as consultants for the United States Department of Defense. He was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1982. He also received the Alan T. Waterman Award in 1978 from the National Science Foundation "for highly original and innovative research which has led to important discoveries and inventions in diverse areas of physics, including astrophysics, radioisotope dating, and optics". Muller is a founder and board member of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature ("BEST") project, which has published an independent analysis of the Earth's surface temperature records. In 1999, he received a distinguished teaching award from UC Berkeley. His "Physics for Future Presidents" series of lectures, in which Muller teaches a synopsis of modern qualitative (i.e. without resorting to complicated math) physics, has been released publicly on YouTube by UC Berkeley and has been published in book form. It has been one of the most highly regarded courses at Berkeley. In December 2009, Muller officially retired from teaching the course, although he still occasionally gives guest lectures. In 2015 a team including Muller received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the Supernova Cosmology Project. MIT Technology Review For several years, he was a monthly columnist with MIT's Technology Review. In his August 2003 column on the polygraph machine used in lie detection examinations, Muller asserted that "the polygraph procedure has an accuracy between 80 and 95 percent". The National Academy of Sciences found that there is "little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy". In his April 2002 column on the anthrax attacks, Muller claimed "I think it likely that the anthrax terrorists were working for Osama bin Laden, and intended to murder thousands of people." Climate change Hockey stick graph After the Soon and Baliunas controversy led to the paper being dismissed as defective and resignations of the journal's editors, Muller wrote in his 17 December 2003 Technology Review column that, while poor papers were not uncommon, Soon and Baliunas had attracted unusual attention for their portrayal of a prominent Medieval Warm Period in contrast to the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (MBH99) reconstruction of the temperature record of the past 1000 years. This reconstruction, nicknamed the hockey stick graph, had featured prominently in the IPCC Third Assessment Report, and differed significantly from the schematic diagram shown in the IPCC First Assessment Report. Muller gave his views on the subsequent controversy. He noted the October