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Scientists in North Carolina say they have identified a gene that affects IQ, a finding that, if confirmed, would be a significant step toward understanding the genetic basis for intelligence. The new research could also have ethical implications because the effect of the gene appears to be quite dramatic: The scientists say that males who inherit a particular version of the gene have, on average, an IQ that is 20 points lower than males who don't. "I have to admit, the ramifications of it are great," said Randy Jirtle, the Duke University biologist who led the new research, noting that...

The campaign against the company is about union politics. It is a testament to the public-relations success of the anti-Wal-Mart campaign that the question above is even being asked. By any normal measure, Wal-Mart's business ought to be noncontroversial. It sells at low cost, albeit in mind-boggling quantities, the quotidian products that huge numbers of Americans evidently want to buy--from household goods to clothes to food. ...Wal-Mart's average starting wage is already nearly double the national minimum of $5.15 an hour...The company has also recently increased its health-care options for employees on the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. Starting...

Just off Coney Island Avenue, in Ditmas Park, among the car washes and Pakistani sweet shops, there sits a lefty coffeehouse that seems to have dropped in from Williamsburg or maybe Seattle. Inside, the walls are painted an inviting shade of yellow; undulating, handmade bookshelves feature local zines—one of the store's bestsellers is America (The Book), by the creators of The Daily Show. A small latte is $3, 10 cents less than at Starbucks. Vox Pop, as the café is called, is the anti-Starbucks in more ways than one. On March 1, its six employees, led by 18-year-old Emmy Gilbert,...

Like thousands of other single women living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Brigette, 24, collects Medicaid and food stamps. Unlike most of her neighbors, she's white and a college graduate—the kind of welfare recipient rarely considered in debates over public assistance. Brigette, whose parents and two sisters run a restaurant in rural Vermont, got her B.A. in film from Bard College, a top-tier liberal arts school in upstate New York. She moved to New York City about two years ago to pursue experimental filmmaking. As young self-styled bohemians have always done, she found a neighborhood with cheap rent and cobbled together a...

The 2006 federal education budget proposal, released in detail earlier this month, is a lot like Jon Stewart—smaller in real life than it looks on TV. President George Bush touts a $100 annual increase in Pell Grants for the next five years, but the grants in real dollars are worth some $800 less than they were in 1975. Meantime, he proposes eliminating specialized programs aimed at increasing college access for poor, minority, and other underserved students, and a thousand other cuts for an overall budget decrease of 3.7 percent. The Greatest Generation had the G.I. Bill to pay for college....

Economics-free trade may have contributed to the extinction of Neanderthals 30,000-40,000 years ago, according to a paper published in the “Journal of Economic Organization and Behavior.” “After at least 200,000 years of eking out an existence in glacial Eurasia, the Neanderthal suddenly went extinct,” writes University of Wyoming economist Jason Shogren, along with colleagues Richard Horan of Michigan State University and Erwin Bulte from Tilburg University in the Netherlands. “Early modern humans arriving on the scene shortly before are suspected to have been the perpetrator, but exactly how they caused Neanderthal extinction is unknown.” Creating a new kind of caveman...

No sooner out of the starting blocks on a rerun of the Mideast peace process than an avalanche threatens to close the road. This time it is not the Palestinians and the long-running shell game whose champion player was the late Yasser Arafat. Israeli commentators already refer to the gathering storm as "the third intifada." Writing in Yediot Ahronot, a leading Israeli newspaper, Nahum Barnea expects in the coming months, "a furious, hurt community ... prepared to take violent action and a leadership that is forced to line up behind the threats of the militants. This is a dangerous game...

Panel says professor of human origins made up data, plagiarized works A flamboyant anthropology professor, whose work had been cited as evidence Neanderthal man once lived in Northern Europe, has resigned after a German university panel ruled he fabricated data and plagiarized the works of his colleagues. Reiner Protsch von Zieten, a Frankfurt university panel ruled, lied about the age of human skulls, dating them tens of thousands of years old, even though they were much younger, reports Deutsche Welle. "The commission finds that Prof. Protsch has forged and manipulated scientific facts over the past 30 years," the university said...

The Kyoto Protocol goes into effect Wednesday, and yet its walls are crumbling down. A high-profile campaign by the British government -- focusing on the discussion of a new alarming report by the International Climate Change Taskforce: 'Meeting The Climate Challenge' ...The group was co-chaired by Stephen Byers, a former minister of transport in the Labour government (whose credentials in the field of climate science had remained a well-kept secret until then) and the US Senator Olympia Snowe. In order to secure a politically correct outcome of the exercise, its instigators apparently did not want to run the risk of...

"In a unique effort to attract college and graduate students to the growing discussion over Social Security's future," reads the press release, "four leading national youth organizations are offering generous prizes to the student team that best answers this question: How would you spend $100,000 to get America's campuses talking about Social Security?" It sounds like a great approach to one of today's hottest political issues. Unfortunately, this particular press release was dated February 1998. Of the four youth organizations that sponsored the Social Security Challenge, three—Third Millennium, the 2030 Center, and FIRST—are no longer active. Meanwhile, President Bush used...

LAUREL HILL, Fla. A few extra pounds may have saved James "Bubba" Taylor's life. The boy, who turns 9 on Tuesday, avoided serious injury after being struck by a .38-caliber bullet during a target-shooting accident, officials said. "He's a little chunky," his grandmother, Alice Harper, told the Northwest Florida Daily News for its Tuesday editions. "Thank God." Taylor was shot Saturday by a neighbor, James Hinshaw, 44, who was practicing marksmanship with the child. The bullet entered Taylor's right side, and traveled through his flesh without striking any organs. Harper said the boy didn't even originally realize he'd been shot...

China is poised to develop the world's first commercially operated “pebble bed” nuclear reactor after a Chinese energy consortium chose a site in the eastern province of Shandong to build a 195MW gas-cooled power plant. An official representing the consortium, led by Huaneng, one of China's biggest power producers, said the proposed reactor could start producing electricity within five years. If successfully commercialised, the pebble bed reactor would be the first radically new reactor design for several decades. It would push China to the forefront of development of a technology that researchers claim offers a new “meltdown-proof” alternative to standard...

MUSLIMS 'PLOTTED MURDERS' Twelve Muslims arrested in Holland have been accused of threatening to kill prominent politicians critical of Islam. The arrests followed the murder of a Dutch film director who made a movie that criticised the religion. Prosecutors, speaking at a pre-trial hearing of the men, said last year's arrests had foiled further attacks. The group, aged 18 to 27, are suspected of belonging to the extremist Muslim group Hofstad. "We are dealing with a very active radical group," public prosecutor Koos Plooy told a pre-trial hearing in Rotterdam. "The group plotted some very serious crimes including murder, possession...

WHEN the British ultra-liberals in the pre-Tony Blair Labor Party published their lengthy election manifesto in the late 1980s, the radical document so explicitly spelled out their defiance of English public opinion that a Tory politician called it "the longest suicide note in history." Now, in choosing their new national leader, the Democratic Party is publishing a much more succinct suicide note. It reads "Chairman Howard Dean." ... Here's how it works: When moderates and centrists embrace the GOP and President Bush, they leave the Democrats to the tender mercies of the liberals. The party is deprived of the ballast...

Amtrak is in trouble again. Congress didn’t give Amtrak the money Amtrak says it needs to solve many of its problems. Recently the majority of members of the Amtrak Reform Council, which went out of business a couple of years ago, returned to Washington to make a plea to Congress to consider the reforms which the council had recommended. (I was a member of the council.) Among the reforms was a call for public/private partnerships. One member of the council, Jim Coston, has formed a company that could be the basis for public/private relationships not only with Amtrak but also...

The price of oil remains high only because the cost of oil remains so low. We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta. The market price of oil is indeed hovering up around $50 a barrel on the spot market. But getting oil to the surface currently costs under $5 a barrel in Saudi Arabia, with...

Washington -- California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Monday she would consider adding private investment accounts on top of the current Social Security system -- a position that is rapidly emerging as a potential Democratic alternative to President Bush's controversial plan to change the giant retirement program. Feinstein, one of a small band of moderate Senate Democrats whose votes will be pivotal in the Social Security debate, reiterated her strong opposition to Bush's plan to allow workers to divert part of their payroll taxes to fund their own private accounts. "I don't see a private plan that doesn't have real drawbacks,"...

"It is amazing how Democrats refuse to seriously acknowledge the political liability of the Clinton brand," Chuck Todd, editor in chief of the daily political roundup Hotline, writes at www.NationalJournal.com. They admit that with some voters in some unwinnable states, former President Bill Clinton's name is the equivalent of a four-letter word. But try having a rational conversation with a smart Democrat who maintains that former Vice President Al Gore was right and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was wrong about how to handle the former president. ... "Clinton's biggest defenders can't come to grips with the fact that the former...

"...the great race is the contest over which will grow faster -- the government or the economy. The ratio of government outlays to GDP rises when the government wins the race, and it falls when the economy wins the race. In the 1960s, government won... In the 1990s, the economy ...won... ...two major factors at work. One factor makes me optimistic. The other ...pessimistic. The optimistic element ...is technological progress... The economy should grow faster than ever, because of Moore's Law... >The technology of the late 1990s has so far only been ...utilized effectively in a few industries. ..still have...

A Pentagon official who publicly disclosed information showing Russian involvement in moving Iraqi weapons out of that country has been dismissed. John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security and formerly an aide to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was forced to leave his position Dec. 10 as the result of a "reorganization" that eliminated his job, defense officials said. In October, Mr. Shaw told The Washington Times that he had received foreign intelligence data showing that Russian special forces units were involved in an effort to remove Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in the...