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CAMBRIDGE, England – Famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking will retire from his prestigious post at Cambridge University next year, but intends to continue his exploration of time and space.

Hawking, 66, is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a title once held by the great 18th century physicist Isaac Newton. The university said Friday that he would step down at the end of the academic year in September, but would continue working as Emeritus Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.

"We look forward to him continuing his academic work at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, playing a leading role in research in cosmology and gravitation," said Professor Peter Haynes, who heads the department.

Hawking became a scientific celebrity through his theories on black holes and the nature of time, work that he carried on despite becoming paralyzed by motor neurone disease.

University policy is that officeholders must retire at the end of the academic year in which they become 67. Hawking will reach that milestone on Jan. 8.

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Last week the first draft of the science curriculum that would be used in Texas schools for the next 10 years was released. The size of the fight to come was quickly made evident by members of the state Board of Education who want to inject religion into the public schools. The draft, the work of science teachers and academics, would remove language from the guidelines that govern the teaching of science that mandates that classrooms include covering the "weaknesses" of major scientific theories. The only major scientific theory the conservatives have in their bull''s eye is evolution. The draft was the opening shot in what promises to be a long and contentious debate next year. The guide that directs science teachers to include lessons on the "strengths" and "weaknesses" of scientific theories has been part of the state''s teaching guidelines for decades. But the guide has meant little because there is no detail on what that means. The growing power of the conservatives on the State Board, however, could make that mandate explicit, especially as the board goes through rewriting the entire teaching curriculum. Article Continues Off Site

    The Bible's history and literature will be required to be taught in public schools in Texas under a new law that has been clarified by the state attorney general to mean exactly what it says.

    "This is a huge victory for the people of Texas and, I think, for people across the country for academic freedom," said Jonathan Saenz, a lawyer for Liberty Legal. "There are 1,300 references to the Bible in the works of Shakespeare alone. Over 60 percent of the allusions studied in [advanced placement] English come from the Bible. Students are going to be better academically and culturally when they hear about the Bible."

    The decision is a result of work by the state legislature as well as an opinion from Greg Abbott, the state's attorney general, in a letter to Education Commissioner Robert Scott. House Bill 1287 was approved by state lawmakers in the spring of 2008, and it was signed into law by Gov. Rick Perry. It states all school districts must offer the course as an elective at the high school level by the 2009-2010 school year.

    Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, the author of the plan, said if 15 or more students express interest in the course, districts must provide it.

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Courtesy World Net Daily

ORANGE PARK, Fla. — David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote “Evolution” in the rectangle of light on the screen.

He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.

“If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”

In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.

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Courtesy The New York Times.

08-12) 17:25 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.

Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC's review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts - not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.

Otero's ruling Friday, which focused on specific courses and texts, followed his decision in March that found no anti-religious bias in the university's system of reviewing high school classes. Now that the lawsuit has been dismissed, a group of Christian schools has appealed Otero's rulings to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

"It appears the UC is attempting to secularize private religious schools," attorney Jennifer Monk of Advocates for Faith and Freedom said Tuesday. Her clients include the Association of Christian Schools International, two Southern California high schools and several students.

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Courtesy SFGate

NEW ORLEANS - Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed into law a bill that critics say could allow for the teaching of "creationism" alongside evolution in public schools.

Jindal, a conservative Christian who has been touted by pundits as a potential vice presidential running mate for Republican presidential candidate John McCain, signed the legislation earlier this week.

The law will allow schools if they choose to use "supplemental materials" when discussing evolution but does not specify what the materials would be.

It states that authorities "shall allow ... open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.

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Courtesy: RawStory

An outside investigation has found that an Ohio public school teacher taught creationism in his science class and used a device to burn the image of a cross on students' arms.

One family filed a federal lawsuit against Mount Vernon Middle School teacher John Freshwater and the school district last week, saying their child was left with a burn mark for three or four weeks.

The report also says Freshwater was insubordinate in failing to remove a Bible and other religious materials from his classroom.

The findings released Thursday by consulting firm H.R. On Call Inc. were to be discussed Friday at a school board meeting.

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Courtesy Rawstory

SB 733, a creationist bill in the Louisiana legislature, was approved on a lopsided vote in the Louisiana House of Representatives today. It now moves back to the Senate, where small differences between this bill and the Senate version must be reconciled before it can go to Governor Jindal. Jindal is a leading contender for John McCain's vice presidential nomination.

In response to this and other attacks on the teaching of evolution in Louisiana, the indefatigable Barbara Forrest (author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design) and other activists in the Pelican State have organized a group to advocate for accurate science education.

Here's their take on this event:

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Courtesy Science Blogs

In international comparisons of science literacy, U.S. students score below average, according to The Condition of Education 2008, a report released May 29 by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The Condition of Education, a congressionally mandated annual report, examines conditions and trends in K–12, postsecondary, and adult education. NCES Commissioner Mark Schneider said the report “allows us to take a big-picture look” at such indicators as U.S. students’ performance on national and international assessments; trends in school enrollments; student-teacher ratios in public schools; and trends in public school expenditures.

This year’s report references the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA 2006), which details “the science literacy of 15-year-olds in 57 educational jurisdictions, including the 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and 27 non-OECD countries and subnational education systems.” On PISA 2006, the average U.S. science literacy score was 489—11 points below the average of the 30 OECD nations. U.S. students had a lower average score than students in 16 OECD countries and a higher average score than students in only five OECD countries. The top five OECD nations were Finland (563), Canada (534), Japan (531), New Zealand (530), and Australia (527).

In addition, U.S. students scored lower than their peers in six non-OECD jurisdictions and higher than their peers in 17 non-OECD jurisdictions.

A Closer Look at Science Literacy

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Courtesy National Science Teachers Assoc.

DALLAS — Opponents of teaching evolution, in a natural selection of sorts, have gradually shed those strategies that have not survived the courts. Over the last decade, creationism has given rise to “creation science,” which became “intelligent design,” which in 2005 was banned from the public school curriculum in Pennsylvania by a federal judge.

Now a battle looms in Texas over science textbooks that teach evolution, and the wrestle for control seizes on three words. None of them are “creationism” or “intelligent design” or even “creator.”

The words are “strengths and weaknesses.”

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Courtesy The New York Times

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