Here in London at The Great Beyond HQ news is trickling through to our ever-open ears that something is happening in the US today. I think it’s called an inauguration.

For those gripped by Obama fever, take a look at Nature’s coverage leading up to today. There’s a special, put together late last year, a commentary and a taste of Nature’s take on the handover, including three features looking back at Bush’s legacy for science. (One, two, three)

Obama’s inauguration is dominating news headlines, but science is also sneaking into the limelight. In the UK’s Observer, science editor Robin McKie bagged an interview with James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, New York City, and famed for his no-nonsense approach to climate science.

Hansen’s warning to the US, and to Obama, is stark: Obama’s four years in office are the four years in which America must act on climate change. It’s not quite what the headline reads in a related, shorter news story “President Obama ‘has four years to save the Earth”, but it’s close.

For other science-related inauguration news, you could do worse than to while away some moments on the New York Times’s excellent interactive graphic.

This piece of neat internet trickery collates the most-used words in presidential inaugural addresses since the dawn of time. (What’s that – time existed before America got its first president?) Click on JFK, 1961, and you’ll notice that he used the word ‘science’. If you click on the word itself, you get a neat summary of all the times ‘science’ has been uttered by an inaugurating president. Note that it hasn’t been mentioned since Nixon in 1969.

‘Scientific’ was uttered five times, by just three presidents, John Quincy Adams in 1825, William Howard Taft in 1909 and three times by Harry Truman in 1949 who talks about using the US’s scientific and technical power to do help drag people out of poverty and to protect them from disease.

Happy inauguration day!