The future Nobel lauretes of the world

Published May 13th, 2009 in Science. 2 Comments

This week, I’m in Reno for the International Science and Engineering Fair. You know your out-of-the-box volcano experiments you showed off for your teachers at your school science fair? Well, I’m here with about 1,800 students who won their school science fairs, followed by regional science fairs, to appear with projects titled, “Infested Forests and Evapotranspiration: Is the Loss of ET Significant Enough to Solve the Water Crisis in the West?” and “Transport Studies of Magnetism in Individual Gold Nanoparticles.” (Some were more casual, such as “Are You Gellin’?”) I’m pretty certain that the students who are here are going to be the ones who help save the world.

Unlike many kids between the ages of 16 – 18, these kids took two hours to listen respectfully to their elders on Tuesday. A panel of Nobel lauretes had been assembled, for a question and answer session moderated by NPR’s Joe Palca. The questions, given by selected students, varied from “How do you predict the economic recession will change the way science is viewed?” (answer: We’re getting more funding) to “Do you have any artistic ability?” Judging from this small sampling, Nobel scientists seem to enjoy poetry. Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Herschel Medal) held up a book of astronomy poetry she edited. Douglas Osheroff (Physics, 1996) took the opportunity to recite a cowboy poem in its entirety.

One student asked what they thought the main renewable energy of the future will be. Without hesitation, the consensus answer was, “Solar.” The Nobel winners established that in fact, all energy comes from the sun, even fossil fuels. Leon Lederman (Physics, 1988) went further than the question to say, “Even more vital than a change of energy is a change of lifestyle. The ability to drive 10 miles to buy bread is going to change. We need to bike, or skate, to do things in a more energy independent way.”

The scientists made jokes, talked about collaboration, creativity, and imagination. They told stories about dead ends in research, and how the ability to be wrong (and accept it) is an important part of science. They were trying to convey to the students that there’s no particular path to science greatness. I talked to one student afterwards who said she really enjoyed the panel. She was surprised and excited to find out that the Nobel scientts were like, regular people. They’re brilliant, of course, but so is she.

A history of the nuclear age precedes a nuclear renaissance

Published May 7th, 2009 in Energy. 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, just as I started researching an upcoming series on nuclear energy, a book on the history of nuclear power landed in the vicinity of my desk. It was extraordinarily convenient. Up until recently, my knowledge of nuclear was marked by the names of accidents and today’s soundbites of politicians calling for nuclear energy as part of a “clean energy mix.”

It wasn’t hard to get into reading Stephanie Cooke’s “In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age.” Cooke has worked as a writer for the industry for many years, and she is adept at weaving stories into the greater fabric of nuclear’s history. She chronicles the Manhattan Project and isolated cities of nuclear scientists, the Cold War and backdoor dealings of countries swept up in the nuclear arms race, Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” and electricity “too cheap to meter.”

You can guess what Cooke’s perspective on nuclear is from the subtitle of her book. She writes, “I started out as a believer in nuclear energy… having little understanding of the relationship between the civilian side of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Gradually my views changed.”

Cooke characterizes nuclear as a highly scientific weapons project gone out of control. Starting with the Manhattan Project, scientists developing the atomic bomb were so focused on their work, so caught up in the pursuit of science, that few of them stopped to think of the implications of the bomb. Or if they did, they were willing to make justifications. A small number walked away from the project.

Once the goal of ending the war was accomplished, more powerful and fearful bombs were be built and tested - with a worldwide audience. Cooke describes Operation Crossroads, a series of bomb tests held in the South Pacific, which she sees as the beginning of the postwar atomic era. Viewed directly by representatives from around the world, The expense put towards this spectacle (including a fleet of boats filled with goats and rodents to measure the impact), as well as the ignorance about radiation (Navy sailors started cleaning the ships’ decks about 40 minutes after the blast, shirtless), and the lengths the military was willing to go in order to complete the operation (moving the atoll’s entire population to another island, blasting off coral heads in order to fit the ships) was quite shocking. Certainly, we live in a very different age now.

But the main thing I took away from the book was the absence of communication between scientists, politicians, and the public. Politicians were making decisions about nuclear weapons without knowledge about the implications, scientists lived in cities cut off from the public due to atomic secrecy, reports on tests were edited and withheld, and the public didn’t know whether to feel fear or complacency. And advocates of nuclear were able to sequester enormous amounts of money to build bombs which were intended never to be used.

Cooke characterizes nuclear power as an afterthought of the weapons program - a way to make this expensive endeavor useful to the public. She has a particularly thorough chapter on Chernobyl, which put a big dent in nuclear power’s aspirations for the past 20 years.

So what does this all mean for today’s nuclear renaissance? I’m not quite sure. Certainly, nuclear’s dangerous history provides plenty of fodder for the opposition. But it’s also true that many bright scientists, with less of a tie to weaponry than the previous generation, have been working to make nuclear safer and smarter than it has been in the past. Now, we have to look at nuclear with a perspective on our energy needs, costs, and comparisons to other renewable energy sources. As nuanced and difficult as the energy business can be, one thing is clear: The future of our energy won’t be an easy decision, or an easy action.

Did water shortages contribute to swine flu?

Published April 29th, 2009 in Bizarre, Body & Mind and Science. 7 Comments

Health officials in Mexico are attempting to zero in on the source of the swine flu that threatens to turn into a pandemic. The current theory is that it began with a young boy who lived near a large pig farm in Veracruz, Mexico. Then the disease spread rapidly through Mexico City, a crowded metropolis of 20 million people. When I heard about the epidemic, my first thought was this: It’s connected to water.

Here’s my theory: In early February, Mexico City began severe water rationing, reducing or completely cutting off water to 5.5 million people. The reason was the city is facing dangerously low water supplies, due to water mismanagement, reduced rainfall, and sprawling development. It was announced that the water shut-offs would continue until the rainy season, which begins in May. Between the lack of access to water, or households saving the precious water they had, I think it’s possible that many people stopped washing their hands.

The Center for Disease Control is recommending hand washing as a prevention against swine flu, and it’s been shown to protect against respiratory disease infection in general. So if people are living in a crowded city, and they’re not washing their hands as normal due to water shortages, the lapse of basic sanitation might create perfect conditions for a flu that jumps from person to person.

I haven’t yet seen any reports linking the water shortages to the spread of swine flu. That means my theory is the totally unscientific product of my own cognitive connections. But I think it may prove to be an interesting connection. Feel free to weigh in with your own wacky theories about the swine flu, or prove me wrong. And not to be your mom or anything, but remember to wash your hands.

Is geoengineering a scary or sensible solution?

Published April 13th, 2009 in Climate and Earth. 10 Comments

Ken Caldeira is a climate scientist who recently ended up on Rolling Stone’s list of “100 People Who are Changing America.” To be correct, Caldeira’s contemplating changing the atmosphere. He advocates furthering research on geoengineering - intentionally altering Earth’s climate.

You can hear the radio podcast or my Clear Voices interview with Caldeira on the EarthSky website.

Caldeira admits that geoengineering is a very risky endavor, and not something we would try without very good reason. But he told me that the threat of a climate crisis - such as worldwide famine - looms larger every day, as the world continues to delay taking major action to cut emissions. “So we need to ask ourselves, if we did confront a climate crisis, what would be our emergency response plan?” Caldeira said.

A climate emergency response plan isn’t as easy as pointing out the exit signs in your building. Creating a means to cool down the climate - even temporarily - is fraught with potential for unintended consequences. Caldeira has been creating climate models to see what would happen if humans were to to shoot sulfur dust into the atmosphere, mimicking a volcano eruption. He said the models show that this scheme would turn down the global temperature, but there is no way that scientists can imagine or enter into the model every possible bad effect (see the “cat effect” on Macquarie Island).

So what Caldeira thinks we should conduct what he calls, “small scale field tests.” This would allow scientists to see how these geoengineering proposals actually interact with the environment. Yet he said it may be “politically risky” to suggest advance research. Indeed, John Holdren, Obama’s scientific advisor, found himself in hot water last week, when he mentioned in an interview that we should consider geoengineering schemes. Both Holdren and Caldeira emphasize that geoengineering is no substitute for serious work on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, and should only be considered in a desperate situation.

I asked Caldeira if geoengineering needs a scientific consensus, much like the consensus on climate change itself. He gave me a mixed answer: In some ways, geoengineering may be effective because it doesn’t require everyone on the planet to change their practices - instead, perhaps a consensus between government leaders. “It’s much easier to deploy from a practical point of view, even though it’s more scary,” Caldeira said.

But on the other hand, Caldeira added, it’s possible that one country may essentially decide to “go at it alone” to alter the climate. Such an action could be unbelievably disastrous, especially if the science behind it has not been confirmed.

As scary as geoengineering and the implications are, if we have the means to alter the climate, research and a regulatory framework are necessary. Caldeira seemed to imply that we’ve already made an important choice. He said, “We need a discussion of how we handle the global commons – do we see our future as one where we learn to live in harmony with the natural geochemical cycles and the natural climate system? Or are humans going to dominate planet and alter it for our own ends? The second path seems to be the one we’re heading down and it’s extremely risky.”

Scientists are like rock stars at the AAAS

Published February 19th, 2009 in Science. 2 Comments

This past week, Jorge and I were fortunate enough to attend the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting. The AAAS is a dizzying four days chock full of science. I like to compare it to the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival here in Austin, except with science instead of music. But in some ways, scientists are not unlike the musicians who come to SXSW. They’re doing work that they care about, and they want to share it with all of us science fans, via Power Point presentation.

Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, is one of my favorite rock star scientists. I felt a bit of a rush when I saw that he was giving a presentation on preventing food crisis in the future. I spoke to him over the phone a year ago, when he was about to open the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in Norway’s Arctic Circle. The vault, designed to preserve agricultural diversity for thousands of years, has come to be known as the “Doomsday Vault.” That makes Fowler “so metal.” (Read this New Yorker article for more about the Doomsday Vault.)

Fowler’s quest is to save the world’s seeds - the building blocks of the agricultural system. He says seeds contain the genetic diversity which will be essential to the future of our food supply. Food crisis could become common in developing countries, and according to Fowler, even United States agriculture is not safe.

Climate change is predicted to change weather and growing patterns, and crops will have to adapt to drought, heat, pests, and diseases. But this doesn’t happen on its own. Plant breeders pick and choose the best genetic characteristics from the pools of seeds, to create a crop which can overcome a pest or disease, consume less water, and keep everyone on the planet fed. It’s a simple, yet incredible process that’s been going on since humans discovered how to breed plants.

I approached Fowler after the food riot symposium had wrapped up. I introduced myself, and told him that I was talking to my friends for weeks after we spoke about his work (it’s true). He told me that his organization had that day announced “history’s biggest biological rescue rescue effort” to save 100,000 seeds within the next two years. I asked him a few questions about it, and you can hear the results of my interview with Fowler in an upcoming EarthSky podcast.

The best thing about my job, I believe, is being able to talk to people who really have a stake in saving our world. There are so many challenges in our future, I’m not always sure how humans will live through them all. But then I can talk to the people who do know. Or at least, they’re working on it.

At the end of our interview, I asked Fowler what he wanted people to know about his project/quest. “Don’t make the assumption that everything is okay,” he said. “Don’t make the assumption that agriculture is ready for climate change or ready to feed a growing population. But do, take some solace in the fact that it can be ready if we do our work properly.”

With a little work, it could have been a (folk) song.

Nerds: You really do have a chance

Published January 14th, 2009 in Human World. 4 Comments

Mark Prokosch is an evolutionary psychologist whose work focuses on mate choice. Meaning, he tries to figure out why women mate with certain men, and vice versa. I’d imagine that his field of scientific research is similar to observing people in a bar as if you were watching the Discovery Channel. Prokosch told me past research has shown that women’s mate choices are weighed heavily on appearance. “In general, women prefer the typical daring socially confident men,” he said.

But Prokosch wanted to go beyond the sexy swagger which woos we women so. He wanted to find out to what extent women value intelligence and creativity.

He made videos of 15 college men doing things like throwing a Frisbee and answering questions like why they would make a good mate and what they think of the possibility of life on Mars. 200 college women watched the videos, and then assessed each man’s appeal based on intelligence, creativity, attractiveness, and potential for long or short term relationships.

Prokosch said his video method is more “ecologically realistic” than the traditional mate choice survey. Still, attractiveness still came out on top. “Of course, physical attractiveness is the best predictor of mate appeal, both in long term mates and in short term mates,” Prokosch said. “That’s no surprise. We expected that.”

But it also turns out that the women’s ratings of intelligence and creativity predicted both long and short term relationship preferences. That means we’re more likely to date an attractive, smart, creative guy, than an attractive but dumb guy who can’t strum a guitar and has never even attempted to write bad poetry.

As a person who has chosen to date a smart guy who can play the guitar rather well (I’m not sure about the poetry), I can confirm the truth of this statement. But what advantage does being smart and playing the guitar have, evolutionarily?

Prokosch speculated that intelligence is an indicator of evolutionary fitness. To a woman, it confers ideas of higher social status, higher income, and more material resources, which are all nice things to pass down to your children. As for creativity, maybe it will mean that Johnny will eventually be in a cool band and get all the ladies, thereby benefiting the human race. (That’s exclusively my own speculation.) Which is to say, Prokosch intends to further his research on creativity.

Measure your authentic happiness

Published December 22nd, 2008 in Body & Mind and Science. 2 Comments

Answer this question: Are you happy? You might be inclined to answer a quick “yes” or “no,” but if you’re anything like me, you’ll soon be embroiled in a deep philosophical self-argument about what is happiness, really? And how to know if I am any happier than the next person who is still employed?

Time to put your dilemmas away, because there is a place on the internet (of course! why didn’t you think of the internet sooner?) where you can immediately receive an objective score of your personal, authentic happiness.

It’s Authentic Happiness. Register for free and you’ll have access to a large number of questionnaires which measure various character strengths and aspects of happiness. Your answers to each questionnaire will result in a score, which you can see measured next to people of similar age, sex, education, etc. Your scores will be saved in your Test Center. And if you’re feeling different later, you can retake the test. Cheater.

The site is run by the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, which sounds like a place for optimists if there ever was one. Positive Psychology is “founded on the belief that people want more than an end to suffering. People want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.”

I believe Oprah is a licensed practitioner. I prefer to read “Ask the Optimist.”

By coincidence, I just started reading a book called, “Stumbling on Happiness,” by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. So far, it’s extremely engaging and surprisingly funny. Gilbert almost immediately makes the point that his book is not a self-help book. Rather, it’s meant to help you understand happiness itself - how we think about happiness, how we think we’ll achieve it, and why we’re such relentless optimists about it. I’m hoping studying up on this book will improve my test results.

Psst… what’s your score?

The economics of recycling everything

Published December 4th, 2008 in Earth and Human World. 4 Comments

Tire Graveyard

SPOILER ALERT: This blog will reveal the answer to the last “Ask the Scientists” question of the year! With bonus explanation.

Sofa Andrade, a smart girl with lots of good questions, asked, “Why can some items be recycled and others can’t?”

The primary answer is that it depends on where you live, and what kind of recycling your area offers. Sadly, you can’t recycle your glass bottle if there is no one up the chain to recycle it for you. You’re not going to melt it down yourself (or are you?). But I wanted to know (and I think Sofia wanted to know, too), in terms of all the things we can produce in the world, is there some inherent quality that makes an item recyclable or not recyclable?

The simple answer to that is no. Pretty much every material can broken down into its basic properties, and recycled. That’s according to Jeremy O’Brien. O’Brien is director of applied research at Solid Waste Association of North America, which means he knows a lot about all sorts of things we would call garbage.

So we can recycle everything! That’s exciting, right? But wait - there’s one big catch, says O’Brien. The reason why most things aren’t recycled is because it’s not economical to recycle them.

“Basically, the price of the new material will determine the price of a recycled material,” he said. “The reason some materials can be recycled and others can’t be, is because the cost of recycled material is higher than the price of a new material.”

A big factor in the price of recycling something is what made that product originally. Newspapers and food cans are easily, cheaply recycled because they’re not much more than the material they were made with - wood pulp and steel. But something like a rubber tire has gone through a chemical process in its manufacture, and it’s nearly impossible to convert it back to rubber. (That’s why there are sad places called tire graveyards.)

Your computer is made of many plastics, metals, glass, and circuit boards, which all have to be dismantled and carefully separated. You may have electronics recycling in your area, but most e-waste is exported to be recycled elsewhere in the world. The whole process - collection, transportation, reprocessing the materials, and transporting those materials to make new materials - makes it easy to see why recycled material gets so expensive.

“But recycling saves the environment! And everyone tells us we should do it!” you say.

Those things are all true. But recycling is entirely a free-market enterprise. Kind of like Wall Street (gah!). So economics dictate recycling, at least in America.

The situation is different in Europe. I lived with a family while studying in the Czech Republic, and I was amazed to see my host father dutifully filling up boxes of glass bottles and taking them to be recycled. I asked O’Brien why people in Europe recycle more actively than Americans. He said Europe has less room for the huge landfills that characterize American waste management. So they regulate recycling, heavily. My host father had a big incentive to return his bottles - he had to pay 5 cents extra when he bought them, which he would get back after he recycled.

“You can get pretty much any recycling level you want if you make it a law,” O’Brien said. “That’s not the case in US. There’s no required recycling, the economics drive the actual level of recycling.”

So what would encourage Americans to recycle more (besides regulations)? “I think what would help is a better understanding of the environmental benefits of recycling, versus using new materials,” said O’Brien. With all the talk of “eco-friendly” this, and “greener” that, we can be hopeful that’s something people are coming around to.

Beer, fish, and the green economy

Published November 26th, 2008 in Bizarre, Human World and Science. 4 Comments

What does fish food made from beer taste like? Pretty neutral, Andy Logan told me. This is second-hand information, Logan didn’t eat it himself. His business partner, Seth Terry, did the taste test of the flaky, soil-like substance they create from beer wastewater. Personally, I’d rather taste the original product (their test facility is at New Belgium Brewery). But fish probably prefer the flaky stuff.

The two environmental engineers have founded a company, Oberon FMR, to supply this ingredient of fish food to the rapidly growing aquaculture industry - that is, industrial fish farms. Almost a third of the world’s seafood supply is farmed fish. It’s especially popular in the developing world, where fish is called “the poor man’s protein.”

“We’re environmentalists trying to figure out how to meet people’s needs without destroying the environment,” Logan said.

They’re also a part of the “green economy,” an emerging sector of the economy steering towards a more sustainable future. As Mark Bittman (my favorite cookbook author) wrote recently in a “real” article for the New York Times, most of the seafood ending up on our plates is unsustainable.

The article says,” Nearly one-third of the world’s wild-caught fish are reduced to fish meal and fed to farmed fish and cattle and pigs. Aquaculture alone consumes an estimated 53 percent of the world’s fish meal and 87 percent of its fish oil.”

Wait, so we’re using wild fish - the tasty, fresh stuff - to make farmed fish, which is discernibly less tasty?

It goes on, “Using fish meal to feed farm-raised fish is also astonishingly inefficient. Approximately three kilograms of forage fish go to produce one kilogram of farmed salmon; the ratio for cod is five to one; and for tuna — the most beef-like of all — the so-called feed-to-flesh ratio is 20 to 1.”

Wow. This seems like a big mistake. Plus, even as demand for farmed fish grows, the number wild fish in our oceans is not. Remember how a lot of our favorite fisheries have collapsed? That kind of overfishing is just moving on down the food chain.

So here’s where the beer fish food comes in. Bacteria eats up the residue left over in the bottom of a vat of beer and ends up as that flaky brown substance. That bacteria reproduces every 20 minutes, and the whole process takes less than 10 days. And what else would we use beer residue for? That’s sustainability - saving the little fishies.

The product will be ready for fish in 2009, presumably after more non-human taste tests. If Oberon’s technique gets scaled up to meet growing demand, this tiny company could drive so many of those “green-collar jobs” people just can’t stop talking about. Or maybe Oberon’s story shouldn’t necessarily be coded, “green,” but simply innovation adapted to this century’s environment and economy.

Honey, who shrunk the president-elect?

Published November 12th, 2008 in Science. 1 Comment

Obama says, \"help me!\"

This is what happens when science and politics mix: Barack Obama’s face gets shrunken down into nanotubes. Scientist John Hart recreated the now-iconic “Obama Hope” image with 150 million carbon nanotubes. As Hart points out on the nanobama website, that’s approximately how many Americans voted in the 2008 election. Very clever, science.

Hart describes how the Nanobamas were made. Basically, it’s complicated, and it involves lots of very expensive equipment, scientific processes, and growing a nanotube “forest.” Interesting fact - a nanotube forest grows much more rapidly than a regular forest! Hart writes, “If you were standing next to the nanotubes as they grow, and each nanotube was a 1 foot (0.3 meter) diameter tree, the trees would be growing at over 500 miles per hour!” Also, you would be very, very short.

Nanobama clusters

Check out Nanobamas on Flickr (there’s also a nano Joe Biden).

I have to say that these Nanobamas remind me of creative pasta shapes - which makes me think of the fortune to be made in political-themed mac and cheese. Mixing politics with cheese… now that’s a good idea.

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