President's Podium

Podium for the opposition?

This is quite a paradoxical era. Scientific research is in its most productive phase and it continues to produce many beneficial technologies for mankind. For example, we rapidly progress towards a better understanding of many diseases and come up with multiple new approaches to cure them. At the same time, however, the voices against science and technology have never been more shrill. But unsu...

Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Death: Closing the Constitution's Succession Gap

Underwriting the presidents.

The United States has had 43 presidents. We examined whether they survive significantly longer or shorter than their contemporaries. We found that survival was better for presidents elected in the 1789-1841 and 1933-2001 periods (SMRs of 0.7 and 0.6, respectively), but worse for those elected in 1845-1929 (SMR = 2.9). We also found increased mortality during the years lived in office (SMR = 1.4...

Presidents who value science.

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 323 13 FEBRUARY 2009 843 COVER An image of Mare Moscoviense on the lunar farside, taken by the Terrain Camera aboard the SELENE (Kaguya) spacecraft on 17 January 2008. Crater frequency distributions derived from such images yield ages of about 2.5 billion years for several volcanic deposits in this mare, indicating that volcanism on the lunar farside lasted about ...

Which presidents are most memorable?

BACKGROUND/RATIONALE Episodic memory loss is a hall-mark of Alzheimer's disease (AD), with recall of recent events becoming progressively difficult. A commonly used tool, the recollection of US presidents, was assessed in evaluating episodic versus semantic memory loss among AD patients compared with spouse controls. METHODS A total of 36 patients (12 men, 24 women) with possible or probable ...