Our red-eye story this morning is heating up: At ScienceInsider , Sara Reardon tells us, “Suspended Polar Bear Researcher Defended by Advocates” (29 July 2011):
The advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has taken up Monnett’s cause, calling the apparently criminal investigation a politically-motivated “witch hunt” against a scientist whose research threatens the government’s ability to drill in the Arctic. Yesterday, PEER filed a “Complaint of Scientific and Scholarly Misconduct” with the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), demanding that BOEMRE reinstate Monnett and apologize.
If it’s really a criminal investigation, apologies will not settle the matter. Let’s hope justice is done and no bears suffer needlessly. Meanwhile, bears, otherwise occupied in gorging on seals they ambushed at a breathing hole, know exactly what to do with a ball – if someone else invents it (to spy on them, actually):
Here, forever free by divine right, the bears smash the thing: