Recently in Science Category

A few weeks back, Powell’s Books posted an editorial article by Theodore Gray, author of “Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do At Home — But Probably Shouldn’t”, asking if Science is an important as Football. On the surface, the question seems ridiculous, and I can’t think of very many people who would dream of saying that Football is more important than Science. Mind you, the people I know are a non-random sample, but even on a large scale, I don’t see most people viewing Science Education as less important than school sports.

This discussion isn’t about funding, though that is certainly an issue. Science instructors do tend to find their budgets for specimens, equipment, and chemicals getting leaner, while sports programs (especially football) are almost always able to get the money they need to continue operating. More than that, however, is how Science education has consistently gotten less dangerous, and consequently less exciting.

Safety is important, but when science becomes boring, kids don’t get interested in science. When people don’t have an interest in Science, we end up with a systemic societal problem where people honestly believe that evolution is a lie, the Earth is flat, that lighting it on fire is an effective means of igniting PETN, and that global climate change doesn’t have any anthropormophic causes (the degree of humanities involvement in climate change is under debate, but no real climate scientists claim that humanity hasn’t impacted the environment). Plus, we delay the progress of Science, since fewer people are interested and participating, progress is slowed.

Gray really bemoans the fact that these moderately dangerous experiments (which aren’t that dangerous when done correctly) have been abolished, but other dangerous activities, Football, are not only sanctioned, but celebrated. And kids do get injured, some badly, every year. Most aren’t bad, but then, neither were most classroom-accidents either.

Being so close to Academia, I’m really afraid that we’re moving more and more, at least in the US, to the kind of world that Neal Stephenson described in Anathem, where the scientists are sequested away from the rest of the population, who mainly continues to operate in ignorance and fear of things that they don’t fully understand. The worst part is that a fair amount of it comes from within Academia itself. Academics strongly stigmatize people who do outreach. People who write for non-scientific publications. People who reach outside of Academia to help the general populace understand why what goes on within Academia is so important.

After all, isn’t a little ridiculous that the most well-respected writer on food science issues, is a journalist?

Some scientists break that barrier, as Carl Sagan did in the 1980s, but only after becoming well established in their career, and often with plenty of derision from their contemporaries. Unfortunately, Carl Sagan has been dead for 13 years, and the no other Scientist-Author has risen who has been able to make the topics as accessible, or as fascinating as Sagan. Others who have tried have focused on issues that have made their writings far more controversial than was necessary, or even helpful.

As important as it is that Science begins reaching out to the public, making people understand their work, essentially arguing for their very existence… Isn’t it just as important that the schools do their part to keep science interesting as they lay down that basic educational, and foundational, framework that they impart upon young people? Certainly parents must play a role here as well, but every child, every student deserves to be exposed to the wonder of Science, the excitement of discovery, and, regrettably, not all parents are up to the task of revealing these wonders.

On last week’s Science Advocacy post, I included a video from the Symphony of Science, but given that they just released a new video on Monday I figured this would be a great opportunity to give some thanks for the work this composer is doing.

The new song, entitled “Our Place in the Cosmos” features clips of Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Michio Kaku and Robert Jastrow for the purposes of putting together this composition, and it’s pretty awesome.

Now, this really isn’t quite what I meant when I said that we need a new voice for Science in America, but it’s still awesome work that I hope will catch some people’s attention and imagination, because at this point, every little bit helps.

I’ve always been really interested in Science, and while my career has taken me to Computers and software in particular, I still try to keep up on, at least in a superficial sense, what is going on in scientific research. In the last few years, this has involved getting a crash course on modern evolutionary theory, since my wife is a researcher in that field, but more than that, it’s a topic that (miraculously) has been the topic of an increasing debate in the last few decades, so evolution is something that anyone with an interest in science should at least have a basic understand of.

Today, at least in the United States, there seems to be a war on science, at least in the public eye. We have scientific principles that have decades of evidence and research backing them up, that some people claim is simply wrong, even though their entire argument is based on the fact that the body of knowledge can’t yet explain everything. We have states that have passed laws to counteract scientific consensus.

Maybe ‘war on science’ is too conservative a claim. This is pretty much a war on common sense at this point.

But, when you look at the scientific community, it’s clear why these problems exist. Scientists suck at selling their ideas and work to non-scientists, hell explaining can be a challenge for these people. But, I’ve talked about this before.

This is about the need for advocates. If not the scientists themselves, those of us who follow what’s going on in scientific research, and who are willing to take the time to learn things well enough to explain them. We need bloggers and podcasters and everyone else to take the time to have reasonable discourse with people who deny scientific consensus to find out why, and respectfully inform people why the consensus is what it is.

The scientific community has, regrettably, lost it’s two greatest advocates to the public in the last fifteen years, and both died very young. Stephen Jay Gould is responsible for a large body of modern evolutionary theory, from punctuated equilibrium to heterochrony and beyond. By all measures, a highly accomplished scientist. But more than that, he was a prolific writer of material that could be marketed to non-scientists, he spent a lot of time on television from the 1980s on, including a guest spot on the Simpsons. Now, he’s been criticized by some in the scientific community for not always presenting the cutting edge of evolutionary theory to the public, but it’s the nature of science to disagree with one another. The main thing is that Gould was able to address the issue of evolution intelligently, and approach-ably to the general public.

And then there was, arguably, the most famous astrochemist who ever lived: Carl Sagan. Sagan took the sort of advocacy that Gould was doing to a whole other level (or actually, Gould never quite managed to reach Sagan’s level of advocacy), including the often rebroadcast PBS series, “Cosmos”, where Sagan talked to people about the origin of life and the universe. He appeared with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, and was recently the subject of an xkcd cartoon.

Sagan, if only for his advocacy, is a legendary figure in science, and one of the best advocates that science has ever had, and we’re desperate for a new advocate. I leave you with this mash-up of footage from Sagan’s “Cosmos”, and hope that we’ll see that advocate soon.

This video, and others are courtesy of the The Symphony of Science.

Generally speaking, I think that most people in the environmental movement tend to focus a bit too heavily on the issue of carbon emissions, often to the exclusion of other issues. For instance, we’re supposed to use compact fluorescent lamps, because they use less power, but ignoring the mercury used in production (given that most people don’t properly recycle the bulbs, this is a huge heavy-metals problem waiting to happen). Same thing with hybrid cars, like the Toyota Prius. So little of what goes into current environmental thinking even begins to consider long-tail, that while we’re busy putting out this current fire, we’re literally pouring gasoline on the next one.

Which is why, it’s so awesome to see real work going on that could potentially solve a lot of problems. Like this talk from July 2009 at TED by Rachel Armstrong on work that she’s involved in that works on literal nanotechnology that creates this microscopic, almost alive, protist-like things that can create limestone reefs in the ocean. And she proposes using this technology to save cities like Venice, which has been sinking into the sea for centuries.

If this works, and I do have some concerns about the ecological impact (namely, how does this system stop growing), it stands to be absolutely amazing, allowing us to create reefs which not only shore up our buildings, but also sequester carbon and serve as habitat for wildlife. Really fascinating.

But more interesting in the short term, because it definitely seems that the implications are far simpler, is some work being done by Gary Lewis of BioAgtive Technologies, where they’ve designed a tractor kit which takes tractor emissions and uses them to fertilize a field. The Australian farmer in the story linked figures he’s saving a half-million Australian dollars per year on fertilizer costs. Plus, he’s taking an output that he’d have anyway and utilizing it in a productive manner.

It’s this sort of enviromental work that really excites me, because they seem to be something which will bring around real, long term, meaningful change in environmental thinking. Incidentally, this is part of why I love TED. The talks are fascinating, and tend to focus on things that you’re not likely to hear about elsewhere.

Today, the Daily Tech reported that, according to NASA, Barack Obama is planning to scrap the Constellation program. Constellation is a pair of vehicles NASA has been working on with the stated purpose of getting the United States back to the Moon for the purpose of building a permanent Moon Base by 2020.

This base is important for several reasons: Learning about life in Micro-Gravity (not Zero G), Telescopes and Radio Telescopes cheaper than Hubble but still free of the Earths Atmosphere, and the stated goal of being the jumping off point for a manned mission to Mars. Even with the plans for ARES, we are already facing an enormous lag of Space Service with the impending retirement of the Shuttle in 2010 (which is long overdue), and scrapping ARES at this point would put the US at such a severe disadvantage as the issue of Space Exploration heats up again.

My main issue is why anyone is surprised. Yes, Obama did endorse a $2 Billion bill to extend the shuttle a single misson, but his stance had always been that he wanted to cut NASA’s funding to support his educational programs. Obama doesn’t feel that human space exploration is worth the cost. And it is expensive. And it is dangerous. But the people engaged in the program are well aware of the risks, and they accept them, for the purpose of science, and the furthering of Human Knowledge and Understanding.

And this is woefully important. Already, we face a looming crisis on this planet. Our population is rapidly approaching 7 Billion, while rising oceans are slowly creating a refugee problem. Ecologists have estimated that the Earth’s Biosphere will only be able to support around 10 Billion people. At the current rate of population growth, we’re likely to face a try, honest, global famine within the next twenty years or so. Science may be able to help us find a way out of this, and space may be able to as well. We’re barreling into a pretty miserable situation, and cutting back on Science is not a good long-term strategy.

Space Exploration may not be the thing that saves Mankind, but the things that we’ll need to fund to sponsor the development certainly won’t hurt. Further development in Hydroponics, Solar Power, Low-Power Electronics, and on and on will be necessary to fund to take us in this direction. All of these have honest, and sincere potential for changing things meaningfully in the next ten years, and the Space Program can (and should) be but one of the ideas pushing this. Even people who don’t believe that the problems of Climate Change are real (or as serious as some claim) can easily get behind pushing these technologies in that realm.

I am reminded, once again, of the words of President John F. Kennedy, given at Rice University in Houston, TX in 1962, where he focuses on the fact that these expensive, and impossible tasks serve to unite us, and drive us forward in ways we never thought we could. We need this sort of inspiration now, we need a goal, and not only the doomsday scenario we are facing. I firmly believe that solving those problems with help with many of ours.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

We live in an interesting time in Science. In the past, the conducting of science required expensive equipment, and immense amounts of time which made the ability to conduct scientific inquiry wholly out of reach to anyone outside of Academia. Several things have changed in society over the last twenty five years as technology has grown which have led us to the precipice of a fundamental change in the way that scientific inquiry is conducted.

First, the people have access to far more information than we’ve ever imagined before. This is due to the Internet, and Internet-based movements like Open Courseware, which makes the ability to learn far easier, not to mention cheaper. Recently, the California University System sought to use Open Courseware to reduce the cost of Education, citing the high costs of textbooks. As someone who has, in some way or another, been tied to a University for the last seven years, I can certainly agree with that sentiment, but more importantly, it makes the information used in gaining a college education available to everyone. Is it a replacement for a College Education? Not likely, since much of the benefits to a college education are inherent in the working with peers, and with the professors, but for some people it’s enough to help.

This has also been met with the recent movement towards opening up Scientific Journals. However, on this point, we still have a long way to go. A journal that my wife’s advisor has been published in on several occasions, Molecular Biology and Evolution, costs around US$141 per year to subscribe as an individual (US$678 as an Institution), less if your a student or a postdoctoral researcher. Frankly, this is cheap. Very cheap. Another Journal where he has been Published, the Journal of Morphology is only available to Institutions, and costs a blistering US$5533 per year to subscribe.

Still, there has been movement here. Both the journals mentioned above allow for articles to be made downloadable via the Internet for free, and it seems that the MBE journals subscription is more to cover membership dues into the organization which publishes it. Things are changing where many grants which are based on public funds (ie, grants for the National Science Foudnation, then the papers resulting from the grant must be made freely available to the public. This is fantastic. In my opinion, Science needs to be conducted freely, and out in the open. First, because then it benefits the most people, and second, openly conducted science is the best mechanism to further drive scientific development. And while many scientists do interesting trade in publication credit and such, ultimately, I believe that most scientists agree. However, if you’re not lucky enough to be affiliated with a university, there is going to be a large percentage of journals which you simply can’t read, because historically, the cost of membership to a journal has been too high. And the scientists do not even see any of the money from the publication of their materials.

We have more access to the data, and to the results of science than ever before, but there is more to the development of an open scientific infrastructure than simply the papers that result from scientific inquiry. The next step is Open Data. Luckily we’ve come a very long way in this respect as well, at least when it comes to research on Genetics. The National Center for Biotechnology Information offers a convenient place for scientists to upload genetic sequences they’ve made in order to allow others to carry on work with that sequence information. GenBank, NCBI’s sequence database, contains tens of millions of sequence records from species ranging from humans to hagfish, porpoises to platypii.

Why do projects like GenBank exist? Well, first, some scientists receive grants to sequence an animals genome. The methods they use for this are generally imprecise, and there is a lot of what’s known as “Shotgunning” involved, meaning that they throw enzymes at DNA and see what sticks. Some genes are easier to extract than others, and depending on the perceived value of the gene, the desire of a scientist to extract it changes. For instance, in Catherine’s lab, they feel that the 18S and the 28S ribosomal genes are particularly valuable for deep historical phylogenetics, and they’ve got some data to back that up. For that reason, the lab has developed protocols to extract those two genes in their entirety, something that many others do not feel is worthwhile. It probably doesn’t help that the protocols need to be modified depending on the species being extracted, and there are a limited number of researches using these genes. Genetic research is still very much changing, and I lack the knowledge of biochemistry to speak any more to the difficulties inherent in the practice. The point is that the people doing the sequencing may not get everything, and they make their data available so that others can do the analysis.

So, with the data being made available, the need for complex lab equipment to perform certain types of analysis on genetic material has been greatly lessened. Certainly if you can do your own sequencing you have an advantage, but it’s no longer necessary. I suspect that many other fields have similar open data initiatives, but genetics happens to be a field today where the sheer quantity of data being produced, and needing to be produced is mind-boggling, so it makes a particularly good example.

This takes us to our third level of what’s required for conduct open science. First, we had the Open Knowledge. Then, we had Open Data. All that’s left now is Open Tools. It just so happens that we already have mechanisms in place to supply this, in the work done by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. In the field of Statistical Biology, there are a large number of software tools that are used by most researchers in this field, and save for one or two notable exceptions, this software is all Open Source, much of it copyleft.

With this, we now have all we need to do real science. We have the ability to learn. We have the data we need. We have the exact same tools used by the academics themselves. Science is doable by the layperson, in a way that it has not been before.

This is not to say that Academia is without merit. Most scientific inquiry will still be done in Academia. The scientific inquiry done in privately-held corporations will rarely be released to enrich all society. The funding necessary for certain types of inquiry will always be easier to get in academia. But, for those people who are interested, who have an itch to scratch, they can do their own research. On their own time. And they have the power to discover amazing things. Academia will always be the heart and soul of science. I never see that changing, but the laypeople need to be able to benefit from, and contribute to, science. There are still battles to be fought, regarding truly free access to research and such, but we’ve come far, and I don’t see the movement toward Open Science slowing down any time soon.

We can still hasten it’s coming though. Make sure that research done using public funds must remain available to the public. Not only the papers published as a result, but the data generated for the research. We should do what we can to make it not only easier, but also more valuable to participate in this Open Scientific Community. It’s for all our benefit.

I’ve known about the sensitivity of our Inner Ear for a long time. But this is just amazing. The Japanese have developed a specialized headset which can allow someone with a remote control to force a person to move they way they want them to.

They use specialized electrical signals that mess with your sense of balance, making you think that you need to move a certain direction so you don’t fall. It’s painless, though disorienting, from what the article says. Creepy stuff.