Scriptorium Scientifica

The colors of fall

2006-11-06T21:45:00.000-05:00

The leaves are falling off the trees pretty quickly here in New England, but only after putting on a fantastic color display this year. I haven't seen blazing foliage like that in a while.

But where do those colors come from? What causes that fiery display? As we all learned in high school biology class, the green we see in the leaves from spring through summer is caused by chlorophyll - the pigment that captures sunlight for photosynthesis. As the temperatures drop and the days get shorter, leaves stop producing chlorophyll. And here's the trick. The orange and yellow pigments, called carotenoids, are already there...the leaf produces them at the same time that it produces the chlorophyll, but they are masked by the intensity of the green coloring. Once the green is gone, the orange and yellow can show through.

As for the reds, they come from pigments called anthocyanins - and these are a little more mysterious. They are only produced in the fall, act as a kind of antifreeze and sunscreen for the leaves, and, interestingly enough, can be a sign of a tree in distress (a tree that turns red early is in some trouble).

In nature, you often find that brilliant colors are a signal for danger or distress. Me, I like to think of these colors as a sign that my favorite season is here.

[Read more at MSNBC.]

When astronomy meets...demolition?

2006-11-06T21:30:00.000-05:00

It can be a dangerous world, even if you don't go out your door. Late last month a cottage in western Germany was destroyed by a fire. What made this fire unusual is that it seems to have been caused by a meteroite. Authorities in Siegburg, Germany, baffeled as to how the fire could have started, turned to a nearby observatory for assistance. At the time of the fire, the earth was passing through a field of "meteoroid splinters." Witnesses who saw the fire also reported seeing a "blazing arc of light" in the night sky.

Most meteors don't make it thru the atmosphere, burning up long before reaching the ground. Seems this one didn't. The police think the meteor that destroyed the cottage was no bigger than 10 mm.

[Take a look at Reuters for the original story.]

Imagine all the people

2006-10-16T21:16:00.000-04:00

As I write this, the US population is on the verge of breaking 300 million. In fact, the Census Bureau estimates that we'll hit the magic number at 7:46 AM EDT tomorrow morning. The last time the country broke a hundred million mark, it was 1967. (That would be 7 years before I was born.)

While many are taking the opportunity to discuss America's consumption patters, resource usage, and immigration policies, an interesting article showed up on New Scientist today. What would happen to the environment, the world, if the human species just up and left? How long would the traces of human habitation last on the planet?

As you can imagine different aspects of the human footprint would disappear at different rates. It's actually a fascinating study in entropy (roughly, the tendency of a system to go to the least energetic state - to just fall apart - when there's no one to maintain it). There's a couple of ways of looking at this article. First, the glass-half-full argument: that in spite of how much we've done to the planet, none if it is totally irreversible, that if left to its own devices, nature will take care of her own. Then there's the glass-half-empty argument: that it would take 100s to thousands (in the case of nuclear waste, maybe even millions of years) to undo the damage we have done.

You can read into it what you want. Me, I like the idea that things can bounce back. But, if we were to turn everything off right now, would the environment, the ecology turn out exactly the same? No, of course not. The environment probably didn't return to an exact pre-Ice Age state after the glaciers melted, either. Once an ecology is altered, artificially or naturally, I imagine it's nearly impossible to return it to its native state. However, the resilience of nature is amazing. You can see it just by looking at a vacant urban lot, and see the grass, weeds, and trees taking it over. Nature will grow back where it can.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't still be careful what we do.

[See New Scientist for the global exit story. To see how close the US is to the 300 million mark, see the Census Bureau's population clock. Most likely, by the time you read this, the zeros will have turned over. "Earth at Night" courtesy of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.]

Nobel Prize updates - have you got your scorecard out?

2006-10-04T14:34:00.000-04:00

Since my last Nobel prize post, two more of the Nobel prizes for 2006 have been handed out.

On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Mather and George Smoot for their efforts to peer into the earliest moments of the universe. Dr. Smoot should not be confused with Oliver Smoot, another MIT alum whose physical stature was the basis for the smoot, a somewhat non-standard unit of measurement.

Wednesday dawned with the announcement that Roger Kornberg had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the mechanisms of genetic translation (the process by which our DNA is decoded into, well, us). Dr. Kornberg follows in the footsteps of his father, Arthur Kornberg, who took home the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1959; they are the 6th father-and-son laureate pair in the history of the Nobel Prizes.

[More on the Nobel website.]

If Fluffy makes you sneeze...

2006-10-02T22:37:00.000-04:00

....then it's time to trade up to a hypoallergenic cat!

For those allergic cat lovers who can't be bothered with antihistamines or allergy injections -- and have about four grand kicking around -- science brings you a new kitty specifically bred to produce less of the protein that makes you red-eyed and and sniffly. The new kitties, created by a research firm called Allerca, were produced by the oldest form of genetic engineering in the book: selective breeding. By finding cats that naturally produce less of the protein (called Fel d1) and breeding them together, Allerca was eventually able to raise cats that don't raise the hackles of our immune systems.

Allerca first started taking orders for the sneeze-less felines back in 2004, and there's already a long waiting list.

[More on the BBC, or on the Allerca website.]

It's like the Oscars, but for academics

2006-10-02T22:01:00.000-04:00

The academic world is holding its collective breath, as we've entered the most exciting time of the year...Nobel season. Over the course of the next few days, the Nobel Institute will announce the winners of this year's Nobel Prizes. Awarded by Sweden's Nobel Institute, the Nobel Prizes have been awarded since 1901 for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace.

The awards were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, who, according to the Nobel Prize website, was "a scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, author and pacifist." He also happened to be the man who invented dynamite.

The will said, in part:

The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.

Nobel died in 1896, but the first award was not given until 1901. The reason? His family contested the will. Ahh, sweet litigation.

And how does one find out if they've won one of these coveted awards? In the US, it seems that one receives a phone call at home, very early in the morning. Still only half-awake, one picks up the phone, and wonders if the person on the other end is a crank caller with a bad Swedish accent. Then one receives several dozen other phone calls, usually from reporters who have also woken up at unreasonably early hours. And then one realizes, "Holy Crap, I'm a laureate! I'd better have some coffee!!"

As of this writing, only the prize for physiology or medicine has been awarded. The winners: a pair of researchers, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, who discovered RNA interference (RNAi). This natural process effectively silences genes like the mute button on a stereo, and can be used both experimentally (to answer the question, "Hey, what happens when I turn this gene off?") and potentially therapeutically in diseases like cancer.

The unusual thing about this particular award is that it came so quickly. The researchers only published their seminal work on the subject 8 years ago. Nobel awardees (or laureates) typically don't receive awards until decades after the actual accomplishment for which they are nominated.

And now, for a shameless plug - the Nobels' lesser-known stepcousin, the IgNobel Prizes, will be awarded this Thursday night. Only slightly less prestigious (they can make or break careers, you know), the Igs honor those achievements which make people laugh, and then make people think. The awards, which are handed out by actual Nobel laureates (there are one or two of them just hanging around in Boston), are awarded in a ceremony with all appropriate pomp and circumstance. I can say that because I will be on stage helping herd the winners through the ceremony.

[For more on the prizes, check out the Nobel website or a recent story from Reuters. For more on the IgNobels, including how to get tickets or see the webcast, take a look at Improbable.com.]

El Nino? Ay caramba!

2006-09-18T21:07:00.000-04:00

Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that a new El Nino event is building. The announcement was based on an increase in sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America...hallmark of a rising El Nino.

El Nino is part of a weather pattern called the Southern Oscillation, a see-saw of temperatures and air pressure between the eastern and western Pacific that can change the normal movement of moisture and wind across the ocean. El Nino (Spanish for "Christ child," a reference to the fact that it always arises late in the year) has a little sister called La Nina, which is characterized by lower-than-normal temperatures near South America.

Why is this a big deal? Because El Ninos can disrupt weather globally. El Ninos can make things wetter in North America, drier in South America and Australia, and can put a damper on hurricane formation in the Caribbean - like what might be happening this year.

The length of time El Ninos last can vary. This one is predicted to hold on until early next year. But then again, no one thought an El Nino was going to occur this year until the last few weeks.

[Check the NOAA website for more information on this El Nino event. To learn more about El Ninos in general, check out NOVA.]

Summer vacation is over...

2006-09-18T21:04:00.000-04:00

...and the Scriptorium is back. My apologies for the silence the last few months.

It's a planet! Wait, no it's not, but it is. Hold on, there are 12?

2006-08-18T15:09:00.000-04:00

Remember the mnemonic you learned as a kid so you could remember the names of the nine planets? It was probably one of these:

"My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles."

"Mother Very Easily Made Jane Stop Using Nail Polish."

"My Very Enormous Monster Just Sucked Up Nine Planets."

Well, it's time to unlearn them, because the nine-planet solar system everyone thought was set in stone after the discovery of Pluto in the 1930s just got tossed. Welcome to the age of the 12-planet solar system, thanks to the new definition of "planet" proposed at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union. They also propose to create a new class of mini-planet called a "pluton."

With the new definition comes the following changes:

Pluto gets downgraded from planet to pluton
Charon, Pluto's moon (more on that in a second), gets bumped up to pluton designation
Ceres, a really big asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, bypasses pluton-ness and goes straight to planet
The large body discovered in 2003 beyond Pluto, which has the melodic name 2003UB313 (unofficially dubbed Xena by its discoverer), becomes the third member of the plutons.

Pluto and Charon are seeing the biggest change in the org chart of Solar System, Inc. Charon gets promoted to independent status - a moon no more - because it is so heavy that the center of gravity between it and Pluto is smack in between them (meaning they revolve around a point in space). Contrast this with the Earth and our moon, where the center of gravity of the two-body system is in the Earth itself (so that the moon actually revolves around us). Thus, Pluto and Charon become the solar system's first double planet.

There may be more plutons on the way; if the definition is approved, then a host of other bodies in the solar system, including other asteroids and maybe even other moons, will earn the title. Meaning we could potentially end up with a solar system with hundreds of such mini-planets. And some really long mnemonics to remember them.

Oh, and the main criterion for joining the planetary club? Roundness.

[Read on at New Scientist to learn about the debate over the definition of planet. And many thanks to my father-in-law for the mnemonics.]

UPDATE: Turns out that if the IAU accepts the new planetary definition, things could get really weird in the solar system, with our moon even eventually qualifying for planethood. Tune back in in about, oh, 5 billion years.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Scratch pluton, make that "dwarf planet." And it's 8, not 12.

Do these bacteria make my thighs look fat?

2006-06-19T22:07:00.000-04:00

Believe it or not, you have a bacterial infection in your intestines right now. And it's OK. We all have bacteria in our guts, ones that live with our bodies in a mutually beneficial (or "symbiotic") relationship. We provide a nice, safe, warm environment, and in return they help us digest our food. There are certain foods that we just couldn't digest without our helpful little microbes, and certain proteins, amino acids, and other nutrients we need that we would have a hard time absorbing if they weren't preprocessed.

Now it appears that they may also influence how well we absorb sugars and store them...and when we store sugars, we store them as fat. Researchers at Washington University inoculated germ-free mice with different microorganisms or a combination of microorganisms and measured how they digested their food. The mice given the combination of bugs digested the sugars within their feed more efficiently, but instead of burning them off, the mice stored them as fat, causing them to gain more weight.

The researchers look at the study as a "logical extension of the human genome project - one designed to define the microbial side of ourselves." They even managed to drop the word "microbiome." (Add that one to the list.)

The take home message? While dieting and exercise are still the best ways to lose and control weight, the bugs in your gut may have something to say about it. The researchers hypothesize that one day treatments that alter the microbial composition of our intestines could be a vital aspect of nutritional control.

[Many thanks to EurekAlert and LiveScience.]

Genetically carnivorous?

2006-06-19T21:30:00.000-04:00

Twin studies are often used to probe the relative contributions of nature and nurture - that is, heredity and environment - to behavioral and other traits. The results can be eerie at times; the popular and scientific literature are rife with descriptions of twins who are separated at birth and meet decades later to find that they have followed the exact same career paths, have the same likes and dislikes, and have similar personality traits.

How about food preferences? Researchers in England surveyed the parents of hundreds of sets of identical and fraternal to determine the heritability of food preference. The results? Kids are more likely to inherit a taste for fish or meat, while preferences for vegetables - and dessert(!?) - are more heavily influenced by availability and/or parental choice.

Does this mean we can breed out vegans?

Believe it or not, this research does have a good purpose. The leader of the research group, Professor Jane Wardle of the Health Behavior Unit at University College London, is keenly interested in what shapes children's food preferences so as to better understand why kids diets are so, well, bad. If you can mold their diet when they're young, maybe you can keep them from getting cancer and heart disease later.

[Check out Yahoo for more, but if you really want to get to the meat of the story, check out Prof. Wardle's UCL faculty page.]

Ropeless jump rope patented

2006-06-14T09:20:00.000-04:00

Yes, you read that correctly. A ropeless jump rope. As in a jump rope, sans rope. Which, in my mind, isn't really a jump rope, rope being the fundamental component, the very essence, of a jump rope. For at the core of a jump rope is, well, rope. That one can jump over. Thus, what we really have here is a pair weighted jump handles, which you can't really jump over.

Come to think of it, what it looks like we really have here is a pair of hollow donuts on sticks.

Coming next to a playground near you: hoopless hula hoop (aka hula dancing), square-free hopscotch, and dodge (same as dodgeball, but without the ball; you just throw yourself to the ground when someone on the other team waves their arms at you).

[Thank you Engadget and Globe and Mail! You can also view the patent, #7,037,243, on the USPTO website.]

The sleeping pill that puts you to sleep AND wakes you up

2006-06-13T22:33:00.000-04:00

Advertisements and PR for sleeping pills (and other medications, too) crack me up, like the one for Lunesta with the freaky glowing butterfly that floats into everyone's bedroom. (Word to the wise: if you're lying in bed and you see a radioactive moth hovering over your head, don't close your eyes. Swat that unholy thing and run.)

But the makers of Ambien seem to be experiencing some mixed PR of late. First came the stories that arrests for driving while under the influence of Ambien are on the rise. Most of the drivers arrested while sleeping behind the wheel didn't even realize they were driving.

You can tell just how powerful Ambien's wake up kick must be, because now there are a limited number of reports of coma patients being temporarily roused by the drug. Three men in England who had been diagnosed as being in a permanent vegetative state (PVS) started interacting with their environment or showed other improvements for short periods of time when given Ambien as part of a research study. The question remains whether the men were misdiagnosed to begin with; supposedly it is impossible to rouse patients in a true PVS by any means.

Ambien: Helps you get a full night's sleep, makes you sleepdrive, and can potentially wake the comatose. I think I'll stick with my long time favorite sleep aid.

[You can read more at New Scientist.]

Can you hear me now? Not if you're over 30.

2006-06-13T21:59:00.000-04:00

I love it when a technology gets turned on its head, but this one could cause some serious consternation among educational professionals. Some students apparently have started downloading a ringtone to their cell phones that is of such a high frequency that adult ears don't pick it up. Thus, if kids have this ringtone on their phones, teachers will never hear the constant beeping as they text message each other with the answers to that math quiz.

It's a simple byproduct of aging - as we get older, we lose the ability to pick up on high-frequency sounds.

The ironic thing? The ringtone is a spin-off of a technology designed to drive off teenagers loitering in front of shops without bothering the older, more genteel shopping clientele.

[Check out the New York Times for more.]

You can almost taste the sonar

2006-06-13T21:55:00.000-04:00

Let's go down the list of ways in which we've enhanced our senses. We have night vision goggles, as well as plain old eyeglasses like mine, for the eyes. There's even a bionic eye in the works. We have sensitive microphones and headphones/earbuds for the ears. There are guys out there with magnets in their fingertips that supposedly let them "feel" magnetic fields. Smell? Not so much done on this as far as I know, although if anyone knows of technological enhancements for the old schnoz, I'd love to hear about them.

How about taste? Well, how would you like to taste the fact that you're about to walk into a wall? For some 30 years the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition has been working the BrainPort - a neural tongue interface. It works like this: the device has a grid of 144 electrodes that sit on your tongue and send impulses through the sensitive nerve endings that you usually use for taste. The result? Your sensory perception is augmented by whatever sensing technology (sonar, radar, IR, etc.) is hooked to the system. The US Navy is supposedly interested in a sonar version for divers, but apparently the visually impaired can also use the system to "see" their surroundings.

[Thanks to Engadget for bringing this to light. Apparently, they like'd it so much they've written about it twice, unless there are 2 different BrainPorts floating around out there.]

Little kids as scientists, scientists as little kids

2006-05-14T21:30:00.000-04:00

My wife likes to point out that our nearly-2-year-old son is the ultimate scientist...something that could be said of all young children. Starting with nothing but boundless curiosity and awe, they are able, with time, to figure out what this world around them is and how it works. You can see it in their eyes as they soak up every bit of information around them.

So you can see why the following made me both nod and chuckle:

"Over the past ten years, developmental psychologists have increasingly used the model of scientific theory change to characterize cognitive development. I have called this idea the "theory theory. It has been consistently productive in explaining the child's developing understanding of the mind and the world. ... The analogy to science has two aspects. First, children's knowledge is structured in a theory-like way, and second, that knowledge changes in a way that is analogous to theory change in science.

"This theory formation system may have evolved specifically to allow human children to learn. Human beings' evolutionary advantage stems from our ability to adapt our behavior to a very wide variety of environments. In turn, this depends on our ability to learn swiftly and efficiently about the particular physical and social environment we grow up in. Their long, protected immaturity gives human children an opportunity to infer the particular structure of the world around them. The powerful and flexible theory formation abilities we see in childhood may have evolved to make this learning possible. In this view, science takes advantage of these basic abilities in a more socially organized way and applies them to new types of problems and domains. Science is thus a kind of epiphenomenon of cognitive development. It is not that children are little scientists but that scientists are big children."

As you might imagine, I added the emphasizing bold and italics. It makes me wonder if Shakespeare had it wrong, that "second childishness" doesn't mark the seventh age of man, but the beginnings of graduate school.

[Many thanks to my ever-vigilant father-in-law for sending this in, via National Review Online. For the whole article, go down to your local library and look up: A. Gopnik (2000). Explanation as orgasm and the drive for causal understanding: The evolution, function and phenomenology of the theory-formation system. In F. Keil & R. Wilson (Eds.) Cognition and explanation. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.]

Getting in touch with your -ome

2006-05-01T15:55:00.000-04:00

Since the human genome project was completed (a feat that, according to some, was actually accomplished 3 times), the sound "-ome" has been emanating softly from laboratories around the globe. But it has nothing to do with meditation and everything to do with, well, everything.

The suffix "-ome" (a corruption of Greek, Latin, or English, depending on who you ask) refers to the organization of complete collections of aspects or features of biology, such as genes (the genome), proteins (the proteome), and so on. Each covers the total catalog of that particular feature for some point of reference, like the dog genome or the transcriptome of a white blood cells, and can form the basis for its own field of study (hence genomics and proteomics). This is the realm of computational biology and bioinformatics, where researchers can produce thousands or millions of data points per experiment, and where biologists spend large amounts of time in the presence of specialists from such fields as mathematics and theoretical physics, fields long used to crunching lots and lots of numbers.

So how many "-omes" are there? Well the list is big, and seemingly getting bigger all the time. Every branch of the biological sciences seems to have its own set of "-omes" nowadays, with more being proposed all the time. The ones I hear about most often are:

Genome (the total catalog of genes within a cell or organism; studied via genomics)
Proteome (the total catalog of proteins within a cell or organism; studied via proteomics)
Transcriptome (the total catalog of RNA transcripts produced by the genes within a cell or organism)
Kinome (the total catalog of kinases within a cell or organism)
Reglome (the total catalog of genes controlled or influenced by a particular pathway, gene, or protein within a cell or organism)
Metabolome (the total catalog of metabolites within a cell or organism; studied via metabolomics)
Interactome (the total catalog of gene or protein interactions within a cell or organism)

And while the proliferation of "-omes" strikes some as a little silly or even dangerous (and it does lead me to ask, do we have to redefine economics?), I actually find it refreshing because it really does signal a sea change in ways of thinking about biology. Each -omic field take a large scale, integrated view of an aspect of biology. And the field of bioinformatics exists today to integrate data from different "-omes" (usually genomics and proteomics these days) into a clearer, holistics picture of what makes the total biology of a cell or organisms. I guess you could call that the bioinforome.

A holistic biology. Sounds pretty zen. Ommmmmm.........

[Credit for the photo of the worm protein interactome goes to Harvard Medical School. Wikipedia also has quite a bit to say on the subject of "-omes"...take a look here and here. Oh, and apparently "comics" doesn't count as an "omic" science.]

Learning from our myrmecological brethren

2006-04-25T13:23:00.000-04:00

This morning, my thoughts turned to one of my earlier posts as I read the following passage in today's New York Times :

And scientists, if you wonder why the public doesn't like you, read one of your papers. Scientific language is necessary. But so is speaking plainly. And if you have something funny, or human, to tell, that won't undermine your work. But it may bring it to a wider audience.

The author, James Gorman, uses the article to rejoice in the lighthearted way myrmecologist Walter Tschinkel sprinkles personal and sometimes humorous asides through his recently publish book, The Fire Ants, bringing a more human touch to the world of research.

Having spent my share of time speciating mosquitoes and identifying microscopic crustaceans in my research days, I can relate to how mindnumbing the grunt work of science can sometimes be...but that's part of the personal side of science, along moments of lab humor/silliness, celebration of "Eureka!" moments, lamentations over experiments that just refuse to work, and personal interactions with other scientists that sometimes leave us all scratching our heads. And while I hope that Gorman is being a little flip with his call for scientific journals to include interludes or asides with their articles (there is a proper time and place after all), it is worth remembering that there are ways we science writers can build humanity into our stories without watering them down, filling them with mush, or resorting to sensationalism.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering what the heck myrmecology is...)

Sweet sixteen

2006-04-24T21:30:00.000-04:00

On April 24, 1990, astronomy took a great leap forward with the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. Operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA, the telescope was named for Edwin Hubble, a pioneering astronomer and one of the first to realize the true vastness of the universe. His work led to the formulation of Hubble's Law, which states that the father away a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it is racing away...first evidence of the expansion of the universe.

(Incidentally, that last link will take you to the announcement of the most recent estimate of the age of the universe - about 13.7 billion years. Take that, Archbishop Ussher!)

The telescope has more than lived up to the exploratory spirit of its namesake. It has returned some of the most astonishing and fascinating pictures of stars, nebulae, galaxies, and other inhabitants of the universe. It has provided us with the first optical proof of the existence of black holes. It has helped unravel some of the diverse and complex processes that drive the birth and death of stars.

And it has peered farther than ever before, both into the distance and into time. For the Hubble Ultra Deep Field survey, the telescope photographed a set of structures more than 13 billion light-years away; because a light-year is the distance traveled by light in one year, these pictures give us a view of a small slice of the universe as it looked more than 13 billion years ago.

Happy 16th birthday, Hubble. Let's hope they can keep you going.

[Photo courtesy of NASA.]

In terms of quality...

2006-04-24T20:37:00.000-04:00

...blogging while tired probably isn't as bad as blogging while drunk or stressed, and is probably less evident when it happens, too.

But it wouldn't even be an issue if my son hadn't decided to get up at 5:00 this morning.

A singular moment

2006-04-11T13:01:00.000-04:00

I know I missed this, and probably a great many of you did as well. But if you were up in the wee hours last Wednesday (April 5) and looked at your clock, perhaps you saw this:

01:02:03 04/05/06

That would have been the time and date at two minutes and three seconds past one o'clock in the morning.

And to think, we all had 24 chances to experience this moment....

[Many thanks to my father-in-law for alerting me to this, and my apologies for not reading it until a week later.]

I love a researcher who can speak English

2006-04-07T21:38:00.000-04:00

[Note to all the knee-jerk reactionaries out there - I am not referring to foreign scientists. Swallow your hypersensitive wrath and read on.]

I attended a seminar on stem cell research for reporters and writers a couple of days ago. Great talks, learned a great deal, and by the end of the day I could almost see stem cells floating in the air in front of me.

But what struck me the most was not the talk of nuclear cloning techniques or the ethics of therapeutic or research cloning. No, it was the speakers themselves and how they spoke to the audience. The best speakers were by far the oldest researchers, the ones who had been in the business for at least 20 years. They knew how to speak to the audience in plain language and as educated lay people.

The worst speaker of the day was the youngest. He was precise, direct, and brilliant, but got bogged down in the minutiae of his work. No one in the room needed to know about the structure of the transfection cassette he used to insert GFP into the ES cells harvested from his chimeric blastocysts. Nor did anyone understand it. Nor, frankly, did anyone care; such information was beyond the needs of that audience.

Now, this shouldn't be surprising, as with age comes understanding, experience, and an increased ability to read your audience. But it does raise an interesting idea. As I've said before, researchers need to be able to talk about what they do for it to mean anything to anyone. But why should it only be the most senior researchers that can do this?

Is it time for graduate and postgraduate programs to integrate media training/coaching into their curricula? Not for the benefit of reporters, really, but to equip students and postdocs to relate to the rest of us what makes their work important. After all we are paying for it. But more importantly, the public needs to be better informed to be able to debate the societal merits and pitfalls of scientific breakthroughs.

And how can we do that if scientists can't tell us in plain English what they do?

Off topic: When Gospel imitates art

2006-04-07T21:08:00.000-04:00

Few of you know this, but when I'm not writing about science I dabble in biblical archeology and religious history - the last refuges of the lapsed Catholic. So I've been really excited reading about the discovery and translation of the lost Gospel of Judas. This gnostic work (a 3rd century Coptic translation of a 1st or 2nd century Greek text) recasts the relationship between Jesus and his biblical betrayer, Judas, portraying Judas as Jesus's closest confidant and willing participant in the events leading up to the Crucifixion.

What I find ironic here is that Martin Scorcese's controversial The Last Temptation of Christ portrayed Judas in just this way.

While most biblical scholars are either a) excited to get another view on the earliest history of Christianity and the various forms it took, or b) don't think it will have any effect on current thinking in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox churches, I have to ask: What does are the implications for the Papacy and the leadership structure of the Catholic Church, which draw their authority from the leadership of the apostle Peter, if Judas was the real successor to Jesus's teachings?

And now back to the regular theme of our forum....

[If you get the National Geographic Channel, check out the documentary on this new text.]

Is it food or fuel?

2006-04-03T22:13:00.000-04:00

Bio-oil is one of many alternative fuels being developed to reduce our dependence on oil. But it didn't start out that way.

The stuff can be made from just about any organic material (also known as biomass) - wood chips, corn stalks, agricultural waste, etc. The US grows enough biomass to replace at least a third of its annual petroleum use. Starting with bio-oil instead of crude, fuel producers can make syngas (a synthetic alternative to crude oil) and, from there, further process it into automotive diesel.

Not bad when you consider that rapid thermal processing, the process used to convert biomass into bio-oil, was originally marketed as a way to make foods taste better. Reminds me of an old Saturday Night Live skit.

[For more, take a look at Wired.]

Copper never looked so good

2006-04-03T21:37:00.000-04:00

You know all those pennies gathering dusk on your bedside table? Well, you may have a new use for them. Researchers in the UK have found that they may have some value in preventing the spread of the flu. When placed on surfaces made of pure copper, samples of type A influenza viruses (the type that includes the much hyped H5N1 "bird flu") dramatically decline and are 99.99% eliminated within 6 hours. In contrast, virus populations on stainless steel surfaces decline by only 50% in the same amount of time.

The point? Surface contamination can be a significant factor in the spread of disease. The use of copper on communal surfaces (e.g., counters, tables, door frames) could help reduce disease transmission.

Metals have long been used for the treatment or prevention of infectious disease. For many decades, both before and after the rise of antibiotics, syphilis was treated primarily with mercury. Colloidal silver (silver dissolved in water) supposedly has some antimicrobial properties. However, as one former Senate candidate found, long term use can turn your skin blue.

[Many thanks to ScienceDaily]