Shenica Odom of the Girl Scouts Council of Greater New York had asked Scientific American to participate this spring in its Career Exploration Program, designed to encourage about 1,200 girls in the South Bronx to explore careers and professions that they might not have otherwise considered for themselves, including jobs involving science, technology, engineering and math (STEM jobs).

So Anna Kuchment, Rachel Scheer and I enthusiastically signed up to visit with sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders at various local schools to talk about our jobs with Scientific American as well as the school and work experiences that have helped us along the way. Anna, who edits the magazines Advances section, spoke to girls at MS 22, Jordon Mott School, on May 3. Rachel heads up SA‘s corporate public relations and spoke to girls at IS 131 on May 4.

I kicked off my IS 131 visit by handing out “I am a Scientific American” buttons, as well as some copies of our lastest issue and reproductions of our first issue back in 1845. I asked the students to discuss their scientific questions with me and how they might go about answering them. Here are some of the fantastic ideas they came up with (the initials of the student who asked the question follows each question along with some information and links to get one started on answers):

–How long can dolphins hold their breath? (MH, Well, here’s an engaging video that explains how long humans can hold their breath. Dolphins are mammals, like us, so there are definitely many similarities in our body forms and functions, though obviously we are land creatures and they are marine creatures.)

–If a shark swims backward, will it die? (ML, I doubt this, but here is an article on some of sharks’ other talents.)

–Are the oil companies going to go broke? (JS, Like all businesses, oil companies must evolve to changing economic and social conditions in order to stay in business. Here’s an in-depth report on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago that explores some of what BP has and has not done to stay in business.)

–What is whale oil? (CC, There is some interesting history about this energy source on this page.)

–What causes headaches? (XIL,Here is information on what headaches are, and here is a funny podcast on what causes ice cream headaches.)

–How do you build tunnels that allow subways to run underground? (LA, Anna Kuchment wrote about this question last summer for Scientific American.)

–What is in the smoke that comes out of buildings in some housing projects? (ML, This article outlines five measures that can help to clean up our air.)

–Why shouldn’t we kill sharks? After all, they kill us. (KAC, Actually, a group of scientists has estimated that humans kill somewhere between 26 million and 73 million sharks a year for the fin trade, as one student pointed out, whereas sharks kill about 1 person in the U.S. every two years, mainly when we swim into their habitats. More on the perils facing sharks today can be read here.)

–And my favorite: Does whale urine protect you from jellyfish stings? (JKN, This question is a variation of the legend that urine from any animal will assuage a jellyfish sting. It is not true. Try a paste of baking soda and seawater instead.)

I hope these questions spark continued interest in science and efforts by students to answer questions  by collecting data and analyzing evidence. Much of the best science starts with questions like those above, and smart answers tend to prompt several more intriguing questions. As I told the girls, my job as a science writer and editor is never boring, I learn countless amazing facts every day, and I work with fun, smart and nice people.

Whale.FM, the Whale Project

Above all, science is a collaborative enterprise, where researchers working together can span the continents. Increasingly, nonspecialists—citizen scientists—are pitching in as well. Whale.FM—a collaborative effort of Scientific American, Zooniverse and the research institutions WHOI, TNO, the University of Oxford and SMRU—lets citizen scientists help marine researchers who are studying what whales are saying. (You can also hear them in a…wait for it…podcast.) That’s a big help for researchers: citizen scientists have gotten years’ worth of work accomplished in months. And directly engaging youngsters and the public with actual research is inspiring for participants as well.

With the help of Robin Lloyd, Scientific American’s news editor, and Angela Cesaro, our Senior Product Manager, Editorial, I moderated a live chat at 1 p.m. on Thursday, April 19, 2012, about this project with Robert Simpson of Zooniverse (Twitter: @orbitingfrog), A.M. (Sander) von Benda-Beckmann of TNO and Carol Tang of the Coalition for Science After School (Twitter: @CarolTang1). An edited transcript follows.

DiChristina: I’m Mariette DiChristina, editor in chief of Scientific American, and welcome to our live chat about Whale.FM. We’ll talk about what citizen science is, what Whale.FM can do for research, and how kids and educators can participate. With us today are Robert Simpson of Zooniverse, A.M. (Sander) von Benda-Beckmann of TNO, and Carol Tang of Coalition for Science After School. I’m going to ask each of them a couple of questions for background, and then we’ll open it up to the audience. My first questions are for Robert Simpson of Zooniverse. Rob: What is citizen science? And what kinds of things can it do?

Simpson: That’s a big question! Citizen science is about enabling everyone to take part in science. The Web has made it easier to do, but its been going on for a very long time. The web also means we can crowdsource the problem and get a lot of eyes looking at something useful. My background is astronomy, which has a long history of amateurs taking part. But many fields (e.g., bird watching) have involved amateurs for a long time. Here at @the_zooniverse we’ve been trying to engage people in citizen science for a few years. We have been asking people to help us classify millions of galaxies, find exoplanets, map the galaxy—and recently we’ve been listening to whales.

DiChristina: Awesome, Rob. @the_zooniverse has many fine projects. Now let’s talk about Whale.FM. It’s a Zooniverse collaboration with Scientific American, TNO, WHOI, the University of Oxford and SMU. Tell us what you do when you go to Whale.FM.

Simpson: When you visit Whale.FM, you are presented with a sound clip of a recording of a whale. The idea is to match the big sound that you see/hear with one of the smaller ones underneath. All the pairings go into a database and we use that to find the best pairs of sounds and build up our understanding of what the whales are saying to each other. Basically: we need help decoding the language of whales

DiChristina: Good segue. Next, I’d like to ask some questions of A.M. (Sander) von Benda-Beckmann of TNO. Sander: Tell us about your research. What do we want to know about whales and their songs?

Von Benda-Beckmann: We a studying the sounds that whales and dolphins make underwater to talk to each other. It is very hard to see far underwater, but sound can travel very far. That’s why these animals rely on sound to communicate, orient and find food underwater. This makes sound on of the efficient methods to study whales while they are underwater.

DiChristina: Sander, one more: What is really missing in the data that you need that citizen scientists can help you accomplish?

Von Benda-Beckmann: We still don’t know much about how whales and dolphins communicate under water. Some species, such as killer whales and pilot whales that we show on the Whale.fm website are very communicative and make a lot of different sounds. This makes it very hard to understand what sound is made for what purpose. For example, do these animals tell each other where they are, that they have found food? To understand this, we first need to know what are the typical sounds that these animals make. This is a hard task, especially for very vocal species such as killer whales and pilot whales.

DiChristina: Is that where the citizen scientists are helping? Cataloging those sounds, as Rob described?

Von Benda-Beckmann Yes, exactly! For killer whales we have a pretty good idea what sounds they make. For the pilot whales, however, we still don’t know. This is where we as volunteers to help us.

DiChristina: Re volunteers: Next, let’s meet Carol Tang of Coalition for Science After School. Carol: What are the big needs for kids after school?

Tang: After school is more about engaging and inspiring youth, and helping them to believe they can grow up to be a creative scientist. Citizen science can engage kids afters chool in REAL science…not memorizing facts, but DOING science.

DiChristina: Carol: How can teachers/volunteers incorporate citizen science into a group activity? Or an assignment?

Tang: After-school STEM needs to be relevant to the real world, engaging and accessible—so citizen science fits the bill! Citizen science projects should be used to ignite curiosity, spur discussions, hone critical thinking. So students can observe birds or record rain or sketch first flowers together and share data with researchers.

DiChristina: Carol: Any specific tips for using Whale.FM?

Tang: Whale.FM is perfect for engaging girls who we know are more interested in bio and whales are popular. I would incorporate Whale.FM along with other hands on biology, marine biology or sound physics activities. Or pair it with a trip to your local aquarium or beach (if you are lucky) to scaffold the learning. Make sure to have discussion about: What is evidence? How do you design research? What is uncertainty?

DiChristina: OK, now I’d like to open it up to questions from the audience. We’ve got some great questions. Rob: Whale.FM has been going for a few months. Any preliminary results?

Simpson: Yes we do have one big preliminary result: the site appears to work We took a subsample of calls that we already knew the call category for and tested the parsing from volunteers. We found that the Whale.FM volunteers grouped up the sounds in the same way that professionals would.

DiChristina: Rob: How well does the cataloging by the volunteers agree with the work that professional scientists do? I’m one of the volunteers by the way! Matching whale calls is a great Saturday activity with my 11-year-old daughter.

Simpson: It agrees very well. We found approximately 90 percent agreement in our preliminary test. Our volunteers are amazing!

(Audience question) melipalSC: Are you also using math tools (spectral analysis for instance) for pattern recognition?

Von Benda-Beckmann: Such methods are commonly to automatically classify whale calls. The challenge here is that a lot of calls are slightly different, and currently too challenging to do so automatically.

(Audience question) DaveMosher: Whale.FM is processing a lot of whale song data. Other than the project’s stated goals. Have you found any surprising new uses for this data—i.e., things you didn’t plan on?

Von Benda-Beckmann: We have had a lot of questions from the scientific community of people who’d like to compare their algorithms against the choices made by volunteers.

Tang: As an educator, kudos on the design of the project. Nothing worse than frustration to turn kids OFF! This one works!

Simpson: The surprise from me has been, as Sander says, that we probably use it to compare automated algorithms and hopefully improve them. There are tens of thousands of whale calls out here. It would seem that Whale FM can help narrow the big problem into a smaller, more mangeable one.

(Audience question) melipalSC: How difficult has been for you to deal with the background noise in the water environment?

Von Benda-Beckmann: Yes, the background noise in the water is typically the thing that is hardest to take out automatically. Humans however are much better at this by far! That is why scientist still keep on going through their datasets by eye/ear and this makes big datasets so cumbersome to process, which is exactly why help of volunteers is so useful!

(Audience question) Angela Grima: I intend to go whale watching this summer. Do u have any suggestions for me. I am novice.

Tang: During migration, whales can be seen from shore or in ships. Make sure it’s an ethical operator because annoying whales is illegal (they are protected). But most whale watching operators have naturalists who know a lot about the biology. Be prepared by reading in advance will help increase the appreciation. Using Whale.FM helps you think about the research that is still being done.  We know so little!

melipalSC: I discovered the Whale.FM project some time ago, and I helped with some matchings. You are doing a great job.

Von Benda-Beckmann: Thanks for helping out!

Simpson: Thanks to all the citizen scientists out there helping with @whalefm.

DiChristina: Thanks for coming! That concludes our live chat for today. For more, visit Whale.FM, e-mail team@whale.fm & follow @WhaleFM (Twitter). Follow @CarolTang1 @SciAfterSchool @orbitingfrog @theZooniverse @WhaleFM @sciam

Courtesy of Nigel Holmes (nigelholmes.com). An illustration on infographics, developed for "Infografics. A visual definition"

“Big Data”—large and often complicated data sets that thwart quick analysis—remained a key phrase at the World Infographics Summit last month. But the buzz that surrounded that phrase seemed measured and in control. Experts of data visualization have emerged, and they come bearing elegant examples of what works, clumsy examples of what doesn’t, lessons learned, blogs and even a podcast.

With two consecutive years as a summit participant, I’m a relative newbie on the scene. Hosted by the Spanish chapter of the Society for News Design and the School of Communication at the University of Navarra, the week of workshops, lectures, awards and conversations held annually in Pamplona, Spain, is collectively known as Malofiej (named after the Argentinian infographics artist Alejandro Malofiej). This was a banner year—the 20th anniversary—attracting more than 200 participants from around the world.

Last year I recalled a sense of urgency swirling around the conference. How to parse through all the data pouring down? What programming languages to use? Would the iPad change everything? How (or should) infographics try to make sense of the data points swirling about in social media? My lecture notes include definitions, categories and tool suggestions. What is an infographic? What is a data visualization? Define, divide and conquer. Anything to help me make sense of the increasing demand for graphics that digest and make sense of large amounts of data.

This year, many of the talks orbited around the idea of beauty. Craft. Minimalism. Clarity of thought, intent and delivery. The emphasis, to my mind, shifted subtly from efficiency of task, to the editorial process—with the ultimate goal of producing a thing of beauty.

The definitions and categories I had dutifully noted last year were condensed. Information is data. Data is information. Whether the end product is a beautifully painted reconstruction of a dinosaur or a clean numerical chart, the goal is the same: create a visual that helps explain a process, concept, event or state.

“Big data,” after all, isn’t new to our magazine’s readers. Infinity, anyone?

From an article by Nicolas P. Rashevsky, Scientific American, September 1925

Scientific American has a long history of working with scientists to help make large data sets understandable—literal depictions of the fundamentals of math and numbers (graphic, below), to bigger picture and more figurative visual displays of large data sets (video, below). Working with scientists and artists to help visualize “Big Data” is a natural extension of what we’ve been doing all along.

Graphic by Brown Bird Design. From "The Strangest Numbers in String Theory" by John C. Baez and John Huerta, Scientific American Magazine, May 2011

As the art director of information graphics at Scientific American, I’m charged with developing explanatory art for some pretty mind-blowing topics. Our team—text editor, expert author, artist, and me—often works toward illustrating a process or concept that has never been rendered before, or may have only been visualized for other specialists in the field in the form of a journal article or conference slide. In other cases, we’re adding new layers of information or tweaking more familiar topics, as recent discoveries change or build upon previous ideas. My job is to shake out the visual jargon, organize the information, and work with freelance illustrators to bring these concepts alive for specialists and non-specialists alike.

In an article by Donald Goldsmith in Scientific American‘s March 2012 issue, the illustration concept emerged quickly, but the details required a fair amount of back-and-forth to sort out. Upon reading an early draft of the manuscript, I thought it would be helpful to provide visual context for the concept of stellar evolution, particularly as it relates to mass: Stars of different masses die in different ways. Within this framework, we could introduce the new theoretical class of star discussed in the text—helium white dwarfs. We could use great primer information from Chandra as a point of inspiration, then update and customize to help illustrate our specific story.

The animation above shows the evolution of that art box, starting with how the information could fit into the larger story, then drilling down into the specifics of what, exactly, it would show. In the top right corner, we presented a basic star life cycle. In the chart below, we broke things down by mass, and showed variations on that theme, with a nod to relative time. The layout and general structure for the graphic remained pretty true to the original vision. But as you can see, the details were quite fluid as Scientific American‘s George Musser (the text editor) and I sorted out specifics with Goldsmith. Tiny and repeated shifts in the content and symbol position were required as we hashed out the content. And then, some final aesthetic tweaks developed as artist Malcolm Godwin refined his renderings and brought the box to life. We hope you enjoy the final product. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Fashionably late, you say? Allow me to take a step back to explain. When I was in journalism school, my science-writing professor—a former Scientific American editor—described the process of writing as similar to brushing hair. You begin with a jumble of words and ideas. Tackling one knot at a time, a writer imposes order on those unruly sentences. The tangles loosen and fall away, and a story emerges.

I think similarly about our plans for Scientific American Mind. We have been active on Twitter for years as @sciammind and we read your comments on this site regularly. We had not, however, taken the bold plunge into the class-II rapids of Facebook… until now.

Our goal with this new page is to provide our fans an easy, fun way to interact with us and other readers. Now is a good time to join our network (“like” our page)—in the near future we’ll have some special offers available only on our Facebook page. See you there soon!

The following is The Editor’s introduction to this issue, for more information about this edition, read the table of contents.

What Time Is It? The Chronic Complaint

That simple question is probably asked more often today than ever. In our clock-studded society, the answer is never more than a glance away, and so we can blissfully partition our days into ever smaller increments for ever more tightly scheduled tasks, confident that we will always know it is 7:03 p.m.

Modern scientific revelations about time, however, make the question endlessly frustrating. If we seek a precise knowledge of the time, the elusive infinitesimal of “now” dissolves into a scattering flock of nanoseconds. Bound by the speed of light and the velocity of nerve impulses, our perceptions of the present sketch the world as it was an instant ago—for all that our consciousness pretends otherwise, we can never catch up. Even in principle, perfect synchronicity escapes us. Relativity dictates that, like a strange syrup, time flows slower on moving trains than in the stations and faster in the mountains than in the valleys. The time for our wristwatch is not exactly the same as the time for our head. It is roughly 7:04 p.m.

Our intuitions are deeply paradoxical. Time heals all wounds, but it is also the great destroyer. Time is relative but also relentless. There is time for every purpose under heaven, but there is never enough. Time flies, crawls and races. Seconds can be both split and stretched. Like the tide, time waits for no man, but in dramatic moments it also stands still. It is as personal as the pace of one’s heartbeat but as public as the clock tower in the town square. We do our best to reconcile the contradictions. It seems like 7:05 p.m.

And of course, time is money. It is the partner of change, the antagonist of speed, the currency in which we pay attention. It is our most precious, irreplaceable commodity. Yet still we say we don’t know where it goes, and we sleep away a third of it, and none of us really can account for how much we have left. We can find 100 ways to save time, but the amount remaining nonetheless diminishes steadily. It is already 7:06 p.m.

Time and memory shape our perceptions of our own identity. We may feel ourselves to be at history’s mercy, but we also see ourselves as free-willed agents of the future. That conception is disturbingly at odds with the ideas of physicists and philosophers, however, because if time is a dimension like those of space, then yesterday, today and tomorrow are all equally concrete and determined. The future exists as much as the past does; it is just in a place that we have not yet visited. Somewhere, it is 7:07 p.m.

“Time is the substance of which I am made,” Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote. “Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.” This special issue of Scientific American summarizes what science has discovered about how time permeates and guides both our physical world and our inner selves. That knowledge should enrich the imagination and provide practical advantages to anyone hoping to beat the clock or at least to stay in step with it. It is now 7:08 p.m. Synchronize your watches.
– The Editors

» Buy this issue

Pilot Whale wearing sound-recording tag. Credit: Daniel Ottmann; photo was taken taken as part of research conducted under permit 14241 issued by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service.

In November 2011, Scientific American, Zooniverse and a team of research partners launched the Web site Whale.FM, a citizen-science project devoted to cataloging the calls made by Pilot whales and Killer whales (Orcas), both of which are actually dolphin species. Different whale families have their own dialects and closely related families share calls. Underwater microphones, called hydrophones, typically attached by suction cups to the whales, record the haunting and lovely sounds. Cataloging calls is a step in learning more about the communication of these magnificent marine mammals.

So far, more than 5,000 Whale.FM visitors (including yours truly) have matched a total of more than 100,000 calls. The task is simple and fun—my daughters (ages 11 and 15) like to match calls with me. (The 11-year-old is pretty good at imitating the calls herself.) How it works: You listen to a call and see a spectrogram, a visualization of the sounds. Then you listen to several others that are displayed on the screen and see if you can select a match.

A question that has come up often about citizen-science projects is, How accurate are the data? Our friends at Zooniverse just did a spot check, using a subset of 300 of the calls. As Robert Simpson of Zooniverse put it in a note, “We’ve compared their call categories to the (very!) preliminary results from Whale FM and it seems that the users are picking out good matches that tally with those of professionals.

” They located 28 subset-to-subset call pairings. A total of 25 of these were matched with calls from the same call category, as defined by professional scientists. Even more exciting, there were more than 350 pairings with calls outside of the 300-call subset—which is an important reason to do Whale.FM.

Whale families share dialects. Credit: Leigh Hickmott, Open Ocean Consulting; photo was taken taken as part of research conducted under permit 14241 issued by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service.

One thing is also certain: Whale.FM already has produced the equivalent of years of cataloguing work by scientists in just a couple of months. Although there’s still more work to do, that’s an achievement worth singing about. For more information about other projects in which you can help scientists conduct research, please check out Scientific American‘s Citizen Science page.

One of the ideas we developed is the program called 1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days, which we made available to teachers in October 2011.

Microbiologist Benjamin TenOever speaks to students about what it's like to be a scientist. Courtesy NY1

The idea of 1,000 Scientists is simple: connect science teachers and their bright-eyed charges with scientist volunteers who are willing to visit the classroom and talk about their work firsthand. NY1 created a lovely video, Chelsea Students Change Their Scientific Perceptions, of one such volunteer, microbiologist Benjamin TenOever, when he visited a New York City classroom. As you’ll see, he wasn’t what some students were expecting. I felt inspired by the video, and thought you might like it, too.

Here’s a list of all the Scientific American editors and bloggers expected at the event, along with me: Jen Christiansen, Krystal D’Costa, Christine Gorman, Fred Guterl, John Horgan, Robin Lloyd, John Matson, Steve Mirsky, Michael Moyer, Caleb Scharf, Sandra Upson and Philip Yam.

While we’re all waiting for this get-together, we thought you’d enjoy this wonderful video, “The Known Universe by AMNH”–which takes you to the edge of the visible universe and back in just six minutes. Mind blown? Just wait until you see the Beyond Planet Earth Exhibit!

 

I said those words to an audience of teens (and adults) at the launch of the first Google Science Fair in New York City last January. (You can see the whole launch event here.) Some 7,000 students aged 13 to 18 entered last year, from more than 90 countries. Scientific American was a partner and I was chief judge.

Now the 2012 Google Science Fair is here–a whole new opportunity for kids to ask those questions and use science to search for answers.

This year, Scientific American also is delighted to help expand the Google Science Fair honors by sponsoring a $50,000 Science in Action award for a project that addresses a social, environmental or health issue to make a practical difference in the lives of a group or community. Volunteer mentors also will help foster the continued development of that winning project for a year.

Hope you’re feeling inspired to enter! Here’s a video to get those ideas flowing.

And here’s information on how to enter. Good luck!

Attendance is free for people who follow both @sciam and @amnh on Twitter—but space is limited, so you have to apply to attend. Sign up here.

Here’s what you can expect:

6:00

Doors open. Pick up a free Scientific American issue and meet some fellow science lovers. There’ll be a reception (with open bar) in the Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians, adjacent to Beyond Planet Earth.

During the evening, you’ll have open access to Beyond Planet Earth and enjoy some short talks from Scientific American editors and contributors and American Museum of Natural History staff after I give a quick welcome.

See a life-size model of the Curiosity Rover, due to reach Mars in August 2012. Essentially a roving science lab, it can explore the Red Planet for years, test samples onboard, fire a laser to help probe an object's composition, and includes a weather station. © AMNH\\R. Mickens

Carter Emmart, director of astrovisualization, and Brian Abbott, manager of the Hayden Planetarium, will lead a tour to the edge of universe and back in the Hayden Planetarium Space Theater. They will also discuss the process of creating data visualizations for the planetarium at an informal Q&A later in the evening.

Ed Bell, co-creator, with Hugo Award-winning illustrator Ron Miller, of the Journey to the Exoplanets iPad app from Scientific American and Farrar, Straus Giroux, and Scientific American Contributing Art Director, will describe the challenges of depicting objects that human eyes have never seen in his talk, “Visualizing Exoplanets.”

Caleb Scharf, Director of Columbia University’s Astrobiology Center and author of Extrasolar Planets and the forthcoming Gravity’s Engines from Scientific American and Farrar, Straus Giroux, will reveal the tempestuous relationship between black holes and the building of stars, galaxies and planets, will speak on: “Beyond the Beyond: The Incredible Journey to Planets, Stars and Black Holes.”

Michael Shara, curator in the Museum’s Department of Astrophysics and curator of Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, will offer an overview of the exhibition as well as some insight into the accuracy of space exploration as portrayed in contemporary and classic film—what they got right, and what they got wrong.

9:00

Event ends. Everybody goes home happy! Hope to see you there.

For his hosting, reporting and co-writing of the documentary, Biello traveled from an ARPA-e conference in Washington, D.C., to fracking fields in North Texas to provide a comprehensive view of the energy challenges our nation now faces. Beyond the Light Switch explores the current debates over hydraulic fracturing for natural gas as well as those surrounding nuclear power. The episodes allow viewers to weigh the environmental and economic costs and benefits of various energy sources in light of growing demands for electricity in the Digital Age. Scientific American Senior Editor George Musser is featured in a Beyond the Light Switch segment during which he gives viewers a tour of his home’s rooftop solar array and breaks down its real costs. (He explores this topic in detail at Solar at Home, part of the Scientific American blog network.)

For 70 years, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards have recognized excellence in broadcast journalism. Regarded today as the most prestigious prizes in broadcast news, the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes, the duPont-Columbia Awards bring the best in broadcast and digital journalism to professional and public attention and honor those who produce it. The duPont-Columbia University Award judges call Beyond the Light Switch “an ambitious and thoughtful documentary series that laid out the facts and conundrums of energy policy facing us all.”

AWARDS

We won a 2011 National Magazine Award in the Finance, Technology and Lifestyle Magazines category for “General Excellence” for the September, November and December 2010 issues. We also were nominated for “Single Topic Issue” for “The End,” the September 2010 issue.

ScientificAmerican.com is a 2011 Webby Honoree in the Radio/Podcasts Category for 60 Second Science and were also a Webby Science Nominee.

In October, Scientific American staff editor George Musser received the 2011 AIP Science Writing Award for his article, “Could Time End?” in the September 2010 issue.

EDUCATION INITIATIVES

We launched all three activities that were Scientific American’s contributions of the six-project Nature Publishing Group (with Nature Education) program called Bridge to Science for Change the Equation:

1. The initial Bring Science Home activities, including five videos, launched May 2. We added weekly posts in October, with our terrific content partners.

2. We launched regular Citizen Science coverage on May 2, featuring a new research project each week for the public to join. Then, on November 29, we went live with our first original project, Whale.fm, developed in partnership with a wonderful team including The Zooniverse, WHOI, TNO, University of Oxford and SMRU. Tens of thousands of citizen scientists have helped make matches of whale calls. I’ve done a few dozen matches myself–I find it very relaxing and fun to listen to the whales for science!

3. 1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days is our project linking teachers and scientist volunteers who are willing to visit the classroom. Here’s a great NY1 video about one such visit. The sign-up form for scientist volunteers launched May 2. We ran focus groups with teachers over the summer. We launched the matching service on September 26. More than 1,600 people are now using the service.

Scientific American participated in the first Google Science Fair as a partner, with CERN, LEGO and National Geographic; the fair drew some 7,000 entries from 90 countries. I was the chief judge and master of ceremonies for the awesome finalist awards event.

WEB SITE

On July 5, we launched the Scientific American Blog Network with 60 terrific bloggers. In addition to their insightful posts in general, the bloggers have contributed to many fine “event” days on the site and we have coordinated on coverage.

We launched new design for the www.ScientificAmerican.com home page on May 2, including the Science Agenda and other features. We added new slide show and video functionality during the year, too.

We launched three new weekly podcasts (adding to the existing Science Talk, 60 Second Science, 60 Second Earth and 60 Second Mind): 60 Second Health, 60 Second Space and 60 Second Tech.

NEW DIGITAL PRODUCTS

We launched with the free Google Currents app, available for iPhone, iPad and Android devices, as a featured content supplier on December 8.

Our free mobile site skin, which works for all smart-phone browsers, became available on November 14. I’ve tried it on BlackBerry and iPhone myself and am personally pleased.

We launched a new PDF series, called Briefings, in early December. Briefings come in six editions: five monthly single-theme newsletters (Nanotechnology, Space & Physics, Climate Change & Environment, Health & Medicine, Mind & Brain) plus one weekly, mixed-topic version.

PARTNERS

The first Scientific American/Farrar Straus Giroux imprint release was in September—the highly praised Journey to the Exoplanets app. The first three books for the imprint will be out in spring/summer 2012, many more in the pipeline.

Stay tuned for more exciting news from Scientific American in 2012!

Scientific American Reader edition in Google Currents as viewed on an iPad

Scientific American is excited to work with Google on the launch of their new Reader App for smart phones and tablets, Google Currents (only available in the U.S. Android Market and Apple App Store at this time). Google Currents is a new application for Android devices, iPads and iPhones that lets you explore online magazines and other content with the swipe of a finger. It brings together this content in a beautiful and simple way so you can easily navigate between words, pictures and video on your smart phone or tablet.

The “Scientific American Reader” edition will feature content from SA‘s Science Agenda (top stories featured on our home page), the latest news and features, our Ask the Experts series, and select posts from our Blog Network.

Our edition was produced using Google Currents producer, which allows publishers to build and manage their content on Google Currents. It enabled me to create sections based on our RSS feeds as well as customize the app to include the Scientific American logo, fonts and color scheme.

Scientific American Mobile Site

In the coming days we will use the Currents platform to create our own stand-alone apps, which will be featured in Android Market for Android phones and tables as well as in iTunes for the iPhone, iPad and iOS devices. These apps join our mobile family, including SA‘s Origins and Endings iPad app and SA‘s mobile site—the latter of which launched in November. The mobile site automatically detects a visitor’s device and directs him or her to the version of our Web site optimized for viewing on that specific phone.

“Throughout our 166-year history, we have strived to play an active role in facilitating innovation in addition to reporting on it,” says Mariette DiChristina, editor in chief of Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the U.S. “Scientific American‘s goal is to make science content available to interested readers anytime, anywhere—no matter which device they choose to read it on. Our mobile site skin and the free news apps we will be releasing over the next few weeks are part of that commitment.”

It’s an exciting time for mobile here at Scientific American. The next challenges we’re tackling include a paid app featuring our magazine content as well as BlackBerry mobile and tablet apps. Look here for more announcements in coming months.

Marie Curie, for those who are unfamiliar, was a pioneering physicist known as the “Mother of Modern Physics.” In her work, she established the nature of radiation and beta rays, and discovered and isolated polonium and radium. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize—for Physics in 1902—and then the first person to win two Nobels in different disciplines, when she won a Nobel for Chemistry in 1911.

Early in 1911, however, the French Academy of Sciences turned down Curie’s application. As French physicist Emile Hilaire Amagat said at the time: “Women cannot be part of the Institute of France.” Marie Curie would not allow her name to be resubmitted for nomination and wouldn’t let the Academy publish any of her work for a decade. (More in this Wired article.)

As the first woman editor in chief of Scientific American, I’m keenly aware of the sense of standing on the shoulders of giants—some of them clearly frequented our editorial offices in 1911. I thought you’d enjoy in its entirety an editorial that ran in the January 21, 1911 issue:

Sex and Scientific Recognition

Had the incident occurred a quarter of a century ago we could have understood better the discussion which has been provoked in that august body, the Academy of Sciences, Paris, by the candidature of Madame Curie for membership. Respect for custom and tradition is an admirable attitude if it be judiciously tempered by due considerations of time, place and personality; but we cannot help feeling that in this advanced age, in such a center of enlightenment as Paris, and where a scientist of such brilliant performance as Madame Curie is concerned, this discussion as to whether she is eligible for admission to the Academy of Sciences, is altogether deplorable.

When science comes to the matter of bestowing its rewards it should be blind to the mere accident of sex; and one does not have to be an enthusiast on the subject of the extension of the rights and privileges of her sex, to feel that here is a woman who, by her brilliant achievement, has won the right to take her place with her compeers in the Academy, or any similar institution devoted to the furthering of science. The scientific world will undoubtedly agree with Gaston Darboux, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, in urging the right of Madame Curie to succeed to the position of which her late husband was next to the last occupant.

As far as the learned societies of other countries are concerned, the election of a woman to the Academy would certainly not be without precedent. Several foreign bodies, indeed, including the Philosophic Society of Philadelphia, have already welcomed her into their membership. Darboux instances the case of the Countess Ersilia Lovatelli, who, as dean of the Archreological section of the Royal Academy of Italy, took a prominent part at a recent meeting of the Academy of Rome, and also that of Elise Wendel, who was a prominent figure at Berlin in 1900 during the centennial celebration of the German Academy of Sciences. To these cases we might add those of Hertha Ayrton, the only woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers of Great Britain, who was considered eligible for election to that distinguished body, because of her discovery of the laws governing certain phenomena of the electric arc, and that of Lady Margaret Lindsay Huggins, who, because of her valuable work in astronomy and her contributions to the journals devoted to that branch of science, was elected an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Elsewhere in this issue reference is made to the fact that a statistical study of American men of science has led Prof. Cattell to draw attention to the fact that women are contributing but a very small share to productive scientific work. If this be so, it is obvious that to contest the right to recognition of such women is further to discourage the entrance of women into a sphere of work in which their patience, intelligence, and strong intuitive perception render them peculiarly well fitted to labor.

The Internet’s future: Danny Hillis talks to Scientific American’s Mariette DiChristina at the Compass Summit.

PALOS VERDES, Calif.—Danny Hillis recalls how simple the Internet was in the 1980s. When he wanted to hook up a computer he would ask Bob Kahn, a U.S. Defense Department computer scientist who was developing the technology, for an IP (Internet Protocol) address. “Bob would take out an index card from his pocket, give you a number, and then cross it off his list,” said Hillis, co-chairman and chief technology officer at Applied Minds, speaking here Monday at the four-day Compass Summit.

How times have changed. Now the Internet is so big and complicated that computer scientists don’t understand it. Nobody knows what devices are connected to it, or even what it’s true shape is, Hillis said. The Internet is now a kind of jungle, in which nobody can say for certain what is going to happen and why.

The jungle metaphor apparently extends beyond technology to the larger world. The economic and political landscape has changed in recent years almost beyond recognition, noted several speakers at the conference, an extension of ideas generated last year at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe. Whether this spells opportunity or trouble seems to depend on your disposition—and it was a point of disagreement at the conference.

The world is shifting toward what Parag Khanna, senior fellow of the New America Foundation, calls Globalization 5.0—an increase in the number of people who are connected by trade and technology. (The silk road in Asia was the first version, colonialism was the second, then came the industrial revolution and the post-World World II world.) Globalization is now happening, for the first time in history, on all continents among all societies. In 1990s the world centered on the U.S.; now it’s moving toward a regional network, with different leaders in each region. “This is uncharted territory,” he said.

Cyberspace is the newest dimension of this globalization, Khanna said. A new fiberoptic cable linking countries comes online every month or two, the latest one connecting India to South Africa. Facebook and other social media transcend countries, creating a kind of meta-state. This trend is behind a demand for accountability from governments, and it’s calling for changes in long-established practices of governance. Diplomats, for instance, have to make room at the table for the likes of Google, Wal-Mart and the Gates Foundation.

The speed of this transformation is unprecedented. It took the U.S. and Europe hundreds of years to urbanize and industrialize, but China and India are trying to do it in one-tenth the time and at 100 times the scale, said Richard Dobbs, director of McKinsey Global Institute. About 3 billion people will join middle class worldwide in the next 20 years, which presents a vast challenge. And it will be a hard challenge to meet: investment capital will be scarce in the coming decades, and prices of commodities such as copper and oil will rise. For the U.S., it means that the current generation of 25- to 44-year-olds are poorer than their parents—the first time in decades.

All this change is happening too quickly for understanding to catch up. Will it make the world a more dangerous place?

Elizabeth Stephenson, partner at McKinsey & Company, is optimistic about opportunities in China, India and other emerging countries. These regions grew faster than developed nations for first time in 2009, and barring some catastrophe this trend will continue for next 30 years, she said.

Khanna also is optimistic. Today’s global web of interconnections is like a spider’s web, he said, and will make the world more resilient to change. “That’s how we’ll stop those black swans, those high impact, low probability events that can knock us off our feet,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be as dangerous a world as we think.”

Geoffrey West, a professor at Santa Fe Institute, took issue with Khanna’s optimistic assessment. The interconnections that Khanna talks about are always changing and complex, and so there is most likely a chaotic element to them, which means that sometimes one small thing that goes wrong can cause an outsized effect. We already see chaotic behavior in the Internet and the power grid. “People use these images without understanding the math and physics underlying them,” he said. Globalization 5.0 may be putting us at greater risk of disasters.

Hillis, though, remains unrepentantly optimistic. “Humans have a way of muddling through,” he said.

The Compass Summit is taking place for the next three days here at the Terranea Resort. Scientific American is a media partner with the event.

Participants from Scientific American, a partner in the conference, include Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina (@mdichristina), Executive Editor Fred Guterl (@fredguterl) and Editorial Product Manager Angela Cesaro (@aecesaro), who is live tweeting the proceedings from Palos Verdes, Calif.

Check out the tweets below and join in on Twitter at #compass11:

Compass was organized by a team that includes Brent Schlender, a long-time foreign correspondent at Fortune and The Wall Street Journal; Peter Petre, former executive editor at Fortune; and Carolyn Jones and Michael Christman, co-founders of the 100 People Foundation.

Participants from Scientific American, a partner in the conference, include Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina (@mdichristina), Executive Editor Fred Guterl (@fredguterl) and Editorial Product Manager Angela Cesaro (@aecesaro), who is live tweeting the proceedings from Palos Verdes, Calif.

Check out her tweets below and join in on Twitter at #compass11:

Launch a Balloon Rocket: When you blow up a balloon, you force extra air into it, creating higher air pressure inside the balloon than outside of it. If you allow the air to exit through only one small hole, the force will be strong enough to propel the lightweight balloon in the opposite direction. Credit: Christine Kaelin

I’ve been meaning to tell you all about a wonderful experience that we at Scientific American had last week participating in our First Family Science Night. With the New York Academy of Sciences and the Children’s Aid Society–and an army of wonderful science grad students–we enjoyed a series of our Bring Science Home activities with dozens of children and their families at the Frederick Douglass Center in Manhattan.

The idea of Bring Science Home, which I developed after realizing that my own daughters really enjoyed exploring their questions about the world with me through such activities, is to give parents, kids and teachers a resource for simple, fun explorations of concepts–which you can usually do in under an hour with things you probably have around the house.

Kids and their parents at Family Science Night learned first hand:
how different bird beaks are adaptive for different types of foods;
how to get iron out of your breakfast cereal;
how craters form;
how to create sticky, icky–fun–oobleck;
how to launch a balloon rocket;
how yeast breathes;
how to raise their heart rates;
and more!

Maybe you don’t live in New York and you’re wondering: How can I Bring Science Home for my own family or school?

Meghan Groome of the New York Academy of Sciences also wrote about Family Science Night, which she said I could share with you:

I’m so excited for our first ever Family Science Night with the Children’s Aid Society and Scientific American but it got me thinking, how is doing science with a family different than doing science with an individual child or class?

Working with a family can be very different than working with a class of children or an individual child. In addition to the different ages of the participants, the participants have varying degrees of comfort and knowledge of science. In my book, there are a few key steps to a successful family interaction.

Yeast Alive! Watch Yeast Live and Breathe: Yeast releases carbon dioxide when it is active. Yeast are so small you can't see individual ones very well. So how can you tell if they are alive or not? You can enlist a whole bunch of them to blow up a balloon for you! Credit: Christine Kaelin

Engage the Whole Group
When you look at your activity, break it down into tasks that you can assign different family members and then make sure everyone has a specific task or role. Even if you just have one science task, such as looking through a microscope, you can assign one person to take a picture, another to interview the person about what their seeing, and then you can have a younger sibling draw what is happening.

Ideally, you’d have a science or observation task for everyone but never underestimate the value of having someone take or make pictures!

You may find that parents are hesitant to get involved or claim not to know any science. Think about your activity and suggest a way for them to participate that mimics an activity they may already feel comfortable with such as organizing and recording the data, being in charge of the tools, or helping a child with a hands- on task. The whole point of Family Science is to make parents feel comfortable and see how these activities are similar to what they already do.

If there is a younger sibling, have crayons and paper at the ready to give so that they can color off to the side. Engaging a younger sibling will allow the parents to focus on the older child and the activity at hand.

Don’t Alienate Anyone
Parents and caregivers often pass along factually incorrect information and it can put you in a very awkward situation. I used to volunteer at the zoo and it was always amazing to hear parents answer the question “What are they doing?” The answer may have actually been “Eating their own poop” but parents usually said something like “Look over there” or “Eating dog food”.

It’s up to you whether you want to correct a parent but think long and hard about if you want to try. A simple “That’s an interesting take on it” is okay but I recommend refocusing them by asking them to make an observation about the task or diplomatically adding your own spin on things.

I am very comfortable correcting a child and I usually start it with “I can see how you might think that…” or asking them where they got that information.

Let the Kids Shine
Doing science with kids often flips the family dynamic since the kids often hold more knowledge on a subject than their parents. Let the kids shine and demonstrate how much they know!

Meghan Groome, Director of K12 Education and Science & the City at the New York Academy of Sciences (left) and Mariette DiChristina, Editor in chief of Scientific American. Credit: Christine Kaelin

Meghan Groome
Meghan Groome is the Director of K12 Education and Science & the City at the New York Academy of Sciences, an organization with the mission to advance scientific research and knowledge, support scientific literacy, and promote the resolution of society’s global challenges through science-based solutions. After graduating from Colorado College in Biology and Theatre, she desperately needed a job and took one as a substitute teacher at a middle school in Ridgewood NJ. She discovered that had a knack for making science interesting and enjoyable, mostly through bringing in gross things, lighting things on fire (but always in a safe manner), and having a large library of the worlds best science writing and science fiction. After teaching in both Ridgewood and Paterson, NJ she completed her PhD at Teachers College Columbia University with a focus on student question asking in the classroom. While at TC, she was a founding member of an international education consulting firm, and worked on projects from Kenya to Jordan with a focus on designing new schools and school systems in the developing world. After graduating, Dr. Groome became a Senior Policy Analyst at the National Governors Association on Governor Janet Napolitano’s Innovation America Initiative. Prior to her work at the Academy, Dr. Groome worked at the American Museum of Natural History and authored the policy roadmap for the Empire State STEM Education Network and taught urban biodiversity in the Education Department. At the Academy, she is responsible for the Afterschool STEM Mentoring program, which places graduate students and postdocs in the City’s afterschool programs and the Science Teacher program where she designs field trips and content talks to the City’s STEM teachers.

For the Birds: Best-Adapted Beaks: This experiment uses common household items and seeds, grains and nuts to mimic how birds might use their beaks to pick up food. Credit: Christine Kaelin

A good way to encourage them is to ask them open ended questions or simply ask them to tell you more about the topic. An almost always good question is “Where did you learn so much about that?”

It’s so important that children get a chance to be an expert on a topic. It helps them think of themselves as someone who can do science and builds their pride in their knowledge.

A good way to engage a younger child (and not alienate them) is to get down at their level. Sit on the floor, kneel, or squat – it doesn’t matter – and don’t forget to smile, make eye contact, and avoid science jargon. Working with kids should be physically active and you should keep your talking to a minimum.

As with any teaching, your first attempt at an activity or lesson may be a bit rocky but with greatly improve the second time around. Try out your lesson before hand, think about ways to assign different tasks, and don’t forget to have fun!

Bring Science Home

At Scientific American, we appreciate the value of a good experiment. So in May, we launched Bring Science Home as a series of free science activities for parents to do together with their six- to 12-year-old kids. We made sure the activities would be fun and easy to do, so families could complete them in an hour or less and usually with items or ingredients they already had around the house. We waited nervously for the results—and were delighted by the warm response. The series was so popular, we decided to make it a regular feature on the Web site on Thursdays. And today, we launch!

For those who’ve already enjoyed Bring Science Home, welcome back. You’ll find the same types of hands-on fun with science here. In addition, we’re now offering terrific activities from partners such as CityScience, Crazy Aunt Lindsey, Science Buddies and others. We’ll also be posting videos from time to time, so you can see the kids and adults in action.

In the coming weeks, look for posts on how to test the color of autumn leaves, on the principles behind a suspension bridge and lots of others. Want to know more about Scientific American‘s education efforts? Check out my October editor’s letter.

Video page prior to September redesign

Also, when we launched this page several years ago it was acceptable to rely on a Flash player. Since the arrival of the iPhone, iPad and other devices that do not support Flash, this is no longer the case. As devices have evolved, so has the technology. We are now able to offer video players via HTML5 (the latest generation of the web programming standard). This means that our videos now play on these devices.

The new page design enables more navigation options, easier sharing and commenting.

We have also created a unique page for every video. This makes it easier for readers to share our videos by email or on social networks. Unique pages also allow us to enable commenting.

The tabs on the original player were a feature that we wanted to preserve and expand, so we created a module for exploring our videos by category as well as by type to provide readers and visitors with easy access to all our videos and our “Scientific American Exclusive” videos as well.

Take a look at our most recent SA video “New York City’s ‘Ring of Steel’: Motion Capture” and let us know what you think of the new video player and pages.

Scientist volunteers and teachers can now make educational connections in classrooms through 1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days, a new service offered by Scientific American.

U.S. students are lagging behind those of other countries in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) proficiency. Meanwhile, K-12 STEM teachers—many of whom, instructing the earlier grades especially, may not have a degree in science or related fields—often must focus on trying to “teach to the test.” What if they could invite researchers into the classroom to lead a lab exercise with students, to inspire kids about what being a scientist is really like, or to update them about the latest findings in their field?

That was the inspiration behind 1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days, a Scientific American program that helps to connect teachers and scientists. We launched the sign-up component of the program in May, and more than 1,100 scientists, from all around the U.S., already have signed up to volunteer.

Now, educators can use the service to locate STEM professionals. Working together, scientists and teachers can help build a better future for our students and our country.

Scientific American is launching this program as part of Change the Equation activities led by our parent Nature Publishing Group. Whether you are a STEM professional, an educator or a student, we hope you find the service useful. We welcome your feedback as well, below in the comments section, or email us at 1000scientists@sciam.com.

“Celebrating cities in many ways is celebrating what is best in us,” DiChristina told the crowd as she kicked off the evening honoring SA‘s September single-topic issue, at the Rayburn Office Building Café on September 15.

Featured guests included former Maryland Governor Parris Glendening, Washington, D.C. Councilman Tommy Wells, Change the Equation CEO Linda Rosen and Matthew Wald of The New York Times.

Keynote speaker Edward Glaeser, who wrote two pieces for SA‘s cities issue delivered a dynamic 20-minute address which enumerated the many ways cities make their residents and society overall smarter, richer, greener, healthier and happier. “Technology has made us more dependent on being smart,” he added. Glaeser also drew on anecdotes from history and economics to captivate the crowd—and sparked conversation for the rest of the evening and beyond.

Images top to bottom:

Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina gave the evening’s opening remarks.

Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina with Claus von Zastrow and Linda Rosen, both of Change the Equation.

Scientific American Publisher Bruce Brandfon, keynote speaker Edward Glaeser, Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina and former Maryland Governor Parris N. Glendening at the event.

The Scientific American and Nature Publishing Group (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group) staff join keynote speaker Edward Glaeser/Grace Baynes, Mariette DiChristina, David Hoole, Ruth Francis, Michael Voss, Edward Glaeser, Rachel Scheer, Vikram Savkar, Neda Afsarmanesh and Fred Guterl.

All photographs by Darren Santos.

To further explore this topic, Scientific American will host a gathering of public policymakers, scientists and researchers, and private sector leaders on Thursday, September 15, 2011, in Washington, D.C. The event will feature opening remarks by SA Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina and Edward Glaeser, director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, Harvard University, who contributed to SA‘s Cities issue.

For live #SACities tweets from the Rayburn House Office Building, follow @sciam_live starting at 6:30 P.M. Eastern time. Images and additional news from the event will be shared on our Web site.