I arrived to this morning’s session on air pollution and heart disease breathless and soaking wet. It was pouring rain and my commute from across the river involved a lengthy wait at the bus stop. (I knew I was in trouble when a tow truck rumbled by hauling the very bus I had wanted to board…)

But I made it in time to hear Jesus Araujo from UCLA present his work on ultrafine particles in air pollution. As the name implies, ultrafine particles are a bit smaller than ‘fine’ particles and, Araujo told me, they tend to be overlooked by regulatory agencies. Recent car models, for example, are praised for having lower fine particle emissions but actually release more ultrafine particles, he said.

Air pollution has long been associated with heart disease, and previous work had shown that ultrafine particles contain more chemicals likely to cause oxidative stress (a kind of stress that can lead to inflammation and all sorts of cellular damage). Araujo’s new work suggests that those ultrafine particles can trigger the buildup of plaque in the arteries of mice -- in fact, he argues that ultrafine particles may be the major culprits in air pollution that contribute to atherosclerosis. You can read more about some of that work here: http://circres.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/CIRCRESAHA.107.164970v1.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 06:08 PM | Permalink

A wise Nature editor once chided me for referring to someone as an ‘expert’. “One man’s expert is another man’s charlatan,” he told me.

Words to live by, and also the topic of a session here at AAAS on evaluating experts. Reporters fret over this all the time: How do you know which source to trust? Is the rebel going against accepted dogma brilliant or a quack? And even when you’ve found what seems to be consensus, what if everyone in a specific scientific community is making the same dangerous assumption?

I didn’t find much novel insight into these issues at the session, and that’s hardly anyone’s fault – these aren’t the sorts of questions that have clear answers. But Sheila Jasanoff of Harvard discussed the issue of trust and had an interesting quote: “What we’ve done in the past to produce trust is to contain debates.” It reminded me of all the times I’ve heard people advise scientists to distill their message down to a sound bite and leave those caveats behind. That advice has always made me feel a little queasy, although I do understand the motivation.

Anyway, a representative from AAAS presented an interesting solution to the problem of scientific experts used in court. These experts are typically hired by either the defense or the prosecution, leaving them open to accusations that they’ve adjusted their analysis to best suit the folks who are paying them. AAAS has been working on a program to provide court-appointed experts that wouldn’t have to soil their hands by associating with either side. Sounds pretty cool – you can check it out in more detail here: http://www.aaas.org/spp/case/case.htm.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 05:59 PM | Permalink

Earlier today, UCLA researcher Nathan Wolfe gave a fascinating talk on the intricate art of ‘viral forecasting’. Viral forecasting takes disease surveillance a step further than public health agencies normally go: instead of waiting for an outbreak and then rushing to contain it, Wolfe tries to find new viruses before they find us.

He likens the work to investigations by intelligence agencies that sift through internet and telephone ‘chatter’ in search of terrorist plots. Wolfe narrows his target area by focusing on areas where a virus is most likely to make the jump from an animal host to a human. He’s traveled around rural Cameroon and collected blood samples from hunters who hunt and eat primates. He’s also enlisted the hunters’ help in collecting samples from caught animals. (That help is voluntary of course: Wolfe does not pay hunters to kill primates.)

Wolfe has found that thousands of people in rural central Africa are infected with a primate virus called Simian Foamy Virus, and he says it’s possible that hundreds of thousands of people are infected worldwide. (SFV doesn’t cause illness in people – yet.) And he says HIV positive hunters in Africa could be catching SIV from their prey. If the simian virus then recombined with the human virus, new HIV strains would be produced.

Although it’s clearly important to catch emerging viruses as early as possible, Wolfe says there are few projects like his. In 2005, Wolfe received an NIH Pioneer award -- an award, he noted with a wry laugh, that is meant for risky, ‘out of the box’ projects. “This kind of thing should be very much in-the-box,” he said. To fix that, Wolfe wants to see a percentage of disease surveillance funding devoting to disease forecasting.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 12:52 AM | Permalink

This afternoon we had a press briefing about a session called “The Father and the Fetus: Revisited”. The session discussed consequences for future offspring when men are exposed to nasty chemicals. Researchers almost always focus on mom, so there's not a lot of data on dad yet. The ‘revisited’ in the title refers to a previous session at a 1991 AAAS meeting. Gladys Friedler of Boston University was candid about why she organized the discussion this year: the 1991 session didn’t lead to the increase in attention and, ahem, funding that she hoped, so she’s giving it another try.

Despite that stated mission, one of the talks again focused on mom. Matthew Anway of the University of Idaho presented published work showing that when pregnant rats are given whopping high doses of a commonly used fungicide called vinclozolin, their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children are more likely to come down with certain diseases as adults. Anway doesn’t believe that vinclozolin mutates DNA -- he thinks the effects are epigenetic. (Anway’s published a ton on all of this, so just do a quick pubmed search if you want more detail.)

All very interesting, but in his brief presentation to journalists, Anway left out the ‘whopping high doses’ part. Meanwhile, some reporters clearly viewed Anway's research as a toxicity study with implications for human health. When finally asked about the dosage, Anway readily said it was much, much higher than humans would normally encounter. And, he noted, he administered the fungicide intravenously. Around the room, news-hungry journalists sagged their shoulders. One reporter chastised Anway for not making the concentration clear from the start. Anway, looking a bit frustrated, answered that he never claimed his work had environmental significance; he was only trying to understand how alterations in fetal development may affect adult disease.

It’s a common tale with a lesson for both sides. Reporters groan that the researcher was unclear; scientists groan that the reporter missed the point. In the end, both sides have to be on the watch for hidden assumptions -- including their own.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Check out our colleague Olive's posts on Climate Feedback

There's also a whole bunch of stuff on Wired Science

And here's what they're saying at ScienceBlogs

Posted by Oliver Morton at 08:47 PM | Permalink

Rocky planets resembling Venus, Mars and the Earth may be as common in our galaxy as any Star Trek fan could hope, according to University of Arizona astronomer Michael Meyer, who announced a new finding from NASA’s Spitzer space telescope at a AAAS press conference today on planetary discovery.

The new Spitzer data, from a survey of 309 very young, sun-like stars in our immediate galactic neighborhood, suggest that rocky planets form around 20% to 60% of them, said Meyer--a very large fraction. True, he said, the evidence is indirect. Instead of seeing actual planets, Spitzer detected the infrared warmth of fine dust grains that orbit the stars at Earth-like distances. But astronomers believe that such dust grains are the byproduct of constant collisions among larger, asteroid-sized chunks--the ongoing process of cosmic bump-'em cars by which the chunks coalesce into full-scale planets. And soon, Meyer added, we should have even better evidence from NASA's Kepler mission. Due for launch in February 2009, Kepler will be the first observatory able to detect Earth-sized (and smaller) extrasolar planets directly.

Meanwhile, as NASA science chief Alan Stern described in the same press conference, NASA is already planning for an even more capable planet-finding mission to be launched in about 2015. This mission is mired in controversy at the moment, because the US Congress recently gave NASA a mandate to pursue one specific technical approach, known as the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) (See Nature, 15 January 2008) But Stern insisted that that issue is far from settled. The final design of the new mission should and will be made in close collaboration with the scientific community, he said--probably in the 2010 time frame, after the astronomers have had a chance to analyze the early results from Kepler.

Posted by Mitch Waldrop at 08:36 PM | Permalink

I took a lot of notes this morning in a session about human cognition and creativity. A pet topic of mine, but the note volume is surely a good sign that it was a thought-provoking and scribble-worthy bunch of talks. My scrawlings weren’t as organized and coherent as they could have been, but that turned out to be a fairly good comparison with how people seem to feel about this field in general. Let me explain.

Researchers are coming at this problem from a lot of different angles. But there doesn’t always seem to be as much stepping back and taking stock as might be worthwhile for such nebulous terms as ‘language’ and ‘cognition’.

First up, Richard Lewontin of Harvard gave a talk entitled ‘why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition’. Heartening start. His argument was that a lot of research directed at understanding what it is to be human is just story-telling, and that he’s not interested in theories of how we got the faculties we have that are impossible to test. For good measure, he added that “we don’t even know what we mean by cognition”.

The trouble was, he was then followed by people with various stories to tell about human evolution. Dean Falk of Florida State University told us her theory of how humans evolved linguistic capabilities, and, in short, the story proceeded thus: human infants, unlike chimps, can’t grasp onto their mothers, and therefore have to be actively carried, but also put down from time to time as mum forages for food. In turn, mums have to speak what some refer to as ‘motherese’, meaningless baby talk, to keep a bond with the baby. Language is a product of this motherese.

Lewontin wasn’t the only one to sound a note of caution. Robert Berwick of MIT has been taking a close look at some of the genetic work on language, centred on a gene called FOXP2, which disrupts speech if mutated. Lots of people got very excited when this gene was discovered, and some groups have suggested that the differences you see between the chimp and human versions (there are 2 amino acid changes) have been preferentially selected for in human evolution, and thus contributed to our linguistic ability. But Berwick’s contention is that these mutations could well have happened by chance. He finished by imagining the body as a computer suite, and likening the role of FOXP2 – a gene that controls the expression of other genes in the brain and elsewhere in the body – to that of the instructions for your computer’s printer. Quite a relegation by some geneticists’ standards.

Posted by Kerri Smith at 07:39 PM | Permalink

I met Lina Colucci yesterday evening when the smell of free food lured me into the exhibit hall. (Years of graduate school have left me with a finely tuned sense of where to go to find free food.) There might have been a few hundred people milling around the hall, but Lina was easy to spot, standing there looking professional and confident in her grey suit and pink ballet toe shoes.

Lina was presenting a poster at the American Junior Association of Science exhibit. Poster topics ranged from testing swimsuit materials to designing better rocket fuel. Lina, a high school senior, ballet dancer, and amateur engineer, wants to design a toe shoe that won’t leave dancers with bunions or sprained ankles. It’s a tough project – the shoes need to be rigid enough to provide stability but flexible enough to, you know, allow the ballerinas to dance. So far she’s torn apart shoes, modeled them, developed fiberglass shanks, found them too brittle, and now plans to move on to a carbon composites. She’ll take the project with her to college next year, she says.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 11:01 PM | Permalink

Presidential campaign season is in full fury, even among the normally politically closeted group known as scientists. This afternoon featured a late-breaking session with science advisors to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. (John McCain apparently wanted to send a rep, but couldn't do so in the short notice given to the campaigns; Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul didn't respond to their invites.)

The room was packed, and the scientists agog with excitement. It didn't take long, though, for the session to shift into typical campaign mode. First one advisor and then the other would run through the list of science- and technology-related items on their particular candidate's agenda. There was a lot of 'check out Hillary's science talk' and 'go to BarackObama.com'. Still, it was an interesting glimpse into the world of real live people who interact with the real live campaigns. (Check www.nature.com/news in a couple of days for a fuller report.)

Clinton's rep was Tom Kalil of the University of Berkeley, who worked as an advisor on science and technology issues in the administration of Bill Clinton. (See Kalil's October 2006 Nature piece, on how scientists should plan for the presidential changeover, here.) Obama's rep was Alec Ross, a technology and social entrepreneur and founder of the technology group OneEconomy. Predictably, most of the questions from the audience had to do with funding and why their particular favorite agency (pick yours: NIH, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy...) wasn't getting as much money as they thought it should.

Perhaps the most striking comment, though, came from Ross, who early on had set up Obama as the fervent opponent of all things traditionally Washington, most particularly lobbying. His advice to scientists about getting their voice heard? Get organized, find a message, and "roll your sleeves up" and get into the fray.

In a word: lobby.

Posted by Alex Witze at 10:31 PM | Permalink

I packed a lot of 'hard' science into this morning (genomics in Africa, the neuroscience of memory and imagination - see Mitch's post below - and detecting/preventing nuclear trafficking), so this afternoon I opted for a session entitled Art and Connoisseurship: New Scientific Techniques conserve Art and Architecture. The 'new' bit was somewhat misleading, as the techniques and case studies themselves have had quite a bit of publicity already - including work assessing the authenticity of some purported Jackson Pollock paintings (featured in Nature) and a study analysing the maths behind tessellated islamic tiles (Science paper here). But the content made a nice contrast to the rest of the day.

The most interesting message of the session for me was that despite all the rigorous science behind authenticating paintings and discovering more about how they were made, none of the gathered evidence can be used when cases of supposed forgery and the like get to court. These techniques, which include 3D scanning, carbon dating and infrared spectroscopy, are by no means preliminary or untested - but the uniqueness of many of the paintings means that "there hasn't been the replication needed" for them to be used in court, says art lawyer Jessica Darraby, who moderated the discussion. I asked Narayan Khandekar of Harvard University Art Museums about this. He has worked on authenticating several possible Pollocks, and given the value of these paintings, one might think his testimony valuable - but he has never been asked to give evidence of their genuineness, or otherwise. What is more, he spoke of a tendency for the art world to believe what they want to believe, and often ignore the science.

It was Alex Matter, a filmmaker who inherited several artworks from his parents (who were friends of the artist), who enlisted Khandekar to analyse several of his paintings and see if they were the genuine article. Khandekar had to give disappointing news. The team looked at three paintings, and in each they found pigments that had not been created by chemical companies until the 1970s, two decades after Pollock's death.

An even fishier story underlay one of them. The first painting the team received had been badly damaged, with deep indentations and lots of paint missing, and partially restored. The cause? The story the owner told was that he'd left the painting in his flat for a few days, where it were brutally attacked by...his cat.

Posted by Kerri Smith at 10:29 PM | Permalink

Harvard’s Dan Gilbert discussed a very new finding in the Memory and Imagination pres conference Saturday: The roads not taken don’t actually haunt us.

Gilbert is one of a number of neuro- and cognitive scientists studying the interplay of memory (of past events) and imagination (of future possibilities). It’s recently been discovered that these two processes use virtually the same brain circuits, as discussed at the press conference by Daniel Schacter of Harvard and Eleanor Maguire of University College, London. But Gilbert has been looking at the interplay from a slightly different angle. One of the things memory is for, he says, is to help us pick good futures and avoid the bad ones. Yet we’re remarkably poor at doing that. You think that winning the lottery will make you really, really happy for a really long time—and then it doesn’t. You think that going blind will make you really miserable—and then when that happens, you adapt and get on with life.

What Gilbert has found is a new mechanism for why our imaginations fail us this way: the alternatives to an event have a profound effect on how much you think you will enjoy it—but almost no effect on how much you actually do. In one experiment, for example, half the subjects were offered a potato chip while they were sitting in a room full of chocolate. Faced with a more desirable alternative, they said they felt so-so about eating the potato chip. But the other half of the subjects were offered the potato chip while surrounded with canned haggis and sardines. Not so attractive. They said the chip would taste great. But in both cases, once the chip was in their mouths—salty, greasy and crunchy—the alternatives faded away, and both groups said they enjoyed the potato chips equally. The sensory reality overwhelmed the imaginary one.

Posted by Mitch Waldrop at 09:26 PM | Permalink

Everyone at a big conference like this knows that there will be many times when you are torn between two sessions that both sound interesting. A case in point this afternoon: a session entitled "Transforming our ability to predict climate change and its effects" and a session called "Global warming heats up: How the media covers climate change". I wasn't sure which to go to -- but I had a pretty good sense of which would be more popular. And so it proved: the new climate science session had 50 people in the audience at the beginning, the media session was standing room only with about 200 people. Hearing people talk about climate science loses out to hearing people talk about talking about climate science in a pretty big way. And I'd be pretty sure that the proportion of journalists in the audience at the media talk was way higher than at the other talk.

It would be easy to snark about this in a let's-not-forget-that-we're-the-real-story-here way -- and indeed I reserve the right to do so. But to be fair, how the media report climate change is important, both to scientists and to the media. And it deserves to be discussed. Some of the discussants made points that are well taken -- Andy Revkin of the New York Times pointing out that the more complex a story is the less space it gets, for example. And David Dickson of SciDev.Net on the role NGOs play in facilitating climate reporting as a way of amplifying their own messages (not just NGOs -- interesting to learn that the British government funds workshops on climate reporting for journalists in China). But I'm pretty sure that I could have learned equally interesting things at the other session (yes, I stayed in the media panel: Hypocrite bloggeur)

What was most striking was the lack of anything very new or any particular way forward coming out of the discussion. Andy and David explained what was wrong eloquently, and Matt Nisbet talked his talk about framing meta-narratives (check out Matthew's blog). But there wasn't really any sense of progress, or of what might be done differently (though someone did ring up the intriguing possibility that when America gets an administration that doesn't get caught trying to brush climate science under the carpet it will become harder for that climate science to become front page news:" White house suppresses report" is far sexier than "Government releases report"...).

Unsurprising, sure -- but if we're going to be self obsessed, maybe we should be so a bit more productively.

And now I really should go to that other session.Or the one on biomass conversion. Or to the one on systems biology. Or to the one on the US presidential candidates. Or the press briefing on population. Or...maybe I should just bump into journalistic cronies in the halls and complain about things. We're very good at that.

Posted by Oliver Morton at 08:08 PM | Permalink

Well, Angela Belcher’s talk was, predictably, very cool. She’s a bioengineer at MIT and one of those researchers who really seems to capture the ethos of the institute: think of something crazy, and then figure out a way to do it. The gist of her work is this:

Biological organisms embody a lot of the characteristics that engineers would like to achieve. They heal themselves. They assemble themselves. They correct themselves. But evolution is an opportunistic enterprise, and living creatures build their materials out of the ingredients around them. Unfortunately, the ingredients we use in important mechanical structures like, say, semiconductors, aren’t terribly abundant. That’s where Belcher comes in: “Maybe we can give organisms the opportunity to work with the rest of the periodic table,” Belcher said today.

So Belcher’s lab set about screening through libraries containing billions of short amino acid chains (called peptides) to find those that can bind to things like semiconductors or magnetic materials. (The high-throughput screen is necessary Belcher noted: organisms started building biomaterials 500 million years ago. It took them 50 million years to 'get good at it,' she said, but her funders want updates every three months.)

Once she finds the right amino acid sequences, it’s relatively easy to work back to the DNA sequence that would encode then. Shove that DNA sequence into a virus, and voila, you’ve made a virus that can bind to a semiconductor.

How do you use it? Belcher’s lab has found peptides that bind to the specific chemical structures found at certain semiconductor deformities. Another peptide can bind to stress fractures in engine blocks. So you can make viruses that express the peptides as well as a fluorescent tag, spray them on a semiconductor or an airplane engine, and look for the fluorescence. If you see it, maybe you don't want to fly that plane.

Belcher gave other examples of how she creates viruses that are coated with peptides that bind gold, for example, or colbalt oxide. The result is a conducting nanowire made of viruses. She’s also made a viral battery that can run an LED light. Take a look through her papers for the details there -- I'm off to the next session.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 08:01 PM | Permalink

No, I don’t work for the Boston tourist bureau. But I have lived in the area just long enough to know that a beautiful day in winter is cause for celebration. And three beautiful days in a row, well … it can be tough to stay inside a convention center.

The convention center’s huge windows overlooking the city don’t make it any easier. It’s another gorgeous sunny day, and I’m looking down on one of my favorite Boston neighborhoods. It’s filled with quirky stores and cafes and bars, but best of all, right next to the convention center is the prestigious Berklee College of Music. I’m in awe of Berklee – at least one of my favorite musicians flunked out of there and a few, I think, actually managed to graduate – and I love seeing the young musicians sulking around the neighborhood, hauling cellos and guitars on their backs and oozing ‘brilliant but misunderstood’ from every pore.

But it’s time to head in to hear Angela Belcher talk about engineering using biomaterials. She assured me the talk would have plenty of pretty pictures, so I’m optimistic that it’ll be worth staying inside to hear it. And I’ll come back to blog about something other than the weather in just a bit.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 05:19 PM | Permalink

One of today’s career workshops centered on a topic that many young scientists don’t think about until it’s too late: how do you plan your first research laboratory? No, I don’t mean the research plan – you’ve all been obsessing over that for years. I mean planning for the stuff: the incubators, the chemicals. the centrifuges, the Erlenmeyer flasks. The enormity of the task may have crossed your mind already when, say, you realized that the incubator you thought nothing of cost the same as your yearly salary.

The workshop was lead by Victoria McGovern, a senior program officer at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. The first step, she advised attendees, is to sit down one night and critically evaluate whether you want to pursue a career in research. She urged everyone to be honest with themselves, but cautioned: “you may need liquor.”

McGovern also suggests that you take a little time one weekend to make a list of every item you think you need to run your own lab. Then, the next time you go into lab, only allow yourself to use the things on the list. How long do you think you’ll last?

(The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has a great guide on how to make the postdoc-to-faculty transition. You can find it at http://www.hhmi.org/resources/labmanagement.)

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 11:01 PM | Permalink

The conference kicked off Thursday evening with a plenary lecture by David Baltimore, the Nobel-prizewinning biologist, former president of Rockefeller and Caltech universities, and current president of AAAS. You know, a real underachiever kind of guy.

While wearing his AAAS president hat, Baltimore's main job has been to choose the theme for this year's meeting. This year, it's "science and technology from a global perspective." And the opening lecture was a quintessentially Baltimore offering: cerebral, far-reaching, but also thought-provoking.

Drawing on his recent travels in Africa, India and elsewhere, Baltimore tackled the science and technology perspectives on the Tom Friedman notion of the world being flat. While the US has fallen into a state of highly nationalistic rhetoric since 2001, he argued, the rest of the world has begun moving far beyond it. India is channeling its education expertise in its Indian Institutes of Technology, and beginning to outsource its own outsourcing...simply because it can. Europe has regrouped and begun powering ahead as an economic engine, while the US "has allowed itself to become mesmerized by the terrorist threat". He saved his choicest words for President Bush, slamming him as "criminal" for allowing the NIH budget to drop over the past five years in terms of real buying power. "The president must believe himself immortal or in the hands of God to decimate this," the most powerful engine for driving science and medical advances in the world, Baltimore said.

It must have made things a bit awkward for the next speaker: Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda. Kagame spoke warmly of meeting with Baltimore and getting his advice on such topics as how to foster institutions of excellence when resources are limited. But Kagame also has to fly back to Rwanda tomorrow, to get ready for a meeting with ... President Bush.

Posted by Alex Witze at 01:04 PM | Permalink

Which do you think better approximates a human being: disembodied human cells in a Petri dish, or mouse cells in a live, sniffling rodent?

A multi-institutional collaboration has been formed to find out. The US National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency announced today that they will try to determine whether computer models, cell cultures, and zebrafish can replace mice, rats, and guinea pigs in toxicology tests.

They’ll start by treating cell cultures with chemicals for which animal toxicity data is already available, to gain a sense of how well results from the two systems match. The shift to cell cultures promises several advantages, including high speed. Christopher Austin, director of the NIH Chemical Genomics Center, says their labs can test 2500 chemicals at 15 different concentrations in a single afternoon using cell cultures. Testing the same number of chemicals in animals has taken thirty years, he said.

But you cannot abandon animal testing overnight, cautioned Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health. The agency officials declined to estimate when their comparisons would be complete.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 06:59 PM | Permalink

The first session of the day was a discussion about the use of cloned animals for food. The topic has been simmering for years, but finally came to a head last month when the US Food and Drug Administration declared the food from cloned animals and their progeny safe, much to the consternation of some US congressmen.

The panel issued the usual assurances: no, Dolly will not be served for dinner. At about $13,000 a head, cloned animals are far too expensive to use for their meat. They’ll be used for breeding instead. Industry reps pointed to the advantages of cloning for harvesting useful genetic traits and achieving consistency in their breeding lines, but Patrick Cunningham from the University of Dublin undercut that argument by estimating that roughly 3/4 of the variation out on the feedlot is environmentally induced, not genetic.

Cunningham brought up another point that isn't often broached. Allowing cloned animals opens the gateway to the next step: genetically engineered animals. Industry researchers are already hard at work (and have been for years) trying to create goats, for example, engineered to produce a drug in their milk. The technology is still far from perfect, and don’t look for this to become an issue immediately. But it’s out there, sitting on the horizon.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 05:45 PM | Permalink

I’m going to venture out on a limb and guess that February is not peak tourist season in Boston. Sure, Boston is the logical place for a science extravaganza like the annual AAAS meeting. The city can’t be beat for the sheer concentration of high quality science (both in Boston and in Cambridge, its scholarly neighbor across the river). But oh, those Boston winters! So dismal and cold.

But today is glorious: beautiful blue skies and a bit of a chill, but not so cold that I had to break out the big puffy coat that makes me look like a 5-ft tall (American) football player. The meeting has only just begun and hardly anyone is here, but surely the good weather will set an optimistic tone – if anyone manages to sneak out of the cavernous interior of the Hynes Convention Center to get a little sun.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 03:43 PM | Permalink

Join our reporters and editors at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting , from February 14-18. They'll be sending back diary reports to this page. The theme of this year's massive conference is "Science and Technology from a Global Perspective" - so watch for notes on developments around the world, all coming to you from Boston.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 12:22 PM | Permalink

It’s not unusual for Noble prize winners to put in an appearance at the AAAS meeting, but this year’s meeting also featured a few Oscar winners as well. In one of the final sessions of the conference, Doug Roble of Digital Domain, filled us in on some of the secrets of designing special effects for blockbuster movies.

Roble listed some of the ways that computer animators try to make their animations look realistic. They use satellite imagery and the latest atmospheric models, he said, and they’re always culling through scientific journals in search of new information. Still, the drive for scientific accuracy has its limits. “It doesn’t have to be totally accurate,” says Roble. “If it looks good, it’s right.”

“I would never ever fly in an airplane that had been designed using my animation,” he added.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 06:37 AM | Permalink

Glancing through my notebook on the last day of the meeting, I was embarrassed to see page after page with flowers and odd geometric shapes sketched in the margins. But doodlers need not feel ashamed, says Mimi Lam of University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “Everybody does these things absent mindedly to think,” she says. Right – that’s why I did it. To think.

Lam has been looking at the quixotic carvings on ancient hominid artifacts like the parallel scratchmarks on a 1.4 million year old bone fragment found in the Kozarnika Cave. Are they art? Symbolism? No, says Lam. They’re meaningless doodles, perhaps comparable to a bear leaving his mark on a tree by scratching its trunk. At best, she said, the marks could be a sign of ancient hominids honing their hand-eye coordination.

Well, if those are doodles, I have to hand it to the doodlers. It’s one thing to doodle with pen and paper. It’s entirely something else to go to the trouble of chiseling your doodles in stone.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 06:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

In a session today on Biosecurity, the debate was on over "dual use" research - work that could be used for good or for evil. How should such work be regulated, and by whom? And what are the most effective ways to ensure that good wins out?

Everyone agrees that education is a big (and cheap) part of the answer: giving new scientists ethical guidance. But according to one questioner in the audience, the issue now is knowing when to start. Graduate school, he says, is about 6 years too late. In the state of Virginia, apparently, kids can take biotechnology classes in highschool. And, he adds, these classes are in the "technologies" department - more commonly known as "shop". As a result, kids with disciplinary problems who are sent off to classes with more hands-on practicals and less bookish homework are ending up doing biotech. Give it a few years, he says, and the juveniles in penitentiary will have had practice splicing fluorescent genes into e-coli and so, presumably, will be all set to become bioterrorists.

Sadly I can't confirm if any of this is true, or a fair assessment of Virginia's biotech efforts (which look admirable to me, from a quick web search). But if there are teachers out there who can let us know if they have a serious problem here, then let us know...

Continue reading "AAAS: Teaching the bad kids biotech" »

Posted by Nicola Jones at 08:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The plenary speech today was a summary of the science in the IPCC’s fourth assessment – a somewhat more sobering counterpart to the light-hearted talk by Larry Page on Friday. It would amaze me somewhat if there was anyone in this room who didn’t already know the conclusions – that the world is committed already to a certain degree of warming, that this warming is very likely due to human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases, and that the impacts of this will include more extreme weather and sea level rise of an unknown but frightening amount. It is, I hope, a case of preaching to the converted. But it’s a message that can’t be hammered home too hard – it only gets better the more it is bashed into peoples’ heads. And it is particularly nice to hear it being done in America.

The AAAS only just this year released its first consensus statement on climate change, saying "global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society". It is amazing how long it takes for such things to happen. Perhaps the only thing slower than the planet’s response to climate forcings is mankind’s psychological response: convincing a planet full of people to do something before it’s too late seems to be about as hard as turning a giant ship at sea before it whacks into an iceberg. It will be rather unfortunate if our policy response runs on the kinds of geological time scales that will see Greenland melt and the Antarctic start to turn green.

People have been thinking of adaptation to climate for a very, very long time. As we’re told today in the plenary, Thomas Jefferson observed: “The changes between heat and cold in America, are greater and more frequent, and the extremes comprehend a greater scale on the thermometer in America than in Europe. Habit, however, prevents these from affecting us more than the smaller changes of Europe affect the European. But he is greatly affected by ours.” The lesson - that those un-used to changes in climate are ill equipped to deal with them - is one that we are still learning today, and will learn with some force in the near future.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 05:55 PM | Permalink

Medicine’s long held obsession with the white male has certainly not come to an end, but it does seem to be lessening over the past few years. More and more, we’re finding that therapies originally tested on white men don’t necessarily work well for members of the opposite sex or other races, and scientists have been trying to work out why.

In today’s session called “Genetic Targeting of Drug Therapies”, Esteban Burchard of the University of California, San Francisco discussed differences in how Latino populations respond to the popular asthma medication albuterol. He found that Puerto Rican kids were less likely to benefit from the drug than Mexican children, and has been narrowing in on some of the reasons why.

It’s always striking how tough these studies are, given so many confounding non-genetic differences in environment, diet, and economic class. But when Burchard set out to determine the genetic origins of Latino ethnic groups, he found another complicating factor – how do we really know what race we belong to, anyway?

Burchard found that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans populations differed in the proportion of genetic regions that came from African, Native American, and European lineages. Mexicans, for example, had more regions that were similar to Native American genotypes. But if you looked at individual members of his studies, the variability in genetic makeup was astounding. For example, some participants who insisted that they were Puerto Rican were 100% European, while others were nearly 100% African.

Burchard says he’s developing statistical methods to incorporate that data into his analysis, but one conclusion is clear: “We don’t really know who we are,” he said.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 08:05 AM | Permalink

The bioterrorism frenzy in the US tends to focus on glamorous pathogens like smallpox and anthrax. But Jacqueline Fletcher of Oklahoma State University worries about more obscure threats like “Karnal bunt” and “citrus canker”. Though they aren't as well known, unleashing those plant pathogens could cost the US millions in higher food prices and lost trade. And quickly catching a plant disease in the over 1 billion acres of crops, forest, and rangeland in the US won't be easy.

Protecting the nation’s plants against bioterrorism isn’t exactly sexy, and Fletcher’s accustomed to spending a fair amount of time justifying the need to protect plants. Today she started out with a historical approach, highlighting plant disasters from years past, like the Irish potato famine of the 1800’s that sent waves of Irish immigrants to the US. And ever wonder why so many Brits eschew coffee in favor of tea? Thank the coffee rust epidemic in the mid-1800’s that wiped out coffee supplies.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 01:22 AM | Permalink

A few things to consider on the 49th running of the Daytona 500 today:

200 miles per hour: average speed of a racecar
0.7 seconds: reaction time of a race driver
144 feet: how long the car travels during that time

Courtesy of Diandra Leslie-Pelecky of the University of Nebraska, author of the upcoming 'The Physics of NASCAR'.

Posted by Alex Witze at 04:36 PM | Permalink

One of the great things about the AAAS meeting is the public events they incorporate to bring in local families. Today is ‘family science day’ here at the San Francisco Hilton, and the place is crawling with kids of all sizes happily wielding geeky science t-shirts and geeky science toys.

Most popular was a Q&A session with the stars of the Discovery Channel show ‘Mythbusters’. These guys -- the beret-wearing Jamie Hyneman and the ebullient Adam Savage – use their experience in special effects and engineering to investigate potential urban legends. They’re best known for doing crazy things like locking themselves in a car and plunging it underwater to see if you can really get out.

But all the fun is really about the scientific method, Hyneman told the rapt audience. “It’s all just general curiosity about the world at large,” he said. “We just want to see what happens.”

Adam, the crazier of the pair, made a serious point when a boy asked him if they would investigate the Bermuda Triangle. “We have to choose a myth that’s actually testable,” he said. “That’s why we don’t do things like the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot.”

A brief lesson in the scientific method right there.

Posted by Alex Witze at 03:00 AM | Permalink

Who wants a robotic companion? Everyone, said David Calkins of San Francisco State University in a robotics seminar today. But after hearing his talk, I wasn’t so sure.

Calkins listed the many uses that robots could serve in the home. Robots could take over tedious household tasks, for example, and provide a conversation partner that can promise absolute confidentiality – or, as Calkins put it, “the conversation partner who won’t tell your wife you’re cheating on her.” Calkins said when his busy schedule and rental agreement didn’t allow him to keep a live dog, he kept a robot dog instead.

And of course, they’ll be ultra popular among “geeky bachelors who can’t get a girlfriend,” he added. Yeah. You know what he means.

Somewhere in there, I started to become uncomfortable, and it wasn’t just the reference to kinky robot ‘companionship’. Calkins proposed lots of perfectly reasonable uses for robots, focusing on how they could provide 24-hour care for housebound elderly relatives. Clearly it’s a good idea – the robots could be used to manage complicated medication regimens, and could call for help should an accident occur.

But I could imagine how this would play out over time. A robot would be cheaper than hiring human help to care for the elderly, and that could eventually translate into less human companionship for our elderly loved ones. Meanwhile, would we start to use the robot as an excuse not to squeeze grandparents into our busy schedules? “No need to visit grandpa today – RoboNurse will take care of him.”

We’ll soon find out -- Calkins says the technology will be upon us before we know it. “Like the internet, home robots will happen faster than you think, and will quickly become taken for granted,” he said.

Gulp.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 02:38 AM | Permalink

Hearing loss in the elderly might not be what you think: it isn’t just the loss of hair cells in the ear, as it is with young kids at rock concerts, or even as many clinicians might tell you when your hearing starts to go. It’s a battery problem. The tissue in the ear that ‘powers up’ the amplifiers of hair cells in the outer ear starts to degrade with age. Oxidants pile up and clog the system. The battery dies. And there goes hearing.

This mechanism was published some four years ago, though it still comes as a surprise to many who hear it today – including doctors. Unfortunately scientists’ understanding of the situation hasn’t yet resulted in any breakthrough treatments. The cells that make up this ‘battery’ can regenerate, so it’s possible that stem cell treatment might be able, one day, to fix the problem. Stem cells would probably also be needed to re-grow hair cells in the ear (which do also die away with age, and don’t grow back). But we’re a long way from clinical trials on any of this. We’ll just have to wait for updates.

In the meantime, a word of advice from the experts on hearing at the conference: don’t listen to your ipod on more than half the volume setting if you listen to it all day (or no more than 80% max volume if you’re just listening for 20 minutes or so). More than that and you may not get to experience age-related hearing loss; your ears may go long before then.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 10:01 PM | Permalink

It seems odd at a conference where the grand scale impacts of climate change take top billing to get excited about the global warming impact of eating an 8 once salmon steak. But aquaculture is booming – salmon farming is expected to increase 240 fold by 2030 – and the environmental impacts of these activities are not just “a drop in the ocean”. To assess those impacts, speakers here have been looking at the overall environmental burden of fish production, from the pollution of waters resulting from producing fish food, to the emissions of a plane bound for San Francisco from Alaska with a hold full of fresh salmon. And some of their conclusions give food for thought.

Continue reading "AAAS: Farm to fork" »

Posted by Nicola Jones at 09:36 PM | Permalink

I started out the morning at a symposium on the future of internet searching, but the discussion of institutional repositories and language translation algorithms was a bit dry, and I soon headed down the hall for a guaranteed thrill: “Robots – Our future’s sustainable partner”.

Perfect timing – I got there just before University of California, Berkeley professor Robert Full started his talk. Full designs robots that mimic animals of all sorts, and can always be counted upon for cool slow motion videos of insects flying or geckos climbing walls. This time he had a fun video of a cockroach on a treadmill (“The American cockroach,” he explained. “The one that you don’t think you have in your house.”) and a robotic crab playing in the surf, to name but a few.

Full also had a live demonstration of StickyBot – a gecko-like robot with bright orange feet designed to crawl up a glass window. Unfortunately, StickyBot seemed to suffer from stage fright, and kept slipping off the glass.

But despite his push for biomimicry, Full says he isn’ t trying to achieve exact biological replicas, and he won’t be copying evolutionary processes to optimize his designs. Evolution, he said, is a tinkerer without a defined goal, but engineers have finite endgames in mind.

And, he added, robots don’t always have to be as complex as the animals they’re modeled after. The legs of his robot crab, for example, had only two joint motions as compared to the biological crab’s nine. “Crabs do a lot of other things,” he said. “They fight with one another, they mate with one another.

“Robots don’t do that… yet.”

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 07:44 PM | Permalink

In late December 2004, the world was riveted by the horrible news coming from the Indian Ocean tsunami. And a lot of people missed the news that - for a few days at least - there was a reasonable chance that an asteroid called Apophis was poised to devastate even more of the globe in the year 2029.

Later calculations showed that Apophis will miss Earth that year, but a slim chance remains it could hit in 2036. And even though that probability is expected to go away with further studies, politicians and governments ought to sit up and take notice, says Rusty Schweickart.

Schweickart is an Apollo astronaut and a key player in the Association of Space Explorers, which is trying to get the United Nations to take a leading role in figuring out who should lead in deflecting any potential asteroid threat, and when. At the AAAS meeting today, Schweickart showed a map of the possible places on the globe that Apophis might still hit in 2036. The potential impact area extends in a line arcing from Kazakhstan over east Asia, extending along the Aleutian islands and down the Pacific, crossing Central America on the northern border of Costa Rica and eventually petering out in the Atlantic just off Africa.

The map vividly illustrates how many countries will be panicking if an asteroid is indeed ever found that looks like it will definitely hit. Schweickart will be speaking to the UN committee on the peaceful uses of outer space next week, in an effort to get some protocols in place. It's not simple to figure out who ought to do what in the face of a planetary catastrophe, he notes. Within the US, agencies such as Homeland Security and FEMA are typically charged with public safety.

"And do you really want FEMA in charge of this??" he asked.

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:53 PM | Permalink

Today’s session on infant memory closed with some sobering news for mothers with diabetes – get your sugar under control, or your child may experience long-term memory difficulties for years to come.

When diabetic mothers experience abnormal blood sugar levels, the developing fetus feels it, too. As a result of the metabolic flux caused by rapidly changing sugar levels, the fetus may be chronically starved for oxygen and may also redirect iron away from the developing brain and other organs to the blood. This, said Tracey DeBoer of the University of California, Davis, can be particularly harmful to the hippocampus – a region of the brain that’s critical for memory

DeBoer and her colleagues tested long-term memory in infants born of diabetic mothers. One-year olds were taught to put a toy car in a container and push a car down a track. The investigators tested recall immediately after teaching infants the tasks and ten minutes later. Children who were born with iron levels in their blood – a sign that they’d experienced abnormal sugar levels in the uterus -- performed just as well as the control group when asked to immediately recall the task. But after the ten-minute delay, they struggled more to remember what they’d been taught.

DeBoer followed up with the same kids two years later, and retested them with age-appropriate tasks that were more complicated and had to be remembered for a longer time. Again, children born with low iron were less successful at retaining memories of the learned task . The greater the iron deficiency at birth, the worse their performance.

On the bright side, DeBoer said that children born to mothers who kept their blood sugar under tight control had normal levels of iron at birth and passed their tests with flying colors.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 04:38 AM | Permalink

Larry Page told the conference today that his invention (PageRank, the thing that drives Google) holds a lesson for science funders…

He started his whole project by accident. He decided to map out the links of the internet, thinking it would take “about a week”, and a few years later had a pretty nice dataset. And, oh, by the way, maybe it would be useful for searching too. “It was completely random – it’s a great example of pure research and why we want to do it.”

“When you have basic technologies, you find interesting things to do with them. If you’re lucky it turns into something big.” Funding agencies take note.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 03:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)