Findings

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.