A couple of blocks from one of Cape Town's glistening oceanside promenades, a few dozen people are cloistered inside a darkened hotel conference room, sitting through an afternoon of PowerPoint presentations on communicating astronomy with the public. As they enthusiastically type notes into netbooks, it's hard to remember that South Africa is still considered a developing nation. The view from the hotel pool is more reminiscent of St. Tropez than Soweto. But 15 years after the end of apartheid, shantytowns still line the motorway between the airport and the five-star residences ... Read More
Criminalizing the Science You Don’t Cotton To
May 27, 2010 • By • 9 Comments
Virginia's recently elected attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, has his hand in just about every divisive issue of the day. He is leading his own charge against the constitutionality of the health care bill, he is suing the Environmental Protection Agency to block it from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and he is tussling with state universities over whether they can bar discrimination based on sexual orientation. But the local fight with potentially the broadest reach is the one Cuccinelli has picked against a single scholar — Penn State climatologist Michael Mann. Mann is the ... Read More
Can Hurricanes Be Predicted Decades in Advance?
May 3, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
In 2007, a reporter for the Post & Courier of Charleston, S.C., was tired of doing straight stories on hurricane forecasts. So he hired a medium to predict the forthcoming storm season. "The sense we got from emergency-management people here," the reporter wrote, "is that the forecasts had been so wrong that they were hearing from the public, 'Why should we pay any attention to this stuff?'" At the end of the hurricane season, it turned out the medium had been more accurate than the scientists who took it upon themselves to make storm predictions. But research seems likely to soon make ... Read More
ESP Study Suggests Lack of Trust in Science
April 20, 2010 • By • 11 Comments
Scientists wondering just how low faith in their field has fallen will get some uncomfortable answers in a study examining belief in Extrasensory Perception, recently published in the online journal Current Research in Social Psychology. In the experiment, conducted by a University of Maryland research team led by sociologist Heather Ridolfo, 160 participants watched a short video in which an individual is remarkably successful at a card-guessing game. In fact, the film’s star was informed of the answers, but it appeared to the study participants that she was either extremely lucky or had ... Read More
Beating Back Space Invaders
April 11, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Hand-wringing over civilization-ending asteroid impacts has taken a back seat to health care, the economy and this winter’s weather. Still, catastrophic impacts do happen. Ask the dinosaurs. They were wiped off the map for good by an estimated 6-mile-wide impactor that struck the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago. (Although some scientists now finger climate change in their extinction.) Anyone who’s ever walked around Arizona’s mile-wide Barringer crater, made about 50,000 years ago, can attest to the destructive force of our solar system’s space junk. Only a ... Read More
Shining Light on Clean Energy Superbugs
April 9, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
Over the past year, amid falling oil prices, an ongoing food vs. fuel controversy, and a few over-anxious market predictions, the bioenergy bandwagon may have picked up a few scratches and dings. But James Liao and Anastasios Melis say a new kind of photosynthetic biofuel could provide the spark for a clean energy revolution. President Barack Obama announced earlier this year that by 2022, he wants to "more than double the amount of biofuel produced in the United States" to an annual rate of 36 million barrels. But the most popular biofuels on the market today, such as ethanol and ... Read More
New Agency Puts Clean Energy on Front Burner
March 14, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The job of developing really big clean-energy initiatives is perhaps beyond the capacity of the private sector. Lacking any assurance that radically different new products will be accepted by consumers, the market provides few incentives for companies making money from their current products to take the risk to research radical new energy concepts. And needless to say, companies that don’t have successful products on the market are not likely to have the money to invest in big ideas. Plus, government priorities don’t include developing saleable products for market. However, countries ... Read More
U.S. Challenged for High-Tech Global Leadership
March 13, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
The United States remains the world's high-tech leader, but other nations are catching up, the National Science Board warned in two recent reports. Science and engineering research is becoming a global enterprise, as more nations develop research capabilities and international collaborations grow in importance, the board said. U.S. corporations are contributing to the shift by conducting an increasing amount of their research and development abroad. The board — which advises the president and Congress on science matters — urged the federal government to take several steps to enhance ... Read More
Maximum Disclosure, Minimum Delay
February 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
When hacked e-mails between climate change researchers surfaced late last year, they created a furor. The messages, swiped from a server at a British university, included a reference to a statistical trick and slights against critics. To climate change skeptics, this was proof of what they'd been saying all along: The idea of a warming Earth is a boondoggle, bought into by greenie extremists looking to blame SUVs, air-conditioning and factory-farmed sirloin. Critics gave climate researchers a good telling off, but the scientists stuck to their guns — er, graphs — citing a ... Read More
Pictures From a Poster Session
February 10, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The final block of speakers at UTEP's Building Partnerships and Pathways to Address Engineering Grand Challenges Conference are managers of federal science and engineering programs from agencies like NASA, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the National Science Foundation, Sandia National Laboratories and — gulp — the Missile Defense Agency. Many of the presentations cover the how-tos of applying for federal research grants and contracts, while some also address programs for student internships. But a few of the managers share intriguing facts about what their agencies ... Read More
