Google has a lot of things going for it, as we all know. But one thing I think they really got right was that they allow their employees one day a week - that's 20% of their time - the luxury of working on new, innovative projects for the company. This could be anything their hearts desire, no matter how wacky or overly ambitious. They then have the option to post and test out some those crazy ideas on Google Labs.

And the results are pretty telling. Without this 20% ideas policy we wouldn't have applications like Google Books, Google Scholar, Google Earth, Gmail... the list goes on.

So I know I'm a bit late to be talking about love, but I was traveling on Valentine's day so I missed out on celebrating with my beloved. But I did catch a neat podcast on the American Physiological Society's site, Life Lines.

Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine scanned the brains of young people newly in love. Making sure they thought only about love (not sex - which has its roots in another part of the brain), Dr. Brown scanned the subjects' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they looked at photos of their beloved. She found that their feelings of love could be traced to a part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area - an area that has to do with reflexes and primitive learning (e.g. hunger, thirst) and reward systems. This suggests that romantic love is more of a primal drive to pursue a preferred mate, rather than just an emotion.

Interestingly, both chocolate and cocaine also activate this ventral tegmental area. So maybe the expression 'love is like a drug' isn't too far off the mark!

And now, from the strange bedfellows department:

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, California, have their 500 trillion watt laser beam locked and loaded. Once it's in action this spring, the laser could be a first step toward harnessing fusion energy; a window into the ultra-high pressure environments inside gas planets; and a test lab where astrophysicists can experiment on "artificial stars." And, oh yeah, it will simulate the conditions inside a nuclear bomb. Its priorities, you may have guessed, are not necessarily in that order.

This isn't the first time basic science has piggybacked on research of a more weaponly persuasion. Captured V-2 rockets were the workhorses of post-WWII atmospheric science; gamma ray bursts were discovered by Air Force satellites designed to spot covert nuclear blasts.

So how do we talk about science at NIF while being upfront about the machine's real experimental priorities? You tell us.

The recent economic stimulus package includes financial aid for university science departments. The bill allocates an extra $10 billion for the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and an extra $2 billion for the NSF (National Science Foundation) to stimulate shorter-term grants for science research. The provisions on the money are that it must be used soon and it must stimulate the nation's economy.

So the question is: How will this money be spent? Most federal science research funding has remained flat for several years, so these additional funds are much needed. And while some of the money is being earmarked for laboratory and building improvements, where will the rest of it go?

Of course there are some concerns with the provisions. For example, will we cut funding in global health research in favor of more domestic benefits? Will stem cell research remain off limits, preventing us from finally catching up with the rest of the world in this fast expanding field? And what about providing jobs for all those graduating PhD scientists? While it's great to encourage people to go into careers as scientists, it's not so great when those people find they can't get hired due to the lack of available positions. The NIH has urged universities to make new hires a priority as they contemplate how they will spend the stimulus funding. Will the institutions listen?

New scientific advances can undoubtedly boost the nation's economy (particularly in the fields of clean energy and biomedicine), but we have to choose wisely in how we spend additional federal funds to make sure what science is done continues to provide for advances in all fields around the world.

It's official - the Boston Globe has followed the lead of countless other national newspapers and has decided to deep six its 'Health and Science' section. I'm not surprised, really, as the section has been shrinking steadily for years. It first went from a full, robust stand-alone pull-out section to a progressively shorter couple of pages in the end of the front section just before the op-eds. This morning, as I flipped to the start of the section, I noticed a short note on the top left-hand corner of the page:

TO OUR READERS
Starting next Monday, the stories and features that now appear in the Health/Science section will move to other sections of the Globe. Personal health stories, including Health Answers and briefs about medical research, will move to "g", which will have a personal health focus on Mondays. Science articles, including Ask Dr. Knowledge and The Green Blog, will move to the Business section, which will have a science and innovation focus on Mondays. White Coat Notes will be published online only, at www.boston.com/news/health/blog.

Is this just another sign of the times for the print media or could we look at it in a more positive manner - science is so prevalent that it doesn't need its own section and there is a place for it in all the sections of the paper? I wish I could argue for the latter, but I fear it's more likely the reality we are facing is that science print media is a dying breed.

I suppose that's good for someone like myself who is in science television, but I still feel a sense of loss that yet another consistently measured and reliable form of science journalism is facing such tough times. Besides, didn't our new president just tell us he wants to help restore science to its rightful place? Doesn't that mean we should be working harder to cover MORE, not less science in ALL forms of media?

I was recently in Chicago for the annual AAAS meeting. The AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) is the largest professional science organization in the world. Some 10,000 people participate in the meeting - so it can be a bit overwhelming, to say the least.

This year, though, I had a mission. I focused in large part on the many sessions dealing with evolution. Evolution was a big part of the conference clearly because of the famous naturalist Charles Darwin's birthday (he turned 200 on Feb. 12, in case you hadn't heard).

One of the more entertaining sessions I went to featured Dr. Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London, author, television personality and New York Times blogger. Her session dealt with the topic of evolution and sexual behavior.

I hate to be wrong. I can still remember the time in fourth grade when we were studying powers of ten, and the teacher asked, "What's one hundred times one hundred?" and I raised my little hand and said, "One thousand." Oh no! Wrong! The shame still stings a little.

So maybe it's a good thing that our jobs as researchers involve a lot of fact-checking. Typically, our tireless associate producers do their own fact checking (two sources for every fact, plus expert reviews, if you're wondering). Our job is to check the checking. But sometimes time is tight, or someone forgot to hire an associate producer (oops!), and then your humble researchers jump in to the void.

That's why this article in the February 9 New Yorker (registration required) made me smile. John McPhee (who, wouldn't you know it, just happens to have a Facebook page) pays tribute to veteran fact-checker Sara Lippincott:

Explaining her work to an audience at a journalism school, Sara once said, "Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker's imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick."

So next time you're watching a documentary, and that "Voice of God" narrator comes on and intones something like, "Elephants poop 300 pounds a day," think about the lowly fact-checker, burning the midnight oil in some carpeted cubicle somewhere, reading everything she can get her hands on about elephants' toilet habits--all in the name of getting it right.

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