Findings

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.