Revealed: how Congress members sound off about science

Words matter, especially for elected officials whose careers prosper or falter on the cut and thrust of political debate. So with the US Congress now back in action after its summer recess, New Scientist has used a neat online tool to find out which members are uttering the words that lie close to our readers’ hearts.

Capitol Words is a project of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit group founded in 2006 to use “the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible”.

Type a word into its search box, and you see a graph charting the total number of times it appeared in the Congressional Record over time. Mentions of “science”, for instance, peaked at around 3000 per month in April 2007, during debate over a bill that would have expanded funding for research on human embryonic stem cells