Ask a science teacher: What creates the wind?

Wind is caused by a difference in pressure from one area to another area on the surface of the Earth. Air naturally moves from high to low pressure, and when it does so, it is called wind.

Generally, we can say that the cause of the wind is the uneven heating of the Earth’s surface by the Sun. The Earth’s surface is made of different land and water areas, and these varying surfaces absorb and reflect the Sun’s rays unevenly. Warm air rising yields a lower pressure on the Earth, because the air is not pressing down on the Earth’s surface, while descending cooler air produces a higher pressure.

But there are many other factors affecting wind direction. For example, the Earth is spinning, so air in the Northern Hemisphere is deflected to the right by what is known as the Coriolis force. This causes the air, or wind, to flow clockwise around a high-pressure system and counter-clockwise around a low-pressure system.

The closer these low- and high-pressure systems are together, the stronger the “pressure gradient,” and the stronger the winds. Vegetation also plays a role in how much sunlight is reflected or absorbed by the surface of the Earth. Furthermore, snow cover reflects a large amount of radiation back into space. As the air cools, it sinks and causes a pressure increase.

And wind can get even more complex. Some parts of the Earth, near the equator, receive direct sunlight all year long and have a consistently warmer climate. Other parts of the Earth, near the polar regions, receive indirect rays, so the climate is colder.

As the warm air from the tropics rises, colder air moves in to take the place of the rising warmer air. This movement of air also causes the wind to blow. It’s a dynamic, complex mechanism, which is why weather forecasting is not quite a precise science.

Today we see windmills, used to make electricity, in operation in all parts of the United States, but especially along our coasts. Coastal regions tend to have fairly strong winds blowing in from ocean to land during the day and out from land to ocean during the night. The cause of this phenomenon is that land heats up and cools down faster than water, again creating a pressure gradient.

From the book, "Ask a Science Teacher: 250 Answers to Questions You’ve Always Had About How Everyday Stuff Really Works"; Copyright © Larry Scheckel, 2013. Publishes December 17; available wherever books are sold.

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'Gravity': Science vs. fiction

Warner Bros. Pictures

1 How Real Is This Orbital Blockbuster? Warner Bros. Pictures

2 Orbital Debris Causes … Complications Warner Bros. Pictures

3 Houston ... We Have a Good One For You Warner Bros. Pictures

4 Can You Steal a Space Capsule? Warner Bros. Pictures

5 Correct Use of Jargon is Critical Warner Bros. Pictures

6 Remember to Use Sunscreen (SPF 900) Warner Bros. Pictures

Warner Bros. Pictures

8 When The Comsat Grid Goes Down, Try Ham Radio Warner Bros. Pictures

Warner Bros. Pictures

Director Alfonso Cuarón's visually stunning film "Gravity," in theaters today, is already being heralded as one of the year's best movies. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney star as astronauts whose mission goes spectacularly wrong when a cloud of orbital debris shreds their shuttle, cuts off communication and leaves them stranded in space.

These details have already been revealed in the film's trailers, but what the previews can't convey is the impressive sense of authenticity and verisimilitude that director Cuarón brings to the big screen. Thanks to a brilliant visual design and strategic use of 3-D effects, the movie feels like being in space.

That sense of authenticity also applies to the film's depiction of the specifics of an actual NASA space mission. It's clear that the filmmakers did their homework. The movie is careful to stay within the realm of plausibility demanded by the genre of hard science fiction.

But just to be sure, we asked former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao -- a veteran of three shuttle missions, four space walks and a six-month stint on the International Space Station -- to help us separate the science from the fiction.

Warning: Several significant plot spoilers dead ahead

Warner Bros. Pictures

The crisis in the film is precipitated when the Russians blow up one of their own satellites, triggering a chain reaction that sends a cloud of lethal debris toward our heroes at around, oh, 17,000 mph. Chiao says the dangers of such a scenario are quite real and have been studied extensively.

"Just in recent history, the Chinese conducted an anti-weapons satellite test," Chiao says. "They blew up one of their old weather satellites, which created a bunch of debris."

Could such an incident really set off a chain-reaction that wipes out everything in orbit?

"It's not implausible, but it's unlikely," Chiao says. "Of course, if you have orbital debris, it can damage satellites or other spacecraft and potentially cause them to break up in turn. But the thing is, satellites are actually spaced pretty far apart. To get a cascade or chain reaction is pretty unlikely."

Science Movies to Avoid on Date Night

Warner Bros. Pictures

Before everything goes haywire in orbit, the spacewalking astronauts Ryan Stone (Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (Clooney) keep it loose by casually chatting, joking with ground control in Houston and even listening to music. Is it really that casual up in space?

"Yeah, during spacewalks we're tied in with Houston and tied in with the crew inside (the shuttle), of course," Chiao says. "We have some light-hearted moments and we joke around a bit."

BLOG: Huge Space Battle Rumbles Virtual Universe

Warner Bros. Pictures

When the debris cloud destroys the astronauts' ride back home -- that is to say, the space shuttle -- Stone is forced to improvise by breaking into an old Soyuz spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. Chiao says such orbital grand theft is quite possible, but pretty tricky.

"In order to open the outer door of the airlock you have to have the inner hatch closed and the air evacuated in between," Chaio says. "On the American airlock, you could open the pressure equalization valves, and there's a handle outside so you could definitely open the outer hatch. But the trick is, on the inside, the crew would have to have already closed that inner hatch. Otherwise you let all the air out of the station. If the crew configured it that way before they abandoned ship, then yes that could happen. It's physically possible."

The Science and Fiction of ‘Oblivion’

Warner Bros. Pictures

After the orbital debris cascade knocks out communication satellites, Stone and Kowalski lose contact with ground control. They keep transmitting, though, in hopes that someone is listening. Each message begins with the rather haunting phrase, "Transmitting in the blind..."

"Yeah, that's real phraseology and that's used in aircraft operations also," Chiao says. "You call 'in the blind' if you're not receiving them, but you think they might be receiving you. You're basically letting them know that you're not able to hear them."

Warner Bros. Pictures

In one rather pretty scene, astronaut Stone ditches the spacesuit and catches her breath in a pressurized space vehicle, as sunlight streams in through a nearby porthole. But without a spacesuit or, say, the ozone layer, isn't dangerous to be exposed to direct sunlight in orbit?

"It depends on the window, but most windows are treated with UV protection," Chiao says. "For example, on the shuttle, all the windows had UV protection coatings on them. On the station, in the Russian segment, the small windows generally did not have UV protection, so they would be more optically pure. You'd get a pretty severe sunburn if you were in direct sunlight through one of those windows."

Into Reality: Top Star Trek Warp Speed Concepts

Warner Bros. Pictures

In fact, Stone uses the porthole sunlight to do a little light reading. Improvising inside Russian and Chinese spacecraft, she's able to get systems working by, apparently, reading the user manuals handily stored nearby. Really? You can fire up a spacecraft by reading the manual?

Surprisingly, Chiao says this is fairly accurate: "There are definitely paper procedures and books, certainly in the Soyuz and, I imagine, the Chinese spacecraft as well," Chiao says. "On the shuttle we had paper books. The problem would be, having not been trained, she may not know how to follow the instructions. She might not even know the language. But the books are there, and they're definitely used."

Chiao, by the way, would be prepared in such a situation: He speaks both Chinese and Russian.

Astronaut Gave 'Gravity' Advice To Sandra Bullock

Warner Bros. Pictures

A fairly relentless thriller, "Gravity" is short on light moments, but one of them occurs when Stone tries to raise ground control on a complex communications matrix … and gets a giddy Chinese farmer on ham radio. According to Chiao, that absolutely could happen, and has.

"On both the shuttle and ISS, we're normally going through satellites, but we have backup ways of communicating that are more direct-line," Chiao says. "We have a UHF radio that could go direct to the ground sites. The normal S-band radios can also go to ground sites. Just because you lose the satellites doesn't mean you lose comm."

And ham radio?

"Sure, on board the station we do have a ham radio and that's one way we organize conference sessions with schools and students," Chiao says. "As we fly from horizon to horizon, line-of-sight, we're able to answer questions for about 10 minutes or so. In fact, I remember hearing truck drivers talking to each other while we were over rural China. I tried calling down to them but they couldn't hear me."

VIDEO: What It's Like To Be An Astronaut

Warner Bros. Pictures

As the film's beginning title cards read, there's no oxygen in space, no air pressure, no sound. Life in space is impossible. The spacewalking sequences, in particular, underline just how vulnerable astronauts are.

Chiao says the trick is not to think about it too much. "You know, I've wanted to do this since I was a little kid, so getting into orbit and looking out that window for the first time was just such an emotional moment."

"Doing a spacewalk is a little different," Chiao says. "You're acutely aware that you're at higher risk. You're not protected by a pressure vessel and a spacecraft hull. If something goes wrong, your buddies inside, there's very little they can do to help you. It's a heightened sense of awareness. You're very careful and deliberate. You're always checking the tethers because the worst thing that could happen is you get unattached...."

Science vs. Fiction: 'Elysium'

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The cultural challenge to climate science writing - PLoS Blogs (blog)

Credit: woodleywonderworks, via Flickr (CC-BY)

My previous posts on the inevitable politics of climate science, I was flattered to see, figured into a terrific article this week by David Roberts of Grist about the futility of “just the facts” approaches to explaining that science to the public. Read his whole post for the thoughtfully developed argument, but these paragraphs offer the gist of it:

… [A] democratic public does not want bare facts. It wants meaning. It wants to know why climate science matters and what can be done about it. More fundamentally, it’s not just that people want meaning, it’s that they only absorb facts through meaning. Our identities are how we make sense of information. This is the whole point of cultural cognition research: We seek out information that reinforces our identities.

Scientists, at their best, avoid this kind of blinkered, identity-reinforcing cognition, at least when they’re engaged in scientific work. They struggle to unearth their own assumptions and subject them to testing, to render them falsifiable. It’s a kind of mental self-discipline that requires considerable training. Scientists should not imagine that members of the general public do or could or should share that same self-discipline. If they want the information they convey to be understood and absorbed, they will have to speak as humans speak, from within a cultural identity and a set of values, not hovering above such mortal concerns.

Roberts notes my “morose conclusion” that scientists should advocate for whatever they want because nobody seems to care what they think, then makes the case that by building bridges to cultural groups with whom they can find real affinities, scientists can become more persuasive. (He cites climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe as a success at this.)

He and I are actually not far apart in our optimism. My remark was perhaps a little too flip: I was only trying to say that I think the potential harm from scientists discussing policy intelligently can get overstated. The kind of engagement that Hayhoe has managed seems like a wonderful example for at least some others to follow, and it should be an inspiration to anyone who wants to help build the democratic consensus that real progress on climate policy will need.

Cultural cognition—people’s universal tendency to screen their perception and acceptance of facts through cultural attitudes—gets a lot of attention from science writers these days, as it should. Walk into a meeting of science writers and talk about the need to better educate climate deniers and a fluttery squawk of scolding about “information deficit models” will erupt from every corner. I mostly agree with this, but will also confess to being frustrated for two reasons at how unproductive the recognition of cultural cognition typically becomes.

My first, lesser reason is that on the face of it, cultural cognition often seems to explain too much. It seems like such a potent force in shaping attitudes that I’m left wondering how anyone ever gets persuaded of ideas at odds with their social groups’ values, even though this clearly must happen all the time. Plenty of Americans haven’t been culturally comfortable with fighting wars, accepting tax hikes, abiding by environmental regulations, or accepting legalized abortions and gay marriages, and yet somehow those things happened through a political process anyway. No doubt the lesson is that in those cases, ways of making those propositions culturally tolerable were found, which makes sense—but it also suggests that instances of cultural cognition only get defined by failure in retrospect, which makes me suspicious.

My other, bigger reason is that in practice, people often treat cultural cognition as a showstopper, and a justification for haughtily criticizing certain communication efforts without offering meaningful alternatives. It’s easy to chide science writers for pointlessly throwing more scary climate facts at a public that doesn’t want to hear them, or for tut-tutting that some climate news will sound like the same old doom-saying hysterics unless it’s been watered down to pabulum. But what exactly are the bridges to those people’s realities we should be using instead? And what do we do if the value frameworks within which they define the world don’t allow meaningful policy responses and their intransigence carries consequences for everyone else?

(Here I should also acknowledge a third reason, which is more of a bias: I’m all for reaching out to others’ cultures with understanding and respect, but if somebody’s culture shows a deep, committed refusal to at least acknowledge empirical physical reality, then it’s hard for me personally to maintain that respect.)

Yet I could be very wrong on these points, which is why I’m glad that some people in science communications are trying to engage with the significance of cultural cognition more meaningfully. It’s why I’ve always been impressed by something that Dan Kahan, cultural cognition’s most prominent investigator, posted this past February, which I’ve called the most edifying and useful thing I’ve read about cultural cognition because it carries a clear message for communicators. Rather than deploring how some unscientific ideas come to be bound up within certain cultural sets, Kahan writes, science journalists need to be more attentive to how these mistaken notions become rallying cries in the first place.

The entanglement of facts that admit of scientific investigation—e.g., “carbon emissions are heating the planet”; “deep geologic isolation of nuclear wastes is safe”—with antagonistic meanings occurs by a mixture of influences, including strategic behavior, poor institutional design, and sheer misadventure. In no such case was the problem inevitable; indeed, in most, such entanglement could easily have been avoided.

These antagonistic meanings, then, are a kind of pollution in the science communication environment.  They disable the normal and normally reliable faculties of rational discernment by which ordinary individuals recognize what is collectively known.

One of the central missions of the science of science communication in a liberal democratic state is to protect the science communication environment from such contamination, and to develop means for detoxifying that environment when preventive or protective measures fail.

Granted, that advice doesn’t do much to help unpollute the existing atmosphere for climate discussions, but it points to ways of preventing the situation from getting still worse. And that may be a second step toward improvement, falling right after the sympathetic outreach efforts of scientists like Hayhoe.

It’s also great that science communicators as a profession may be starting to take a more scientific approach to overcoming these cultural blocks to understanding, as John Timmer of Ars Technica reviewed splendidly back at the beginning of August. And although I’m not attending the ScienceOnline Climate conference now in progress, the feed of tweets emerging from it testifies to the value of the discussion. The program is also giving lots of attention to exactly these kinds of communications issues, such as the plenaries on “Testing Climate Communications Hypotheses” and “Credibility, Trust, Goodwill, and Persuasion,” as well as sessions on “Lamenting Eden-Climate Change Discussions Across Ideologies,” on “Problem solving, democracy, and handling climate change,” and on “Engagement Strategies—The CCTI & Beyond.” Follow along on #scioClimate and let’s see what we can all learn.

The The cultural challenge to climate science writing by Retort, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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NJ medical marijuana bill: What does science say? - Fox News

Today, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie made a decision to sign a bill that will make medical marijuana easily accessible for children.

"As I have repeatedly noted, I believe that parents, and not government regulators, are best suited to decide how to care for their children," said Governor Christie in his conditional approval of the bill. "Protection of our children remains my utmost concern, and my heart goes out to those children and their families who are suffering with serious illnesses. Today, I am making commonsense recommendations to this legislation to ensure sick children receive the treatment their parents prefer, while maintaining appropriate safeguards. I am calling on the legislature to reconvene quickly and address these issues so that children in need can get the treatment they need."

The decision will have huge implications for 2-year-old Vivian Wilson who suffers from severe form of epilepsy called Dravet Syndrome, which causes her to have multiple seizures a day.  Vivian’s parents have said that ingestible extracts of certain strains of marijuana have helped children with their daughter’s condition.

But what does the science say? Dr. Arnold Fried, chairman of the Neuroscience Institute at Hackensack University Medical Center in N.J., spoke with Fox News Health of what is known about medical marijuana and how it could be used to potentially help Vivian.

What does the science show in regards to using medical marijuana to treat neurological diseases?

"The data is very poor in terms of its efficacy.  With that said, there are anecdotal reports that show it helps, but there are not big studies.  For it to be a good study, you would have to design it so that the (the marijuana) could be given in a way where they would also have a control sample. So the person doesn’t know if they got the drug or a placebo.

"However, in these anecdotal stories where they say it helps, there may be something else that is explaining what happens.  That’s the problem with anecdotal evidence; it doesn’t control for bias, and it doesn’t control for other variables.  You’d have to control for those, then see if it’s really effective.  But sometimes we do make decisions based on anecdotal data, so if that’s applicable here, it may be worth a try."

In theory, how would medical marijuana help neurological issues?

"From what I know about the science, doctors prepare an edible form of an extract of marijuana.  It’s not the chemical that makes you high, it’s the one that acts on the brain cells.  Basically it suppresses electrical activity.  A seizure is where you have an abnormal electrical signal in the brain that starts in one place or multiple places simultaneously and then spreads throughout the brain.  It’s an abnormal electrical wave that causes the person to have movements or shake.  So the drug would work by suppressing that wave."

Could medical marijuana potentially treat other neurological disorders?

"It’s sometimes used to treat multiple sclerosis in order to suppress some abnormal neurologic function, whether it’s pain or an unpleasant feeling in the extremity – what we call a dysesthesia.  These are some uses that are talked about.  And some people say the overall function for MS is approved.  They’re more mobile."

What is your particular stance on medical marijuana?

"My feeling about this case is that it should not be a political question or a social question.  It should be a medical question.  Has this girl exhausted a more proven way of dealing with her seizures?  I don’t know if a panel of physicians has really looked it over.  If they have, that’s great, but if they haven’t, they need to decided: Has she availed herself of surgery or nerve stimulation, which sometimes help dramatically.  

"If she truly has exhausted all the medical and surgical modalities for dealing with this epilepsy, I'm for it."

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Math and science initiatives become mainstream - Danbury News Times

It's not just the increase in jobs that's led area schools to increase the focus on teaching skills related to the STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering and math.

However, it is a powerful motivator, since over the past 10 years, growth in STEM jobs was three times as fast as growth in non-STEM jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Traditionally, states and districts have kept these subjects separate in both instruction and assessment, but increasingly they recognize the value of the discipline and way of thinking the STEM approach provides students across all disciplines.

"It's more problem solving and problem finding," Bethel High School technology teacher John Ryan said. "It transcends passive learning when a teacher stood in front the classroom. The more actively engaged students are, the more it improves the way kids retain their learning."

Critical thinking, problem solving, being scientifically literate and being able to collaborate are skills that scientists have used for ages in their work, and area districts are adopting a STEM approach in a variety of ways.

Danbury Public Schools has a middle school STEM academy for 300 students that incorporates the model into all the curriculum.

Bethel has an Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences Program, a four-year program in which students receive a cross-discipline approach to academics, design, and innovation skills that are integrated with digital media and science and technology topics.

It's part of the 21st Century Skills Initiative started at Education Connection with money from a nationally competitive federal government grant.

New Fairfield and New Milford high schools also have aligned programs with the 21st Century Skills Initiative, which provides original curricula, training, and support for innovative courses in science, technology, and math.

Other area programs include Danbury schools middle school STEM program academy, which has 300 students, a summer science camp in collaboration with Western Connecticut State University and growing collaborations among department heads at the high school.

Danbury's K-12 STEM curriculum administrator Harry Rosvally said he hears about new STEM programs starting around the state each year.

"STEM's become elevated in everybody's view. More people are aware of the need to support STEM," Rosvally said. The thriving corporations in the area, like Praxair and Boehringer Ingelheim, underscore its value.

At Danbury High, teachers are collaborating in various ways with STEM subject areas, he said.

"We realize it's the right way to do things," he said. "We realize that if the kids have use of a 3D printer it's so engaging that now they have the hunger to know the physics and math that goes with it."

Brookfield started its own 21st Century Skills class at the high school and now it's been added to the middle school, where fifth- through seventh-graders take it as part of their special class rotations and eighth graders can take it as an elective.

Brookfield also has a middle school technology/engineering education course that teaches math, science and technology principles. Students can take it as a rotating course in fifth, sixth, and seventh grade and then as an elective in eighth grade.

"We have a very active science, math and technology program where department heads work very closely together planning and collaborating," Brookfield Assistant Superintendent Genie Slone said.

The goal is for educators to teach students logical, analytical, creative and critical thinking skills, said Frank LaBlanca, who leads the 21st Century Skills Initiative for Education Connection.

"A STEM approach helps certain students learn these skills better than in other ways though there is no one solution for all students," he said.

eileenf@newstimes.com; 203-731-3333

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Elsewhere in Science, 16 August 2013 - Science Careers Blog (blog)

Elsewhere in Science, 16 August 2013By Donisha Adams Jim Austin August 16, 2013

Every week, Science publishes a few articles likely to be of interest to career-minded readers. But because those articles aren't featured on Science Careers, our readers could easily overlook them.

To remedy that, every Friday we're pointing readers toward articles appearing in Science—the print magazine as well as the other Science-family publications (ScienceInsider, ScienceNow, Science Translational Medicine (Sci. TM), and Science Signaling—that hold some relevance or nuggets of advice for readers interested in furthering their careers in science. (Please note that while articles appearing in ScienceInsider and ScienceNow may be read by anyone, articles appearing in Sci. TM and Science may require AAAS membership/Science subscription or a site license.)

• Since 1948, researchers with the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) have been monitoring a group of men and women from Framingham, Massachusetts for cardiovascular disease risks. In the News and Analysis section of Science this week, Jocelyn Kaiser writes about the budget cuts faced by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute-sponsored program.

What's the connection to science careers? For one thing, a few people will lose jobs: "In response to this year's cut, FHS plans to lay off 19 of 90 staffers as well as scale back clinical exams and laboratory work," Kaiser writes. But the really important connection to careers is that the cuts threaten to compromise a study that has been going strong for 65 years and has delivered many important insights into cardiovascular disease. For scientists to do their work well, they need steady, adequate funding. When they don't get it, the cost can be high.

• Also in News and Analysis, Jeffrey Mervis writes about the National Science Foundation's (NSF's)  decision to cancel this year's round of funding for political science while keeping the program in place. NSF isn't saying much, but the move "appears to reflect an impasse between NSF's desire to preserve its highly regarded peer-review system and the need to abide by language in a government-wide funding bill that restricts NSF's ability to support research in the discipline," Mervis writes. An amendment to the 2013 spending bill passed in March limits NSF's political science funding to cases "when a project is deemed vital to national security or the country's economic interests."

"The casualties," Mervis writes, "include this year's edition of Duke University's long-running Ralph Bunche Summer Institute for promising minority students considering academic careers in political science. 'We were told this winter we had been recommended for renewal and were waiting for the paperwork when Coburn was passed,' says Paula McClain, a professor of political science and dean of the graduate school at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Then NSF put its $160,000-a-year contribution on hold. 'The students would have started in early June, and in late April I finally decided I couldn't keep people hanging on any longer.' "

• This week's juiciest career-related story is Yudhijit Bhattacharje's engaging look back at the discovery, by Marco Tavani's AGILE research team, of anomalous gamma radiation from the Crab nebula. "For decades, the three pulsars had emitted radiation so steadily that astronomers had come to rely on them as cosmic standards to calibrate their instruments—AGILE included," Bhattacharje writes. "Geminga, being closer, normally shines brighter than the Crab. But in the AGILE map, the Crab blazed brighter and larger than Geminga. The anomaly raised the troubling prospect of a flaw in the telescope's detectors. Tavani wanted to wish it away."

Tavani and his team eventually won awards for the discovery, but Tavani dismissed it when it first appeared in 2007—despite protestations from members of his team—because the observations seemed too weird. " 'For the moment, we put this week of observations in our drawer,' " Tavani told the group. " 'And we do not talk about this to anybody.' "

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Tornado Tech: How Drones Can Help With Twister Science - NPR

Tornado researchers want to use small drones, like this one called the Noctura, to study the storms.

Andy Arena/Oklahoma State University

Oklahoma was hit particularly hard by two massive outbreaks this year in what's been another deadly season of tornadoes in the U.S. Despite technology and forecasting improvements, scientists still have plenty to learn about how and why tornadoes form.

Currently, one of the best ways for researchers to understand how tornadoes form is to chase them. So off they go with mobile science laboratories, rushing toward storms armed with research equipment and weather-sensing probes.

It's dangerous work. Three chasers died in one of Oklahoma's May tornadoes because the storm unexpectedly changed directions. And there's also a lot left to chance — only 20 percent of supercell thunderstorms produce tornadoes.

"It's a loaded gun," says Jamey Jacob, an aerospace engineering professor at Oklahoma State University, of the big weather systems. "It's ready to go off, but when and where does it fire?"

One of the downsides of the current tornado research method is that it's passive, Jacob says. "You throw [probes] out there, [and] you hope something gets caught up [in the storm] somewhere," he says.

So he and dozens of other scientists and engineers are remaking tornado technology. They're looking to small drone aircraft loaded with sensors that can be launched from the trunk of a car, far from a potential tornado.

"With unmanned aircraft," Jacob says, "you fly it where you want it to go."

If you open up these drones, the contents could have come from a middle school science project. But the Kevlar shell and the tiny sensors are fit for a high-tech military plane.

Brian Argrow directs the research and engineering center for unmanned aerial vehicles at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"Being able to sample the pressure, temperature, humidity, wind velocity — that you can't do remotely," he says. "Radar can only do so much at this point."

Scientists think these drones can help them increase warning time from the current 14-minute average to as much as an hour. Argrow says the technology exists, and the planes are ready to go, but many of them are stuck in university laboratories, frustrating researchers.

Drones can provide information about temperature, humidity and pressure that current radar systems can't provide. Above, the Talos drone, which has a 15.5-foot wingspan.

Jamey Jacob/Oklahoma State University

"It's often that technology gets ahead of policy, particularly in this country, and this is an instance where that essentially has happened," he says. "Some of the technology — the capability, anyway — has gotten ahead of what the current air traffic system is able to accommodate directly."

The Federal Aviation Administration declined to be interviewed for this story, but Argrow and his team started working with the agency in 2009 to integrate the new storm-chasing technology into the nation's airspace. They were able to fly into a few storms back then. But it's a very slow, bureaucratic process that doesn't mesh well with fast-developing thunderstorms.

Scientists think if new policies are put in place, these aerial chasers could be widely operational in five years, allowing meteorologists to make more accurate tornado warnings.

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Australia's One Nation under climate science denial - The Guardian

Link to video: Stephanie Banister: 'I don't oppose Islam as a country'

Oh, how the world laughed at Stephanie Banister – the extreme right wing Australian election candidate who told a TV interviewer that Islam was a country.

Wasn't it just side-splitting to hear the 27-year-old One Nation hopeful get her Qu-ran's mixed up with her harams?

What fun to hear her re-write the Jewish faithful as a congregation of Jesus-followers?  You could have knocked me down with a kippah.

The Queenslander claimed she was a victim of selective editing from the television network Channel Seven, which aired the interview. She's since pulled out of the election race.

But virtually every major news outlet in the developed world covered Banister's gaffs.

After twisting its satirical knife every which way, US television political comedy The Daily Show suggested Banister had set "a new low watermark for electoral ignorance".

But after reading her party's stance on climate change, I beg to differ.

One Nation appears to have gone shopping to the Climate Science Denial Mart and come back with the whole deli counter of debunked talking points.

"What's really behind all the global warming hoopla," One Nation's website asks.

"Power.  It's the same old Marxist/Communist/Fascist collectivist shtick, dressed up in new clothes. Global warming is all about a power grab by a wealthy elite and their collectivist sycophants — using the (United Nations) as a cover and tool."

Elsewhere, One Nation accuses the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO of engaging in the corruption of science.

Much of the material is near identical to that offered by the climate science denial organisation the Galileo Movement, whose patron – Sydney shock-jock Alan Jones – says human-caused climate change is a hoax and the science is "witchcraft".

One Nation New South Wales Senate candidate Pauline Hanson even cites the Galileo Movement's project leader Malcolm Roberts, asking readers to check out a document which Sydney Morning Herald environment editor Ben Cubby has described as a "pile of horse shit".

Now, while you probably wouldn't expect the Christian Democrats to jumble its religious lexicon, the party is as equally clueless as One Nation about the current state of climate science.

According to the Christian Democrats, there are "equally reputable scientists" who say that climate change "is not, and never was driven by CO2 levels".

This ignores a recent study, co-authored by fellow The Guardian environment blogger Dana Nuccitelli, about 97 per cent of scientific studies on climate change in the last 20 years all agree that global warming is caused by humans. It also ignores all the major science academies in the developed world.

The CDP says it is "agnostic" about human caused climate change, which is a bit like saying you're an agnostic about the laws of physics.

Definitely not an agnostic, but rather an all-out worshipper of anti-science, is the Christian fundamentalist Rise Up Australia Party, led by a Melbourne Pastor who thinks humans have only been on earth for 6,000 years. Rise Up Australia also drafted in UK Independence Party figure Lord Christopher Monckton earlier for a pre-election push.

Key minor parties in Queensland – Katter's Australia Party and Palmer United Party – have also chosen to put debunked fringe ideas above sound science.

Katter's Australia Party says: "The scientific case is not made out and nor is there empirical evidence connecting carbon emissions to global warming - the argument is simply not sustainable."

The Palmer United Party doesn't say anything about climate change aside from saying it wants a national commission to investigate the "carbon issue" but its leader, billionaire miner Clive Palmer, is a climate science sceptic.

Palmer tried to play-down the role of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by telling an ABC television audience that "97 per cent of carbon dioxide is from natural sources" – as if this was somehow relevant.

One Nation also does this sweet little climate denial two-step that tries to suggest that carbon dioxide is both inconsequential but also powerful enough to be the life force of the planet.

Pauline Hanson writes: "Carbon dioxide is Nature's invisible, tasteless, odourless trace gas essential to all life on Earth."

Perhaps she's been reading the same talking points as Opposition leader Tony Abbott, who earlier this year dog whistled to the climate denial crowd when he described emissions trading as "a so-called market, in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one."

Abbott has said in the past that he thinks climate science is "crap" but has also said he thinks it does contribute to climate change.

But Abbott's Liberal Party is riddled with representatives scornful of the risks of burning billions of tonnes of fossil fuels annually to load the atmosphere with that all-powerful (but also trace gas) carbon dioxide.

In Queensland, the state party's rank and file members voted last year in favour of a motion to ban the teaching of climate science in schools.

The motion was proposed by a party member who claims to have debunked the greenhouse theory using just two fish boxes and a roll of cling film in an experiment he cooked up in his kitchen.

Maybe it's time to quote some wise words from that former One Nation candidate and religious philosopher Stephanie Banister.

"Everyone in the world has a lot to learn about day to day stuff. Everything in life is just about learning."

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Science Movies to Avoid on Date Night - Discovery News

Another criminally underappreciated sci-fi film, director Andrew Niccol's 1997 "Gattaca" deals with both the hard science and social science aspects of human genetics technology. In a near-future setting, a kind of popular eugenics system allows parents to genetically profile embryos prior to implantation, selecting for optimal hereditary traits. Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke -- surely two of our most genetically gifted movie stars -- must navigate a scary future society in which destiny is determined by genes. The name of the space agency in the film, Gattaca, is composed of the letters GATC -- or guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine, the four bases of DNA.

While there's nothing particularly gross or disturbing in "Gattaca," the very subject matter -- and the presence of those two elite specimens Thurman and Hawke -- might lead a romantic interest to start questioning your own genetic potential.

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Grocery Shopping While Hungry Not Good Idea, Science Confirms

If you've ever gone grocery shopping while you're hungry, you know the task can be a challenge: Everything looks good.

Now new research confirms that grocery shopping when your stomach is rumbling is probably not a good idea.

To hungry shoppers, high-calorie foods may be more tempting than usual, the researchers said.

In the study, researchers asked 68 people to come to their lab and to avoid eating for five hours before they came. Upon arrival, half of the participants were told they could eat as many wheat crackers as they wanted, while the other half were not given any food.

Both groups of participants were then asked to grocery shop in an online store that offered high-calorie foods, such as candy, salty snacks and red meat, as well as low-calorie foods, such as fruits, vegetable and chicken breasts.

Participants who were hungry purchased more high-calorie products, the researchers found. On average, hungry people purchased 5.7 high-calorie products, while the group that ate before shopping bought 3.9 high-calorie products.

In a second experiment, the researchers, led by Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, analyzed purchases of 82 people in a real-world grocery store. They compared the purchases of those who went shopping between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. (an "after lunch" period when people are less likely to be hungry) to those who went shopping between 4 and 7 p.m. (when people are more likely to be hungry).

Those who shopped between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. bought fewer low-calorie products compared with those who shopped between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. (buying eight products versus 11 products).

"Even short-term food deprivation can lead to a shift in choices such that people choose less low-calorie, and relatively more high-calorie, food options," the researchers wrote in the May 6 issue of the Journal for the American Medical Association.

The findings suggest "people should be more careful about their choices when food-deprived and possibly avoid choice situations when hungry by making choices while in less hungry states," the researchers said.

Pass it on: Grocery shopping while hungry may lead to unhealthy food choices.

Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow MyHealthNewsDaily @MyHealth_MHND, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on MyHealthNewsDaily .

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How Much Say Should Congress Have in Science Funding?

A battle over science is under way in the halls of the Capitol, with some in Congress calling for more say in which research projects receive federal dollars.

Political science studies funded this year must show their results will benefit U.S. economic or security interests, and another proposal imposes similar new criteria on other scientific studies.

In response, critics have charged lawmakers with intruding into the National Science Foundation’s approval process.

“Every scientific discipline has a stake in undoing the damage inflicted on political science, and, in fact, to the national interest,” by the new criteria, writes Kenneth Prewitt of Columbia University, in a commentary published in tomorrow’s (May 3) issue of the journal Science. “Every scientist should vigorously contest any effort to apply those criteria more broadly.”

Congress and science

The new rule for political science comes from legislation passed in March, which denies the National Science Foundation (NSF) the ability to fund political science studies unless the research will promote national security or the economic interests of the United States. A proposal by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) would expand that requirement to all NSF-funded studies.

Smith’s draft bill, obtained by Science Insider, would require the NSF to certify that any project it funds meets new criteria, including being “in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science.” [7 Great Dramas in Congressional History]

During a hearing in April, presidential science adviser John Holdren objected to applying new criteria to funding proposals: "I think it's a dangerous thing for Congress, or anybody else, to be trying to specify in detail what types of fundamental research NSF should be funding,” Holdren said, according to a Science Insider report.

Prewitt and others say these efforts by lawmakers bring a number of risks, including valuing short-term pay off at the expense of long-term, and often unanticipated, benefits. For instance, narrowly targeted criteria would have prevented the funding of the defense research that led to the Internet, Prewitt says.

“Today, we cannot know how and when the science of the Higgs boson sub-atomic particle will prove useful. But conditions will change; the knowledge will be used,”writes Prewitt, referring to a newly discovered particle thought to explain how other particles get their mass.

Congressional criteria also put agencies in a situation where they must consider whether or not a project is politically feasible, on top of reviewing its scientific merits, said Robert Cook-Deegan, a research professor at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.

Currently, the NSF awards grants based on intellectual merit and the broader impacts of the research. Decisions are made by peer review, a process in which experts in a particular field evaluate a proposal. New criteria threaten this process, and as a result, politically controversial science, such as climate change and stem cell research, could be stifled, Prewitt argues.

In a statement, Smith defended his proposal, writing: “The draft bill maintains the current peer review process and improves on it by adding a layer of accountability.” 

Constitutional privilege?

Proponents of more oversight do have a strong argument, Cook-Deegan said, because the U.S. Constitution gives Congress oversight over executive branch agencies, including the NSF. (Congress, as part of the federal budget, approves the NSF’s budget.)

Both Smith and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who proposed the criteria for political science studies, have questioned the merits of individual, NSF-funded studies. Their lists have included studies on the evolving depiction of animals in the magazine National Geographic; on attitudes toward majority rule and minority rights focusing on the Senate filibuster; and on the International Criminal Court and the African Union Commission’s interpretation of international justice and human rights.

These lists are the latest in a well-established history of singling out individual research projects for criticism. Beginning in March 1975, Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire began issuing “Golden Fleece Awards,” highlighting what he considered wasteful government spending. His research picks included studies to determine why people fall in love, and under what conditions people, monkeys and rats bite and clench their jaws, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

It is unlikely to be a coincidence that social science research, including political science, has been a particular target for Republican lawmakers. Historically, conservatives have perceived social science as a tool to advance the liberal agenda, Cook-Deegan said.

This perception has created political conflict over research in a number of topics, including gun violence, he said. Gun violence research, stymied for many years by congressional decree, received a boost from President Barack Obama earlier this year as part of his response to the shootings in Newtown, Conn. 

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NY group buys Tesla property, plans science center

MINEOLA, N.Y. (AP) — A New York community group that raised $1.3 million in a six-week online fundraising effort has purchased a laboratory once used by visionary scientist Nikola Tesla.

"We're feeling very excited and gratified that we've reached this milestone," said Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, on Long Island. Her group announced last week that it had finalized the purchase of the Tesla lab and property for $850,000.

Tesla was a rival of Thomas Edison who imagined a world of free electricity. He conducted experiments in the early 20th century at his laboratory in Shoreham, about 65 miles east of New York City.

Volunteers struggled for nearly two decades to raise money to acquire the property with limited success.

Their effort got a jolt of support last summer from Seattle cartoonist Matthew Inman, a Tesla fan who started promoting the fundraising effort on his website, theoatmeal.com.

Within six weeks, more than $1.3 million had been raised from 33,000 donors in the U.S. and 108 countries.

Tesla abandoned the lab in 1917. For many years it was a photo chemical processing plant; in 1993, officials determined that the property's groundwater had been polluted with cadmium and silver. A remediation effort overseen by state environmental regulators was completed last year.

Alcorn said that the purchase of the property was a key first step but noted much work needs to be done before the group can realize its goal: "to create a fitting memorial to Tesla and a science center to benefit the entire world."

She estimated another $10 million will be required to renovate the property, which is overrun with brush and includes several dilapidated buildings in the complex that will likely need to be demolished.

Alcorn said her group's first priority is to secure the property from further vandalism. Additional fundraisers are being discussed, but Alcorn had no specific details.

Among Tesla's accomplishments were developments in alternating current and research in the creation of wireless communication and radio. He died in New York City in 1943.

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Obama Champions Science Research in Address

President Barack Obama expressed his unequivocal support for the science industry in a public address today (April 29), saying the nation cannot afford to make sweeping budget cuts that threaten to stall the depth and pace of research.

Obama spoke before an audience of scientists, engineers and doctors this morning to mark the 150th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences.

"What I want to communicate to all of you is that as long as I'm president, we're going to be committed to investing in promising ideas that are generated by you and your institutions, because they lead to innovative products, they help boost our economy, but also because that's who we are," Obama said. "I'm committed to it because that's what makes us special, and ultimately what makes life worth living." [25 Amazing Facts About Science]

After policymakers failed to reach an agreement to avoid government-wide spending cuts earlier this year, $85 billion in across-the-board cuts — referred to as "the sequester" — was signed into law on March 1.

Making deep cuts to research and development programs could jeopardize the country's competitive edge, and it hinders the widespread benefits that these efforts could have, Obama said.

"What we produce here ends up having benefits worldwide," he explained. "We should be reaching for a level of private and public research and development investment that we haven't seen since the height of the space race, that's my goal."

The sequester is expected to take a significant toll on scientific research, with numerous federal agencies and organizations now facing the possibility of huge cuts to their budgets. In particular, the National Institutes of Health is expecting to face $1.5 billion in cuts; the National Science Foundation is estimating its budget could shrink by $283 million; and the American Association for the Advancement of Science is estimating an $8.6 billion cut in 2013.

Obama called the fallout from the sequester a product of "misguided priorities" in the nation's capital, adding that the country cannot afford to gut programs that are on the brink of important discoveries.

"It's hitting our scientific research," Obama said. "Instead of racing ahead … our scientists are left wondering if they'll be able to start any new research projects at all, which means we could lose a year, two years, of scientific research."

In his address, the president reaffirmed his commitment to "grand challenges," such as solar energy projects, NASA's Curiosity rover mission on Mars, and initiatives to better understand how the human brain processes information and memories.

Furthermore, he stated the government should continue to invest in the projects that promise the most return on taxpayer investment, without being influenced by politics.

"In all the sciences, we've got to make sure that we are supporting the idea that they're not subject to politics, that they're not skewed by an agenda," Obama said.

The president added that his administration will continue to focus on promoting science, technology, engineering and math — the so-called STEM subjects — to the next generation of Americans.

"We want to make sure we're exciting young people around math and science and technology," Obama said. "We don't want our kids to just be consumers of the amazing things that science generates. We want them to be producers as well."

Follow Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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'Space Hackers' Take On Citizen Science for Suborbital Spaceflight

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The increasing demand for flying experiments in space was clearly in evidence over the weekend as a standing room only crowd of 100 people packed into a room here at the Hacker Dojo to hear about a new era of citizen science.

The attendees came to the first-ever Space Hacker Workshop on Saturday and Sunday (May 4 and 5) to learn about how they could build and fly experiments on a new generation of manned suborbital vehicles such as XCOR Aerospace's Lynx space plane.

The event, which was sponsored by the Silicon Valley Space Center and Citizens in Space, attracted high-school and college students, university professors, space professionals, scientists, technology experts and others interested in this emerging field. [The Top 10 Private Spaceships]

New reusable vehicles slated to come online soon will provide affordable and repeated access to space for professional and amateur scientists and help to revolutionize microgravity research and science education, said Citizens in Space founder Ed Wright.

"With the suborbital vehicles being developed...there's going to be an opportunity to fly many thousands of small payloads on suborbital vehicles every year," Wright said.

Citizen space scientists

Citizens in Space is a program run by Wright's Texas-based organization, the U.S. Rocket Academy, which has purchased 10 flights aboard the two-seat Lynx just for research. Ten lucky citizen scientists will get to fly in the passenger seat of the vehicle and operate the experiments that they have designed and built. Five of those slots already have been filled.

So, just how cheap will it be to fly experiments in space? Wright said that while a typical tiny CubeSat might cost between $3,000 and $5,000 to build and another $100,000 or more to launch into orbit, developing and flying scientific payloads aboard the Lynx will be many orders of magnitude cheaper.

"At the base level, you're going to have people who are able to build an experiment for $200 or less and have an opportunity to fly in space through programs such as Citizens in Space, and I think this is just going to change everything," Wright said.

"We may reach the point in five or 10 years where every high school science major will have the opportunity to build and fly a payload in space during the course of his academic career before he graduates,” he added.

The development of suborbital vehicles such as the Lynx and Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is coming at a time when maker spaces are popping up all over the country. Wright said these joint work spaces are perfect places for people to build the types of do-it-yourself science experiments that Citizens in Space wants to fly.

Wright's academy is developing the Lynx Cub Payload Carrier, a unit that can hold up to a dozen small experiments in a space behind the pilot's seat. The carrier will give XCOR the ability to fly space tourists in the passenger's seat while also carrying scientific experiments as secondary payloads.

A seat on Lynx costs $95,000, while a ticket to fly on SpaceShipTwo — which last week made its first-ever powered test flight — will set you back $200,000 at the moment. (Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson said recently that ticket prices would soon temporarily rise to $250,000.) [Photos of SpaceShipTwo's Test Flights]

A range of experiments

Four XCOR employees traveled 300 miles (500 kilometers) north from the town of Mojave, where they are building the first Lynx, to address the Space Hacker audience and answer questions.

Khaki Rodway, XCOR's director of payload sales and operations, gave an overview of Lynx's capabilities and a progress update on the assembly of the first vehicle, which could fly by the end of this year.

"We're doing it because there's lots of stuff to do," Rodway said of the emerging market for experiments.

During the two-day workshop, participants heard talks about the experiments that will be carried out in the microgravity environment and vacuum of space. These experiments will range across many different fields, including materials processing, fluid dynamics, life sciences, protein crystal growth and technology demonstrations.

NASA astronaut Yvonne Cagle talked about sending odd "water bears" into space. Water bears, also known as tardigrades, are tiny organisms that are virtually impervious to heat, radiation and vacuum conditions. Cagle believes that by studying water bears, scientists can learn a great deal about how to help humans adapt to space.

Jason Reimuller, president of the company Integrated Spaceflight Services, told the audience about his Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere (PoSSUM) campaign, which will use a Lynx to study the dynamics of clouds over the North Pole. The vehicle will operate out of a high-altitude spaceport in either Alaska or Sweden, Reimuller said.

Ryan Gillespie, an aerospace engineer from Sunnyvale, Calif., said he is interested in pursuing Citizens in Space's High Altitude Astrobiology Challenge, which is offering cash prizes of up to $10,000 for the development of a device that will collect micro-organisms living at the edge of space.

“I'm not so much interested in the $10,000 — it's more the fact that when you come up with anything, it needs a purpose," Gillespie said. "Here's something that actually has a purpose for mankind."

Driving technology forward

Richard Mains of Mains Associates, who works with the NASA Flight Opportunities Program that funds experiments on suborbital vehicles, said these new spaceships are driving technology development at a much faster rate than traditional NASA programs tend to do.

"I think what's actually going on here with these reusable suborbital launch vehicles is kind of a whole new paradigm where you're not putting a payload up on the space station for six months," Mains said.  "And these vehicles aren't that big. But they are flying very often, So these payloads now have to be small, smart, autonomous — very very easy to kind of activate and deactivate, reprogram, get data out of."

 "I see all of that driving technology in a very, very interesting fashion," Mains added, mentioning the emergence of open-source platforms as another powerful driver. "So I'm very excited about what I've heard here."

Silicon Valley was a perfect location to hold the workshop given that it's at the leading edge of technology development, Mains said.

Wright said he was extremely pleased with the workshop, which sold all of its 95 tickets and had a waiting list on Saturday morning.

"I think it's gone very well," Wright said. "It's really been a great turnout. It's been very exciting for everyone here. The people from the NASA Flight Opportunities program were very excited about this. XCOR was very excited about this."

Wright says he hopes to conduct five or six additional workshops in cities across the country over the next year.

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Dark and Dirty: The Cutthroat Side of Science

NEW YORK — Being a scientist is a noble profession, but it has its darker side. From fierce competition to plagiarism to outright scientific fraud, scientists are far from immune to the sordid.

A panel of experts discussed the slimy side of science at an event held here on April 30 at the New York Academy of Sciences and moderated by "Scientific American" Editor-in-Chief Mariette DiChristina.

Dr. Morton Meyers, professor and emeritus chairman of the department of radiology at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook, recounted historical conflicts over the Nobel Prize; Harold "Skip" Garner, a professor at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, described wholesale plagiarism in scientific literature; and Dr. Ivan Oransky, executive editor of Reuters Health, delved into the slippery world of retracted studies. 

Scientists "are people who have ambition and envy and jealousy, just as you and I do," Meyers said at the event. It's "interesting to lift the veil on scientific discovery to trace the human elements that underlie many of these things." [7 Personality Traits You Should Change]

Battle for recognition

As most humans do, scientists seek recognition for their efforts, and nowhere are the stakes higher than for that pinnacle of scientific honor: the Nobel Prize. Meyers' new book, "Prize Fight: The Race and the Rivalry to be the First in Science" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) deals with some of the great conflicts over priority and credit in the Nobels.

One such conflict involved the inventor and biochemist Selman Waksman and his then-graduate student Albert Schatz. Waksman and Schatz were studying antibiotics found in the soil when they came across streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. The two patented and published their research. Schatz was listed as first author on the paper but second on the patent.

Waksman was awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery of streptomycin in 1952, prompting Schatz to sue Waksman for a share of the credit and the patent royalties. Schatz won a settlement, but was blacklisted from getting a job and faced major struggles for the rest of his career. [Top 10 Mad Scientists]

"Both were right, and both were wrong," Meyers said. The story illustrates the gray area of apportioning credit in a supervisor-graduate-student collaboration. But in other cases, it is more black and white who deserves the credit.

'Borrowed' work

Scientists are usually fastidious about citing their work, but sometimes the pressures to publish become too great. With success in academia tied to scientific output, it's not surprising that some researchers stray into plagiarism.

Garner found such plagiarism while developing software to search the Web for paragraphs of text in order to track down scientific studies. In doing so, he inadvertently stumbled upon a plethora of results that "were virtually identical but had author sets that were nonoverlapping," Garner said. In other words, the papers were "borrowed" and republished by other scientists without the correct attribution.

Garner ran his program on a supercomputer, comparing the texts of tens of millions of scientific articles. From the results, he created the "Déjà Vu Database," containing about 80,000 pairs of papers that were more similar than mere chance would allow. About 10 percent of these appeared to have two sets of authors, so Garner sent questionnaires to the authors, asking them to explain the duplication.

"Ninety-five percent of the original authors were unaware of being ripped off," Garner said. About one-third of the copiers said they didn't think the practice was wrong, another third apologized and the rest made excuses, such as not knowing they were an author.

Some pretty prominent people were among the copiers, including the chairman of the clinical department of a prominent university in Boston, and a former vice president of Iran, Garner said. He even received mortal threats from the Iranian VP.

Garner has developed similar technology to detect instances of fraud, such as applying for multiple grants for one study. In biomedicine, such "double-dipping" accounts for $200 million to $300 million in government spending, Garner estimated. Ultimately, Garner hopes the government will make use of this software to prevent this kind of malfeasance.

Retract that

But it doesn't always stop with copying. In some cases, individuals stray into the realm of fabrication.

The number of scientific retractions — statements that a scientific study should not have been published because its data or conclusions are erroneous, plagiarized or made up —  has been growing steadily in recent years, at a rate that outstrips the increase in studies.

Oransky and Adam Marcus, managing editor of "Anethesiology News," run a blog called Retraction Watch. They started the blog because they wanted to shine a light on retractions. Some retractions are the result of minor mistakes, but all too frequently, foul play is involved.

Some scientists are repeat offenders. Take the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, who has been in the news recently for committing academic fraud in several dozen published papers.

Then there's the Japanese scientist Yoshitaka Fujii, who has had 183 papers retracted, Oransky said. Or the South Korean plant scientist Hyung-In Moon, who faked other scientists' email addresses so he could review his own papers.

It was once thought that misconduct was behind fewer than half of retractions, but it turns out to be responsible for two-thirds of them, Oransky said. The problem is compounded by the fact that retracted papers remain in scientific-article databases, so people continue to read and cite them.

In light of all these problems, science loses some of its luster. But as in any profession, it's important to remember that "scientists are humans, too," Garner said.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Science of 'Protein Origami' Unfolds

There's now a way to make "protein origami" — self-assembling shapes made of twisted molecular strands— a new study reveals.

The technology builds upon the advances of DNA origami, a technique that has been used to build box shapes, DNA scissors and other materials. Now, bioengineers have produced a single-stranded coil of protein that spontaneously sprang into a pyramid shape. While just an early demonstration, the technique could someday be used to make vehicles for drug delivery or to catalyze reactions.

"It is a piece of great work in the field of programmed biomacromolecular self-assembly," said chemist Chengde Mao of Purdue University in Indiana, who was not involved in the study. "The beauty of the strategy is its simplicity." [Biomimicry: 7 Clever Technologies Inspired by Nature]

Proteins are the molecular building blocks that carry out a host of vital functions in cells. They are composed of long chains known as polypeptides, which coil and fold to form complex 3D structures.

The idea with protein origami is to create rigid segments that can self-assemble in a modular fashion, like LEGO bricks. The segments are "smart" materials, because they contain all the information for the final structure inside them.

For the bricks, researchers designed well-studied structures called "coiled-coil segments" — a combination of two or more helices that intertwine. They then made a chain of 12 of these segments stitched together on flexible hinges, which self-assembled into a pyramidlike shape known as a tetrahedron. Each edge of the tetrahedron was bounded by two of the segments.

"The shape is completely different from anything natural," said senior study author Roman Jerala, a synthetic biologist at the National Institute of Chemistry in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Jerala and his colleagues confirmed the tetrahedron's formation using several kinds of microscopy. Each tetrahedron was only about 5 nanometers on an edge, about one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair.

Right now, it's just a proof of principle, Jerala told LiveScience. But ultimately, protein origami could be used to encapsulate drugs, for instance, to allow their controlled release. Or these structures could act as catalysts for reactions, much like enzymes in living cells.

Creating similar shapes using DNA origami is cheaper and easier to handle than proteins, said Paul Rothemund of Caltech, who was not involved in the study. But protein origami lets you make them much finer. "Making structures out of DNA is like building molecular structures out of DUPLO blocks [giant LEGOs]," Rothemund said, but  "working with proteins, on the other hand, is sort of like working with adult LEGOs — they have a much smaller intrinsic resolution."

Scientists have created small objects out of proteins before, but these had to be symmetrical shapes, Jerala said. Using protein origami, "we can take natural elements and do something completely different that does not exist in nature," Jerala said. "Nature just didn’t explore all the possibilities."

The findings were detailed today (April 28) in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitterand Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Has Science Cured Gray Hair?

Gray hair — one of the classic signs of aging that can lead to a midlife crisis for some — may some day be a thing of the past, much to the chagrin of hair-dye manufacturers and Corvette salesmen.

A team of European researchers claims to have found not only the root cause of gray hair, but also a treatment for the condition. Additionally, their treatment may help people with vitiligo, a condition that causes the loss of pigment in patches of skin, they say.

It's been known for years that hair turns gray due to a natural buildup of hydrogen peroxide in hair follicles, which causes oxidative stress and graying. (Hydrogen peroxide solutions have been used for years as a cheap and easy way to "go blonde.") [8 Tips for Healthy Aging]

In younger people, an enzyme called catalase breaks down hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen. But lower levels of this enzyme, combined with lower levels of enzymes called MSR A and B that repair hydrogen peroxide damage, cause hair to turn gray as people age.

The researchers, whose findings are published in the experimental-biology publication FASEB Journal, analyzed 2,411 people with vitiligo.

By looking at people with two different kinds of vitiligo — strictly segmental vitiligo (SSV) and non-segmental vitiligo (NSV) — they discovered that both kinds resulted from oxidative stress.

And by applying a topical treatment, a substance called PC-KUS, the researchers successfully treated the discolored skin and eyelashes of people with vitiligo.

Though gray hair isn't always a welcome sign of aging, some evidence suggests it can be an indicator of good health.

Researchers in 2012 found that wild boars with significant graying hair "were actually those in prime condition and with the lowest levels of oxidative damage," researcher Ismael Galván of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Spain said in a statement.

"Far from being a sign of age-related decline, hair graying seems to indicate good condition in wild boars," Galván said.

Nonetheless, many people will go to extreme lengths to hide any hint of aging, including gray hair.

"For generations, numerous remedies have been concocted to hide gray hair," Dr. Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of FASEB Journal, said in a statement. "But now, for the first time, an actual treatment that gets to the root of the problem has been developed."

The treatment will be welcome news to people with severe or unsightly cases of vitiligo. "This condition, while technically cosmetic, can have serious socio-emotional effects," Weissmann said. "Developing an effective treatment … has the potential to radically improve many people's lives."

Follow Marc Lallanilla on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Obama Praises Mars Rovers, US Science in Speech

Intrepid rovers on Mars responsible for major scientific discoveries on the Red Planet exemplify what is "best in us," President Barack Obama said today (April 29).

Obama made the remarks during an address to the National Academy of Sciences that marked the organization's 150th anniversary. In the speech, Obama expressed his support for the sciences as a fundamental part of American life in today's world.

"Today, all around the country, scientists like you are developing therapies to regenerate damaged organs, creating new devices to enable brain controlled prosthetic limbs, and sending sophisticated robots into space to search for signs of past life on Mars," Obama said during his address. "That sense of wonder and that sense of discovery, it has practical applications but it also nurtures what I believe is best in us."

Achieving those research goals takes funding, something that the sciences are somewhat short on according to Obama.

"What we produce here ends up having benefits worldwide," Obama said. "We should be reaching for a level of private and public research and development investment that we haven't seen since the height of the space race. That's my goal."

At the moment, however, the sequester — sweeping budget cuts that are expected to hamper scientific research — could make those goals harder to achieve, Obama said.

"It's hitting our scientific research," Obama said. "Instead of racing ahead … our scientists are left wondering if they'll be able to start any new research projects at all, which means we could lose a year, two years, of scientific research."

Many planetary scientists have already come out against NASA's 2014 budget proposal. The new document cuts funding from the space agency by $50 million but advocates say that the new budget, if approved by Congress, represents a $268 million cut from planetary sciences funding.

Hope for the sciences is not lost, Obama added. The next generation of potential scientists gives him hope for the future of the country.

"We don't want our kids to just be consumers of the amazing things that science generates," Obama said. "We want them to be producers as well."

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter and Google+. Follow us on Twitter, Facebookand Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.

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Special Report: How vaccine scares cast shadows over science

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent

HELSINKI (Reuters) - At a Finnish medical convention in January 2011, a colleague approached neurologist Markku Partinen, laid a hand on his shoulder and said: "Markku, it's going to be a bad year for you."

In the following months, other scientists ridiculed him, questioned his methods and motives, and raised doubts about his mental stability. Colleagues began crossing the street to avoid him, he says.

Partinen, director of the Helsinki Sleep Clinic and Research Centre, had raised the alarm about a GlaxoSmithKline vaccine called Pandemrix. He had discovered the drug, used to protect people from H1N1 swine flu, may be linked to a jump in cases of narcolepsy, a rare sleep disorder, in children and young people. He knew his findings might help limit the risks of narcolepsy for other children around the world, but was fearful nonetheless. The work was bound to generate scientific suspicion and public anxiety. Indeed, he struggled to get his paper on the vaccine published.

His story underscores an increasingly tough challenge for scientists balancing compelling data with public concern over vaccines and their side effects. Treatments which stimulate immunity to disease are highly controversial. In the past couple of decades - especially after a British doctor made now-discredited claims linking the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism - the field has become even more charged. After the false alarm sounded by British doctor Andrew Wakefield, some scientists say they are more hesitant to credit reports of potential side effects from vaccines.

Wakefield's 1998 paper suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism was debunked after repeated scientific studies found no such connection, and was retracted by The Lancet medical journal in 2010. In that year, Wakefield was also struck off Britain's medical register by the General Medical Council for repeatedly breaching "fundamental principles" of research medicine, and he is no longer licensed to work in the UK as a doctor. But he still has thousands of passionate followers, especially in the United States, who question the use of any vaccine and applaud any new evidence that vaccines have unintended consequences.

"Wakefield has done so much damage. We've seen it with all these anti-vaccine people, and now we also see the damage he has done to science," Partinen said.

Partinen's findings have now been replicated and confirmed by at least four independent teams of international scientists. Studies in Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Norway and Britain have also shown the risk of developing narcolepsy is between seven and 13 times higher in children who were immunized with Pandemrix than in those who were not. European drug regulators have recommended the vaccine no longer be used in anyone under 20.

GlaxoSmithKline acknowledges the statistical association, but alongside many more research teams around the world, the company is investigating what might cause the link.

Emmanuel Mignot, a psychiatrist and narcolepsy expert at Stanford University in the United States, is being funded by GSK to investigate further. He says scientists now face a dilemma: even when you publish sound scientific findings, you could attract criticism "like Wakefield", he says.

"And at the same time, I really feel strongly that there's nothing worse than to suppress information - that's how you create paranoia in the public."

Wakefield, who now lives in Austin, Texas, told Reuters he stands by his 1998 Lancet paper. He also says he was the subject of "false allegations" in a subsequent investigation by the British Medical Journal and denies his research was fraudulent. A defamation lawsuit he took out in Texas against the British Medical Journal, its editor Fiona Godlee and writer Brian Deer was dismissed last year when the court said it did not have jurisdiction. Wakefield is appealing that decision.

Godlee said Deer and the BMJ stand by their reporting and their editorial commentary on the Wakefield case "and we believe that Dr. Wakefield's claims are meritless." She described his latest legal challenge as "frivolous" and "yet another instance of him trying to use litigation to harass and silence his critics."

ANTI-VAXXERS

Vaccines have been controversial almost since they were invented in the late 18th century. When British physician Edward Jenner showed he could protect children from smallpox if he infected them with cowpox, the objectors included clergy who believed vaccination was not Christian because it came from an animal.

Today, most doctors and scientists view the technique as one of the greatest breakthroughs in modern medicine. No other medical intervention has done more to save lives and fight disease.

Yet over the past couple of decades, a growing number of people have again become suspicious. The MMR scare "created a sense of fear of vaccines that has extended well beyond autism to a general fear that we're just giving too many vaccines too soon," says Paul Offit, an American pediatrician and vaccine scientist who blasted Wakefield in his book, "Autism's False Prophets."

Wakefield's dedicated following in the anti-vaccination movement - "anti-vaxxers" for short - believe all vaccines are dangerous and should be avoided. For example, Idaho-based group Vaccination Liberation declares on its website that "vaccines are toxic" and that there is no proof vaccinations are safe or effective. It says Wakefield was subjected to a "chain of persecution" and a "witch hunt."

Partinen rejects any comparison between himself and the man who sparked the MMR-autism scandal, calling Wakefield a "fake".

At a medical center on the outskirts of Helsinki, another Finnish scientist agrees with Partinen's results and is probing the mechanics of the Pandemrix-narcolepsy link, which she thinks may have to do with the vaccine's super-charging effect on the immune system.

Outi Vaarala previously worked in research on autoimmune diseases and diabetes. Since crossing over into the field of vaccinology, she says she has found herself harangued in emails and phone calls by people on one side accusing her of undermining trust in vaccines, or on the other begging her to join an anti-vaccine crusade.

"There's not the kind of open discussion we used to have. You're afraid you will lose your whole career if you say something bad," says Vaarala. "When you're dealing with vaccine it suddenly becomes like working in politics, or religion."

"SERVES YOU RIGHT"

For the parents of Swedish teenager Emelie Olsson, the row over vaccines complicates their struggle to come to terms with all that has happened to their family in the past few years.

Emelie is one of at least 800 people across Europe who developed narcolepsy, an incurable, life-long sleep disorder, after having the Pandemrix shot. In total, 30 million doses of the shot were given to people in 47 countries during the 2009/2010 H1N1 swine flu pandemic. It was not used in the United States.

An engaging 14-year-old, Emelie used to enjoy singing in a choir, taking tennis lessons, playing piano and kicking about with her friends. She now struggles to stay awake during the day and battles with terrors and hallucinations that deprive her of sleep and make her scream out in the night.

Her parents, Marie and Charles, still believe children should be vaccinated against diseases that put their lives at risk. The anti-vaccination movement denounces their views.

A blog post on the website "CureZone", which says it is dedicated to "educating instead of medicating", seeks to use Emelie's story as a "cautionary tale" against all flu vaccines. "Don't be fooled. Don't be brainwashed," says the post, by a blogger named "befurther". "Don't end up like Emelie and her parents."

Charles Olsson says some anti-vaccine campaigners have told him in comments online that he is to blame for Emelie's condition because he should not have allowed her to have the flu vaccine. "They even tell you: 'It serves you right,'" he said in their Stockholm apartment on a dark and snowy winter's afternoon.

He cites one post in Swedish on a Facebook page about vaccination where he was discussing what had happened to Emelie. A contributor called Peter W wrote: "Everyone is directly responsible for the vaccines that they take, parents as well, when recommending shooting poison into their newborn babies."

Marie says it feels uncomfortable that "we, people who are in favor of vaccines, have almost become marketing tools for the anti-vaccine movement."

BALANCING RISKS

Offit, the American pediatrician, says one reason the vaccine debate is so polarized is that people find it hard to balance risks. He helped invent a shot against rotavirus, a diarrheal disease that kills hundreds of thousands of children a year in poor countries.

Even at his state-of-the-art Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, he sees children die of diseases that could be prevented through immunization.

During the 2009/2010 pandemic, he saw five children die of H1N1 flu and saw parents baffled and crushed with grief.

"All those children's parents had chosen not to vaccinate them, and all of them said, 'I can't believe this happened to me,'" he told Reuters. "Vaccines are medical products. They have a benefit and - like any product that has a benefit - they could also have a risk. But from the public's standpoint it's difficult. For them, any risk is a bad thing."

Offit says he's had hate mail and death threats, and needed an armed guard at meetings at the CDC during the years he has spent arguing against the anti-vaccination movement.

Vaccination rates, which fell after the MMR scare, have now recovered. But millions of children were unvaccinated, which scientists say explains why some diseases that were nearly eradicated in wealthy countries have rebounded.

Last year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported an outbreak of whooping cough in the United States that was the most severe in more than half a century.

Hitting an 18-year high, there were 2,016 cases of measles in England and Wales in 2012, according to the UK Health Protection Agency, the highest annual total since 1994.

BIG PROBLEMS

Partinen attended another Helsinki medical conference last month, two years after he had been warned about difficult times ahead. But this time he was leading the first Nordic Symposium on Narcolepsy and its links to the H1N1 swine flu vaccine.

"When we found this, we wanted to publish our results and spread the news to the world because we knew Pandemrix was also being used in other countries," he said. "But there were big problems."

Having double- and triple-checked his findings, Partinen approached the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the world's most respected medical journals, and submitted his study for publication. He says the journal asked for several revisions to the paper, then finally declined to accept it.

"After that we sent it to The Lancet," he said, stressing that this was the same journal which published the now discredited Wakefield paper.

While it is not unusual for such high-level medical journals to reject many papers, Partinen said he was shocked by the strength of The Lancet's resistance to his.

"It was quite exceptional, they asked for revision and revision and revision," Partinen said. "Then they said they'd made an editorial decision - that they couldn't publish it because we didn't know the (biological) mechanism (behind the link between narcolepsy and Pandemrix)."

Partinen argues that scientists don't know the biological mechanisms behind a whole host of diseases - multiple sclerosis and diabetes to name just two - yet The Lancet is full of peer-reviewed papers about those.

Neither The Lancet nor the New England Medical Journal would comment on their editorial decisions.

By the time Partinen's study was published - March 2012, in the open-access journal of the Public Library of Science, PLoS One - many more scientists had replicated his findings, the H1N1 flu pandemic that Pandemrix was designed to protect against had been declared over, and the vaccine's use had been restricted.

For those with narcolepsy it was already too late.

"There is no doubt any more that there is a link," Partinen said. "But it's taken three years to get here."

(This story has been refiled to add a dropped word in the first paragraph)

(Edited by Simon Robinson and Sara Ledwith)

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Supreme Court Prop. 8 Arguments Focus on Sex, Science

The U.S. Supreme Court heard 60 minutes of oral arguments in Hollyingsworth v. Perry, a case involving California's Proposition 8, on Tuesday (March 26), touching on issues of legal standing, sex and science.

Proposition 8 was a 2008 ballot initiative that reversed an earlier California Supreme Court decision allowing gays and lesbians to wed in the state. A federal district court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals both overturned Proposition 8 as unconstitutional, on the basis that it took away a right once held by the state's gay and lesbian minority. However, same-sex marriage has been on hold in California as the case has made its way to the Supreme Court.

The justices first grilled the lawyer representing Proposition 8, Charles Cooper, on whether his clients have legal standing to pursue the case. The state of California itself is not defending Proposition 8, and the job has been taken over by a group called ProtectMarriage.com, led by Dennis Hollingsworth.

The anti-Proposition 8 case, represented by lawyer Theodore Olson, is brought by Kristin Perry, a lesbian denied a marriage license in California in 2009.

Scientific arguments

After hearing arguments on the legal standing issue, justices quizzed Cooper on whether same-sex marriage could cause any harm, with the lawyer arguing that same-sex marriages are too new to know for sure.

"I think it better for California to hit the pause button and await additional information from the jurisdictions where this experiment is still maturing," Cooper said, speaking for a hypothetical California voter.

Justice Antonin Scalia then stepped in to offer a concrete possibility for harm.

"I don't know why you don't mention some concrete things," he said, according to a court transcript. "If you redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, you must — you must permit adoption by same-sex couples, andthere's -­ there's considerable disagreement among -- among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a — in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not." [5 Scientific Reasons Gay Parents Are Awesome]

Sociologists and psychologists have only recently begun investigating the effects of same-sex parenting on children. Early results are based on small studies, but these studies have failed to find any major red flags. In one 2010 study that combined data from 80 different research projects, for example, children of lesbian parents had similar levels of academic achievement and well-being compared with kids of straight parents. California currently allows gay couples to adopt.

Much of the debate circled around the needs of children and the importance of procreation to the state's interest in marriage. In one exchange, Justice Elena Kagan asked whether it would be constitutional to prevent couples over the age of 55 from marrying, given that they would not be procreating.

"Your Honor, even with respect to couples over the age of 55, it is very rare that both couples, both parties to the couple are infertile, and the traditional -" Cooper began, before being interrupted by laughter.

"I can just assure you, if both the woman and the man are over the age of 55, there are not a lot of children coming out of that marriage," Kagan shot back. [See full transcript of the Prop. 8 arguments]

For and against

The arguments pitted two different worldviews against one another. Cooper summed up the pro-Proposition 8 side, saying "The concern is that redefining marriage as a genderless institution will sever its abiding connection to its historic traditional procreative purpose, and it will refocus, refocus the purpose of marriage and the definition of marriage away from the raising of children and to the emotional needs and desires of adults."

Meanwhile, Olson argued that Proposition 8 "walls off gays and lesbians from marriage, the most important relation in life, according to this Court, thus stigmatizing a class of Californians based upon their status and labeling their most cherished relationships as second-rate, different, unequal and not okay."

The justices have a wide range of options in the Proposition 8 case, from ruling that the proposition's supporters have no standing to ruling on whether marriage is or is not a fundamental right guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. In the former case, same-sex marriages in California would likely resume, but the ruling would not affect other states. The latter decision would have national ramifications.

The Court could also decide that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional on the technicality that California allows same-sex unions for gay couples and marriage for straight couples. This, the Court could decide, sets up an unconstitutional situation of "separate but equal" that violates the 14th Amendment. Such a ruling would affect only California and other states that allow civil unions but prohibit gay marriage.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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