Among Americans under age 30, Jon Stewart is tied with Bill O’Reilly as the nation’s most admired journalist. Overall, he’s No. 4.

In a March 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center, Stewart was tied with Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Anderson Cooper. He was behind No. 1 Katie Couric, O’Reilly and Charles Gibson and ahead of Jim Lehrer, Walter Cronkite, Ted Koppel, Wolf Blitzer and a slew of others.

Of course Stewart is a comedian. His “Daily Show” airs weeknights on Comedy Central.

But in an era when “real” TV newspeople often toss softball questions at political candidates (or in the case of George Stephanopoulos to Hillary Clinton in one of the televised debates, didn’t ask one he said he knew she wouldn’t want to answer!) and press sensational issues rather than policy questions, Stewart gets down to brass tacks, which is not news to anyone who watches him regularly.

On his show last night, he asked John McCain whether he’d rather run against Clinton or Barack Obama. McCain didn’t want to answer, and Stewart pressed him. It was a compelling question. No answer came, but Stewart was more dogged than any “real” anchor of late. He also pressed McCain, quite humorously, on the serious issue of how he can shake the shadow of President Bush and why that’s any different from Obama having to shake Pastor Jeremiah Wright. The point was clear: You politicians all have baggage, but you like to gloss over yours while pointing out the other guy’s. McCain was frank in distancing himself from Bush’s policies. It was a darn good news interview, and yet funny as hell at times.

Stewart also drew out the softer and more jovial side of John McCain that you rarely see on the network or cable news programs. Maybe we got a glimpse of the real John McCain last night, and since he’s running for president, that’s no laughing matter.

Anyway, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism actually studied the content of “The Daily Show” for all of 2007 in an effort to figure out why Stewart is so admired as a journalist, even though Stewart himself says he is not one.

The upshot: Stewart uses a lot of news footage from the day’s events to show contrast and contradiction (just like the other news programs) and he picks selectively among major events (just like the other news programs) and ignores a lot of what happened during the day (just like …).

The Pew analysis, out yesterday, concludes: In its choice of topics, its use of news footage to deconstruct the manipulations by public figures and its tendency toward pointed satire over playing just for laughs, “The Daily Show” performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature — getting people to think critically about the public square.

• See also: Scientist Finds Truthiness in the ‘Colbert Bump’

In Texas, three pot smokers have taken grave digging to a new low.

Two men and a juvenile were said to dig up a corpse, decapitate it and make a bong of the head, reports the Houston Chronicle. One can only assume they were well into the brownies before grabbing their shovels.

We humans really do have an obsession with death. Offbeat post-life practices range from letting the vultures eat us to “plastination” for display. Add this new one we learned of today: dissolving a corpse with lye.

The rising cost of gas is fueling a slew of lifestyle changes and is even expected to have an environmental impact. It’s too early to quantify clearly, but life in these United States is changing faster than you can say “fill ‘er up.”

People are driving less, skipping events and changing summer plans. Some are driving more slowly (even airlines are employing this fuel-saving trick).

The types of vehicles you’ll see on the road of the future will be much different. U.S. sales of SUVs are plummeting, off 32 percent in April compared to the same month last year, and people stuck owning them are struggling to sell on a flooded market. Likewise, demand for small cars and hybrids is soaring. New small car sales were up 18 percent in April.

The knock-on effects are even more interesting:

Deaths down. Fewer miles driven means safer roads. One study predicts nearly 2,000 fewer people will die because of the recent price hikes.

Less gas consumption (fewer SUVs, less driving, etc.). One economist estimates that each $1 rise in gas leads to 14 percent less fuel consumption over the long haul. Of course, as consumption falls, some analysts say prices at the pump could dip, stimulating demand.

Less pollution. If we use less gas, logic dictates that smog will decrease (you’ll breath cleaner air) and we’ll pump lower amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Little if any research has quantified this potential outcome, but the traffic-death study also predicts 600 fewer pollution-related deaths.

Lifestyle changes. An online CNN poll, though not scientific, has 46 percent saying they plan to get used to “staycations” and 26 percent figuring to cut back on summer travel. Separately, a Florida State University management professor surveyed 800 employees in the southeast who each commuted at least 15 miles a day. Among the findings (which have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal):

• 52 percent have reconsidered taking vacations or other recreational activities.
• 45 percent said escalating gas prices have caused them to fall behind financially.
• 33 percent would quit their job for a comparable one nearer to home.

The FSU researcher, Wayne Hochwarter, contends all this affects employee productivity: “People concerned with the effects of gas prices were significantly less attentive on the job, less excited about going to work, less passionate and conscientious and more tense,” he said.

Even NASCAR feels the pinch. Their fancy fuel is now $6.25 a gallon. (In the 1970s, NASCAR shortened races to save fuel during the OPEC crisis; no such plans yet this time around.)

Meanwhile, oil continues to reach new highs with one prediction of $200/barrel inside two years. And gas prices, well, you know.

Newsday has posted a slew of reader comments that hint at the lifestyle changes underway and in the wings. One high school athlete says Mom can’t attend some of the away games. Another woman worries she’ll have to walk to work soon.

The ultimate effects, either on summer tourism or lifestyles in general, awaits scientific study and actual data. But the largely anecdotal evidence now available suggests we’ll soon be looking back at a different America.

A Wi-Fi setup in your body, using Bluetooth connected to base station in your home, could alert a hospital of a heart attack or other health emergency, predicts the UK’s Ofcom, the independent regulator for communications industries.

From The Times in London: If the “in-body network” recorded that the person had suddenly collapsed, it would send an alert, via a nearby base station at their home, to a surgery or hospital.

Other than possible privacy concerns, such a device seems pretty simple, composed of off-the-shelf ideas: Think external heart rate monitor’s worn by runners mixed with the common cell phone ear bud and the already implantable RFID chips.

Road & Track got a surreptitious sneak peak of the 2009 Prius, which as part of the hybrid class of gas/electric cars is bound to be in high demand.

Here’s the cool part: The new model will be faster and get better mileage. Detroit has some work to do.

See it here.

I see a formerly well-off family with driving-aged teens, now squeezed by fuel and food prices into eating Top Ramen and trading in three severely devalued SUVs for one of these beauts. The old gas guzzlers will be lying around like all cell phones larger than deck of cards.

See also the 100 mpg car.

Ask any reputable meteorologists or climate researcher and they’ll tell you no single storm can be attributed to global warming. Somebody should tell Al Gore.

According to the right-leaning Business & Media Institute, Gore said today on NPR’s Fresh Air (with host Terry Gross):

“And as we’re talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated,” Gore said. “And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China – and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.”

Global warming is indeed predicted to fuel more powerful storms, but many, many other localized and short-term factors are at work with any given cyclone. In fact it’s quite possible that a short-term cooling trend will have an entirely different effect over the next few years before the long-term warming trend resumes. This is not simple A to B then on to C stuff. Rather, it’s complex science … best left to scientists.

Blaming this storm on climate change, which the above quote pretty much does (and which will be interpreted that way regardless), has Gore doing the same thing as those who don’t think global warming is real: It distorts facts, stretches them to fit a view.

There are two primary types of information useful in evaluating climate change:

• Predictions of future climate conditions using historical data, facts about changes underway, and models to fast-forward various what-ifs.
• Continued scientific study to see if events and conditions change as models predicted and to hindcast observed changes to create better models of what’s going on.

Proclaiming the cause of an event underway, one that nobody has studied, is counterproductive to Gore’s cause and, like pumping hot air into hurricane, fuel for his detractors’ arguments.

Just as the majority of people have warmed up to the reality of global warming, one new look into the crystal climate ball calls for some cooling over the next decade.

The forecast, detailed in the journal Nature, calls for a blip in the long-running and presumably ongoing warming trend. It is an effort to look ahead just one decade.

From a NY Times article: The authors stressed that the pause in warming represented only a temporary blunting of the centuries of rising temperatures that scientists have projected if carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases continue accumulating in the atmosphere.

The predicted shift owes to changes in ocean currents, which have long been known to work on years-long and decades-long cycles to alter temps and rainfall patterns. Think El Nino.

The question is, is this a good or bad thing? When my son gets temporary respite from a fever, he’s tricked (as am I, every time) into resuming normal activities, which inevitably seems to exacerbate the illness and bring a return of the fever.

Likewise, might a period of cooling chill efforts to raise awareness of the pickle our planet is in? In this period of rising fuel and food prices, one can imagine long-term climate and pollution issues taking a back seat to economic realities.

If U.S. architects want to get back into the Guinness Book of World Records, they better start thinking big.

In an article today about China’s colossal new airport building (Terminal 3 is said to be the world’s largest), the International Herald Tribune point out:

China is home to the world’s largest shopping mall (the 650,000-square-meter, or seven-million-square-foot, South China Mall); the longest sea-crossing bridge (stretching 36 kilometers, or 22 miles, over part of the East China Sea); the largest hydroelectric dam (the massive Three Gorges project); and the highest railroad (an engineering marvel that crosses the Tibetan permafrost almost 5,000 meters above sea level).

U.S. buildings used to vie with each other for tallest. Now we barely make the global lists. The Sears Tower, antenna included, is a mere 1,730 feet tall. Dubai’s tallest building under construction is already 2,064 feet in the air and headed to 2,625 feet.

And current records will likely be seriously trumped (but not Trumped) before long. Saudi Prince al-Walid bin Talal plans a mile-high skyscraper along the Red Sea.

While we’re at it: Billionaire Mukesh Ambani is building what might be the world’s costliest home, a $2 billion, 550-foot-tall mansion (Mansion? Is that the word for something like this?) with a heliport on top. Maybe Warren Buffet, the world’s richest man, can reclaim this title for the U.S. someday. He’s certainly been saving up. For five decades, Buffett has lived in the same 10-room house in Omaha. Just think what a view of Nebraska he could get from, say, a couple miles up…

Some ill-informed members of the Florida House of Representatives voted this week to pass a bill that would bring creationism into schools. A different version in the Senate would have to be reconciled for any new law to be made.

The evolution bill (SB2692) would require that alternatives to evolution be taught in public schools.

Here’s the core of the problem: There are no viable alternatives. Yet Florida Governor Charlie Crist has tacitly bought into the naiveté. Asked whether he believes in evolution, Crist said: “I believe in a lot of things. We should have the freedom to have a good exchange of ideas, right?”

That’s a stupid answer and an even stupider question, and Crist fuels irrational creationist flames by failing to give a square answer. Evolution is not something to believe in or not believe in. It is something to realize (or dismiss or perhaps not understand).

Religion is something one believes in. The rightness or wrongness of the Iraq war is something you can believe in. The certainty of a pay raise next year is something you can believe in.

The theory of evolution is one of the most well-established scientific theories, rooted in facts and observations from multiple tests and investigations on several scientific fronts over many decades. There’s absolutely zero credible evidence to support any other explanation for the incredible diversity of life and the changes that we see happening right before our eyes.

Do you “believe” that deadly superbugs are evolving to resist antibiotics? The question is irrelevant to the rapidly evolving bugs, but ignorance of facts could leave you just as dead.

According to the Sun-Sentinel, the bill is likely to die for lack of action anyway, as the legislative session ends Friday But don’t be surprised though to see the bill re-emerge in the future. Like organisms, bad legislation on this topic has a habit of evolving into new forms and surviving like a superbug.

The Ewart brothers in Chicago claim to have adapted a Prius to get 100 mpg.

That’s double what you get from the most fuel-efficient production car (powered at least partly gas or a variant fuel) sold in the United States, according to fueleconomy.gov. The Toyota Prius, at No. 1, gets 48 city, 45 highway

Next up is the ultra tiny smartfortwo (shown at right, actual size) which tops out at 33/41 and holds two French people and a bag of peanuts.

You’d think we’d come a lot farther, what with all the hybrid hoopla of late.

The Ewart’s figure if two guys can hit 100 mpg — they stuck some batteries in the trunk — car companies should be able to, too. (See the video story on this low-flying Orville and Wilbur duo.)

Okay, so record gas prices have awoken the feds: Fuel efficiency standards will rise more quickly than had been planned, we learned this week, but the fed plan is still convoluted, less than what’s technically feasible (Ewart Motor Company?), and rollout is phased and delayed. Meantime, an LA Times article says reasonably priced, mass-produced electric cars really are coming. Of course, we won’t be able to rely too heavily on nuclear power plants for their electricity because uranium is running out.

For the record, the least efficient vehicle: Lamborghini Murcielago, regardless of whether you can’t afford the regular one or the Roadster version: 8/13.