would allow federal employees to be paid for four of the twelve weeks of parental leave to which they are entitled under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) (P.L. 103-3). The legislation also would permit federal employees to use up to eight weeks of accrued sick leave for parental leave.

Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA) is horrorstruck by the untold expense this is going to cost the government.

"I would...ask that federal workers take note of what we do here today. We are not talking about making sure that someone who has a child or adopts a child has the opportunity to take the time off for bonding. We already ensure 12 weeks of that and have for [more than a] decade." Rep. Issa continued, "[L]et's look at this from a practical standpoint. You are running a federal department. You have somebody who you need, and every single year, as often happens, they take on a new foster child that they keep for three to five years and they have, let's say, three foster children. That means that individual will be gone on paid leave over and above their vacation, over and above their 13 days of sick leave a year, they are going to be gone four weeks every year, conceivably for a full 20 years. So, by having not just the birth [of a child]...we can conceivably go so far beyond the $850 million [in Congressional Budget Office] scoring, we could easily end up in the tens of billions of dollars

I am struck dumb by this apocalyptic vision of federal employees with hordes of foster children bankrupting the U.S. government. Here you thought the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a costly enterprise that threatens our economic security, but it turns out it's the foster children of federal employees combined with the evils of paid parental leave. Who knew?

I arrived in Arlington Texas this afternoon to attend the annual meeting of the American Society of Parasitologists. I'm going to give a talk tomorrow about the public awareness of parasitology, talking about my long-term relationship with the beasties in books, articles, blogs, and beyond. But till then, I get to hang out with parasitologists. I've met a lot of the people here over the years, like the leech-master Mark Siddall, and I've read the work of a lot of people I'm just meeting (work on things like how lice jumped from gorillas to human ancestors).

And I'm also hearing new people talking about research I've never heard before--"nice and weird," as one parasitologist described the species she studies. I heard about a parasite in Nebraska, a flatworm called a trematode (Halipegus eccentricus), that scientists discovered living in the ears of bullfrogs. But the trematodes in their ears are all adults. Matt Bolek from the University of Nebraska described how he and his colleagues had figured out the rest of the parasite's life cycle. The parasites release their eggs from the frog ears, which then get scarfed up by snails, where they hatch and start to develop. Then they leave the snails and swim in search of little aquatic invertebrates called ostracods. The ostracods get eaten by the larvae of damselflies, which then mature and fly into the air, only to be devoured by frogs. The parasites escape the damselflies and move through the bodies of the frogs to their ears. One trematode, four hosts.

And you thought your commute was long.

Tomorrow I'll blog about more of these marvelous beasts.

[Image courtesy of Matthew Gilligan]

[Update: In answer to commenters--that's an invertebrate known as a isopod that's eaten the fish's tongue and is now sitting where the tongue used to be. Nice and weird, baby.]

The decision to vote has puzzled scholars for decades...The results show that a significant proportion of the variation in voting turnout can be accounted for by genes. We also replicate these results with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and show that they extend to a broad class of acts of political participation. These are the first findings to suggest that humans exhibit genetic variation in their tendency to participate in political activities.

Here's a figure which really cuts to the chase:

A Gallup survey out this week reveals a wide partisan gap in perceptions of evolution. Specifically, 60% of Republicans say humans were created in their present form by God 10,000 years ago, a belief shared by only 40% of independents and 38% of Democrats.

These Gallup findings are the latest to underscore an emerging partisan divide on controversial areas of science. With many prominent Republicans continuing to dispute climate change, Democrats in recent elections making stem cell research part of their campaign strategy, GOP primary candidates openly doubting evolution, and Hillary Clinton promising to end Bush's "war on science," these issues have become part of America's partisan DNA.

In other words, it's very easy for citizens to convert climate change, stem cell research, or evolution into just one more wedge issue like abortion, taxes, or gun control that help define what it means to be a Republican or Democrat. The political packaging of science for electoral gain is the unfortunate outcome of a lot of different forces, with both Republican and Democratic leaders to blame.

Incidentally, the Gallup survey results also help indirectly shed light on how many non-religious, agnostic, or atheistic American adults might be out there. Consider the graph below, that shows that the proportion of Americans who believe that evolution has occurred with God playing no part has edged up slightly over the past 15 years to roughly 14%. This figure compares favorably to data from a recent Pew report that measures roughly 16% of Americans as saying that they are "religiously unaffiliated."

It's likely, however, that these figures over-estimate the number of truly non-believing Americans who might be out there. Pew reports that among the 16% saying they are unaffiliated, that a large portion (41%) say religion is at least somewhat important in their lives, seven-in-ten say they believe in God, and more than a quarter (27%) say they attend religious services at least a few times a year.

Among all adults, according to Pew, roughly seven-in-ten say they are absolutely certain of God's existence, with slightly more than one-in-five (22%) less certain in their belief.

This paper is pretty technical, but Logothetis hits the important points of what it is we think we are actually measuring using the fMRI. Also, he notes that the difficulty in interpreting fMRI data lies in the fact that you have to make assumptions about network architecture that may or may not be true. Other experiments are required to confirm the validity of these assumptions.

I ended my morning session by posing the following issues and questions to the participants, with these issues arising from what I see as major changes in the political and media system that are generating new demands for scientists and their institutions as public communicators.

As I've noted at this blog many times and outlined in a talk last week at the BIO 2008 meetings, what are needed are novel forms of public dialogue complemented by media strategies that are informed by careful audience research.

Yet these initiatives raise several important questions. Namely:

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In particular, Jha et al focus on mindfulness meditation, which is defined as continuous and "non-judgemental" attention to the unfolding present, and has shown a variety of beneficial health effects (as described in a previous post). The meditation literature suggests there are two forms of mindfulness meditation: a "concentrative" form which involves continuous allocation of attention (e.g., towards breathing) and a "receptive" form which involves keeping attention in a state of readiness of preparedness. Interestingly, many meditation protocols suggest that the concentrative form must be developed first, due to the benefits it provides in limiting "mind wandering" during receptive meditation.

Jha et al connect these rather opaque terms to cognitive neuroscience with recourse to the Corbetta & Shulman model of attention. Jha et al suggest that "Receptive meditation" might involve the ventral attentional network (involved in monitoring the environment) whereas the "concentrative meditation" might involve the dorsal attentional network (involved in directing attention to particular stimuli or responses).

To test this idea, Jha et al recruited three groups of subjects: a control group of nursing students from UPenn, a "training" group of meditation-naive subjects who would undergo 8 weekly 3-hour sessions of meditation training, and a "retreat" group of experienced meditators who would go on a month-long mindfulness meditation retreat.