Findings

Podcast on Evolution: Scientists vs. the Public

In this final podcast from the meeting, Science Podcast host Robert Frederick sits in on a discussion about communicating the major events in evolution to the general public. Why do new scientific discoveries make the public more skeptical of evolution? And how can scientists better convey their findings to a general audience?

Listen to the podcast here.

A Grand Diversion in Louisiana

Decades of draining, dredging and other mistreatment have taken a severe toll on Louisiana wetlands. Hurricane Katrina focused a spotlight on the need to restore the marshes, which can lessen the risk of water surging toward New Orleans. But any such plan would have to compete for money with other flood protection projects, such as raising levees. Results of new model, unveiled here yesterday, may help win support for repairing the wetlands.

Louisiana wetlands face extreme challenges. Sea level is rising and the ground is sinking, both of which threaten to drown the marshes. Normally, sediment deposited by the Mississippi River helps build up the delta, allowing the marshes to stay above water. But engineering of the river to make it better for shipping has caused much of its sediment to flow into deep water. 

Podcast: Food, Fuel, and Human Survival

Not all biofuels are alike. Some are easier to produce, and others are actually bad for the environment. Science Podcast host Robert Frederick sat down with biofuels experts from around the world to discuss the pros and cons of biofuels, and what the human race needs to do to survive on this planet.

Listen to the interview here.

Warm Sea Urchins on Acid

Marine biologists break out in a cold sweat when they think about the impact of greenhouse gases on the oceans. It's not just the fact that global warming raises the temperature of the sea. Scientists are also worried about acidity. The burning of fossil fuels pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and when it gets absorbed by seawater, it turns into carbonic acid and makes the oceans more acidic.

Warmer waters are stressful for marine life, making organisms like coral more vulnerable to disease. A lower ocean pH—i.e. a more acidic environment--makes it harder for marine invertebrates to construct their shells. But there has been little work looking at the combined effects of warmer waters and stronger acidity.

At a symposium here yesterday, physiologist Gretchen Hofmann of the University of California, Santa Barbara, reported that the combination can be deadly for the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, that she works on. DNA studies are also revealing details about how the urchins battle the stress. "This is cutting edge," says marine ecologist Jane Lubcencko of Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Creationism: Would You Like Fries with That?

Amid the clatter of a hotel dining room last night, a spirited debate over creationism caught my ears. A table full of speakers was preparing for a session today on the public understanding of science.

Evolution doyen Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), based in Oakland, California, was presiding in a charcoal blazer. Still pale from a bout with the flu, she sipped spoonfuls of French Onion soup. "It's the first time I've been dressed in a few days," she confessed.

So what's the best way to deal with creationists? "It's a dialogue we need," said Steven Case of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, as he dug into a mushroom burger. "The only way to know they're hearing you is by listening."

The Podcast Visits Family Science Days

The fun of science was on full display at the fifth annual Family Science Days. Via interactive booths and demonstrations, kids of all ages learned about everything from the history of yo-yos to the physics of Nascar. Science news writer Elsa Youngsteadt stopped by to chat with some of these possible future scientists.

Listen to the podcast here.

A Podcast Conversation with ScienceNOW Editor David Grimm

It's been a busy meeting, and the blog posts are flying fast and furious. Science Podcast host Robert Frederick sits down for a quick chat with ScienceNOW editor David Grimm to discuss some of his favorite stories from the meeting so far--as well as the advantages of blogging versus writing regular news stories. 

Listen to the conversation here.

Your New Home in Saudi Arabia

How do you persuade 500 science majors from around the world to pursue graduate studies at a new university in a desert nation? Especially one where Sharia law prevails and women can't vote or drive?

Money, mostly--nearly $28 million this year in scholarships.

The school is the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST), scheduled to open in 2009 on the west coast of Saudi Arabia. The recruiter is Matt Jones of the Institute of International Education in Washington, D.C., who's here advertising a program to get undergraduates in their junior and senior year to commit to KAUST.

Why True Love is Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

How horrifying might it be to lose a limb? How exhilarating to find true love? When these things actually happen, reality rarely matches our predictions. At a session this morning, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert presented new experimental results that may explain why. 

Gilbert suspects that anticipation may play a key role in the disconnect between fact and forecast. When people have lots of time to think, he said, they may consider alternatives that cast the expected experience in a favorable or jaundiced light. Imagine you just took a test, for example, and didn't feel good about it. You might anticipate getting a C or a D grade; and in that case, you'd think you'd feel great if you actually got a B. But when you get your test back and do get that B, the grade doesn't taste as sweet as you thought it would. That's because, according to Gilbert's theory, your brain is so busy processing the moment that the earlier comparisons disappear.

Podcast on Emerging Chemical Contaminants and Human Health

While chemicals are ubiquitous in coastal environments, there are new classes of emerging chemical contaminants that will have both direct and indirect effects on ocean and coastal ecosystem health, as well as potential implications for human health. 

Science Podcast host Robert Frederick interviewed NOAA's Nat Scholz about his latest research on the effects that a mix of chemicals has on salmon. The podcast also includes an overview of the related scientific research from Science's Erik Stokstad.

Listen here.

Presidential Campaigns Call for Big Boosts to Research Funding

Representatives of the two remaining major Democratic candidates for U.S. president both endorsed big budget increases for federally funded basic scientific research at a debate before hundreds of scientists today, with the Clinton team offering decidedly more specifics on their plans.

Apart from that distinction, few policy differences emerged during the hour and half debate held this afternoon to generally positive reviews. None of the details the campaigns laid out were new. In addition, neither committed to a proposed science debate for the candidates themselves, which would be supported by major research organizations and thousands of U.S. scientists, and which would take place on 18 April in Philadelphia. And both trained more fire on outgoing president George Bush than each other.

Pesticide Brew Spells Trouble for Salmon

Salmon in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, and elsewhere, have been in a world of hurt for decades. One of their main enemies is agricultural chemicals, like chlorpyrifos. The pesticide interferes with salmon brains and harms their ability to feed, according to studies by Nathaniel Scholz, a zoologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. Now Scholz's research is showing that mixtures of pesticides are even worse for salmon and can be surprisingly lethal. 

Chlorpyrifos and other so-called organophosphate pesticides kill cells by inhibiting acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme that helps neurons communicate. These pesticides are sprayed on crops and are widespread in streams in the Northwest; half of the waters sampled by the U.S. Geological Survey contain six or more pesticides. In their previous work with salmon, Scholz and his colleagues had only looked at the effects of one pesticide. To get a more realistic idea of exposure, they designed lab experiments to test effects of mixtures of chlorpyrifos and four other pesticides, exposing juvenile salmon to two compounds at a time.

Podcast on the Evolution of Morality

While moral judgment is a trait found in all cultures, there is wide variation among moral systems. In this podcast segment, Science correspondent John Bohannon moderates a panel discussion on evolutionary and psychological perspectives on moral judgment. The panelists were Marc Hauser from Harvard University, David Wilson from Binghamton University, Samuel Bowles from the Sante Fe Institute, and Judith Smetana from the University of Rochester.

Listen to the discussion here.

Five Things You Didn't Know about Jim McCarthy

The president elect of the AAAS, James McCarthy is one of the most visible faces in U.S. climate science. He's a world leader on ocean science and the arctic, and he co-chaired a working group of the UN's 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Some things you should know about him:

1. His scientific heroes: U.S. climate science legend Roger Revelle ("For the realization that all these pieces--the oceans, the atmosphere, biodiversity, climate--fit together") and Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin, who was the first chair of the IPCC in 1988 ("Bert had this sense that scientists had an obligation to put [climate science] into the policy arena. He managed to get scientists to work together to do that.")

2. He's got sharp elbows when it comes to entering the public fray over climate change policy. McCarthy, a professor at Harvard, lambasted a New York Times article that included criticisms of Al Gore's use of science in the film, An Inconvenient Truth. "If you feel obligated to publish what are simply opinions, please use the opinion pages rather than the science section," read his letter to the editor.

Podcast Interview with Futurist and Inventor Ray Kurzweil

The power of engineering took a simple scientific principle from Daniel Bernoulli and turned it into modern aviation.  News writer Elsa Youngsteadt spoke with futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil about  the challenges engineers face in turning the most recent scientific principles into technologies for the 21st century.  Listen to the interview here.

Lady Montagu over Cocktails

Former molecular biologist Sandya Narayanswami and Dominic Reid of the British Royal Society were chatting at the cocktail hour the other night when Reid mentioned he was arranging the 350th anniversary celebrations for the Society in 2010. Museum celebrations were planned, he said, as were lectures and television shows celebrating British science. Narayanswami, an Englishwoman now working as a fundraiser for Caltech, worried Reid was leaving somebody out.

"Don't forget to honor Lady Montague--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu," said a smiling Narayanswami, adjusting her dark shawl. Born in 1689, Montagu had traveled to Turkey in 1716, where she wrote a series of famous letters about the Middle East. As wife of the British ambassador, she had access to the harems of the Turkish elite, where she saw women immunizing their children with a traditional smallpox vaccine derived from smallpox pustules. Montagu herself had smallpox, and she wanted to protect her children. "So she had them vaccinated," explained Narayanswami.

Satellites for Human Rights

These two satellite images, presented here today, are part of an ongoing court case in the African Union against the government of Zimbabwe. They're also an example of a recent partnership between science and humanitarian groups. Staff of the AAAS Science and Human Rights program analyzed these images in 2006, when lawyers accused Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe of having bulldozed entire villages to prevent people from voting. The government initially dismissed the accusations as routine enforcement of zoning regulations, but satellite images revealed the true extent of the destruction. The "before" photo (left) shows an intact village in 2002; in 2006, the village had been bulldozed (right). Such images are not freely available: AAAS spent $250 to purchase the 2002 photo from an archive, and it shelled out $1792 for a private company to capture an updated photo in 2006.

Face in the Crowd: Krishna Athreya

Krishna B. Athreya is now a respected mathematician at Iowa State University, but when he was 11 he was nearly flunking math in the small town of Pattamadai, India. "My mother was despairing of me," he recalled the other night. She brought him to a teacher she knew named K. Venkatarama Iyer. "He showed me mathematics was like a ladder, one thing builds on another." Athreya managed to turn his academic career around--and received his PhD at Stanford in 1967. These days the theorist splits his time between Iowa and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Teaching students "gives me great joy," he says.

But it's not just university students that Athreya tries to excite. He regularly speaks to school groups in India; in July of last year he returned to Ramaseshier High School in his hometown, where he was greeted like royalty. "It was very cute to see him being mobbed by the female students," said his wife, whose first name is also Krishna. She was attending the meeting as part of a panel on scientists with disabilities.

Invasion of the Lace Corals

In the evolutionary battleground of the sea, most of the action is thought to take place in shallower waters. There, the constant struggle between predator and prey has sparked new ways of killing and better means of defense. Those species less equipped for the fight have often taken refuge in deeper water. Yesterday a biologist presented the first strong evidence that some corals have taken the opposite path, rising from the deep to invade shallow water several times.

The corals are called stylasterids, also known as lace or hydrocorals. They first appeared 65 million years ago and live as deep as 2800 meters--and perhaps further down too. Just 10% of stylasterid species inhabit shallow water. Alberto Lindner of the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, collected samples of stylasterids from around the world, mainly from fishing trawlers that had snagged the corals and from scientific dredging.

Magnetized by Thermonuclear Energy

I snuck away from a session this afternoon to wander through the enormous exhibition hall at the heart of the convention. Dozens of scientific institutions, companies and agencies are advertising what they do, and some have a clever pitch. Like the magnets that drew to me to one particular booth, that of the International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor.

ITER is the $12 billion international facility to be built at Cadarache, France, by 2014. The project is an experiment to demonstrate the feasibility of using hydrogen fusion--the reaction that powers the sun--to generate a vast supply of energy.

Podcast Interview with Autism Researcher Justine Cassell

Today featured a session about autistic children learning social behavior by interacting with and controlling virtual children. Science Podcast host Robert Frederick spoke with Northwestern University's Justine Cassell. Listen to the interview here.

Scientists: Be True to Your School (Board)

Are you a scientist fed up with watching creationists take over school boards from Pennsylvania to Kansas? Or do you just want to improve science education in your local district? If so, you might want to take the advice offered at an AAAS meeting session today: Run for your local school board.

The session, led by political scientist Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, provided numerous tips for would be scientist-candidates. Miller, a member of the DeKalb, Illinois school board for 3 years during the 1980s, took participants through his 9-step program for getting elected, including how to decide whether to run in the first place (Step 1), how to raise the necessary campaign funds (Step 5), and, most importantly, how to win voters to come out and support you (Step 9).

Scientists Share Their Favorite Mars Photos

We all have our favorite photographs from trips we've taken. For two of the scientists who have led the Mars Rover missions starting in 2004, two shots stand out.

For Cornell's Steve Squyres, who's presenting this afternoon on continued progress of rovers Spirit and Opportunity, a shot called "Everest Pan," taken in 2005 from the summit of Husband Hill near Gusev Crater is his favorite. "It's just a spectacular view. It's the highest point in the entire traverse," the rover principal investigator told Science. "You can see the geology of the entire mission." In the distance, for example, is the rim of Gusev crater, 80 km away, where Spirit found geochemical and visual evidence of water a year before the picture was taken.

Methuselah of the Deep

The oldest known organism in the sea is a deep-water coral living off Hawaii, a paleoceanographer reported here today. At more than 4000 years old, it's far older than any other sea creature, and rivals bristlecone pine trees in antiquity. 

Brendan Roark of Texas A&M University in College Station was studying the corals to extract climate records while a post-doc at Stanford University. In 2006, he and colleagues reported in a paper that they had found a "gold coral", Gerardia sp., as much as 2390 years old, according to carbon-14 dating. A "black coral" known as Leiopathes glaberrima was even older, 2600 years. The next oldest marine organisms are clams, which live a few hundred years.

Podcast Interview with the Head of Rwanda's Ministry for Science

Rwanda plans to spend 3% of its GDP on science in an effort to lift the country out of poverty.  But where will that money come from, and how will it be spent? 

At last night's opening ceremony, Science Podcast host Robert Frederick spoke with Romain Murenzi, head of Rwanda's Ministry for Science, Technology and Scientific Research.

Listen to the interview here.

Artificial Playmates for Autistic Children

Children with autism spectrum disorder are unable to sustain play, fantasy, and fluid social interaction. At least with real people. But psychologist and linguist Justine Cassell of Northwestern University in Evanston says that interaction with virtual peers releases hidden social skills in these kids.

A virtual child is a cartoonish-looking, gender-neutral 8-year-old that appears on a TV or projection screen. When it interacts with a real child, half of the action takes place in the real world, and half in the virtual world. For example, the virtual child "watches" the real child as he or she plays with dolls, thanks to sensors on the toys. The virtual child can also talk to the real child in the pre-recorded voice of a real child, and even uses lifelike expressions and gestures.

Poverty and the Brain: When It's Right to be Wrong

Scientists like to be right. In a weird way, though, they also like to be wrong. What I'm talking about is the desire that most researchers have of seeing their field advance by leaps and bounds--so that their ideas of tomorrow make their ideas of today seem at least partly, if not fundamentally, wrong in hindsight.

Researchers at the meeting provided a glimpse of that attitude this morning at a press conference on recent scientific findings on how poverty affects brain development. Although social scientists, psychologists, and educators have known for decades that children who grow up in poorer homes often have difficulties with learning and educational achievement later in life, only in recent years have the causal mechanisms started to become clear. Researchers are now finding out how the higher levels of stress that arise in poorer families can adversely affect the brain development of children.

Tell Us What You Really Think, Professor Baltimore

After expounding on the science of AIDS and the prospects for international scientific development, outgoing AAAS president David Baltimore wrapped up his Friday night opening address with a strident election-year message: America needs a political change, and President George W. Bush has been bad for science and bad for the world.

"I've held my breath awaiting new leaders in Washington ... who I consider true Americans," he said. The lines elicited neither applause nor boos from the crowd of about 1200. He called for a science debate among presidential candidates. "The United States allowed itself to become mesmerized by the terrorist threat," he said. Baltimore marveled at "how much growth there is in Europe while the US has been fighting in Iraq," blasted Congress and the White House for passing "a budget that does not meet the needs" of American science, and called on Americans to "hold our head low in penance for the horrors inflicted by our country in Abu Ghraib."

Scientist Finds Hope among the Ruins

Research can change worldviews, topple paradigms, bust myths and improve people's lives. It can also be a window into the human spirit, as Elizabeth Frankenberg discovered while studying the psychological impact of the Indian Ocean tsunami that ravaged coastal regions of South East Asia in December of 2004.

Frankenberg, a sociologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and her colleagues began their study in Indonesia a few months after the tsunami left thousands dead and many others homeless. They found that a subset of individuals affected by the catastrophe continued to show symptoms of post traumatic stress more than two years after the event. Last night, on the eve of presenting her findings to conference attendees, Frankenberg told Science how the fieldwork had affected her personally.

A World Without Engineering?

In making the case for more research funding, scientists often ask a simple question: what would the world be like without scientific advancement? Ioannis Miaoulis, the president of the Boston Museum of Science, asked a different, though related question, to a packed hall of attendees last night: what would the world look like without engineering?

Very different, of course. There would be no chairs, no microphones, no glasses, no buildings, Miaoulis said, drawing upon the setting. And most of the listeners in the auditorium wouldn't be there either, he said, because without the engineering of drugs and vaccines, the average life expectancy of people would be 27.

Podcast Interview with David Baltimore

Robert Frederick, host of the Science Podcast, has a short interview with AAAS president David Baltimore on the theme of this year's annual AAAS meeting: Science and Technology from a Global Perspective.  Listen here.

Fishing for Data on Ocean Trawlers

Over the last decade, marine ecologists have grown increasingly worried about the impact of trawling fishing gear on seafloor ecosystems. But evidence of this activity   remained largely invisible from the surface until two years ago. That's when trawling expert Elliot Norse of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Bellevue, Washington learned of a way to detect shallow-water trawling as it happens, and possibly quantify it worldwide.

The breakthrough came thanks to Google Earth, the popular application that lets the public explore maps with satellite photos. A California fishing consultant had discovered that digital images of the ocean include high-resolution pictures of fishing boats and the plumes of seafloor mud that they kick up. (The plumes persist in the water for roughly eight hours after they're formed. If a satellite happens to pass over during that period, it can record the trawling for posterity). "Call it Google serendipity," says John Amos, who runs the nonprofit remote sensing group SkyTruth. He's collected some of the photos and will present them tomorrow at a session on the oceans.

Ocean Map Charts Path of Human Destruction

Four years in the making, a groundbreaking new map of the state of the world's oceans was released today, and its message is stark: Human activity has left a mark on nearly every square kilometer of sea, severely compromising ecosystems in more than 40 percent of waters.

The map, presented here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science--and published tomorrow in Science--combines 17 anthropogenic stressors, including coastal runoff and pollution, warming water temperature due to human-induced climate change, oil rigs that damage the sea floor, and five different kinds of fishing. Hundreds of experts worked to weigh and compare the stressors, overlaying them on top of maps the scientists built of various ecosystems, with data obtained from shipping maps, satellite imagery, and scientific buoys. Then marine scientists modeled how different ecosystems would be affected by the stressors, mapping so-called impact scores onto square-kilometer-sized parcels worldwide. The scores correspond to colored pixels on the new map.

Five Things You Didn't Know about Jim Hansen

This year's winner of the AAAS award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility is as close to a household name as there is in climate science. James Hansen of Columbia University and NASA has been studying Earth's climate for more than three decades. In 2006, he said he was being "censored" after NASA public affairs officials turned down certain interview requests with him on climate change. Hansen spoke to Science before receiving his award, and revealed a few things you might not know about him:

1. He first met Al Gore in 1982, when the future Nobel Peace Prize winner was holding some of the earliest hearings on global warming. "It was quite impressive that a congressperson was that well informed about the science," Hansen says.

2. Hansen is occasionally recognized by strangers. "It has happened a few times recently," he laughs. Recently on an airplane, an executive with a company that sells hydrogen-powered cars approached him and asked if he'd be willing to drive one of the firm's vehicles for a while. "I said, well, I would except there aren't many stations to fill it up," Hansen says. "I don't want to drive out of my way."

Baltimore in Boston: Scientific Outsourcing Comes to India

Last month, during a trip to India, AAAS president David Baltimore realized just how flat the earth is becoming when it comes to science.

There he visited a firm called TnQ in Chennai whose thousand employees, many of them PhD's, edit and prepare American and European scientific papers. Much like customer support and other industries that have been outsourced to India, TnQ takes manuscripts that have been accepted for publication in journals like Cell and copyedits them and prepares their layout. During Baltimore's visit, the staff showed him his own review paper on RNA—which he had submitted to the journal Immunity—and  which TnQ had processed and edited from its facilities. "[I was] impressed by the scientific knowledge of the staff," he told a room of international reporters this morning at the inaugural breakfast of the association's 2008 meeting.