Climate change is causing such dire problems for marine species that scientists are considering trying radical, previously ‘sacrilege’ methods to save them, they said today.

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Scientists have sequenced the genome of modern humans’ closest relatives, the Neanderthals. And so far they have found….

…well, not much, actually. At least not much that Svante Paabo, leader of the Neanderthal sequencing project, was willing to share with us this morning. The highlights, briefly: there’s very little or no evidence of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals. Neanderthals weren’t able to digest milk as adults. They have similar mutations to modern humans in a gene involved in language, FOXP2. And they do not appear to have the version of a gene involved in brain size, microcephalin, that is commonly found in Europeans.

And Paabo does not think it will be possible to clone a Neanderthal from fossil DNA: “I would say [cloning a Neanderthal] starting from the DNA extracted from a fossil is and will remain impossible as far as I can see into the future,” he said. But he left open the possibility that some new technology may one day change that state of affairs.

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As the annual meeting of the world’s largest general scientific society kicks off in Chicago, Illinois, this morning, there’s an atmosphere of celebration despite the chilly temperatures outside. It’s not just the double anniversary of both Darwin’s and Lincoln’s birth. For scientists, the election of U.S. President Barack Obama is a real thawing of the cold shoulder they have felt from Washington, D.C. for the past eight years, said James Mc Carthy, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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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: https://circres.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/CIRCRESAHA.107.164970v1.

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: https://www.aaas.org/spp/case/case.htm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.