Category Archives: Science

USA Science Losing Ground

I have written about the continued decline in the relative position of science in the USA compared to the rest of the world: Engineering the Future Economy – Economic Strength Through Technology Leadership – The Best Research Universities – U.S. Slipping on Science – Diplomacy and Science Research – Scientists and Engineers in Congress. The USA continues to act as though the rewards for scientific excellence automatically go to the USA. That isn’t the case and as many other countries make smart investments in scientific centers of excellence the USA chooses to do very little.

Has U.S. Science Lost Its Competitive Edge?

Craig Barrett, former CEO of Intel, delivered perhaps the most stinging indictment of the current political system. “There will be winners and losers, and the losers are the ones who insist on looking backwards,” said Barrett. “We continue to subsidize 19th century technology–like in the $290 billion farm bill–rather than the 21st century technologies that will allow us to remain competitive. We’re fat, dumb, and happy.”
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hefty increases at three science agencies–the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Last summer, legislation that incorporates many of those recommendations became law. But funding for most of the initiatives has yet to materialize.
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Speakers repeatedly pointed to those anemic budgets as evidence that politicians haven’t realized the threats to American preeminence in science posed by the rest of the world.

As I have said many times the consequences of failing to take sensible action today will be large. Science and engineering centers of excellence have been a very important factor in the economic success of the USA.

NSF Graduate Research Fellows 2008

photo of Sarah Lukes

The National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program aims to ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and to reinforce its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in the relevant science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees.

This year NSF awarded 913 fellowships: which come with a stipend of $30,000 and $10,500 cost of education allowance. On the ASEE Science and Engineering Fellowship blog, that I manage in my full time job with the American Society for Engineering Education (the Curious Cat Science and Engineering blog is my own and not related to ASEE), we highlight awardees including: Sarah Lukes mechanical engineering graduate working on her PhD at Montana State University; Ben Safdi, engineering physics and applied mathematics dual major at Colorado University – Boulder; Henry Deyoung, computer science major at Carnegie Mellon University, Jennifer Robinson, computer science major at North Carolina State; Lydia ThÃ©, biology major at Swarthmore; and Julia Kamenetzky, physics major at Cornell College.

Fellows from previous years include: Sergey Brin, H. David Politzer and Eric Maskin.

Challenging the Science Status Quo

Challenging Science

When scientists question facets of existing theories or propose new ones, they present the best evidence available and make the strongest arguments they can to their colleagues. Colleagues in turn challenge that evidence and reasoning. The rigor of this process is what makes science such a powerful tool.
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Lynn Margulis wrote a paper, “The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells,” which argued that eukaryotic cells – those with a true nucleus – arose when cells with no nucleus symbiotically incorporated other such cells to make new cells that could perform more functions. The paper was rejected by many journals, and when eventually published by The Journal of Theoretical Biology it was highly criticized. Margulis spent decades defending her work, but scientists now accept her suggested mechanism through which organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts evolved. Her suggestions about other organelles have not stood up to experimental tests, and are not as widely accepted.
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In 1982, Stanley Prusiner published an article on his research into scrapie – a disease in sheep related to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease – which argued that the infectious agent was not a virus but a protein, which Prusiner called a “prion”. Because no one had heard of a protein replicating without a nucleic acid like DNA or RNA, many virologists and scrapie researchers reacted to the article with incredulity. When the media picked up the story, “the personal attacks of the naysayers at times became very vicious,” according to Prusiner. However, his critics failed to find the nucleic acid they were sure existed, and less than two years later, Prusiner’s lab had isolated the protein. Subsequent research provided even more support for prions, and in 1997 Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Cosmology Questions Answered

A great list of Cosmology Questions Answered, including: Why do we think that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating? What is quintessence? What is the Universe expanding into?

Everything that we measure is within the Universe, and we see no edge or boundary or center of expansion. Thus the Universe is not expanding into anything that we can see, and this is not a profitable thing to think about. Just as Dali’s Corpus Hypercubicus is just a 2-D picture of a 3-D object that represents the surface of a 4-D cube, remember that the balloon analogy is just a 2-D picture of a 3-D situation that is supposed to help you think about a curved 3-D space, but it does not mean that there is really a 4-D space that the Universe is expanding into.

Fat Cell Count Set in Childhood

Fat cell number is set in childhood and stays constant in adulthood

As fat people have an abundance of fat tissue, the natural assumption is that fat people have more fat cells, or ‘adipocytes’. That’s only part of the story – it turns out that overweight and obese people not only have a surplus of fat cells, they have larger ones too.
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During adulthood, about 8% of fat cells die every year only to be replaced by new ones. As a result, adults have a constant number of fat cells, even those who lose masses of weight. Instead, it’s changes in the volume of fat cells that causes body weight to rise and fall.
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we couldn’t have a clearer indication of the importance of childhood as a window for preventing obesity and the chronic diseases affected by it – cancer, heart disease, diabetes and more.

The message is especially stark following the recent Foresight report, which estimated that if current trends are left unchecked, by 2050 a quarter of all UK children under the age of 16 will be obese. The knowledge that their fat cell count will then be set for life makes the cost of inaction even higher. Fortunately, it seems that the UK Government is taking appropriate steps and recently pledged over a third of a billion pounds on a concerted strategy to tackle childhood obesity.

Colony Collapse Disorder Continues

1.1 Million Bee Colonies Dead This Year

The information provided here was generated by a survey conducted by the Apiary Inspectors of America. They took the survey in January and February this year, and in the process, gathered information from 18% of the colonies in the U.S.

The survey found that about 35% of all the colonies in the U.S. died last winter. Of those that died, 71% died of natural causes, 29% from symptoms that are suspect colony collapse disorder. Doing the math that comes to at least 10% of all the bees in the U.S. last year died of Colony Collapse Disorder.
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Considering all these factors, undue concern over IAPV detection is not warranted. While IAPV’s role in colony losses remains a priority in ongoing research, we do know that high levels of other common bee viruses, such as KBV, DWV, and ABPV, have also been linked with certain incidences of high colony mortality or decline in worker numbers. We also know that nearly all bee colonies are infected with at least one type of virus and that all these viruses are potentially pathogenic.

The research continues. As I have said before this is a great example of scientists in action trying to figure out what is happening.

Autism, Science and Politics

Clinton and Obama parrot the “vaccine and autism connection inconclusive” line by Tara C. Smith:

Ugh. At least they don’t say there’s “strong evidence” to support it like McCain. I can certainly get behind more research on environmental factors in autism development (and of course, additional funding for biomedical research, period), but we’ve been there/done that for vaccines. I wonder if either of them are even aware of The National Children’s Health Study?

The National Children’s Study will examine the effects of environmental influences on the health and development of more than 100,000 children across the United States, following them from before birth until age 21. The goal of the study is to improve the health and well-being of children.

Variables examined will include vaccinations received, and development of autism will be one of the outcomes examined. What more can you ask for? Obama and Clinton’s claims of ignorance on the part of the scientific community when it comes to vaccines and autism show that we don’t have any real science defenders in the running.

Wheat Rust Research

By increasing the production of wheat it is said Norman Borlaug has saved more lives than anyone else who ever lived, for which he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. See his New York Times opinion piece: Stem Rust Never Sleeps

Today, wheat provides about 20 percent of the food calories for the world’s people. The world wheat harvest now stands at about 600 million metric tons.

In the last decade, global wheat production has not kept pace with rising population, or the increasing per capita demand for wheat products in newly industrializing countries. At the same time, international support for wheat research has declined significantly. And as a consequence, in 2007-08, world wheat stocks (as a percentage of demand) dropped to their lowest level since 1947-48. And prices have steadily climbed to the highest level in 25 years.

The new strains of stem rust, called Ug99 because they were discovered in Uganda in 1999, are much more dangerous than those that, 50 years ago, destroyed as much as 20 percent of the American wheat crop. Today’s lush, high-yielding wheat fields on vast irrigated tracts are ideal environments for the fungus to multiply, so the potential for crop loss is greater than ever.

If publicly financed international researchers move together aggressively and systematically, high-yielding replacement wheat varieties can be developed and made available to farmers before stem rust disease becomes a global epidemic.

The Bush administration was initially quick to grasp Ug99’s threat to American wheat production. In 2005, Mike Johanns, then secretary of agriculture, instructed the federal agriculture research service to take the lead in developing an international strategy to deal with stem rust. In 2006, the Agency for International Development mobilized emergency financing to help African and Asian countries accelerate needed wheat research.

But more recently, the administration has begun reversing direction. The State Department is recommending ending American support for the international agricultural research centers that helped start the Green Revolution, including all money for wheat research. And significant financial cuts have been proposed for important research centers, including the Department of Agriculture’s essential rust research laboratory in St. Paul.

This shocking short-sightedness goes against the interests not only of American wheat farmers and consumers but of all humanity. It is tantamount to the United States abandoning its pledge to help halve world hunger by 2015.

Bacteriophages: The Most Common Life-Like Form on Earth

There are more bacteriophages on Earth than any other life-like form. These small viruses are not clearly a form of life, since when not attached to bacteria they are completely dormant. Bacteriophages attack and eat bacteria and have likely been doing so for over 3 billion years. Although initially discovered early last century, the tremendous abundance of phages was realized more recently when it was found that a single drop of common seawater typically contains millions of them. Extrapolating, phages are likely to be at least a billion billion times more numerous than humans. Pictured above is an electron micrograph of over a dozen bacteriophages attached to a single bacterium. Phages are very small — it would take about a million of them laid end-to-end to span even one millimeter. The ability to kill bacteria makes phages a potential ally against bacteria that cause human disease, although bacteriophages are not yet well enough understood to be in wide spread medical use.

Photo credit: Wikipedia Electron micrograph of bacteriophages attached to a bacterial cell. These viruses have the size and shape of coliphage T1.; Insert: Mike Jones

Amazon Molly Fish are All Female

No sex for all-girl fish species

A fish species, which is all female, has survived for 70,000 years without reproducing sexually, experts believe.
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The species, found in Texas and Mexico, interacts with males of other species to trigger its reproduction process. The offspring are clones of their mother and do not inherit any of the male’s DNA. Typically, when creatures reproduce asexually, harmful changes creep into their genes over many generations.
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One theory is that the fish may occasionally be taking some of the DNA from the males that trigger reproduction, in order to refresh their gene pool.

Dr Laurence Loewe, of the university’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “What we have shown now is that this fish really has something special going on and that some special tricks exist to help this fish survive. “Maybe there is still occasional sex with strangers that keeps the species alive. Future research may give us some answers.”

He added that their findings could also help them understand more about how other creatures operate. “I think one of the interesting things is that we are learning more about how other species might use these tricks as well,” he said. “It might have a more general importance.”