From the LA Times --- (this time by way of the Consumerist, now owned by Consumer Reports)

Great story in the LA Times today. A grad student does a routine job of research, gets a tiny little mention in a major science publication. But--shock! Awe!--his results make the Big Wood industry look bad, so they try to suppress even that little bitty article. Bright fucking move guys--the story is now all over the place:

after his research appeared in the online version of the journal Science in January, the Oregon State University graduate student began to feel like a lightning rod. A federal agency briefly yanked funding for his project, irate politicians and timber interests e-mailed Donato's dean to complain, congressmen grilled him, and professors at his own university tried unsuccessfully to keep the paper from being published in the print edition of Science.

Why, fer chrissakes? What could this paper have shown that they were so desperate to suppress? And why right now? Yeah, you guessed it...

His principal finding — that post-fire logging hindered forest regrowth — was hardly revolutionary. But the study, with Donato as lead author, was published just as Congress was considering legislation to make it easier for timber companies to undertake salvage logging of dead trees after fires on federal land. That bill, backed by the Bush administration and recently passed by the House, is based on an underlying assumption that burned forests recover more quickly if they are logged and then replanted.