Findings

The mysterious meter-tall "hobbits" of Indonesia have upended many anthropologists' views of human evolution, so talks on the little people always draw a crowd. At a symposium Friday afternoon on the evolution of the human species, William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York state offered a roundup on the bones from Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores and added a few tantalizing bits of news.

Want a carbon-neutral, guilt-free way to power your car or heat your home? An ideal fuel would be hydrogen gas, because it can be made by splitting water molecules with electricity from solar panels. The crucial ingredient is a catalyst to drive the reaction. Last year, chemist Daniel Nocera of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge unveiled a cheap, easy-to-use catalyst. It was a big development, but there was still room for improvement, as Science reported this summer:

A final big push will be to see if the catalyst or others like it can operate in seawater. If so, future societies could use sunlight to generate hydrogen from seawater and then pipe it to large banks of fuel cells on shore that could convert it into electricity and fresh water, thereby using the sun and oceans to fill two of the world's greatest needs.

That hurdle has now been cleared. In a lecture yesterday at the meeting, Nocera described to a packed hall how the catalyst works in seawater or dirty freshwater. He also noted that the catalyst constantly repairs itself, although its lifetime is still unknown. The results will be published in the next few days.

--Erik Stokstad

Ever since researchers found fossils of Homo erectus beneath a medieval castle in Dmanisi, Georgia, they have been chipping away at the image of this venerable human ancestor. At 1.8 million years old, the fossils at Dmanisi are the earliest members of the human family known outside of Africa. Now, it turns out that they managed to trek all the way across Africa and the Middle East with the most primitive kind of stone tools known, rather than with more sophisticated stone hand axes that were thought to be essential for intercontinental travel. The textbook vision of the first world traveler has changed, says paleoanthropologist David Lordkipanidze of the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi.

Many talks at this year's meeting start with a nod to Charles Darwin, often with the same famous photo of the great scientist in profile, to celebrate his 200th birthday. But paleoanthropologists talking in a session aptly called "The Origin of the Human Species" on Friday clearly felt a special bond with him.

Paleoanthropologist William Kimbel was the first speaker, and he began the session by saying that he was recently asked if he had a chance to go back in time to talk with Darwin, what fossil would he take with him. Kimbel said he would show Darwin a skull of the human ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, which is best known as the species that includes the famous partial skeleton of Lucy from Ethiopia. "I can imagine sitting at a table with Darwin, a little smile on his face," says Kimbel. "You can tell from the photos he's not a smiley kind of guy, but he would recognize that australopithecines were an intermediate between apes and humans." 

At a meeting full of scientific celebrities, a former politician has proven to be the greatest draw. Of course, Al Gore is no ordinary politician, especially to any scientist interested in climate change. One might say he's a politician turned scientist, and tonight, as an invited speaker, the former vice president sought to reverse the equation: He asked all of the scientists in the audience to get involved in politics.

Gore began by saying that the economic crisis we find ourselves in today is intertwined with the climate crisis.  Both, he said, have their roots in our dependence on carbon-based fuels. He even went as far as to compare climate change with the mortgage meltdown. "We now have $7 trillion worth of subprime carbon assets whose value is based on the assumption that it is perfectly all right to put 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet," he said. 

Then it was on to An Inconvenient Truth territory, with Gore updating the doomsday scenarios he laid out in his book and 2006 movie. The Arctic ice is melting faster than we anticipated, the Maldives is trying to buy itself a country that won't sink, and no one seems to notice anymore when 1 million people are evacuated from New Orleans. "Is this the new normal?" Gore asked.

So what can scientists do?

Science Podcast host Robert Frederick interviews incoming AAAS president Peter Agre. He faces a vastly different political landscape than outgoing president James McCarthy. "There's a national level of joy," says Agre, "in that we have new leadership in Washington that wants to restore science to its proper place."

Listen to the podcast here.

In 1969, scientists found formaldehyde floating through space. Since then, radio telescopes have spotted a number of other complex molecules--even some that could form the building blocks of life. But they've been a bit myopic in their search. Today, researchers presented some preliminary results from a project aimed at taking a much larger survey of the sky. And they're asking the public for help.

That project is the Prebiotic Interstellar Molecule Survey (PRIMOS). Launched in 2004, it plans to inventory all of the chemicals found in space. In the past, scientists would decide on the molecule they were looking for, and then set their telescope's radio frequency to that one molecule. The approach paid off, netting a number of aldehydes and simple sugars, but Anthony Remijan of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, thought there was a better way. Why not, he and colleagues reasoned, look at all frequencies available to us instead and see what comes up?

U.S. researchers have little to show for efforts in recent years to reach out to counterparts in North Korea. But the stars may be aligning for a new push, particularly if the Administration of U.S. President Barack Obama jump-starts stalled efforts at science diplomacy. The new U.S. Administration "presents a new face internationally and can make this a very special time to engage in these activities," Peter Agre, incoming AAAS president and a 2003 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, said at a session on engaging scientists in North Korea.

The atmosphere of late for scientific cooperation has been bleak. Intelligence analysts say that North Korea is gearing up for another provocative round of missile tests and that relations between North and South Korea are at their lowest point in years.  "Educational or academic exchanges in the strict sense are limited to virtually nonexistent," said Fred Carriere of The Korea Society in New York City. "Trust and a communication deficit is the root of the problem."

When scientists talk about the oceans, things can get really depressing real fast. Coral reefs are dying all over the world. The cod fishery off Newfoundland fell apart in the early 1990s, costing thousands of people their jobs. And the pollock catch in the Bering Sea, one of the biggest fisheries in the United States, has fallen sharply in recent years.

But at this year's AAAS meeting, fisheries scientists are getting together to tell fish tales with happy endings. There's good news about fish? You bet there is, says Joshua Cinner, who studies marine reserves at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. And he and other scientists are realizing that they need to start talking that up. "If people get bombarded all the time with this bad news, they're going to stop caring," says Cinner. "We've seen some good decisions, and we want to make people aware of them."

So what's the good news?

  As outgoing AAAS president James McCarthy delivered the address, "Our Planet and Its Life: Origins and Futures," that kicked off this year's meeting, he made it clear that he took that sub headline seriously. Tonight's talk was an admiring look back at hundreds of years of science and a nervous look forward to what lies ahead.

Things started, appropriately enough, with Charles Darwin. If you haven't heard, today is the famed naturalist's 200th birthday--and 2009 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. McCarthy noted that a lot has changed since Darwin's time, and not all of it has been good. "Much of his studies occurred in areas that had seen little effect of human presence," said McCarthy, who has been heavily involved in climate change issues and reports. Yet even in Darwin's day, the seeds of our so-called anthropogenic era were being sown. After all, McCarthy noted, this year also marks the 150th anniversary of the first commercial oil well and the precursor of today's internal combustion engines.

McCarthy then fast-forwarded to the future--and it wasn't a pretty sight.