BBC radio continues to impress with its coverage of science, and this evening the estimable Dr Carl Sagan receives a whole hour of airtime with Archive on 4.

The programme is presented by Dr Brian Cox the rockstar physicist who in 1997, as keyboardist with the popular music combo D:ream serenaded the Labour Party into government with the anthem Things Can Only Get Better.

I hope a rockstar entomologist is currently penning the lyrics for the next change of government, since if the rumours about the size of the national debt facing the UK are true we will be needing an army of trained dung beetles to cope with the mountain of excrement left for future generations.

Although I considered London a vile place and fled it for Downe as soon as possible, the existence and writings of its current mayor Boris Johnson are always a delight.

In today’s Daily Telegraph, he writes charmingly of his suppressing his impulse to slay a bee with a copy of book about Marcus Aurelius. Swatting a bee would be one fewer Apis or Bombus to pollinate the world’s flowers and that would be a bad thing.

It would also be an inappropriate use of the tome in question. Surely a book on Aurelius should be used to thrash only jellyfish to death.

a glass of sherry in the direction of the BBC’s Mr. Quentin Cooper and his excellent programme Material World.

Today’s programme, available on iPLayer for the next sennight, is a splendid listen. It includes the following topical segment:

As leaders of the G20 leading industrial nations meet in London to discuss recovery packages for the world’s economies, we ask what science can do to help end the global recession. Historian Eric Rauchway has been looking back to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the attempts to use science to bolster the measures of Franklin Roosevelt’s reflationary New Deal, and how the New Deal laid the groundwork for post-war science policy. Sir Martin Taylor explains the thinking behind the Royal Society’s Fruits of Curiosity enquiry, announced this week to establish the role of science in the UK economy.

Men and women in labcoats leading the world out of its financial depression in ways other than prescribing is an image which gladdens my heart. Some Soviet-style posters and colossal statues of heroic scientists holding aloft items of lab equipment would make tremendously inspiring iconography for the population.

Wales was a country which, for its modest size, produced people of considerable talent. I much enjoyed Dr. Steve Jones’s rewrite of The Origin ‘Almost Like a Whale’ and have had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Tony Campbell who did illuminating work on the flourescing jellyfish protein aequorin and applied it to biomedical diagnosis.

How sad that this country’s legislature now appears to have begun cultivating idiots.

They have made an award of £4500 a pair of psychics who will, at a time of extreme recession, ‘will use it to instruct people on how to contact friends and relatives “on the other side”.’

The full story of a country taking a proud history and applying fingerpaint like a three year old is here

I am sure that Aneurin Bevan, father of the welfare state would become Aneurism Bevan, were he alive to see such nonsense.

65 million years too late and how could you have stopped the comet anyway? I hear you cry. Their extinction is settled, but it is their reputation that is under assault from our thoughtless media.

Too often the word ‘dinosaur’ is used as an exemplar of obsolescence. Don’t be a dinosaur, one advert chid and advised an immediate upgrade of one’s company computer systems. A picture of an Apatosaurus skeleton looming over what must have been a large computer tower (certainly knee-high to an Apatosaurus) subliminally made the point. Buy our computers or you will go extinct like those lumbering small-brained failures the dinosaurs.

Advertising copywriters and creatives found guilty of this offence should be gored by Triceratops horridus (or better yet the subspecies T. reallyhorridus) for such misrepresentation. Dinosaurea were a superorder which dominated the land for 160 million years with such success that for many millenia ‘mammal’ meant ‘free range dinner’.

The inspiration for NSPOD is in the virtual pages of the British political journal the Spectator. A journal in the Conservative interest, its columnist Mr Clive Davis has tossed off two impressive paragraphs about those who use racist terms while disguised in white wine in BBC green rooms and their more vociferous supporters who ‘make fools of themselves in comment threads.’

They may rave, recite, and madden round the land, they may have stegosaurian brains the size of walnuts, they may have more brains in their hindquarters than in their heads but they are not dinosaurs.

If correspondents see any further co-option of these noble beasts in the service of mammon or mouth-frothers, please contact chazdarwin at googlemail dot com and we shall disembowel them, as with a Velociraptor’s claw (which of course could simply have been a climbing aid and not at all an evolutionary adaptation intended to inflict misery on corrupt men in cinematic presentations).

“At 9:25 p.m. on Wednesday 15 October 2008, Jill Rafael-Fortney sat down at her home-office computer and wrote an e-mail to Michael Ostrowski, the chair of her department at Ohio State University in Columbus.

“Mike, I didn’t get either of my grants. I just found out about the second one a few minutes ago. My career in research seems to be over. It is all I ever planned to do from the age of six, so I don’t really have another well thought-out plan. Can we talk tomorrow?”

Rafael-Fortney had tried, and failed, to renew the R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that supported her work on mouse models of muscular dystrophy. She had tried, and failed, to get a new R01 grant to study a genetic abnormality that might be widespread in human heart failure. At nearly 39, she had run out of track."

From the august journal which runs this network. It is a good, if dispiriting read that presages the culling of US scientists between the ages of 35 and 50.

Their new President is being buffetted by economic storms but promised to restore science to its rightful position. I suspect the excellent Darcy Kelley and Jill Rafael-Fortney (a consolatory glass of sherry in their direction), and the many unnamed scientists whose plight they echo could find excellent use for some of Mr Obama’s economic stimulus package.

Probably far better use than the bankers (who, I understand have trousered some $20 billion of bonuses for their outstanding recent performance) and the automobile manufacturers who continued making large fuel-hungry vehicles in the face of overwhelming evidence that the world cried out for thrift.

I have wiped more and better brains off my rock hammer than those erstwhile masters of the universe have been found to possess.

A damp but cheerful postlady arrives at the door bearing a communication from a correspondent. It seems that someone has asked the Advertising Standards Authority to investigate whether Danone’s fermented milk based products which claim to boost digestive transit and immune systems are indeed “scientifically proven”, as their television commercials claim.

We await the outcome of the investigation with some interest. It would be regrettable if the cause and name of science was allowed to be attached to products for commercial gain without independent verification.

the noble Lord Drayson who works as minister for science appeared on the wireless programme Today to extol the virtues of science and make a bid to to change its perception among the population. The noble Lord, who unlike many in Government has experience in the field in which he ministers said: ‘..many people really believe that science can have a big impact on our future. We really need to change this if we going to fulfill the full potential of our country.’

’What we’re trying to do is change the perception, bust the myth about elitism…and show that science is relevant to everyone.

’We expect jobs focused on maths and science to increase by a third in the next few years. We want to get to the stage where people talk about science the way they talk about football, about art. It’d be quite cool for people to understand how to bend it like Beckham for example.

‘We are seeing that the proportion of children sticking to science through school is increasing. But they really don’t see how science is relevant to the development of their own careers.’

The interview is here, scroll to 0720.

I look forward to the British population debating science with the passion they currently reserve for soccer. One of my favourite ways of whiling away an hour over my Saturday evening sherry is to listen to 606 on BBC Radio Five Live, where Britons sometimes hit Ciceronian heights of oratory in their appreciation of Association Football.

When biological sciences have their own hour long phone in on prime time national radio – possibly called Sex Oh Sex – we will know that this branch of the sciences has arrived in the public consciousness in the manner wished by the noble Lord.

Having changed the public conversation about science, it would be wise for the Minister to apply his mind and ministerial team to improving the employment conditions of young scientists on the ill-paid, insecure postdoctoral treadmill. Fine ministerial words on the dead ball abilities of a fading soccer star are welcome, but they butter no Pastinaca.

I see a little more social identity theory at work in the popular prints this weekend. A consultant for the usually estimable journal New Scientist, writing in yesterday’s Guardian has suggested that scientists suffer from an inferiority complex.

Mr. Brooks must meet scientists of a very different kidney to those whom I am privileged meet in my peregrinations. I find these people quite the opposite, in fact I would go so far as to say that our laboratories contain many whose years of study, reading and research have produced people most secure in their intellects and, when you enquire further with enormous personal and cultural hinterlands outide their scientific life. A scientist can venture into the literature, art and music and go way beyond the mere dilleante. As science becomes ever more complex and costly, the reverse is not true.

Scientists are intensely aware of the boundaries of their work, indeed it would be irresponsible of them not to be, but that does not equate to a feeling of inferiority. Sceintists are some of the cleverest people around, and they know it, but they do not claim to have the cures for all the ills of the world in ther lab coat pockets as Mr Brooks seems to suggest many think they have.

To bolster his somewhat tenuous case, Mr Brooks joins other journalists in apostrophizing the Large Hardron Collider. As dinosaurs are fascinating to children because they are large, terrifying and extinct, the Large Hadron Collider exerts an almost hypnotic attraction to journalists because it is large, very expensive, will do something way beyond their comprehension and has been constructed people who are, in the words of the Daily Telegraph’s Scientific Prognosticator ‘clever clogs’. The risk of it creating black holes has been underestimated, it seems by a minute amount of interest only those interested in the minute fractions of a minute amount.

Mr Brooks states some truths that scientists would not dispute: ‘Science is not the arbiter of truth. All it can do is offer opinions about the answers to certain questions that we ask of nature. And it reserves the right to revise those opinions in the light of future discoveries.’

Indeed. He then loads both barrels of his fowling piece, takes careful aim and shoots himself squarely in the foot:

‘Even mathematics loses touch with any notion of truth once it steps into the real world. Last May, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Germany, warned that financial systems were operating in dangerous territory because traders were transferring their naive notions of the truth of mathematics on to the “black box” models used to predict and control trading.’

So, a mathematician warns that those erroneously applying mathematics for their own ends risk the failure of that enterprise.

‘A few months later, we all found out just how dangerous that territory was.’

Were I that mathematician I would not be feeling inferior, I would be feeling rather vindicated. I would also question whether the current world financial crisis can be laid solely at the feet of mathematicians, which is what Mr Brooks seems to imply.

is definitely President of the United States of America, it was inspiring to hear the man say to a listening world that his administration ‘…will restore science to its rightful place’. The BBC reports that scientists are optimistic about President Obama.

Of course, we have all heard politicians give undertakings of this kind before. And we have equally seen politicians then ignore them. President Obama makes this undertaking at a time when the economy of his country is in a parlous state, which is not the 51st state the Union would have wished for.

Science is a more expensive undertaking now than when £500 would take a young naturalist on a five year circumnavigation. That sum would not now purchase a quarter of a machine to undertake polymerase chain reactions. While mortgages are being foreclosed, automobile manufacturers are asking for large quantities of money and banks are in trouble, it will a brave President who will pledge large sums of federal funds to support science. It will also be a far-sighted President who pledges money to support science.

President Obama could start cheaply by continuing the tone set in his Inauguration Address and forbidding state education boards attempting to have creationism or its degraded offspring intelligent design taught in science classes as recently happened in Louisiana.

A great deal has been written about President Obama’s election, and it would be otiose of me to raise a glass in his direction when the ever excellent Dr. Revere at Effect Measure does it with such eloquence in this post. The post ends with a truly splendid song.