."

Creating Virtual Michelangelos
published by ComputerBits
You've probably heard the conjectures before: if only Gutenberg had a Xerox; if only Mozart had a MIDI; if only Einstein had an Apple. With great tech tools, how much more productive would these geniuses have been?
A research team from the University at Buffalo (UB) in New York is asking a similar question. What if Michelangelo and Rodin could have sculpted in virtual reality, before chiseling away on their next masterpieces?

New Threats to Teens: Pro-Anorexia Web Sites
published by ComputerBits
As if pornography and predators weren't enough to worry parents, Internet sites espousing the virtues of anorexia -- so-called "pro-ana," or pro-anorexia sites -- have popped up on the World Wide Web. These sites encourage girls and young women to starve themselves in pursuit of "bodily perfection."
"Pro-ana web sites are analogous to web sites for cocaine addicts that tell them how to do cocaine, or web sites for depressed people that instruct them on how to overdose, shoot, or hang themselves," said University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) behavioral neuroscience professor Mary Hagan, who is presently studying this worrying Internet trend.

Will Carbon Chips Ever Be Computer Bits?
published by ComputerBits
Carbon chips may one day be a viable alternative to silicon chips in many applications, say researchers at Xerox who have been trying to perfect so-called "printed organic electronics" with several major breakthroughs along the way.

"The electronic configuration of carbon is very similar to that of silicon, so many researchers have looked to carbon as an alternative to silicon," said University of Missouri computer science professor and department chairperson Harry Tyrer. "Science fiction has taken the opposite tack proposing silicon based life forms," Tyrer added.

Living Computers: Bringing IT to Life
published by ComputerBits
Computers that mimic life by evolving with their tasks, replicating their microchips, and healing their own circuitry may represent the future of information technology. "Borrowing from biology -- learning from it to advance computer science -- is one of the most exciting and promising areas of exploration going on," says IBM Corporation technology & manufacturing senior vice president Nick Donofrio. Even the Internet was inspired, in part, by the way synaptic networks in the brain "know" to route around damaged tissue to develop a failure-resistant communications system.

Paperless OfficeCase studies show how and why
published by ComputerBits
If wireless was the last big thing, paperless may be the next for IT professionals seeking to cut storage space, reduce costs, and improve efficiency by reducing mountains of paper to bits of data.