I'm friends with a fair number of US-trained young scientists, and the only ones I know who are planning to leave the country can't stay because they aren't US citizens. A small minority (~15% or so) plan to seek or currently have temporary postdoctoral positions overseas, but I doubt that many intend to make that arrangement permanent. I might add that I personally have experience doing research in another country, and I have no inclination whatsoever to leave the US. I admit that my personal, anecdotal evidence isn't proof against a larger trend, but it does make me suspicious. What makes you believe that "most" young scientists are departing the US?

I don't think so. (IANAL, but I have been following news about the HHS mandate and the RFRA.) The judge seems to have ruled that the owners of Hobby Lobby aren't eligible to receive protection under the RFRA. They intend to appeal, of course. I hasten to add that other judges have granted businesses preliminary injunctions against the mandate, and some informed commentators I've read are saying that this issue probably will go eventually to the US Supreme Court.

Synechoche.

Actually, in some cases you do, and it's not just about kowtowing to stupid religious people. It's an important tenet of limited government. Specifically, it's one reason that religious freedom (which protects the right of atheists to be atheists, too, btw) is enshrined in the first amendment of the US Constitution. It's also reflects the fact that our government is supposed to be "of the people, by the people, and for the people," as Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address. We are citizens of the US, not subjects or slaves of its government. We live in a pluralistic society where everyone has different ideas about the ultimate authority that they are answerable to, and the concept of religious freedom stems at least in part from the recognition that government has no business picking from among them. As far as it's practical (and perhaps a little farther, because we ought to err on the side of individual liberty), we should refrain from coercing people to do things that violate their firmly held convictions.

There's actually a pretty recent law about this that's been getting a little press because of the HHS contraception mandate. It's called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it basically prohibits the passage of laws that create a substantial burden to religious freedom unless the government has a really good reason for doing it, and also the law in question is the least intrusive way of going about it.

You might find this story interesting.

I have never felt insulted by disagreement, even strong disagreement. However, what people like Richard Dawkins do often goes beyond disagreement into the realm of being intentionally insulting. And regardless of what he says in this video, which strikes me as duplicitous, he has at other times specifically advocated ridiculing religious people.

The truth will out "eventually", but that's not always fast enough. You should check out the book Plastic Fantastic, which is about the Schön scandal. The careers of many innocent people who wasted years of their PhD training trying to replicate fraudulent results were ruined in that little episode. Schön was asked repeatedly to provide access to his samples, to more clearly describe his methodology, and the like, but kept finding excuses to avoid doing so. He was only found out when suspicious researchers in his area noticed that the noise in the results of multiple experiments was identical, likely having been faked using the same random numbers. It's a classic example of the inadequacy of our current way of doing and reporting science to quickly identify fraud.

The summary contains a hint. The US government keeps the price of helium artificially low. The article that the link goes to is an interview, in which it is stated,

The rich wells are in the USA, they contain up to 2 % helium within the natural gas. But the United States decided to sell their strategic helium reserve five years ago, driving prices down.

It's entirely possible that the price of purified He is currently so low that re-purifying it isn't cost effective.

I know I shouldn't respond to trolls, but your argument (to the very limited extent that you actually made an intelligible argument) seems to assume that "private industry" was in a race with the government and lost. The real situation is not that simple. It's possible that government funding displaces private spending on this kind of research, and that absent government funding, some company or other would have achieved this result more quickly and cheaply.

You are essentially arguing that because not all the common meanings of organic are identical, some of them are wrong, which doesn't make any sense to me. I repeat: Lots of words have more than one meaning. Sometimes they even have more than one technical meaning.

Lots of words have more than one meaning. Sometimes they even have more than one technical meaning. The word organic wasn't coined specifically to refer to hydrocarbons. It was borrowed by chemists from ordinary language. That chemists use it in a particular way in some of their technical communications is no reason to think that it ought to be off limits for everyone else. And yes, I too have taken a certain sophomore level college course. Big whoop.

More of a moderate? I think the problem he's trying to fix is that he's already perceived as too much of one. Hell, as far as I'm concerned, Romney and Obama are practically the same, once you strip away all the silly campaign rhetoric. You're right that there's no danger of those on the "far right" voting for Obama, but that doesn't automatically mean that they'll turn out to support Romney, either.

There are cultural norms about when it is and isn't appropriate to toot one's own horn. In this situation, if the guy had gone to the press and claimed credit for the idea or insisted to his superiors that NASA set the record straight, he would have looked extremely petty and not like a "team player." His reputation would have been ruined not only in the public sphere, but among many of his colleagues. You might argue that someone somewhere would give the smart young guy who saved Apollo 13 a chance, but I think that's a nerd fantasy. There are lots of smart grad students. A good personality (read: willingness to play by the rules) is usually as important as smarts.

This is also far from an isolated occurrence in the sciences. I understand that the grad students of a few Nobel Prize winners have been pretty embittered by the lack of official recognition of their contributions.

Astroturfing is a way that activists try to take advantage of our bias in favor of "grassroots" movements. Pointing out that astroturfing might be occuring obviously doesn't prove the activists wrong, but it is a warning against being manipulated.

Oooh.. he mad. You can always tell when a liberal has nothing intelligent to say in response to you: He calls you the worst things he can think of ("bigot", "xenophobe".. oh my!), hunkers down, and hopes that you go away.

It's encouraging that he didn't call you a racist. Maybe he senses that they used up the rhetorical force of that one during the President's campaign in 2008 and in his early years in office. With any luck, the word "bigot" uttered by a progressive will soon be taken as seriously as a conservative accusation of socialism.