Alan Alda: Scientists Should Learn to Talk to Kids

What is time?

That's the question put to scientists this year by the Flame Challenge, a contest first conceived by actor Alan Alda, famous for his roles on the TV shows M*A*S*H and "The West Wing." The directive? For scientists to explain this complex concept in ways that will inspire and interest 11-year-old children.

The Flame Challenge gets its name from last year's inaugural competition, which posed a question from Alda's own childhood: What is flame? As an 11-year-old, Alda had asked a teacher this question and gotten back the baffling, one-world answer, "oxidation."

Now scientists will face an arguably bigger challenge in explaining the concept of time. Kids will judge the entries, which are due by March 1. (Teachers must apply for their classrooms to become judges by Feb. 1.) Creativity is encouraged: Last year, the winner explained flame with not only an animated video, but also with an originally composed song.

Alda talked with LiveScience about the sophisticated minds of 11-year-olds, his own interest in science and why scientists should learn to talk to kids.

LIveScience: How did you get interested in science communication?

Alda: I think my interest began when I was actively involved in helping communicate science when I was doing "Scientific American Frontiers" and other science shows on PBS. Accidentally, we discovered an unusual way to do science communication, which was through conversations with scientists rather than asking a set bunch of questions that had predictable answers. What we did was get into a real conversation where I didn't know what the answers were going to be. I didn't even know what the questions were going to be. [What's That? Your Basic Physics Questions Answered]

What happened was the scientists, in pretty much every case, came out from behind lecture mode and got personal, because they really wanted one person to understand, which was me. When I finally did understand it, it often became a little television moment where the audience saw an event take place, and it made it easier for them to understand it, too.

In the course of that, I began to think, wouldn't it be wonderful if scientists had this ability to engage in a personal dialogue with the public like this without somebody like me having to be there for it?

LiveScience: What's the goal of the Flame Challenge?

Alda: I'll tell you what it looks like it is and what it actually is. It looks like it's a way to teach 11-year-olds science, and what it really is is a way to get scientists to experience how hard it is to say something that they know so well in a way that an 11-year-old can understand it, so that they get challenged by the difficulty of it, and, we hope, want to look further into communicating hard stuff more simply.

What's interesting about it is that the kids are so excited about being the judges of these entries. They get a chance for the first time, somebody their age, to judge the work of somebody the scientist's age. They're very serious about it, they're not flippant at all. In the first year's round a very common complaint was that the entries weren't informative enough. They don't just want entertainment, they want information. [Gallery: Science Meets Art]

LiveScience: What's the advantage of gearing the answers toward kids rather than adults?

Alda: That just happened by accident. The way this came about, I was asked to write a guest editorial for the journal Science about communicating science. I can remember the chair I was sitting in where I was working on it, and I remember thinking, "I'm writing something anybody could write."

Everybody knows all these reasons we need good communication. It suddenly occurred to me, wait a minute, I have a very vivid story of poor science communication. It was when a teacher gave me a one-word answer to a question. I was so fascinated by what flame was, and I asked this teacher and she said, "Oxidation."

It became a real springboard for action. What happened is that more than 800 scientists around the world contributed entries [last year], and more than 6,000 kids around the world became judges, including an aboriginal classroom in Australia. They were from all over.

This is purely anecdotal, but 11 seems to be an age where you can formulate tough questions, and you can assimilate the answers to those questions. But it also turns out that if an answer makes sense to kids, it's going to make sense to most of the rest of us, too.

LiveScience: This year's question seems much tougher.

Alda: It's way tougher, and it makes me think that 11-year-olds have grown in sophistication since I was an 11-year-old. I asked about something you could see and feel the heat from and you could read by. It was there. But now these kids are asking —"What is time?" — which you can keep track of with a clock or the change of seasons, but what it actually is is an extremely deep question that I think a lot of people have tried to answer unsuccessfully.

It'll be really interesting to see how scientists approach this answer. I think it has to be satisfying on the sense that it gives you a handle in the underlying depth of the question and maybe gets you interested in exploring it further. I think it would be a very successful answer if all it does is get a couple of kids interested in devoting their lives to that question.

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10 Scientists Who Mattered in 2012

Scientists were plenty busy this year, with landing the 1-ton rover Curiosity on Mars, announcing the discovery of what is likely the Higgs boson and even revealing a little-dirty secret in research.

For the second year, the editors of the scientific journal Nature have announced their "Nature's 10," the top 10 scientists who mattered in 2012, with profiles that dig deeper into the personal stories behind the achievements. Here's a look at their picks.

A heavenly discovery?

A particle sought after for decades came to light in spectacular fashion on July Fourth this year, with physicists from two experiments being conducted in the Large Hadron (LHC) Collider near Geneva announcing they had found a particle that looked eerily similar to the Higgs boson, predicted to give all other matter its mass.

While several billion neurons (not to mention the Wattage used in the LHC) were behind the discovery, director general of LHC's host lab CERN, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, made sure the world heard about it, according to Nature editors. Apparently neither group was willing to claim an actual "discovery" until their evidence was proven to a certain level of certainty. With a gentle hand, Heuer nudged for the announcement, but let the scientists be scientists and stick to the facts (for instance saying they had a 5 and 4.9 sigma level of certainty, respectively), while he used, only once, the word "discovery." (A 5 sigma means there is only a one in 3.5 million chance the signal seen in the LHC data isn't real.) [Top 5 Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson]

Mars madness

Another whopper for science in 2012 was arguably the landing of the Mars rover Curiosity on the Red Planet's surface. Leading the 50-person team behind the smooth landing was engineer Adam Steltzner, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The touchdown technique was a first: Curiosity was lowered to the Martian surface on cables by a rocket-powered sky crane, one that had an alien look on its own. "Because it looked so outlandish, we all felt very exposed," Steltzner told Nature. "If it failed, people would have been like, 'You idiots.'" It didn't.

Since its spectacular touchdown, Curiosity has discovered an ancient streambed where water likely flowed for thousands of years long ago and hints of possibly life-giving organic compounds.

Hurricane Sandy Cassandra

Not all happenings were so uplifting. After Hurricane Sandy battered the East Coast and left transportation tunnels flooded and millions without power, climatologist Cynthia Rosenzweig wasn't surprised. That's because the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies researcher and a team of other scientists had forecasted such cataclysmic events in 2000 as part of a report for the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The dozen years of warning helped city officials incorporate climate change into city planning. Rosenzweig, who started off as a farmer in Tuscany but eventually moved from agricultural science to climate science, is now trying to assess whether those efforts reduced Sandy's damage. [On the Ground: Hurricane Sandy in Images]

Can you repeat that?

It's a dirty-little secret that many scientific results can't be reproduced. In 2006, Elizabeth Iorns, a geneticist at the University of Miami, tried to replicate a study about a cancer gene and couldn't. She found that few scientific journals wanted to publish her findings and that she got blowback from colleagues. That lit a fire in her belly to ensure that more scientific results are rigorously tested. To that end, she created a startup based in Palo Alto, Calif., called the Reproducibility Initiative. The goal of the fledgling nonprofit is to have third-party researchers replicate important scientific experiments. If the startup can make headway, it may help scientists know which results are real.

Sex bias

While it's no surprise that women are underrepresented in science, pinning that to discrimination, rather than gender differences in aptitude or interest, has been tricky. But when Yale University microbiologist Jo Handelsman showed that researchers offer fictitious female job applicants about $4,000 less in salary and rate them as less competent and worthy of mentorship than male counterparts, she produced strong evidence for sexual bias. Handelsman says she hasn't personally experienced strong bias, but became motivated to speak out about it when other women scientists described their experiences with sex discrimination.

Mad man

Timothy Gowers isn't a likelier crusader in the world of scientific journal publishing. The Cambridge University mathematician has won the Fields Medal (mathematics highest honor) and has been knighted for his influential work. But he made waves this year when he spearheaded a global boycott of the giant publishing group Elsevier, discontented with the publishing group's sky-high prices and their fight against open-access scientific publishing, which can be viewed by everyone without a subscription. The boycott has fueled growing interest in open-access publishing and may even have influenced Elsevier to withdraw its support for a controversial, anti-open access political bill. The bill, the Research Works Act, would have allowed scientists to publish research funded with U.S. taxpayer money in journals that would be closed off to the general public.

Deadly research

When Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, used just four genetic tweaks to create a highly lethal strain of the H5N1 bird flu that could spread through the air, it sparked a global discussion about whether such deadly pathogens should be created. Critics argued that the mutant bird flu could be accidentally released and that publishing the findings could give would-be terrorists a road-map for creating a biological weapon. Fouchier's results were eventually published in Nature with key methodological details removed, but not without a flurry of discussion over the ethics of the research. Throughout it all, Fouchier has been arguing that the research is necessary and safe. In January 2012, Fouchier and other flu researchers agreed to a moratorium on researching this particular type of flu. Now he has set his sights on a mysterious, deadly form of pneumonia that has emerged from a bat virus in Saudi Arabia.

Watching cells grow

Cedric Blanpain doesn't trust Petri dishes, sort of. This skepticism in the ability of lab-dish cell growth to replicate what happens in real life led Blanpain to uncover, in 2011, distinct stem cells in the adult mammary gland. This year, he applied a carcinogen to mouse skin and then followed tumor growth using a cell-tracking method; his results showed not all cells contribute equally to tumor growth, with some dwindling after a few cell divisions and others, the stem cells, generating thousands of clones — the tumor-generating cells. "I saw the first slide, and I said 'show me the second one.' After the fifth, I was sure what I was seeing," Blanpain told Nature.

Manslaughter verdict

A reminder that science doesn't always, and sometimes cannot, stay in the ivory towers, this year brought a devastating manslaughter verdict for six Italian scientists and one government official Bernardo De Bernardinis (an engineer by training) accused of being too reassuring about the risk of an earthquake prior to a temblor in 2009 that killed 309 individuals in the town of L'Aquila. [See Photos of L'Aquila Earthquake Destruction]

Seismologists across the globe expressed appall at a verdict that didn't account for the fact that earthquakes cannot be predicted with any level of accuracy. Even so, De Bernardinis not only showed compassion for those who lost loved ones in the earthquake, but he also showed up at every hearing, Nature reported. Insisting that he only listened to what the seismologists told him before the infamous press conference at the center of this trial, De Bernardinis also admits he should've waited for a concise statement from the scientists before addressing the public. Now, he hopes the trial will lead to better risk-prevention systems in Italy that have clear-cut expectations for scientists, government officials and the media.

Sequencing genomes

The head of the Chinese genome-sequencing institute, BGI, Jun Wang has shown modesty and confidence in the significance of what he and colleagues are doing. And the numbers speak worlds: BGI is leading the sequencing of 10,000 vertebrates (animals with backbones), 5,000 insects and other arthropods, and more than 1,000 birds, including some extinct ones. In this year alone, BGI was listed in 100 scientific publications, Nature reports, adding the organization is a "main player" in the 1,000 Genomes Project Consortium, whose aim is to find genetic factors behind disease.

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Holiday Gift to Stargazers: The Christmas Sky

The Yuletide evening sky is especially rewarding, with much of the eastern swathe filled with brilliant stars — sort of a celestial Christmas tree.

Distinctive groupings of stars forming part of the recognized constellation outlines, or lying within their boundaries, are known as asterisms. Ranging in size from sprawling naked-eye figures to minute stellar settings, they are found in every quarter of the sky and at all seasons of the year. 

The larger asterisms — ones like the Big Dipper in Ursa Major and the Great Square of Pegasus — are often better known than their host constellations. One of the most famous is in the northwest these frosty December evenings. 

The Northern Cross

The brightest six stars of the constellation Cygnus (the Swan) — which was known simply as the “Bird” in ancient times — compose an asterism popularly called the Northern Cross. [Night Sky Observing Guide for December 2012 (Gallery)]

Bright Deneb decorates the top of the Cross. Albereo, at the foot of the Cross, is really a pair of stars of beautifully contrasting colors: a third-magnitude orange star and its fifth-magnitude blue companion are clearly visible in even a low-power telescope. (In astronomy, lower magnitudes signify relatively brighter objects. Venus' magnitude is around -5, for example, while the full moon's is about -13.)

While usually regarded as a summertime pattern, the Northern Cross is best oriented for viewing now. It  appears to stand majestically upright on the northwest horizon at around 8:30 p.m. local time, forming an appropriate Christmas symbol. (And just before dawn on Easter morning, the cross lies on its side in the eastern sky.)

The Christmas package

Look over toward the southeast part of the sky at about the same time, 8:30 p.m. or so. Can you see a large package in the sky, tied with a pretty bow across the middle? Four bright stars outline the package, while three others make up the decorative bow. [Stunning Night Sky Photos of December 2012]

Now you can see how our modern imagination might work, but tradition tells us that those seven stars formed a mighty hunter called Orion, the most brilliant of the constellations and visible from every inhabited part of the Earth. Two stars mark his shoulders, two more his knees and three his belt.

As is also the case with the mighty Hercules, the figure of Orion has been associated in many ancient cultures with great national heroes, warriors or demigods. Yet in contrast to Hercules, who was credited with a detailed series of exploits, Orion seems to us a vague and shadowy figure. 

The ancient mythological stories of Orion are so many and so confused that it is almost impossible to choose among them. Even the origin of the name Orion is obscure, though some scholars have suggested a connection with the Greek "Arion," meaning "warrior." 

The myths all tend to agree that he was the mightiest hunter in the world, and he is always pictured in the stars with his club upraised in his right hand. Hanging from his upraised left hand is the skin of a great lion he has killed. Orion is brandishing this skin in the face of Taurus, the Bull, who is charging him.  

The heavenly manger

The legendary French astronomer Nicolas Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) referred to the three belt stars of Orion as "The Three Kings." If we consider these three stars to represent the Magi, then it's fitting that the star cluster known as Preasepe,(the Manger) lies not far to the east, within the faint zodiacal constellation of Cancer.

A manger is a trough or open box in which feed for horses or cattle is placed. The Book of St. Luke tells us that the baby Jesus was set down in a manger because there was no room at the local inn. In our current Yuletide evening sky, Preasepe thus can represent the manger where Christ was placed... 

The constellation Cancer is practically an empty space in the sky, positioned between the Twin Stars (Pollux and Castor) of Gemini and the Sickle of Leo. It’s completely devoid of any bright stars and would probably not be considered a constellation at all, if not for the fact that there had to be a sign of the Zodiac between Gemini and Leo.

In the middle of Cancer are two stars called the Aselli ("donkeys") that are feeding from the manger; Asselus Borealis and Asselus Australis bracket Preasepe to the north and south, respectively.

To the unaided eye, the manger appears as a soft, fuzzy patch or dim glow. But in good binoculars and low-power telescopes, it is a beautiful object to behold, appearing to contain a smattering of several dozen stars. Using his crude telescope, Galileo wrote in 1610 of seeing Preasepe not as one fuzzy star, but as  " . . . a mass of more than 40 small stars." 

The shepherd’s star

If you are up about an hour or so before sunrise, look toward the east-southeast to get a glimpse of what Flammarion described as "The Shepherd’s Star," the planet Venus. He wrote:

"She shines in the east in the morning, with a splendid brightness which eclipses that of all the stars. She is, without comparison, the most magnificent star of our sky; the star of sweet confidences."

Indeed, Venus is always bright. This year, it will remind those who rise early on Christmas morning of the Biblical "Star in the East."

Telescope targets

Venus may be rather disappointing to those who receive a telescope as a holiday gift, appearing as nothing more than a dazzling disk of light. But there are two other splendid planetary targets to gaze at.

That very bright 'star" that you notice at day’s end in December, glowing about one-quarter of the way up from the east-northeast horizon right after sundown, is actually Jupiter. The gas giant is a superb telescopic showpiece, with cloud bands crossing its disk and a retinue of four large moons. On Christmas night, Jupiter will be visible just above the waxing gibbous moon, making for an eye-catching sight.

And lastly, in the predawn morning sky is "the lord of the rings," Saturn, which this week rises above the east-southeast horizon around 3 a.m. local time and just before sunrise can be found about 30 degrees above and to the right of Venus.

Your clenched fist held at arm's length measures about 10 degrees, so Saturn will appear about "three fists" up and to Venus’s right. .A telescope magnifying 30-power or more will reveal Saturn’s famous rings, now tilted almost 19 degrees to our line of sight.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+. 

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New 'Baby Picture' of Universe Unveiled

Astronomers have released a new "baby picture" of the universe.

The all-sky image draws on nine years' worth of data from a now-retired spacecraft dubbed the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

WMAP launched in 2001 and from its perch a million miles away from Earth (in the direction opposite the sun) it scanned the heavens, mapping out the afterglow of the hot, young universewith unprecedented accuracy.

This image maps the temperature of the radiation left over from the Big Bang, at a time when the universe was only 375,000 years old. It shows a temperature range of plus-or-minus 200 microKelvin, with fluctuations in the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation appearing here as color differences.

These patterns allow astronomers to predict what could have possibly happened earlier, and what has happened in the billions of year since the universe's infancy. As such, the spacecraft has been instrumental in pushing forward cosmological theories about the nature and origin of the universe.

Among other revelations, the data from WMAP revealed a much more precise estimate for the age of the universe — 13.7 billion years — and confirmed that about 95 percent of it is composed of mind-boggling stuff called dark matter and dark energy. WMAP data also helped scientists nail down the curvature of space to within 0.4 percent of "flat," and pinpoint the time when the universe began to emerge from the cosmic dark ages (about 400 million years after the Big Bang.)

The probe retired two years ago, and the WMAP science team is now releasing its final results, based on a full nine years of observations.

"The universe encoded its autobiography in the microwave patterns we observe across the whole sky," Charles Bennett, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who heads the WMAP science team, said in a statement. "When we decoded it, the universe revealed its history and contents. It is stunning to see everything fall into place."

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AP-GfK Poll: Science doubters say world is warming

WASHINGTON (AP) — A growing majority of Americans think global warming is occurring, that it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do something about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds.

Even most people who say they don't trust scientists on the environment say temperatures are rising.

The poll found 4 out of every 5 Americans said climate change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it. That's up from 73 percent when the same question was asked in 2009.

And 57 percent of Americans say the U.S. government should do a great deal or quite a bit about the problem. That's up from 52 percent in 2009. Only 22 percent of those surveyed think little or nothing should be done, a figure that dropped from 25 percent.

Overall, 78 percent of those surveyed said they believe temperatures are rising, up from 75 percent three years earlier. In general, U.S. belief in global warming, according to AP-GfK and other polls, has fluctuated over the years but has stayed between about 70 and 85 percent.

The biggest change in the polling is among people who trust scientists only a little or not at all. About 1 in 3 of the people surveyed fell into that category.

Within that highly skeptical group, 61 percent now say temperatures have been rising over the past 100 years. That's a substantial increase from 2009, when the AP-GfK poll found that only 47 percent of those with little or no trust in scientists believed the world was getting warmer.

This is an important development because, often in the past, opinion about climate change doesn't move much in core groups — like those who deny it exists and those who firmly believe it's an alarming problem, said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University social psychologist and pollster. Krosnick, who consulted with The Associated Press on the poll questions, said the changes the poll shows aren't in the hard-core "anti-warming" deniers, but in the next group, who had serious doubts.

"They don't believe what the scientists say, they believe what the thermometers say," Krosnick said. "Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they had been seeing all along."

Phil Adams, a retired freelance photographer from Washington, N.C., said he was "fairly cynical" about scientists and their theories. But he believes very much in climate change because of what he's seen with his own eyes.

"Having lived for 67 years, we consistently see more and more changes based upon the fact that the weather is warmer," he said. "The seasons are more severe. The climate is definitely getting warmer."

"Storms seem to be more severe," he added. Nearly half, 49 percent, of those surveyed called global warming not just serious but "very serious," up from 42 percent in 2009. More than half, 57 percent, of those surveyed thought the U.S. government should do a great deal or quite a bit about global warming, up from 52 percent three years earlier.

But only 45 percent of those surveyed think President Barack Obama will take major action to fight climate change in his second term, slightly more than the 41 percent who don't think he will act.

Overall, the 78 percent who think temperatures are rising is not the highest percentage of Americans who have believed in climate change, according to AP polling. In 2006, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, 85 percent thought temperatures were rising. The lowest point in the past 15 years for belief in warming was in December 2009, after some snowy winters and in the middle of an uproar about climate scientists' emails that later independent investigations found showed no manipulation of data.

Broken down by political party, 83 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans say the world is getting warmer. And 77 percent of independents say temperatures are rising. Among scientists who write about the issue in peer-reviewed literature, the belief in global warming is about 97 percent, according to a 2010 scientific study.

About 1 in 4 people surveyed think that efforts to curb global warming would hurt the American economy, a figure down slightly from 27 percent in 2009 when the economy was in worse shape. Just under half, 46 percent, think such action would help the U.S. economy, about the same as said so three years ago.

The AP-GfK poll was conducted Nov. 29-Dec. 3 by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cellphone interviews with 1,002 adults nationwide. Results for the full sample have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points; the margin of error is larger for subgroups.

The latest AP-GfK poll jibes with other surveys and more in-depth research on global warming, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University's Project on Climate Change Communication. He took no part in the poll.

When climate change belief was at its lowest, concerns about the economy were heightened and the country had gone through some incredible snowstorms and that may have chipped away at some belief in global warming, Leiserowitz said. Now the economy is better and the weather is warmer and worse in ways that seem easier to connect to climate change, he said.

"One extreme event after another after another," Leiserowitz said. "People have noticed. ... They're connecting the dots between climate change and this long bout of extreme weather themselves."

Thomas Coffey, 77, of Houston, said you can't help but notice it.

"We use to have mild temperatures in the fall going into winter months. Now, we have summer temperatures going into winter," Coffey said. "The whole Earth is getting warmer and when it gets warmer, the ice cap is going to melt and the ocean is going to rise."

He also said that's what he thinks is causing recent extreme weather.

"That's why you see New York and New Jersey," he said, referring to Superstorm Sandy and its devastation in late October. "When you have a flood like that, flooding tunnels like that. And look at how long the tunnel has been there."

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Associated Press Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta, News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius and writer Stacy A. Anderson contributed to this report.

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Online:

The poll: http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com

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Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

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Scientists seek to solve mystery of Piltdown Man

LONDON (AP) — It was an archaeological hoax that fooled scientists for decades. A century on, researchers are determined to find out who was responsible for Piltdown Man, the missing link that never was.

In December 1912, it was announced that a lawyer and amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson had made an astonishing discovery in a gravel pit in southern England — prehistoric remains, up to 1 million years old, that combined the skull of a human and the jaw of an ape.

Piltdown Man — named for the village where the remains were found — set the scientific world ablaze. It was hailed as the missing evolutionary link between apes and humans, and proof that humans' enlarged brains had evolved earlier than had been supposed.

It was 40 years before the find was definitively exposed as a hoax, and speculation about who did it rages to this day. Now scientists at London's Natural History Museum — whose predecessors trumpeted the Piltdown find and may be suspects in the fraud— are marking the 100th anniversary with a new push to settle the argument for good.

The goal, lead scientist Chris Stringer wrote in a comment piece published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is to find out "who did it and what drove them" — whether scientific ambition, humor or malice.

Stringer heads a team of 15 researchers — including experts in ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating and isotope studies — examining the remains with the latest techniques and equipment and combing the museum's archives for overlooked evidence about the evidence unearthed at sites around Piltdown.

"Although Charles Dawson is the prime suspect, it's a complex story," Stringer, the museum's research leader in human origins, told The Associated Press. "The amount of material planted at two different sites makes some people — and that includes me — wonder whether there were at least two people involved."

Doubts grew about Piltdown Man's authenticity in the years after 1912, as more remains were found around the world that contradicted its evidence. In 1953, scientists from London's Natural History Museum and Oxford University conducted tests that showed the find was a cleverly assembled fake, combining a human skull a few hundred years old with the jaw of an orangutan, stained to make it look ancient.

Ever since, speculation had swirled about possible perpetrators. Many people think the evidence points to Dawson, who died in 1916.

Other long-dead suspects identified by researchers include Arthur Smith Woodward, the museum's keeper of geology, who championed Dawson's discoveries and gave them vital scientific credibility. The finger has also been pointed at museum zoologist Martin Hinton; Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; and even "Sherlock Holmes" author Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived near Piltdown.

Stringer said the key may lie in a later find nearby — a slab of elephant bone nicknamed the "cricket bat" — that seemed to back up the first Piltdown discovery. It was revealed as a clumsy fake, carved with a steel knife from a fossilized elephant femur.

One theory is that Hinton — skeptical but afraid to openly question Woodward, his boss at the museum — might have planted it thinking it would be spotted as a hoax and discredit the whole find. A trunk with Hinton's initials found in a loft at the museum a decade after his death in 1961 contained animal bones stained the same way as the Piltdown fossils.

Miles Russell, senior lecturer in archaeology at Bournemouth University, thinks the museum's work may shed new light on how the forgery was done. But he thinks there is little doubt Dawson was the perpetrator.

"He is the only person who is always on site every time a find is made," Russell said. "And when he died in 1916, Piltdown Man died with him."

Russell is author of the new book "The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed" — though he doubts speculation about the century-old fraud will stop.

"People love conspiracy theories," he said. "And this is one of the biggest scientific hoaxes of all time."

Whoever was behind it, the hoax delayed consensus on human origins, leading some scientists to question the authenticity of later finds because they did not fit with Piltdown Man.

Stringer said Piltdown Man stands as a warning to scientists always to be on their guard — especially when evidence seems to back up their theories.

"There was a huge gap in evidence and Piltdown at the time neatly filled that gap," he said. "It was what people expected to be found. In a sense you could say it was manufactured to fit the scientific agenda.

"That lesson of Piltdown is always worth learning — when something seems too good to be true, maybe it is."

___

Online:

Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature

Piltdown Man at the Natural History Museum: www.nhm.ac.uk/piltdown

___

Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless

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Evidence of Early Life Draws Ire from Scientists

Life may have first emerged on land about 100 million years earlier previously thought, suggests a study that has scientists up in arms, many of whom are arguing that the research paper should never been published in the first place.

The study, published today (Dec. 12) in the journal Nature, suggests that ancient fossilized creatures found in Southern Australian sediments actually came from land, not from the ocean. If the findings are true, the fossils would have been lichenlike plants that first colonized land, not ocean-dwelling ancestors of jellyfish.

"We have big organisms living on land a lot further back than we thought before," said study author Gregory Retallack, a geologist and paleobotanist at the University of Oregon.

But the study has faced intense skepticism from several experts in the field — some of whom have questioned not only the study's scientific validity, but also its acceptance into a prestigious scientific journal.

"I find Retallack's observations dubious, and his arguments poor. That this was published by Nature is beyond my understanding," wrote Martin Brasier, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, in an email.

Primitive sea dwellers

Scientists first discovered the fossils in 1947 in the Ediacaran Hills of Southern Australia. The reddish rocks contained imprints from a strange, striated creature called Dickinsonia, as well as other primeval creatures that lived around 550 million years ago. [Extreme Life on Earth: 8 Bizarre Creatures]

Until now, scientists had long believed the rocks were made up of ocean sediments and that Dickinsonia and other primeval creatures fossilized in the outcroppings were sea dwellers similar to jellyfish or sea pens that lived just before the Cambrian explosion began about 540 million years ago, when all the major animal groups suddenly appeared.

But when Retallack first saw the fossils, he wondered whether they were formed on land. In particular, the fossils had a reddish hue that comes from oxygen in the atmosphere reacting with iron to create rust — a process that doesn't happen under the sea, he said. He also noticed that nodules throughout the rock looked strikingly similar to the rootlike structures put out by primitive lichen or fungi found in other ancient soils.

To see if some of the Ediacaran fossils were land-dwellers, he tested the rock's composition and found it was characteristic of the very first stages of soil formation on land, in which nutrients such as potassium and magnesium are depleted. A similar process doesn't happen in the ocean, he said.

In the current paper, Retallack argues that the ancient fossils are actually a primitive precursor to lichen or fungi and that they helped colonize land, paving the way for the Cambrian explosion.

Even today, lichen are the pioneers that first take root on bare rock, creating the precursors of soil (other organisms can grow on lichens).

"One of the first things that happens when you have a piece of bare ground is some lichen come in and eventually some new stuff comes in like dandelions, and pretty soon you've got a tall Douglas fir forest," Retallack told LiveScience.

Scientists skeptical

But several scientists have called his claims into question and wonder why Nature published the piece. [Top 10 Science Journal Retractions]

The rocks may have turned their reddish hue much more recently, some 65 million years ago, when they somehow rose above the water; in that scenario, the sediments could have been underwater at the time Dickinsonia and other Ediacaran creatures lived, Shuhai Xiao, a paleontologist at Virginia Tech wrote in an accompanying article in Nature. In addition, the chemical composition of the rocks doesn't preclude the fossils originating in the ocean.

What's more, some of the fossils are oriented as if they were dragged by current or ocean waves, Xiao wrote. Finally, many of the species Retallack reclassifies as land-dwellers are found elsewhere in the world in rocks that are unambiguously formed from ocean sediments.

Retallack's ideas "would represent a fundamental change in our picture of evolution, but they will probably face continuing skepticism because the evidence is unconvincing," he wrote.

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The Science of Finding the Perfect Christmas Gift

For all of recorded history, people have been giving presents for a myriad of reasons: to show affection, curry favor, or fulfill familial duty. And the custom goes beyond the human species. Even family cats are known to bequeath presents of dead mice or birds on their owners.

"It's an act of social communication," said SunWolf, a communications professor at Santa Clara University. "Without using words, you're always saying something: 'I wish we could be closer, I think of you, I miss you.'"

But figuring out how to translate your love for someone else into that perfect gift can be stressful. Here are some tips for making gift-giving a joy for both the giver and the receiver.

Get one big present

A big present looks more impressive when it stands on its own, according to a study reported last year in the Journal of Consumer Research. Putting a tube of lip balm in with the cashmere sweater will make gift-givers view the present less favorably.

That's because people tend to average out the value of the present, making the whole package seem cheaper.

Use that wish list

Buying something straight off a person's wish list may seem lazy, but it may be the safest strategy, said Nicholas Epley, a psychologist at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

Epley's team has found that when people receive a gift they like, they didn't actually care whether someone put a lot of careful thought into selecting it.

His team conducted a study at the Museum of Science in Chicago where people were asked to either randomly select or carefully choose a high-rated or low-rated present from the gift shop for another person. Those who got coveted items didn't think much about the giver's intentions. [Geeky Gifts: Holiday Guide for Science-Lovers]

"What we found is that a gift giver's thoughtfulness, or how thoughtful you thought the gift giver was, counted only when you got a crappy gift," Epley told LiveScience.

Put some thought into it

But despite the fact that a good gift needs no context, getting a thoughtful gift does have benefits — for the giver.

Givers who were asked to think carefully about a gift choice felt closer to the receivers than those who were asked to pick randomly, Epley said. That held even when givers were offering presents to random strangers.

"Perspective taking, or imagining being in another person's shoes, makes you feel closer to the person," he said.

But mention the thought

Thoughts do wind up counting when you get a bad gift, Epley found. For instance, when the museum visitors in his study received a low-rated ruler that said "Rulers of Science" on it, they were more likely to appreciate the gift if they were told how the giver had thoughtfully selected it.

So it might be good to write a little note on that card to Uncle Marv describing why that life-size replica of George Washington made you think of him.

"The practical message of this is not that you shouldn't put thought into a gift. You shouldn't assume your thoughts will count like you think they do or that people will magically know how thoughtful you are," Epley said.

Agree to opt out

It's also okay to stop giving gifts, even if you have done so in the past. That friend you met in 1989, the grandmother who knits progressively uglier sweaters, or the co-worker who you don't know very well — if thinking about giving or receiving is stressful, it's okay to not give a gift as long you communicate it clearly, SunWolf told LiveScience.

"Just like any relationships that don't work anymore we need to have an exit strategy," she said. Instead, come up with an alternate way of showing you care, like telling grandma "The gift giving thing isn't necessary anymore grandma, I'd be happy with just having lunch with you."

Consider regifting

There's also regifting — recycling a gift you've received previously — which new research in the journal Psychological Science suggests may not be as offensive as once thought, at least to the gift giver. To improve acceptance of regifting, the researchers suggested voicing your feelings when recycling a present, even expressing to the receiver that it's OK for them to do what they like with the gift (even if that means passing it along next year).

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