Fisherman have been upset about stolen fish for quite some time. The problem isn’t just that the whales are stealing the fish- it’s that many of them aren’t leaving evidence. This affects the estimate of the sablefish “fishable population,” which in turn affects fishing quotas. If the fishermen could estimate how many fish were being stolen, these numbers could be included into the totals.

The video reveals not only how the whales are committing the crime, but also how fisherman might overcome the problem. Whales emit sonar pulses to hunt for food. These pulses bounce off of their prey and back to the whales, helping them gauge size and distance. In the video, these pulses can be heard quickening as the whale reaches the line. Then, instead of ripping off the fish, the whale bites down on the line and shakes the fish loose. He keeps emitting the pulses until the fish is released, but doesn’t make any more noise until he has freed his own teeth from the line.

Researchers now think that they might be able to count how often fish are being stolen by tracking patterns of these sonar pulses. However, they’re quick to point out that this video only catches one whale in the act, so much more investigation is needed.

Here’s the video from Science Friday, and here’s an article from National Geographic with a little more info. I encourage you to at least check out the video- just seeing the whale emerge from the corner of the screen, mouth open and teeth pointy, like a creepy shadow puppet, is surreal.

In 1957, Terence Boylan, a budding 9 year-old scientist, wrote a letter to the National Institutes of Health requesting $10 to build a rocket ship.

Dear Sir
My friend and I are very interested in space travel and have a great idea for a rocket ship. We were wondering if we could have a little sum of money ($10.00) to fulfill our project. We would [be] most grateful if you would send it to us.
Sincerely,
Terence Boylan

The letter landed on the desk of NIH grants administrator Dr. Ernest Allen, who took it to his review committee. Out of their own pockets they funded Terence’s proposal, leading to series of experiments and a successful launch. It’s one of the most heartwarming stories I’ve heard in a long time. Here’s a link to the pdf article. It’s a must-read.

The story was made into a children’s book, available free from NIH’s website.

An interview with Terence, reflecting on the experience:

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]]> http://blog.scienceinsociety.northwestern.edu/2009/05/the-best-10-nih-ever-spent/feed/ 0 http://blog.scienceinsociety.northwestern.edu/2009/03/to-build-a-better-tomorrow/ http://blog.scienceinsociety.northwestern.edu/2009/03/to-build-a-better-tomorrow/#comments Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:50:50 +0000 Noah Rowland http://blog.scienceinsociety.northwestern.edu/?p=543 Science education has been the subject of much reform and debate over the years, sensitive to national test scores, career statistics, and perhaps most importantly, thw priority of science in many nations’ social and political agendas. Many stress the importance of science education as the best possible hope of solving the multitude of mankind’s problems, because only with a good education can scientific breakthroughs continue to populate news headlines and make their way into the average person’s life. It isn’t often, however, that the younger generation is able to teach the older generation, which is exactly what physics undergrad Xiaohang Quan has done in researching her thesis, according to The Daily Princetonian.

She has found a way to improve the algorithms used in analyzing data produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator. The LHC came online in September of last year despite fears that its activation would lead to the “end of the world” via the creation of a black hole or some other unforeseen result. However, it needed to be shut down after one of the components broke down several days after the switch was flipped.

Particle accelerators have been used by physicists to discover the nature of the universe and its components – to see how everything fits together and works. The LHC is currently our best bet to discover the ever-elusive dark matter and dark energy by its ability to recreate conditions thought to be present milliseconds after the Big Bang.

Quan, a senior in college, astounded future peers by the fact that she was an undergrad making this discovery, boding well for the direction science education is moving around the world. Despite continued assault from creationists and religious critics and all manner of opposition from those who don’t quite understand both the importance and the need for these discoveries, education of younger generations is clearly moving forward. The question here must be, is it moving fast enough and well enough to ensure our survival?

Obama’s recent call for upcoming generations to give up careers in finance in favor of engineering is evidence of the dire straights not just this country, but humanity and the world itself is in. We have problems, problems on problems, that cannot be solved overnight, or by cleverly worded legislation, or by throwing money at them. What is needed is dedicated research with encouragement and enthusiasm – an optimistic approach that is especially hard to come by these days. We all have our parts to play, young and old, politician and scientist and citizen alike. Can we stand up to the challenge, can we continue to push ahead, and take our cue from people like Quan? We have the potential, that much is evident. But do we have the drive? That remains to be seen.

In the past two postings I’ve talked about my experience working with the Science Entertainment Exchange, which aims to improve the quality of science in movies and other forms of entertainment by connecting movie and TV people with scientists who have expertise in something related to their story lines. In my last posting, I addressed some creative ways in which scientists and engineers can be helpful in this endeavor. In this posting, I will address how the entertainment industry can further the agenda of scientists and engineers.

Ten years ago, while I was doing my PhD in neuroscience at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, the ABC TV news show “Primetime Live” decided to do an exposé on wasteful government funding of science. Their strategy was to ask the main funding agencies for a list of the titles of currently funded projects and pick the ones that sounded the most “out there.” Since my lab was studying prey capture in weakly-electric fish, the project I was working on got picked. Luckily, the executive producer was well informed about science and after trips to several of the labs, where he found that the selected projects had excellent justifications, they switched the tone of the show. It became about how seemingly strange and obscure basic science projects have led to revolutions in our understanding of everything from genetics to brain plasticity.

Amusingly, it seems like they didn’t tell their main wasteful-spending critic about the shift in tone. Former congressmen Ernest Istook from Oklahoma (a Republican) dismissed each research project in turn. For our project, Sam Donaldson (who’s toupee sits as a reminder of one neglected corner of scientific research) said to Istook: “How electric fish attack their prey, we’re spending money looking at that” Istook shook his head and responded “You know, that is really curious….humans don’t go around making attacks with electricity underwater….it just doesn’t work that way” (click here to view the video).

This kind of populist anti-science pandering is a recurring phenomenon. One recent example is Sarah Palin’s remarks during a speech in October: “Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You’ve heard about some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.”

The entire genetics revolution occurred because of research on fruit flies started over 50 years ago. Given that her child has a genetic disorder that scientists do research on using fruit flies (I kid you not), her attack is darkly ironic. Professor John Carlson from Yale University, who organized the 50^th Annual Fly Meeting in Chicago that just finished on Sunday, told me over dinner last week that he had invited Palin to the meeting. Her staff was to get back to him on that, but not surprisingly never did.

The fact that such attacks can gain traction (45.7% of traction, if you count the popular vote for McCain-Palin this past election) shows how far we have to go in terms of educating the public about research. Increasing the quality and content of science in entertainment is one small part of the solution. One of the areas of research we told the TRON-2 producers about–to help with difficult but key dramatic transition in the movie–is a new branch of physics which several investigators at Northwestern work on. Should that make it into the movie, this will increase the awareness of the public for this kind of work and make it slightly less likely to become the target of ignorant political attacks.

By increasing the quality of the portrayed science, one can foresee a slow process of increased scientific “situation awareness” in mass culture. In such a climate, people may be able to think more critically about Palinesque pseudo-expose’s of scientific programs. The short-sighted turn away from basic science to translational research, which represents a failure of science education on a large scale, may be helped. Massively irrational practices and beliefs, such as creationism and homeopathy, may be less likely to spread.

For these reasons, I hope that the National Academy’s Science and Entertainment Exchange is successful in getting a mutually beneficial dialogue started between scientists and story tellers. Having recently heard that our input to the makers of TRON 2 has had a significant impact on the storyline, I’m optimistic that the effort will pay off.

At the heart of the mission is the Kepler telescope. The telescope contains a very sensitive photometer, capable of measuring very small changes in light intensity. By continuously monitoring the light being emitted by over 100,000 stars, it can detect a subtle “dimming” of a given star’s light if an orbiting planet passes in front (view a graphic of the “transit method” for detecting planets).

The mission’s goal is to identify planets in the “habitable zone,” the distance from a star where a planet is likely to have liquid water present. Once a planet is detected, NASA researchers will use information including the planet’s period (the time it takes to orbit the star), the star’s temperature and mass, and the planet’s mass to calculate the planet’s surface temperature.

For the next several months, Kepler will travel to its final vantage point: a carefully-calculated, unobstructed orbit around the sun. From there, Kepler’s three-and-a-half year unblinking gaze will begin.

Original Article

At the end of my last posting, I promised to tell a bit about my meeting with the makers of TRON 2 at a studio in LA. We met in a beautiful high-tech conference room with loads of food, a videographer recording the proceedings, and what looked to be part of some giant gear system excised from a sunken ship quietly decorating a corner. This lent an air of steampunk to the feel of the room.

The TRON 2 people solicited comments from us on the draft script that we had all read (while under careful watch from a production assistant) and then asked us for help with some specific problems they were having. It was an energetic and intense exchange, the kind where jumping in has to occur at the expense of interrupting someone. This was all done in contracted confidence for obvious reasons, so not much can be said about the specifics of what we discussed.

Participating in the exchange brought many questions to my mind about what ways entertainment industry folks and scientists can help one another.  There are two ways that seem interesting, one I call Truth is Stranger than Fiction and one I call You Gotta Know the Laws to Break ‘Em.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction: Not long ago I read a study and watched videos showing a fish (grouper) that dances for moray eels to seduce them into hunting together. One of them (the grouper) scares prey away from open water, making them hide in the crevices, while the other (the eel) can scare them out of crevices. Together they make an unbeatable team. While we are still trying to figure out how to communicate with one another, here’s two very different species of fish who not only have done this, but end up with some great sushi dinners out of the deal. There are all kinds of interesting stories like this in our work that can make exceptional raw material for the entertainment industry.

More examples:

• Ants communicate by making sounds. There’s a caterpillar that’s hacked their language and is greeted (and more importantly, fed) like a queen when it arrives in a nest.
• A robotics group in Italy is making a plant-inspired robot (plantoid) they call a SeedBot, with an artificial “root” that slowly grows and expands into the soil, as a possible planetary exploration probe.
• While I was at a robotics conference in Rome at Angelicum University, I saw a presentation on a robot that can walk on water. Watching the proceedings from the front of the room was a huge Christ on a cross (one is in every classroom of Angelicum), wearing what I imagined to be a look of “that’s SO done.”

You Gotta Know the Laws to Break ‘Em. You can only be an outlaw when you know what the laws are. A scientist is someone who knows the natural laws or regularities of their domain. Doing violence to those laws can be very useful for dramatic effect – we saw this in the first Tron with how the light cycles did turns. They performed perfect 90 degree turns without loss of speed. Nothing in the physical world can do that because of inertia. This breaking of the laws of physics effectively communicated the immateriality of the world inside the computer.

There is, of course, another way scientists can contribute: fixing gross inaccuracies in the portrayed science. A January 2009 issue of Science had a blurb on the Science Entertainment Exchange (SEE). I was disappointed to read the example they chose to highlight, which was an astrophysicist (Neil deGrasse Tyson) whining to James Cameron that when Kate Winslet looked up from the deck of the Titanic, the stars in the sky were in the wrong position. Cameron’s response: “Last I checked the film’s made a billion dollars.”

I liked this response, not because of its ironically crass commercialism, but because it’s a reference to how much people enjoyed the story. Fixing star position, while perhaps worth doing, certainly doesn’t contribute to the quality of the story. This kind of fact checking, it seems to me, is the least interesting way in which we can contribute.

Finally, and more interesting than fact checking, we can help story creators develop plotlines that facilitate the audience’s suspension of disbelief when it comes to fantastic elements of the story. So, it seems clear that scientists and engineers can be useful to entertainment people — how useful can they be to us? I’ll address that in my next posting.

The goal of this blog is to share Northwestern University’s broad range of scientific interest and perspective. Accordingly, we’ve assembled a group of thoughtful individuals representing the university community: scientists & non-scientists, staff, faculty, and students.

You can read about my background here.  In a nutshell, I come from an eclectic mix of biochemistry, molecular biology, hockey, and art. And I’m passionate about communicating science with the public.

Why? For starters, it’s just plain fun. Science is truly a discipline always on the edge. Walk into a research lab – doesn’t matter if it’s chemistry, physics, or biology – and it’s possible you’ll witness an experiment being done for the first time in the history of man. Of course, it may fail miserably. Such is the process of science. Yet when it works, it leads to new experiments and collaborations, which lead to things like cancer therapies, the internet, solar panels, and tankless hot water heaters (homeowners, you need one of these).

It’s also true that scientists have an obligation to to inform and educate the public at large. Much of the basic research done at universities across the country is funded by your money (the taxpayer-funded budget for the National Institutes of Health last year was ~ $29 billion). It’s only reasonable that you ask, “What advances has my money helped support?”

Public policy also enters into the equation. We collectively need to make tough decisions about how to move forward on issues like stem cell biology and climate change. Key to making informed decisions is a basic understanding of 1) the problem, 2) available solutions, and 3) the downstream consequences. For any given issue, perfectly rational and educated people will disagree about 1-3. It happens all the time in labs, town halls, and pubs across the globe. The key is having a scientific understanding of the problem, along with its moral, legal, and social implications.

We hope this blog will highlight the issues and encourage the debate.  Please join us!

“Have you heard about that collider in Europe? It’s going to blow up the Earth.”

He was talking about the Large Hadron Collider, a new particle accelerator constructed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It stands to teach us a great deal about our universe once it resumes operation later this year. But, after seeing some of the headlines about it in the media, I could understand how one might think it’s going to destroy our planet.

So, I was extremely excited that someone brought it up. I had just finished editing an article about it for Science in Society, and was armed with enough knowledge to debunk any outrageous theory. Blow up the Earth? Not likely. But what about a giant black hole? I could handle that too.

My excitement didn’t stem from a desire to be a complete know-it-all. Instead, it was exactly the opposite. You see, despite having worked in the sciences at Northwestern for the past four years, I am not a scientist. Not even close. I have a bachelor’s degree in English literature, and will (hopefully) soon have a master’s in creative writing. Lots of fiction, not so many facts.

But, I spend every day immersed in science, catching up on the basics while learning about the extraordinary research taking place at Northwestern and around the world. So, my excitement was because I could share this knowledge with someone, one on one, the way that so many faculty, students and staff at NU have shared their knowledge with me. And then that someone could pass it along to someone else.

That’s why I’m all the more excited to be a part of the Science in Society blog. I can share with you what I’m constantly learning, and you can share your thoughts with me. My hope is that I can illustrate just how infinitely interesting science can be – and how we’re not going to blow the whole place up.

It is important to point out that the presence of methane is, in and of itself, not conclusive evidence of life. Methane can be produced from purely non-biological chemical reactions. Based on NASA’s current findings, it’s impossible to say if the gas is from biologic or geologic sources.

Interestingly, the article also highlights recent research showing that microbial life can live quite happily miles underground. A team from Indiana University recently discovered microbes living two miles beneath the Earth’s surface. These microbes harnessed energy from the radioactive decay of nearby rocks to generate fuel. If Martian life does actually exist, it would likely be deep underground, where the temperature is significantly warmer and liquid water would flow freely.

It will be interesting to see if the next Mars rover mission, scheduled for 2011, will target one of the suspicious methane-rich sites.

Original Article

Why CNN would chose to do this isn’t exactly clear. Many of the most pressing issues affecting our country have deep science and technology roots: energy, health care, climate change, and even national security. In fact, a report released this week by a US government bipartisan commission noted that the US is likely to be targeted with a biological weapons attack in the next five years. With seven fewer reporters on the job, in-depth coverage of these important issues will be scant.

Perhaps the first story for “Planet in Peril” could be the growing media disinterest in covering science. The topic would be especially appropriate for a planet in peril.

Original Article