A recent survey in the news showed that the war in Iraq had dropped to number 3 on a list of issues currently obsessing potential voters in the ongoing presidential campaign season.

That war trailed the economy and gas prices on the list of items clearly furrowing the brows of the American electorate. Oddly enough in the reams of coverage devoted to oil prices, the Iraqi insurgency, the mortgage crisis, the credit crunch and all the ensuing economic upheaval attached, the war in Afghanistan barely creates a ripple.

Sure, we’re concerned that Pakistan’s role in the War on Terror could be a little more one-sided–with that nation’s government, army and secret service preferably falling on OUR side of the fence–but all-in-all Afghanistan has become a kind of “limbo war”; not as concrete as the one in Iraq, but a place where all the success since the routing of the Taliban has become dimmer, their resurgence a grim reminder of how unfinished the job is over there.

I would get more sanctimonious about this issue if in truth I wasn’t as guilty of my own–at best, amnesia; at worst, indifference–towards the situation. I worry about gas and the economy, too.

Yet earlier this week I received the most wonderful e-mail in my “Letters to the Editor” mailbox.

Typically, it overflows with bargain Viagra and/or Cialis pitches, angry missives from Creationists or UFOlogists and for some reason of late, irked Raëlians. But on Wednesday I received an e-mail from SFC William H. Ruth of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division stationed somewhere in Afghanistan.

Sgt. Ruth wrote in response to SPACE.com Senior Editor Tariq Malik’s story Monday about Prof. Stephen Hawking’s belief in extraterrestrial life and he has a suggestion for NASA:

“Please forward this to the proper channels. I have read Stephen Hawking’s latest remarks on space travel and the importance of it to human survival. The problem is, NASA is going about it all the wrong way.

Here is an idea: Send battle-hardened, strong-minded soldiers and marines on the long trips into space. We are conditioned to live with the bare minimal (of) life’s necessities and are trained to be prepared for … the worst conditions that any environment could throw at us.

Hell, me and my men will go, set up a colony somewhere and await colonists to arrive.

Me and most of my men are on our 3rd or 4th deployment into a combat area. We are scouts, reconnaissance specialists. We go before everyone else and spend time living off the land. Sounds just like the type of men needed for a long colonization journey.

Please pass this message on to anyone you know in the space program. (T)here are many men already trained and prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country and the human race.

Thank you for your time.

SFC Ruth, 101st Airborne Division. Afghanistan”

I don’t know what impressed me more, Sgt. Ruth’s enthusiasm, his selflessness or his commitment to his country and all humanity. We traded e-mails throughout the week and I pointed out that many in NASA’s astronaut program are pulled from the U.S. Air Force and Navy.

Still, the idea of sending scout parties with years of practical experience seems obvious to me. As Dennis Tito, the first civilian space tourist has shown us, you don’t have to have extra-special skills to go into space, just the desire to go there.

Sgt Ruth sent me a pic of he and his fellow soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan:

Sgt. Ruth’s e-mail put Afghanistan in the forefront of my mind as one of the most important issues of the day. Last time I checked, Osama bin Laden is still cavorting there in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For anyone at NASA reading this, take a serious look at Sgt. Ruth’s proposal, it’s a brave out-of-the box idea. In all humility, I realize that this is what real heroes do: They protect their country, their fellow soldiers and the defenseless. They tolerate impossible conditions and the very real risk of injury and possible death.

And when they have some free time, they look to the stars and dream of saving humanity.

If you would like to reach Sgt. Ruth and his troops to thank them for their service and wish them well, please e-mail me here at this address. All appropriate e-mails will be forwarded.

You know, when I first heard that J.J. Abrams was doing the next retcon-ed Star Trek movie with a trip to Starfleet Academy I got a little squeamish. Let’s face it, Mission Impossible III was “Alias” with a prettier lead. Still, the first teaser trailer is up and it’s all nerd-bump-inducing. Go HERE to see it as I can’t seem to embed it.

One can only hope that NASA chief Mike Griffin’s recent assertions about how humanity should respond to global climage changes was just an intellectual hiccup that had more to do with his personal beliefs and not public policy.

But as the sun sets on the Bush administration and more and more cracks appear in its carapace of secrecy, it’s becoming obvious that the tendrils of overt partisan politics have ensnared almost every federal government department and agency within and without the Beltway.

Of course there is nothing new with these kind of shenanigans, agency heads–like NASA’s Griffin, or the Department of Justice’s Alberto Gonzalez–serve at the pleasure of the President and administrations–Dem or GOP–routinely install fellow ideologues or intellectual “fellow travelers” in the hope of moving forward on election promises and creating legacies with policies whether foreign or domestic.

However, Griffin’s statements raised eyebrows mostly because it followed a series of incidents involving NASA that seemed to support the belief that this administration has a routine disregard for the Constitution, a disdain for the rule of law, no matter how minor, and the increasing perception that the separation of church and state is a hindrance of some kind.

It is these actions that observers in the scientific community find unsettling. Take for example the revelation two weeks ago that NASA’s top lawyer ‘fessed up to destroying DVD recordings of a talk Griffin had with his staff. What was that all about? What could the chief administrator have said that was so incendiary that a complete record of it had to be destroyed? This kind of self-censorship would just seem an odd aberration if previous incidents had not occured.

Early in 2006 when allegations were raised that NASA attempted to stifle its head climatologist, James E. Hansen, there were those who argued that the scientist protested too much and he was a prima donna. However, when it came to light that Hansen’s ability to speak to the press had been hampered by a 24-year-old creationist, a political appointee barely out of college with dubious credentials and seemingly motivated by divine insight, it became clear that Hansen’s concerns were well-founded and NASA had not escaped the worst political excesses of these divided times.

As Griffin furiously back-pedaled in the wake of his initial NPR interview last week, President Bush also attempted to re-position himself and his administration as friends of the environment with a remedy for global climage change which he will unveil at the G8 conference this week. Here’s hoping this “about face” has some legs, but considering the President comes from the state with the highest carbon emissions in the Union, he might want to try the new policy in his own backyard before attempting to strong-arm China and India to follow suit.

Due to the speed in which the news cycle changes, it’s often very difficult for us here at LiveScience to gauge just how inspiring, how interesting, how controversial the topics we cover actually are.

Every now and then, we seem to touch on a sore point. A topic that really gets stuck in the collective maw.

Case in point: Last week’s revelation that chimps, our long-distant relation in the evolutionary chain, had the gall to be more evolved than us!

Yes, not content to sit around grooming each other and grasping things with their feet, these simian self-starters decided that if anyone was going to get the upper hand on face-gurning and poo-throwing, it was going to be them.

Not so fast, responded many an irate reader: “When you figure out that we as humans rule the world,” e-mailed one, “maybe you will stop wasting your time trying to make your chimps out to be more than they are.”

Wrote another, “you refer to a “chimp/human” split 6 million years ago. If you read the Holy Bible, you will know that God created man in His own image and I can guarantee you that God is NOT a chimp!”

Or my personal favorite: “I believe you meant: ‘Chimps more evolved than journalists,’” sent by the oh-so-clever Lancelot Link.

I just don’t know what it is about the whole “man descended from apes” thing that causes such apoplexy. It’s not just that it’s heresy, it’s as if it’s personal, like we’ve ruined the family reunion, dredged up the family secret and shone a kleiglight on the red-headed kid stuck in a sea of brunettes.

Still, just when the righteous indignation reached its crescendo, Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report chimed in, telling his audience that when he’s driving home late at night he likes “to read LiveScience.com on my laptop computer because I know I won’t fall asleep at the wheel if I’m enraged.”

I mean, it’s not as if we’re a bunch of bible-bashing, secular humanists foisting our reason-driven political and ideological agendas on the public. Though I think maybe that’s how Stephen sees us …

Not at all, we’re just servants to empirically derived facts, that’s all. A motley crew of ink-stained wretches parsing the often byzantine intellectual landscapes that are scientific press releases and coaxing out news that you, our dear readers, can consume.

Despite the name-calling, the condemnation, the innumerable prayers being offered up for our souls, it’s nice to get the feedback. The statistics tell us we have oodles of visitors, but it’s nice to know they’re actually reading; that we’ve hit a nerve. That ideas cause people to question their beliefs is, we think, a good thing. It show us that people care, that they’re engaged.

Or in Stephen’s case, enraged.

Just as the groundswell of gossip-mongering, prurience and plain old media exploitation reached its histrionic crescendo surrounding astronaut Lisa Nowak’s tragic fall-from-grace, along came the untimely (inevitable?) death of Anna Nicole Smith, a woman truly famous for doing absolutely nothing.

For the families of all involved in what appeared to be an ill-fated romance among NASA’s astronaut corps it can only be a relief that Smith, a beauty of Amazonian proportions who married well, widowed ugly and parlayed the ensuing media circus into reality-TV stardom shuffled off this mortal coil just in time for the 5 o’clock news Thursday evening. Talk about timing! People always dissed Smith for her “dumb blond” persona, but it appears that, even in death, she could play the press. In many ways Smith was heir to Marilyn Monroe’s legacy or–for those too young to remember–Smith was Jessica Simpson “dumb” before Simpson’s father packaged it for MTV.

For someone like Smith, the relentless, 24/7 coverage of her self-created trials and trevails was the business that she was in. She was truly a late-20th Century media creation, a “celebrity” custom-built for red carpet openings, boozy breakdowns and lamentable trysts in romantic locales, bringing Andy Warhol’s “famous for 15-minutes” maxim to its obvious, ignorant conclusion.

Then there’s Nowak, who prior to Monday’s very public breakdown, arrest and arraignment, lived her life like the rest of the nation’s astronaut corps in a kind of noble obscurity, trotted out for photo ops and interviews when it came time for NASA to promote visibility for its ongoing manned space program, specifically last July’s mission to the International Space Station.

A quick Google search this morning captured about 2.5 million references for Anna Nicole Smith, while Nowak came in with a paltry 890,000. That said, a bulk of the Nowak references, almost 50 percent of the search pages, referenced the awful events of the last five days of her life. In fact, it’s safe to say that the media has printed more column inches in the last four days on Nowak’s personal tragedy than it did over the last year on the fact that she risked her life as a member of the STS-121 space shuttle Discovery crew.

It’s nice to know where the media’s priorities lie. So you can imagine my surprise last night when I saw People magazine’s latest issue at the local pharmacy with Nowak, her alleged intended victim and her alleged paramour plastered on the cover. On the other hand, just imagine how surprised People’s editor’s were today, realizing that when they put the issue to bed Wednesday, in less than 24 hours, a “real celebrity” would do something really worthy of a cover story? Tragic, really.

Disturbing news from the land that gave us both ABBA and The Hives and those really tasty pancakes and meatballs. According to a new study completed by the organization Vetenskap & Allmänhet (Public and Science), VA, 23 percent of the Swedish population think astrology is a science.

Ouch.

It gets worse, it seems that more Swedish women then men believe astrology is a science. This is certainly very retrograde.

We get a lot of questions from our readers who love LiveScience’s Life’s Little Mysteries. Unfortunately, a few of those questions are beyond the purview of rational scientific investigation and ultimately, explanation. However, as a public service, I will attempt to answer, to the best of my ability, those questions that my limited life experience (and frantic use of Google) will allow:

Kreidler writes: “Can science engineer a seedless and coreless apple? The other part is, Will it taste good? Because a red delicious is anything but.”

There’s no accounting for taste, Kreidler, but I wholeheartedly agree with you. One bad apple might not spoil a whole bunch, but this mushy variety has a long way to go before it deserves the appelation “delicious”. To answer the first part of your question: Science can do anything: cloned meat, Beano, square watermelons. It’s all about finding a niche and sell, Sell, SELL! As soon as all of us who want seedless, coreless apples to appear in our local supermarkets join together in one great chorus, then we will see science come up with a solution.

Isis writes in wanting to know: “What was the best thing before sliced bread?”

Unleavened. Ingredients are easy to come by, it’s quick to make, travels well and is low in calories. I like mine with seedless, blackcurrent preserves. MMmmmmm.

Li’l Mexican asks: “Why do mosquitoes like to buzz in our ears?”

Because if they buzzed our eyes, we wouldn’t hear them. Duh.

Robert wants to know “Is there a way you can make ice cubes sink in water?”

Try holding them down with your foot until they stop struggling.

Bro writes: “What causes yawning?”

Al Gore, the National Review, most German operas, the last four Steven Spielberg movies, the last three Star Wars movies, People magazine’s relentless coverage of Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen’s last album.

V asks: “Where do squirrels go at night in New York City. I see them out and about in the morning, but i don’t see them at night, I was just wondering.”

After a busy day of foraging, chasing tails, storing nuts for the winter and posing for tourists, it’s a little known fact that Manhattan’s squirrels loooooove to partay, wiling away their evenings downtown at such trendy clubs as Bungelow 8, Fresh! and club/party-thrower icon Susanne Bartsch’s moveable feast, Happy Valley. (Hipsters have been known to ride the “L” train to Williamsburg.)

LoverMan wants to know: “How does one mend a broken heart?”

Time. But time won’t give you time and time makes lovers feel like they’ve got something real. Patience. It’ll work itself out fine, all we need is just a little patience. Sugar, make it slow and you’ll come together fine. All you need is just a little patience. Once upon a time you were falling in love, but now you’re only falling apart. There’s nothing you can do. A total eclipse of the heart.

Brian asks: “Does subliminal messaging really work?”

Well, you sent a question, didn’t you? Bwah!HA!Ha! ha! You are forever under our control! Now, go!  Buy me donuts!

Jais wants to know “”Why do people fall in love?”

Well, geez. I dunno, you meet someone, and they like you, even though, like, you wish you were taller, or more handsome or more successful, and they, like have a way about them that, like, makes you comfortable so you start to hang out and go to dinner and see movies and then, like, BOOM! You’re picking china. Aaaaanyway, sometimes it doesn’t work out and nothing you EVER do is good enough and you realize that she is totally going to become her mother and … hmmm, see previous question above from LoverMan.

Loa wants to know: “Are we going to have a Sodom and Gomorrah again soon? If so, which cities might they be?”

Silly, they’re already here! San Francisco and Las Vegas, in that order.

Residents of Colorado and Wyoming got a start early Thursday morning, January 4 as the remnants of a Russian Soyuz 2-1b rocket re-entered the atmosphere and broke up high above the countryside.

NORAD spokesman Sean Kelly told the Associated Press that the agency was trying to confirm reports that a piece of the rocket may have hit the ground near Riverton, Wyo., at about 6 a.m.

The rocket, made in Russia, was launched from Kazakhstan on December 27, carrying the European Space Agency’s COROT space observatory into orbit.

Flying high above the Earth’s atmosphere, the Convection Rotation and planetary Transits (COROT) satellite will look for smaller, rocky extrasolar planets beyond our solar system.

“Objects falling from space are almost an everyday occurrence,” Kelly told the AP. And he is correct. Earlier in the day and further east, a metal object, believed to be a meteor, crashed into a house in Freehold Township, NJ. Thankfully, no one was injured by either event.

Watch the cool video of the rocket re-entry here.

Following the somewhat hysterical response to the arguably silly planet definition first coined by the IAU, it’s nice to see cooler heads prevailing. Me? I’ve never liked Pluto. Cold, indifferent, a wayward child on a wacky trajectory, calling it a planet is like calling Britney Spears a singer. First impressions can dazzle, but after awhile it’s nothing but sequins and lighting …

Entering my teens in the wake of the punk rock explosion of 1976, I had little time for what my peers considered the boring meanderings of Pink Floyd and the other prog rock ilk of that era.

Thankfully, I grew out of the petty Balkanization of rock ‘n’ roll that went on to give us alt-rock college radio or “Classic Rock” stations that play the same dozen or so songs ad infinitum — e.g., “Freebird”, Led Zep’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll”; in the New York City area, anything by Billy Joel, in Los Angeles, anything by The Eagles, etc., etc. — and I went on to attend a couple of Pink Floyd laserium shows during the early-1980s.

OK, I may have been under the influence at the time, but in the darkness of the planetarium, Floyd sounded AMAZING, a truly incandescent experience. As I said, it might not have just been the music. Let’s face it, Pink Floyd were always the thinking man’s Grateful Dead; amazing soundscapes, dark lyrics rich in metaphor, feelings of alienation and disconnect. If the Dead offered a long, strange trip to filthy hippy ur-slackers, then Floyd were somewhat malevolent tour guides, offering up the more harrowing destinations on the road: the dark side of the Moon or the Wall.

Earlier this week, it was reported that the Johns Hopkins’ University School of Medicine completed a study involving the revered and — depending on your school of thought and /or political affiliation — the reviled natural hallucinogenic drug, psilocybin.

The 36 volunteers, the AP reported, described the mind-blowing experience “as one of the most meaningful or spiritually significant experiences of their lives. Some compared it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.”

Sweet!

Actually, maybe not. At least a third of the participants had really bad trips, a “downer” as they say in the hippy parlance of yore. However, the other two-thirds found the experience somewhat life-affirming, some even “said the experience had changed them in beneficial ways, such as making them more compassionate, loving, optimistic and patient. Family members and friends said they noticed a difference, too.”

Dude, righteous buzz!

Levity aside, it’s important to remember that the mind is as mysterious and multifaceted as the Universe or the Earth’s deepest oceans. Psychology and psychiatry have barely scratched the surface of how our minds work.

In a wistful twist, the study’s release coincided with the report of the death of Syd Barret, tragic troubadour of the nascent psychedelic rock scene of mid-1960s Britain and the founder of Pink Floyd.

Obviously talented, Barrett was what used to be considered “sensitive” — and not in that snickering frat boy sense of the word. By all accounts he was a handsome, musical lad with an open charm that endeared him to fans and rock critics alike. But as a child of his era — and of his profession, pop star — Barrett consumed a lot of psychedelic, hallucigenic drugs, specifically LSD.

Once upon a time, LSD, or acid, was a once-legal pharmaceutical used by some scientists to better understand such mental illnesses as schizophrenia. Acid causes euphoria, flights of almost tangible fancy, hallucinations, and on the downside, somewhat depressing and harrowing trips. By 1966, the drug had been criminalized as it was by then the party favor of choice for hippy kids and swingers of all stripes, including Barrett.

Barrett became an acid casualty. A man so consumed by the inward journey the drugs led him on that he soon became unable to function in his role as bandleader and songwriter for Pink Floyd. He’s not the only one, of course, but to a certain degree he is one of the more famous; mythologized by the indie-rock intellectuals and mainstream media.

Personally, I find Floyd’s first LP a little on the twee side with too many references to dwarves, pots of tea and English gardens. (FYI: An LP is a “Long Player”, a 12-inch black vinyl disk where the music was engraved into grooves on the platter’s surface. Difficult to download, but way too easy to scratch, especially if you were on acid.) I supposed a lot of people would consider it “pastoral”, but poncey would be my adjective of choice. (The second Floyd record Saucerful of Secrets is a little more interesting.)

Anyway, while revisionism would make it appear that Barrett’s musical contributions defined his life and changed rock, I think that this honor, sadly, goes to his personal meltdown and to his slow, painful decline into diabetes-related death at at 60 that spurred the remaining members of his band, specifically Roger Waters and David Gilmour, to later greatness.

As the band edged into the 1970s, Barrett’s spirit helped define some of their greatest moments: “Brain Damage” from Dark Side of the Moon, all of Wish You Were Here and of course the protagonist of The Wall, a claustrophobic amalgam of Waters and Barrett.

Commenting on the recent psilocybin study, Charles Schuster, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at Wayne State University and a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse told the AP that “we’ve lost 40 years of (potential) research experience with this whole class of compounds,” due to the criminlization of such hallucinegenic drugs.

Shuster is correct of course, sometimes laws aimed at protecting the general welfare of the population can be too draconian, and exemptions should be made to allow for scientific study. But while I would throw my support behind a sensible policy that allows for the study of drugs like psylocybin, I can’t help but think that while Academia lost 40 years of research, during that time, Syd Barrett lost 40 years of his life.