SYNTHETIC PHOTOSYNTHESIS:

While researchers and technologists around the world scramble to find cleaner sources of energy, some chemists are turning to nature’s own elegant solution: photosynthesis. In photosynthesis, green plants use the energy in sunlight to break down water and carbon dioxide. By manipulating electrons and hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms in a series of complex chemical reactions, the process ultimately produces the cellulose and lignin that form the structure of the plant, as well as stored energy in the form of sugar. Understanding how this process works, thinks Daniel Nocera, professor of chemistry at MIT, could lead to ways to produce and store solar energy in forms that are practical for powering cars and providing electricity even when the sun isn’t shining.

Faster, please.

POLITICS IN IRAN:

The biggest source of discontent in the country is economic. Inflation is about 18 percent and the unemployment rate is moving past 30 percent. Since Ahmadinejad took over, the price of oil has skyrocketed, bringing in lots more money, yet the Iranian GDP growth rate has dropped from four percent a year, to three percent. As a result, the average Iranian is worse off than before. Ahmadinejad promised to spread the oil wealth around, but that has not happened, and most Iranians are not happy. Ahmadinejad and his politically correct attitudes are the cause of the spreading poverty. Ahmadinejad has taken action, but mainly to halt economic activity with the outside world, which he considers largely hostile to Islam. Ahmadinejad wants Iran to be self-sufficient, like North Korea. You get the idea. So do most Iranians, and they are not happy about it. But they are still not willing to fight to change it.

Can’t we encourage them, or something?

UPDATE: More on Iran’s economy, here.

GENDER QUOTAS ON scholarly panels.

MORE PHOTO-FISHBLOGGING from Ann Althouse.

The gar is pretty impressive, and I can’t really match it. But here’s a pretty nice picture of a sawfish that I took when I went to the aquarium with the girls a couple of years ago.

He seemed to like watching the people through the glass. I guess we looked . . . delicious.

To me, he looked kind of like a space alien.

And don’t worry, I’m not going to try to match her dead animal photos, though I passed a bloated roadside possum today and was tempted. Also, sadly, a very pretty little fox. Cars, I guess, take the role of predators nowadays.

THINGS THAT DON’T BOTHER ME: Rudy Giuliani donated to Planned Parenthood? Hey, that’s okay. So have I.

I understand that the pro-life people, and the social-cons generally, are unhappy with this. But hey, a lot of gun-rights people thought that Bush was squishy on the gun issue — and he has been. Nonetheless, he’s been a lot better than Kerry or Gore would have been had they been elected; his support for the assault weapons ban, for example, was extremely limp. Likewise, the social-cons are crazy if they let this sort of thing keep them home on election day in 2008. And I think that the Republicans’ troubles started — as I pointed out at the time — when the social-cons overplayed their hand during the Terri Schiavo affair. But hey, vote for who you want.

HMM. HOW DID I MISS THIS DEVELOPMENT?

“It seems that Europe leads Americans in this way of thinking,” Romney told the crowd of more than 5,000. “In France, for instance, I’m told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past.”

I’m pretty sure it’s different from the Europe of the present, too. I’ve got family in France, and I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Eugene Volokh points to a post by Ana Marie Cox suggesting that Romney got this from an Orson Scott Card science fiction novel set in the future, in outer space.

Now look, I like science fiction, and I wouldn’t mind a President who read science fiction — though I’m not sure the Battlefield Earth thing helps him here — but I also want a President with a firm grip on the difference between fiction and, you know, reality. This is just weird.

UPDATE: Ace:

A truly outrageous move on France’s part to so undermine the very foundation of civilizational organization.

One problem: It’s not true. . . . Coming Next: Romney explains his flip-flop to the pro-life view as caused by the new respect for life gained after witnessing the destruction of planet Alderaan, where “a million voices cried out… and then were silenced.”

Of course, Ace also notes some other alternate-reality enthusiasms that are getting less press attention. Edwards should be ashamed, and needs some book-learning of his own.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader David Fleeger writes about Romney and Edwards (well, mostly Edwards’ “trutherism”) and observes: “I don’t know about you, but for the first time I have begun to feel a little fear for the next year’s elections. The nation can (probably) survive incompetence. Reality-denying psychosis is something else.”

As I’ve said before, our political class was obviously dysfunctional in the 1990s. Times have gotten worse, but they haven’t gotten better. Further thoughts from Rob Port.

MORE: A suggestion that there’s less to Edwards’ gaffe than meets the eye. Jeez, I hope so.

A LOOK AT TREATING AND PREVENTING HEART ATTACKS, from Darshak Sanghavi in Slate.

And here’s a podcast we did a while back on heart attack treatment and prevention.

RUNNING WILD WITH MIKE GRAVEL:

“That’s him!” says a Today show producer. All eyes focus on an old-fashioned Checker cab coming up Broadway, an odd relic in the teeming New York City traffic. It’s a bright Thursday afternoon and dozens of sign-carrying supporters are gathered at the main entrance of Columbia University. They begin clapping and whooping for their new favorite presidential candidate—a 77-year-old most of them hadn’t even heard of a week before.

NBC has taken an interest as well. A crew is on hand to film the rally for the network’s morning show and its 5.3 million viewers. “Wait! Is he driving?” wonders one of the supporters. As the Checker gets closer, the white-haired man behind the wheel waves at the crowd and smiles a broad politician’s smile. He is driving. Newsweek columnist and occasional Today correspondent Jonathan Alter is riding in the back seat, looking a little green. It turns out the two got in a fender bender on the way uptown. The Checker’s brakes went out on Madison Avenue, and Gravel rear-ended another cabbie. But, with no injuries and after consulting a mechanic, they’d pushed on.

A rough ride for Alter, but a good couple of opening paragraphs.

JACOB SULLUM: “The federal hate crime bill is unnecessary, unjust, and unconstitutional.”

NOW THIS IS JUST EMBARRASSING: Squirt guns banned at Tennessee State University.

I’m pretty sure this won’t make anyone safer, unless some crook somewhere dies laughing.

MICHAEL TOTTEN TALKS ABOUT IRAQ and the French elections, on the latest Blog Week in Review.

OBEY CURSES KUCINICH. Kucinich strikes me as a bit kooky, but also as one of the least curse-inspiring members of Congress.

AL SHARPTON SQUIRMING: Not a pretty image.

I HAVEN’T PAID AS MUCH ATTENTION TO THE PELOSI EARMARKS STORY as I should have, but Stephen Spruiell has a roundup. Excerpt:

For now, it appears that the problem is less with Pelosi’s disclosure on this particular earmark and more with the state of earmark reform in general. The Democrats swept into power making a lot of noise about cleaning up the “culture of corruption” in Washington. Earmark reform was a big part of their stated agenda. First, they put a “moratorium on earmarks” until new rules governing them could be put into place. Then the House passed new earmark-disclosure requirements. “It’s good that we’re even having this discussion about Pelosi’s earmark,” Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, tells NRO, “because now [thanks to new disclosure requirements] we know that she’s the one who asked for it.”

But that’s where Democrats left it. The House rules apply only to the House. The Senate lumped earmark reform into its ethics and lobbying bill, which is now languishing in conference and has yet to take effect. Nevertheless, the Democrats must think these half-measures constitute thorough earmark reform, because the moratorium is long gone. The Water Resources Development Bill contains, along with Pelosi’s earmark, more than 800 others. Perhaps the most egregious is a provision to add sand to a California beach famous for its annual sandcastle competition.

The Democrats campaigned as a party that would clean up Washington. But the water-development bill, exemplified by Pelosi’s earmark, is nothing if not Beltway business as usual.

Meet the new boss, yada yada.

WHILE BOB MCCHESNEY AND I HAVE BEEN TALKING about the future of news media, the poor folks at Scripps have been trying to do something about it. Here’s the latest internal memo, which faces the bad news admirably:

You’ve no doubt read about recent challenges in the newspaper business. We’re certainly not immune to many of these trends.

In the first quarter of this year, our total revenues were down 7.8% compared to last year, our expenses were down slightly, and our profit was down 28%. Many of our industry peers posted similar results. While online revenue remained strong (up 20%), total ad revenue fell due to classified advertising declines at our larger papers, as well as some softness in retail advertising.

The long and the short of it is that any business that has declining revenues and sharply declining profits must do something about it.

Some suggestions on what to do can be found in the comments, here.

AXIS OF SOROS?

FRED THOMPSON ON GEORGE TENET:

My attention was drawn to Tenet’s statements that al Qaeda is here and waiting and that they wish nothing more than to be able to see a mushroom cloud above the United States.

Naturally, the media emphasis is not on that. Its attention is on any differences Tenet had with the administration. The media’s premise is that Iraq should not have been considered a real threat to us and that the administration basically misled the country into war. While one may take issue with Tenent on several things, I was intrigued that on some very important issues, Tenet did not follow the media script when answering Russert’s questions.

Read the whole thing.

IN THE KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL BLOG, Les Jones looks at the handgun permit issue and concludes: “Concealed Carry Weapons Permit Holders More Lawful Than Most.” Gee, do you think?

TODAY’S BRAND-CONFUSION MOMENT:

Andrew Sullivan of Instapundit questions Parsons choice of metaphor, seeing as how the Sioux nation ultimately lost the war.

Well, me and Andrew are pretty much interchangeable, I guess! But it’s not BuzzTracker’s finest hour . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Matthew Bown emails: “I think they meant Mickey Kos of Daily Kaus.”

That must be it. . . .

WHICH NEWSPAPER WILL BE THE FIRST TO DIE? Bob McChesney and I address this question in today’s Los Angeles Times. You’ll never guess which one is my pick . . . .

SOME CRAPPIE BLOGGING from Ann Althouse.

IN THE MAIL: John Robb’s Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization. From a quick look, it appears that Robb thinks that state sponsorship will become a less important part of the terror equation, and that we need to start hardening and decentralizing our society so as to make it more resistant to terrorism. I think he’s clearly right about part two, and quite possibly right about part one. He also seems to support “pack not a herd” approaches to security and disaster response, which, again, I agree with strongly.

UPDATE: More on Robb from Ed Cone.

WHY IS OBAMA SO TIRED? “During a campaign speech, Barack Obama overstated the Kansas tornadoes death toll by a factor of approximately 1,000, saying 10,000 had died when only 12 did. He later explained that he made a mistake because he was tired.”

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh points out that campaigning for President is tiring. Indeed it is. That’s a reason not to start early — as I’ve mentioned here before, the sooner you start, the sooner you get tired enough to make dumb mistakes. If Obama’s tired enough to do that now, what will he be like in a year? I suggested a while back, after an earlier gaffe, that he should get some rest and this would seem to underscore the need.

Of course, being president is tiring too, and one of the arguments for a grueling campaign season is that it weeds out people who don’t function well when tired.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Feeling the heat in Alaska:

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has dropped his support for a controversial salmon marketing program he created that has funneled tens of millions of federal dollars to fishing industry interests in Alaska and has become an element of a Justice Department corruption investigation into the Senator’s former aide and his son, ex-state Sen. Ben Stevens (R). . . .

The AFMB’s connection to the FBI probe of Stevens’ son has brought renewed scrutiny on the project and the way it has doled out millions of federal dollars since 2003. Critics of the AFMB, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), have long complained that it is little more than a pork-barrel conduit for special interests and large fishing companies in Alaska.

Perhaps the most high-profile example of what McCain and others call wasteful spending was a grant from the AFMB to Alaska Airlines to paint a jumbo jet to resemble a salmon, a project that cost millions but that was justified as a way to advertise Alaska salmon products.

In the state, however, the AFMB has long been seen as a mechanism for companies and individuals close to Stevens and other members of the state’s Congressional delegation to secure federal dollars.

Pork isn’t just about helping the folks back home, or wasting taxpayer dollars. It’s about corruption.

BLOGGINGHEADS FROM BAGHDAD: Robert Wright talks with the embedded Eli Lake, who’s there covering the surge. Pretty cool. It’s Must-See BloggingHeads TV. No, really — watch it.

(Via Kaus, who has a summary).