The Great Debate: The Storytelling of Science (Part 1/2)

The Origins Project at ASU presents the final night in the Origins Stories weekend, focusing on the science of storytelling and the storytelling of science. The Storytelling of Science features a panel of esteemed scientists, public intellectuals, and award-winning writers including well-known science educator Bill Nye, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, theoretical physicist Brian Greene, Science Friday’s Ira Flatow, popular science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, executive director of the World Science Festival Tracy Day, and Origins Project director Lawrence Krauss as they discuss the stories behind cutting edge science from the origin of the universe to a discussion of exciting technologies that will change our future. They demonstrate how to convey the excitement of science and the importance helping promote a public understanding of science.

Video by Black Chalk Productions

climateadaptation:

Whoa! Number 8 is making my mind doooo thinnnngs.
contemplatingmadness:

10 Science Experiments That Looked Like the End of the World
It’s official: The Large Hadron Collider helped to find a new particle, and it didn’t turn the world inside out. Everybody relax! But history is full of strange experiments that people predicted might bring about the end of the human race… and in some cases, they might actually have had a point.
Here are 10 scientific experiments that people believed — rightly or wrongly — had the potential to wipe out humanity.
10. Digging the Kola Superdeep BoreholeInitiated in 1970, this Soviet science experiment sought to drill as deep as possibleinto the Earth’s crust. The borehole on theKola Peninsula dug to a depth of 12 kilometers into the planet’s crust by 1994.
While the Soviets did not encounter the Mole Man during digging, drilling a deep hole into the Earth’s crust (which varies from 30 to 50 kilometers in thickness) could have unleashed seismic forces that nobody could control, much like in the Doctor Who story “Inferno,” which aired that same year.

9. New Zealand’s Tsunami BombKnown more for a connection to the Shire than innovation in weapons creation, New Zealand experimented with the use of bombs to create artificial tsunamis, between 1944 and 1945.
By strategically placing bombs, the military scientists behind New Zealand’s Project Seal believed they could divert explosive energy through water, causing tsunamis and tidal waves. After thousands of test explosions, New Zealand ceased experimentation, because military scientists kept having trouble with funneling the explosive energy in a horizontal direction. If New Zealand’s tsunami bomb experiments had been successful, tsunami creation could have gone mainstream — allowing anyone with a conventional explosive device to create widespread chaos and death with ease.
8. Operation CirrusIn the late 1940s, the United States attempted to divert the path of hurricanes by seeding the storms with dry ice. After scientists poured 180 pounds of dry ice into a hurricane moving east into the Atlantic Ocean, the hurricane made an extremely unpredictable move — and changed directions. The hurricane collided with the town of Savannah, Georgia — no stranger to unusual government intrusions , killing at least one person and causing over $200 million in damage.
This early weather-changing experiment eventually led to the UN’s Environmental Modification Convention, banning weather changing experiments conducted as a means of war.
7. Project Mercury and VolcanoFrom 1987 to 1992, the Russian military detonated nuclear weapons underground, with the goal of disturbing tectonic plates and electromagnetic fields as a weapon, in Project Mercury and Project Volcano.
These experiments sound like the basis for a bad James Bond movie, but four experimental attempts actually happened — until the 1978 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques banning experiments of this nature. Extended disruption of tectonic plates could cause a series of severe earthquakes and destabilize electromagnetic fields, leading to a number of theoretical and unforeseen issues.
6. Genetically engineered oil-eating superbugsIn the mid-1970s, General Electric R&D scientist Ananda Chakrabarty introduced a plasmidthat allowed the bacteria Pseudomonas putida to digest petroleum. Chakrabarty designed the bacteria with the hope that it would be used to clean up oil spills. But many people were terrified that these engineered bacteria could run amuck, consume everything in their path, and “out-compete” other bacteria and organisms for survival on Earth. The bacterial dominance theory is a “green” precursor to the grey goo theory — and it might be a more likely possibly.
5. Accidentally creating a black holeBefore the opening of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York, public fears amassed over the idea of the RHIC creating an uncontrollable black hole during the course course of its operation. This lead to aplethora of sensational articles in 1999, topped off by a story from the The Sunday Times of London running with the headline “Big Bang machine could destroy Earth.”
The researchers at RHIC study aspects of black holes, but they lack the energy available to create a real gravitational black hole. Whether or not the researchers crossed their fingers when they began experiments at RHIC in 2000 is another story, but as far as I know, we still exist and are not suffering the extreme relativistic effects of a journey through a black hole.
4. U.S. experiments increasing the efficiency of Magnaporthe griseaWheat blast and rice blast cause huge damage to world crops, but they’re rare in First World countries. The fungusMagnaporthe grisea leaves lesions on individual plants, that can release thousands of spores and contaminate an enormous area in a single night. The fungus exists in over 80 countries, and it entered the United States in 1996.
During the Cold War, the United States experimented with a weaponized form ofMagnaporthe grisea, which could spread via a spray — or via bombs. Nobody knows whether the U.S. intentionally used the weaponized form, but if these “contagious” crop diseases started spreading uncontrollably, two of the world’s most vital crops would be devastated, causing a worldwide famine.
3. Starfish PrimeDetonating a nuclear weapon outside of the planet’s magnetic field just sounds like a bad idea, but the United States decided to go ahead and detonate six nuclear weapons at high altitude, during 1962’s Starfish Prime(and Operation Fishbowl).
How did this nuclear explosion affect the Earth’s magnetic field? Luckily, the magnetic field “snapped back” into place — causing a strong electromagnetic pulse as a side effect. But if our geomagnetic field had been permanently altered, we could experience a loss protection from cosmic rays and solar winds, along with massive earthquakes, as the continents moved around.

2. Weaponizing the plagueThe Plague was responsible for killing up to 60% of the population of Europe in the 14th Century — and then, the Soviet All-Union Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations succeeded in weaponizing it in the late 1980s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, program director Vladimir Pasechnik went public with this research, which included military preparations to load warheads with a time-released version of the Black Death. In order to handle the plague, the Soviet program encased a powdered form of bacterial agent, Yersinia pestis, in a polymer capsule.
1. The Trinity nuclear testIn the days preceding the detonation of the first nuclear bomb, scientists within the Manhattan Project debated what would happen in the aftermath of detonation, with a few scientists believing the bomb would not explode at all.
Enrico Fermi, however, suggested the detonation of the bomb could create a chain reaction that would set the Earth’s atmosphere ablaze and kill almost all life on the planet. It is disturbing to realize that scientists would go forward, in light of the ruminations of a Nobel Prize winner — but thank goodness, Fermi hypothesized incorrectly.

Whoa! Number 8 is making my mind doooo thinnnngs.

contemplatingmadness:

10 Science Experiments That Looked Like the End of the World

It’s official: The Large Hadron Collider helped to find a new particle, and it didn’t turn the world inside out. Everybody relax! But history is full of strange experiments that people predicted might bring about the end of the human race… and in some cases, they might actually have had a point.

Here are 10 scientific experiments that people believed — rightly or wrongly — had the potential to wipe out humanity.

10. Digging the Kola Superdeep Borehole
Initiated in 1970, this Soviet science experiment sought to drill as deep as possibleinto the Earth’s crust. The borehole on theKola Peninsula dug to a depth of 12 kilometers into the planet’s crust by 1994.

While the Soviets did not encounter the Mole Man during digging, drilling a deep hole into the Earth’s crust (which varies from 30 to 50 kilometers in thickness) could have unleashed seismic forces that nobody could control, much like in the Doctor Who story “Inferno,” which aired that same year.

9. New Zealand’s Tsunami Bomb
Known more for a connection to the Shire than innovation in weapons creation, New Zealand experimented with the use of bombs to create artificial tsunamis, between 1944 and 1945.

By strategically placing bombs, the military scientists behind New Zealand’s Project Seal believed they could divert explosive energy through water, causing tsunamis and tidal waves. After thousands of test explosions, New Zealand ceased experimentation, because military scientists kept having trouble with funneling the explosive energy in a horizontal direction. If New Zealand’s tsunami bomb experiments had been successful, tsunami creation could have gone mainstream — allowing anyone with a conventional explosive device to create widespread chaos and death with ease.

8. Operation Cirrus
In the late 1940s, the United States attempted to divert the path of hurricanes by seeding the storms with dry ice. After scientists poured 180 pounds of dry ice into a hurricane moving east into the Atlantic Ocean, the hurricane made an extremely unpredictable move — and changed directions. The hurricane collided with the town of Savannah, Georgia — no stranger to unusual government intrusions , killing at least one person and causing over $200 million in damage.

This early weather-changing experiment eventually led to the UN’s Environmental Modification Convention, banning weather changing experiments conducted as a means of war.

7. Project Mercury and Volcano
From 1987 to 1992, the Russian military detonated nuclear weapons underground, with the goal of disturbing tectonic plates and electromagnetic fields as a weapon, in Project Mercury and Project Volcano.

These experiments sound like the basis for a bad James Bond movie, but four experimental attempts actually happened — until the 1978 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques banning experiments of this nature. Extended disruption of tectonic plates could cause a series of severe earthquakes and destabilize electromagnetic fields, leading to a number of theoretical and unforeseen issues.

6. Genetically engineered oil-eating superbugs
In the mid-1970s, General Electric R&D scientist Ananda Chakrabarty introduced a plasmidthat allowed the bacteria Pseudomonas putida to digest petroleum. Chakrabarty designed the bacteria with the hope that it would be used to clean up oil spills. But many people were terrified that these engineered bacteria could run amuck, consume everything in their path, and “out-compete” other bacteria and organisms for survival on Earth. The bacterial dominance theory is a “green” precursor to the grey goo theory — and it might be a more likely possibly.

5. Accidentally creating a black hole
Before the opening of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York, public fears amassed over the idea of the RHIC creating an uncontrollable black hole during the course course of its operation. This lead to aplethora of sensational articles in 1999, topped off by a story from the The Sunday Times of London running with the headline “Big Bang machine could destroy Earth.”

The researchers at RHIC study aspects of black holes, but they lack the energy available to create a real gravitational black hole. Whether or not the researchers crossed their fingers when they began experiments at RHIC in 2000 is another story, but as far as I know, we still exist and are not suffering the extreme relativistic effects of a journey through a black hole.

4. U.S. experiments increasing the efficiency of Magnaporthe grisea
Wheat blast and rice blast cause huge damage to world crops, but they’re rare in First World countries. The fungusMagnaporthe grisea leaves lesions on individual plants, that can release thousands of spores and contaminate an enormous area in a single night. The fungus exists in over 80 countries, and it entered the United States in 1996.

During the Cold War, the United States experimented with a weaponized form ofMagnaporthe grisea, which could spread via a spray — or via bombs. Nobody knows whether the U.S. intentionally used the weaponized form, but if these “contagious” crop diseases started spreading uncontrollably, two of the world’s most vital crops would be devastated, causing a worldwide famine.

3. Starfish Prime
Detonating a nuclear weapon outside of the planet’s magnetic field just sounds like a bad idea, but the United States decided to go ahead and detonate six nuclear weapons at high altitude, during 1962’s Starfish Prime(and Operation Fishbowl).

How did this nuclear explosion affect the Earth’s magnetic field? Luckily, the magnetic field “snapped back” into place — causing a strong electromagnetic pulse as a side effect. But if our geomagnetic field had been permanently altered, we could experience a loss protection from cosmic rays and solar winds, along with massive earthquakes, as the continents moved around.

2. Weaponizing the plague
The Plague was responsible for killing up to 60% of the population of Europe in the 14th Century — and then, the Soviet All-Union Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations succeeded in weaponizing it in the late 1980s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, program director Vladimir Pasechnik went public with this research, which included military preparations to load warheads with a time-released version of the Black Death. In order to handle the plague, the Soviet program encased a powdered form of bacterial agent, Yersinia pestis, in a polymer capsule.

1. The Trinity nuclear test
In the days preceding the detonation of the first nuclear bomb, scientists within the Manhattan Project debated what would happen in the aftermath of detonation, with a few scientists believing the bomb would not explode at all.

Enrico Fermi, however, suggested the detonation of the bomb could create a chain reaction that would set the Earth’s atmosphere ablaze and kill almost all life on the planet. It is disturbing to realize that scientists would go forward, in light of the ruminations of a Nobel Prize winner — but thank goodness, Fermi hypothesized incorrectly.

ichthyologist:

aqualoves:

rhamphotheca:

Discovery of a New Deep Chemosynthetic Community

Deepwater Canyons Project Science Team

After several days of lost dives due to bad weather and making dives under difficult conditions, we are today in calm seas exploring an area that was discovered last year during a NOAA mapping cruise. While conducting a seafloor survey, NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer found bubbles coming from the seafloor at a site south and offshore of Norfolk Canyon; they thought these bubbles may indicate a new methane seep site, but they had no way of verifying this idea.

Today, we deployed the Jason remotely operated vehicle (ROV) from the NOAA Ship Ron Brown to 1,600 meters (nearly a mile deep—our deepest dive yet!) to explore the area around those bubbles. After transecting over soft sediment for a short time, we saw some indications that we were getting close to a probable methane seep. These indications included white patches of bacteria on the sediment surface that feed on the methane and sulfides, plus shells of dead mussels, which are the dominant animals of methane seep communities…

(via: NOAA Ocean Explorer)

(photos: Deepwater Canyons 2013 - Pathways to the Abyss, NOAA-OER/BOEM/USGS)

Hydrothermal vents are one of the coolest ecosystems on earth

Hydrothermal vents are one of the hottest ecosystems on earth

lotrproject:

I have spent most of the day writing on the final report for our Bachelor Thesis project in organic chemistry.

One member in our group, Stig, has a chemistry related tumblr you should check out: http://kemistig.tumblr.com/

thenewenlightenmentage:

11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox

Most people take it for granted that we have yet to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Trouble is, the numbers don’t add up. Our Galaxy is so old that every corner of it should have been visited many, many times over by now. No theory to date has satisfactorily explained away this Great Silence, so it’s time to think outside the box. Here are eleven of the weirdest solutions to the Fermi Paradox.

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ikenbot:

Will E.T. Look Like Us?

Evolution helps us imagine what aliens might be like

Side Note: I love these types of discussions, specifically because of their overall implications. The more we learn about how evolution works and where it works and under what conditions the more we see how life, while not always probable still very possible, can grow on other worlds. Think of how limited our technology still is in terms of what we are able to see and how many habitable planets we can currently detect. Now think how exponentially larger that scope of detection would become if its technology continue to progress. I imagine this would also change our minds about how we think evolution evolves elsewhere, how much more diverse it may be, and how often in occurs in the cosmos once the right conditions for life are set. I recommend reading this whole piece especially if you’re well into astronomy, biology, or astrobiology and the topic of evolution occurring elsewhere in the Universe.

Image: Cover art for Carl Sagan’s ‘The Dragons of Eden’

by SciAm’s Michael Shermer

What are the odds that intelligent, technically advanced aliens would look anything like the ones in films, with an emaciated torso and limbs, spindly fingers and a bulbous, bald head with large, almond-shaped eyes? What are the odds that they would even be humanoid? In a YouTube video, produced by Josh Timonen of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, I argue that the chances are close to zero (www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKAXrmkx12g). Richard Dawkins himself made this interesting observation in a private communication after viewing it:

I would agree with [Shermer] in betting against aliens being bipedal primates, and I think the point is worth making, but I think he greatly overestimates the odds against. [University of Cambridge paleontologist] Simon Conway Morris, whose authority is not to be dismissed, thinks it positively likely that aliens would be, in effect, bipedal primates. [Harvard University biologist] Ed Wilson gave at least some time to the speculation that, if it had not been for the end-Cretaceous catastrophe, dinosaurs might have produced something like the attached [referring to paleontologist Dale A. Russell’s illustrated evolutionary projection of how a bipedal dinosaur might have evolved into a reptilian humanoid].

I replied to Dawkins that if something like a smart, technological, bipedal humanoid has a certain level of inevitability because of how evolution unfolds, then it would have happened more than once here. In his 2001 book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright argues that our existence precludes other terrestrial intelligences of our level from arising. But Neandertals were as close as one can get to a counterfactual experiment: they had hundreds of thousands of years to themselves in Europe without our interference and showed nothing like the technological and cultural progress of the modern humans who displaced them. Dawkins’s rejoinder to me is enlightening:

But you are leaping from one extreme to the other. In the film vignette, you implied a quite staggering rarity, so rare that you don’t expect two humanoid life-forms in the entire universe. Now you are … pointing out, correctly, that a certain inevitability would predict that humanoids should have evolved more than once on Earth! So, yes, we can say that humanoids are fairly improbable, but not necessarily all that improbable! Anything approaching “a certain inevitability” would mean millions or even billions of humanoid life-forms in the universe, simply because the number of available planets is so huge. Now, my guess is intermediate between your two extremes … I suspect that humanoids are not so very rare as to justify the statistical superlatives that you permitted yourself in the vignette.

Good point. But of the 60 to 80 phyla of animals, only one, the chordates, led to intelligence, and only the vertebrates actually developed it. Of all the vertebrates, only mammals evolved brains big enough for higher intelligence. And of the 24 orders of mammals only one—ours, the primates—has technological intelligence. As the late Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr concluded: “Nothing demonstrates the improbability of the origin of high intelligence better than the millions of phyletic lineages that failed to achieve it.” In fact, Mayr calculated that even though there have evolved perhaps as many as 50 billion species on Earth, “only one of these achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization.”

The late astronomer Carl Sagan, in a Planetary Society debate with Mayr (Bioastronomy News, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1995), noted that technologically communicating species “may live on the land or in the sea or air. They may have unimaginable chemistries, shapes, sizes, colors, appendages and opinions. We are not requiring that they follow the particular route that led to the evolution of humans. There may be many different evolutionary pathways, each unlikely, but the sum of the number of pathways to intelligence may nevertheless be quite substantial.”

Thus, the probability of intelligent life evolving elsewhere in the cosmos may be very high even while the odds of it being humanoid may be very low. I strongly suspect that we are blinded by Protagoras’ bias (“Man is the measure of all things”) when we project ourselves into the alien Other.

thenewenlightenmentage:

DNA’s double helix discovery turns 60 – how monumental is it, really?

In April 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson published an unassuming one-page research paper with a finding many claimed would “revolutionize biological research”: the double helical structure of DNA. But how revolutionary has the discovery been, really?

Continue Reading

Laboratory Equipment: NASA to Get 'Green' Spacecraft Propellant

laboratoryequipment:

In 2015, NASA will, for the first time, fly a space mission utilizing a radically different propellant — one which has reduced toxicity and is environmentally benign. This energetic ionic liquid, or EIL, is quite different from the historically employed hydrazine-based propellant, which was first…

I don’t care who wins, I just want to know WHERE SYBR GOT THAT AWESOME NECKLACE.

Scinerds: Why So Many Scientists Are Abondoning Their Fields

technoccult:

Klint Finley

Here’s my article for Wired about why so many scientists ended up working in the tech industry:

Tech companies are snapping up scientists with backgrounds in fields like physics, mathematics and bioscience — people we might expect to be busy curing cancer, saving…

I have a bit of a dilemma. I’m going to a conference in a few months that will be attended by both young investigators and Nobel Laureates. Nature is going to be there, and they’re interested in filming some conversations between the young people and the more experienced scientists. They’re calling for applications to be one of the people they follow. You’re supposed to talk a little bit about what you do of course, but also about who you would like to talk to, and what should be the subject.

I’m thinking about applying, and I basically have two choices. First, I could request to talk to the only female Nobel Laureate in attendance about how she has coped with being a female in a male-dominated field, how she managed to have a family in a profession that is incredibly demanding on one’s time and stamina, whether or not she thinks the field is getting better or worse at attracting and inspiring young women. I’m somewhat familiar with her work, at least it is distantly related to what I used to do, but I don’t think that would be the focus of the discussion.

On the other hand, there is another Nobel Laureate who has done a lot of work more relevant to my current field; however, his stuff is a lot more theoretical, and I’m an experimentalist. I tried to read one of his papers and it was like 60 pages long and I didn’t understand a word of it. I would like to talk to him because he’s super famous (they’ve named TERMS in evolutionary biology after him), but I’m really intimidated by the prospect, and I’m not sure I would be able to ask him “smart” questions.

As I’m writing this, I think maybe I could talk to him about what it’s like being an evolutionary scientist who’s interested in life’s origins in a field that is usually dominated by medical research (i.e. how does one get funding when it’s hard to demonstrate an obvious, immediate benefit to society?).

As you know if you’re a follower, I’m passionate about the advancement of women in science; but I’m wondering if the female Laureate is tired of answering questions about this. She should be recognized for her work (which is SUBSTANTIAL) above all. In addition, Nature just ran an issue which had a ton of interesting articles about this very subject. So maybe they feel it’s being overdone, or maybe they feel it’s a hot topic that needs to be pursued further. I guess the only way to find out is to apply. I wonder if I could level with them and propose both ideas, and let them pick which one they like better. Of course, it’s absolutely not guaranteed that I would even be selected.

I would really appreciate input on this, either privately or publicly (but I would encourage you to make it public; that way others can benefit from the conversation).

For reference, some of Nature’s suggested topics include: whether biofuels can replace fossil fuels, the future of catalysis as rare Earth metal supplies dwindle, and drug development in the face of rising antibiotic resistance.

science111:

1. dip a spoon of gallium in a glass of hot water

2. make a bubble with smoke instead of air

3. dissolve the tablet in weightlessness

4. set fire to the energy-saving lamp

5. push two identical clouds of smoke

6. create a vacuum in the empty tank

7. set fire to the smoke from the candles

8. overturn the glass with smoke

9. pour the hot solution in a plastic cup [x]

colchrishadfield:

If you fly in space, this a great group to be with, surrounded by talent: Pavel, Tom, Chris, Roman & Alexander.

Astronauts! In space!

But through it all, look for a way to break out, to find a field and subject not yet popular…there is the quickest way advances are likely to occur, as measured in discoveries per investigator per year. You may have heard the military dictum for the gathering of armies: march to the sound of the guns. In science, the exact opposite is the case—march away from the sound of the guns….observe from a distance, but do not join the fray. Make a fray of your own.

E.O. Wilson, Advice to Young Scientists via TEDTalks (via callstheadventurescience)

Camera Nikon D2Xs
ISO 200	Aperture f/4.8
Exposure 1/60th	Focal Length 20mm