In Print & On the Air

THE CREDIBILITY OF THE United States has been "gravely damaged" by the government's inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to SCOTT SAGAN, professor of political science and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies. On Oct. 2, Sagan told National Public Radio that the Bush administration, by warning about the existence of such weapons but failing to find any, has made it much more difficult for a future president to argue or make a credible statement if and when a genuine and imminent threat emerges. Sagan said the United Nations weapons inspection team headed by David Kay has done a very good job in Iraq. But, he added, information in the Kay report revealed "bad things" about the relationship between the intelligence community and the administration.

STANFORD HAS A LONG LIST OF Nobel laureates, but psychology Professor Emeritus PHILIP ZIMBARDO is the first to bring home an Ig Nobel, the San Jose Mercury News reported Oct. 4. The annual awards, which honor people whose academic research "cannot or should not be reproduced," are presented at Harvard by the Annals of Improbable Research. Zimbardo and two Italian academics garnered their Ig for research on how Americans and Italians of voting age evaluate politicians in contrast to sports figures and themselves. They found that voters judge everyone -- except politicians -- according to five categories of personality. Evaluation of politicians was based on just two areas: energy and honesty. The research paper concluded that keeping things simple is an "efficient strategy for coding the mass of complex data, thus combating informational overload." Zimbardo told the Associated Press he felt honored and hoped the publicity would build interest in his research. But that was not his first reaction. "This is a very strange thing, this Ig Nobel. I had heard vaguely about it," Zimbardo said. "At first I thought it was an insult."

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES reported Oct. 6 that scientists have pounced on the revolutionary idea that Down syndrome -- the most common genetic cause of mental retardation -- can be treated. Researchers at the university's new Down Syndrome Center already have identified abnormalities in the nerve cell structure of sufferers that appear to be responsible for brain damage. They're now trying to home in on the offending genes. "People thought that once you're born with Down syndrome, that's it; you can't make the brain better. But we know that is not true about brains," said WILLIAM MOBLEY, the center's director and chair of the Department of Neurology. "Brains are plastic. We may not be able to cure this disease, but we may be able to make people's lives better."