Weekend news roundup

This morning British Newspaper The Guardian reported that upon taking office, to-be-President Obama will take action to reverse a number of policies enacted by the current administration.

John Podesta of the Obama transition team, singled out stem cell research and environmental restrictions on oil drilling as key areas for use of extraordinary powers to be used to institute rapid change.

This wasn't mentioned in the Change.org blog. Valerie Jarrett told Meet the Press that the major issues of concern to the incoming administration would be the economy and national security during the transition period. I guess that's to be expected though, it's something which needs a lot more preparation for Jan 20th.

PZ Myers' blog Pharyngula opines that Republican enthusiasm for the fragrent Sarah Palin could lead to a Palin persidential campaign in 2012. I confess that although the prospect is a pretty horrifying one it doesn't strike me as a very likely one. The video linked in Pharyngula is worth watching to see the shouting match between Pat Buchanan and Laurence O'Donnell.

Dr Adam Rutherford spoke with British education site teachers.tv on Friday, in response to the the teachers.tv poll whic revealed that 18% of science teachers think that creationism should be taught in the classroom. It's a little worrying that a country as secular as Britain could have almost 1/5 of it's science teachers so poorly suited to their professions.

Speaking of godlessness, Prof Paul Bloom of Yale, writing in Slate, discussed a psychological study which suggests that atheists are less charitable than the faithful. Interestingly, this apparent parsimony doesn't appear to be directly related to atheism, as secular communities outside of the United States don't show these tendencies. In fact, it may be the group exclusionism tendency of humans that lead to atheists to feel alienated from the wider religious mainstream, disincentivizing them from participating in charitable work. After all, who would be willing to contribute to a community that excludes you and labels you as immoral and unpatriotic?