Framing science: everything is a national security issue

I have subscribed to EurekAlert's feed of biological sciences press releases for a few years now, and they occasionally show up in the miniblog in the right-hand column of the front page. The press releases are almost universally written by dedicated PR officials at universities, learned societies, and not-so-learned societies. I get the impression that the PR officials have minimal interaction with the scientists involved, and the results of this enterprise are almost invariably worth more in comedy currency than scientific (the reason all of these links are from scienceblogs.com is simply because I ran out of words to link before I could look for other sources of mockery). We criticise newspapers for their poor grasp of scientific developments, and ever poorer communication of them, but actually, they seem pretty good at faithfully reproducing some of the nonsense in press releases (I would have a go at linking all the words in that sentence to bad newspaper coverage of science, but it would be too easy just to link to the past fortnight's editions of the Daily Express).

Alongside the accidentally absurd are the deliberately overblown. It's an unfortunate effect of the internal market in science that sometimes, the survivor is not the one who does the best and most important work, but the one who shouts the loudest about how good and important their work is. The item that inspired this particular outpouring is this, from yesterday: New use for stem cells found in war on terrorism. That's some hefty framing.