Gray wale, Eschrichtius robustus (page 455). - After Scammon, "Marine Mammals of the North-West Coast of North America", New York 1874, drawn by P. Neumann/Wikimedia Commons

Tens of thousands of whales were slaughtered each year for decades from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s, in the service of lighting city streets, painting ladies’ lips and providing multitudinous other modern conveniences.

This monomaniacal hunt led many species to the brink of extinction. But recent research has suggested that gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) populations in the Pacific might have already been on their way down. So are the real life Ahabs really off the hook—at least for the gray whale’s plight?

Getting a picture of pre-whaling whale populations is tricky. Early- and mid-19th century population estimates and whaling records can be as convoluted as Queequeg’s tattoos. And attempting to estimate ancient populations by assessing contemporary populations’ DNA relies on assumptions that do not always hold water.

Historic data estimated the pre-1850 gray whale population to be somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000, whereas genetic estimates puts that number at 19,500 and 35,500.

A more solid tale of whale populations and their distributions is of interest not just to historians but also to policy-makers seeking insights into restoring contemporary gray whale populations, which are still less than a third of what they likely once were. So scientists have been curious to get a sense of how many of these Pacific whales there really were.

Gray whale vertebra image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Jlikes2Fish

A team led by Elizabeth Alter, of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, undertook an effort to set the record straight. They harvested DNA from gray whales captured or beached along the northern Pacific coasts of the U.S. and Canada both recently and historically. The researchers compared contemporary whale DNA to that sampled from whalebones uncovered at archeological digs of indigenous fishing villages that ranged from 150 to 3,500 years old.

According to the analysis, there was, indeed, a severe population bottleneck. But it didn’t happen before the Pequods of the world set out for their cetacean prizes. So it probably wasn’t the “Little Ice Age” (cooling from 1300 to 1850), predation from killer whales (Orcinus orca) or increased hunting by indigenous populations that took the gray whale to the edge of evolutionary obscurity.

The new genetic data reveals that this bottleneck probably occurred about 93 years ago (or about six whale generations ago), which would have been in the final furious push of industrialized whaling. During this time, there were only about 9,070 gray whales left in the eastern Pacific. Before that population pinch, the area likely was home to more than 60,000 of these massive, 16-meter-long creatures.

The work underscores the difficulties of using modern genetics alone to estimate ancient animal populations. “Historic baselines for many marine populations [might be] much larger than previously estimated,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published online May 9 in PLoS ONE.

So, thanks to some clever new analysis, these old whalebones proved worth their salt in helping us understand whale populations in the era before we humans started launching our harpoons. And Melville’s characters—and their actual analogues–remain implicated in the crime.

Now a team of scientists—physicists Frank von Hippel and Richard Garwin along with environmental scientists Rodney Ewing and Allison Macfarlane—suggest that burying plutonium is the only reasonable solution to this problematic stockpile in a comment to be published in Nature on May 10. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) They also recommend the U.K., which is presently debating what to do with its nearly 100 metric tons of plutonium, should lead the way by studying how to immobilize the “element from hell” in ceramic pucks that can then be buried in deep caverns or even deeper boreholes.

There are other alternatives. The U.K. actually appears to be leaning toward following the example of France and Japan in their attempts to use the plutonium in so-called mixed oxide nuclear fuel, or MOX. This alternative fuel gets its name because it bears fuel pellets made by combining oxides of uranium and plutionium, a fact that also makes MOX more expensive and harder to handle. By one French estimate from 2000 recycling plutonium in this way adds $750 million to the annual cost of electricity generation in France compared with fuel rods manufactured from uranium freshly dug out of the ground and enriched. The U.S. is spending $13 billion to turn 34 metric tons of its plutonium stockpile into MOX at a facility in South Carolina. And the U.K. failed in its prior attempt to produce MOX fuel at Sellafield, which shut down last year after spending $2.3 billion in its abortive attempt.

Another option is to use the plutonium as fuel directly in so-called fast reactors, which employ neutrons to initiate fission that are whizzing about much faster than in current nuclear reactor technologies. That high-speed neutron action necessitates cooling such reactors with something a little more difficult to deal with than water, such as liquid sodium (which burns on contact with air or water). And that has meant maintenance problems have plagued the world’s fast reactors, such as Monju in Japan or Superphénix in France, although both Russia and the U.S. have each had some successes.

In the end such fast reactors don’t so much solve the plutonium problem as delay it: A hole in the ground to hide the radioactive stuff would still be required. So why not just take the cheap route and immobilize it, then bury it, asks the team of scientists? That may be because finding a place to bury it has proved politically radioactive—from Japan to the U.S. Here, Yucca Mountain in Nevada is no closer to being a solution for nuclear waste today than in the 1980s when it was first designated as a final resting place for U.S. radioactive residue. A recent blue ribbon commission recommended starting over from scratch (although the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico has fared better). Nor has the U.S. adequately prepared for tearing down its aging nuclear reactors and dealing with the radioactive waste left behind, according to an April Government Accountability Office report. The problem with treating plutonium “unambiguously as the dangerous weapons material that it is,” as the scientists put it, is that few want to pay to have it buried, even very deeply, anywhere near their backyards.

Image: Courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy

Acraga coa larva (Credit: Daniel Janzen)

Yesterday, stunning photos of a semi-translucent, gelatinous caterpillar spread quickly across the Internet—probably setting a new speed record for larvae of all kinds. Scuba instructor and amateur wildlife photographer Gerardo Aizpuru spotted the creature in early April on a mangrove tree leaf near Cancun, Mexico. He submitted his pictures to Project Noah, a user-created database of geotagged wildlife photos, where various commenters identified the species as the larva of a fuzzy orange moth called Acraga coa.

The adult Acraga coa moth (Credit: Daniel Janzen)

Although it’s not 100 percent certain that the “jewel caterpillar” Aizpuru photographed is Acraga coa, it almost definitely belongs to the same family of moths, known as Dalceridae. Scientists have identified around 84 different species of Dalceridae moths, whose larvae are sometimes called “slug caterpillars” because they are so gooey. If you search for “Dalceridae” in Google Images, you’ll see different larvae with the same roly poly bug shape and gumdrop spines, but different colors and patterns. Dalceridae larvae reminded me immediately of nudibranchs, a group of strikingly colored mollusks whose appearance is perhaps best summarized as “trippy.”

Unidentified Dalceridae larva (Credit: artour_a, flickr)

Nudibranchs and many other animals—including many caterpillars—use vivid pigments to advertise their toxicity and keep predators away. But so far biologists have not figured out why some Dalceridae larvae are so colorful. Daniel Janzen, a biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has raised Dalceridae in captivity. He says that although the larvae tend to be bright and conspicuous and spend a lot of time walking on the tops of leaves—as though they did not fear birds and other predators—he has no evidence that Dalceridae are poisonous and he knows that they do not sting, unlike some of their cousins.

Acraga hamata larva, also of the Dalceridae family (Credit: Daniel Janzen)

Biologists do have some ideas about the function of larvae’s gumdrop spines, however. The glutinous cones break off extremely easily—one can gently tweeze them off or even pull them off by accident—suggestive of the way some lizards’ tails snap off in a predator’s mouth. Janzen says this trick might help the larvae escape from hungry insects and birds, but researchers have not yet confirmed this. In one telling experiment, however, Marc Epstein—an insect biosystematist at the California Department of Food & Agriculture—and his colleagues placed Dalcerides ingenita larvae in glass Petri dishes and introduced a few ants (Camponotus floridanus) to each dish. Many ant species devour caterpillars and other plump grub if they get the chance. Once inside the Petri dish, the ants inspected the larvae with their antennae, but most backed off without trying to take a bite. The few ants that chomped down got their mouths temporarily stuck in the larvae’s jelly coat or pulled away quickly and cleaned the gunk off their mandibles. In subsequent tests, Epstein found no evidence of toxic chemicals in the larvae’s goo, suggesting that it deters ants purely because of its stickiness.

Another Dalceridae larva (Credit: Daniel Janzen)

Perhaps “jewel caterpillar” is an apt name after all—you can look, but you can’t touch.

Google’s contention has been that its autonomous auto would be safer than those driven by humans, offer more fuel-efficiency and promote economic development. The Nevada DMV’s Autonomous Review Committee seems to have bought into this argument and is issuing the Google’s self-driving Toyota Prius a distinctive license plate featuring an infinity symbol and the letters “AU” set against a red background. (Nevada license plates for old-fashioned flesh-and-blood drivers depict a mountainous scene in blue and white below a yellow-orange sky.)

What Google's driverless car sees.

Google began lobbying Nevada to be the first state to allow self-driving cars to be legally operated on public roads shortly after the company’s self-driving car project exited stealth mode in 2010, Scientific American reported in May 2011. At that time Google’s robot fleet of six Priuses and one Audi had traveled more than 240,000 kilometers with minimal human intervention and only one incident in which a test car was rear-ended by a (human-driven) vehicle. The cars are outfitted with two forward-facing video cameras, a 360-degree laser range finder, four radar sensors and advanced GPS units.

Google estimates that one million lives could be saved annually around the globe by driverless cars. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration points out that even though traffic crashes and fatalities have come down in recent years, in the U.S. alone there were 5.8 million crashes in 2008. Of those, about 34,000 resulted in fatalities, 1.6 million resulted in injuries and 4.2 million entailed some sort of property damage.

Nevada has actually thrown open the door to anyone interested in testing an autonomous vehicle on the state’s roads. An applicant must submit proof that his or her driverless car has driven a minimum of 16,000 kilometers, a complete description of the autonomous technology, a detailed safety plan, and a plan for hiring and training test drivers. According to the DMV, “When autonomous vehicles are eventually made available for public use, motorists will be required to obtain a special driver license endorsement, and the DMV will issue green license plates for the vehicles.” Sounds like Nevada’s pretty sure that driverless cars are a part of the state’s future.

Images courtesy of Google

For the New America Foundation’s recent “Feeding the World While the Earth Cooks,” the restaurant seems like it was chosen specifically to highlight those inherent tensions. Nora describes itself on an awning as “certified organic, exciting, seasonal, elegant dining, innovative, enjoy, creative, memorable, fresh, healthy, tasty.” Nevertheless, steak retained its place on the menu, albeit locally sourced and “grass-finished.” That allowed even the woman next to me, a food-justice advocate who campaigns for better food access for the poor, to feel comfortable ordering it.

And yet it takes 8 kilograms of feed to make one kilogram of cow, 4 kilograms of feed for one kilogram of pork and two kilograms of feed for one kilogram of chicken. “The number one thing you can do if you care about climate change is cut down on meat consumption,” as Dawn Moncrief, executive director of meat reduction group A Well-Fed World, noted the following day. That is one thing the world is most definitely not doing. While the U.S. may have reached “peak meat,” the emerging economies of China, India and elsewhere more than make up the difference

Back to the table: The clinking of knives and forks accompanied brief discursions on biochar (use charcoal in your soil and other handy tips from the 1800s), climate change (weird weather is upon us), and the soil crisis (20 kilograms of topsoil are lost for every 25 kilograms of corn produced in this country). The rivers of America run brown with our patrimony while farmers are enserfed to big business, while employing legions of actual serfs to service their fields, according to several of the speakers at the conference.

In fact, ethical conundrums abound when it comes to food. How to reconcile stewardship of the planet and the moral imperative to provide better food (and nutrition!) to the billions starving? How to reconcile a lifestyle founded on getting fat and a need to convince others not to widen their own girths? The central tenet of the discussion: this doesn’t have to be a conflict, technology can save us from having to choose, whether through genetically modified crops or lab grown meat. But the cow cells grown in culture still have to eat something as well as nourish. So how do we convince others to eat less meat while still enjoying a nice steak?

Setting those social quandaries aside for a moment, there are at least six other major challenges facing agriculture in the 21st century, according to farmer Fred Kirschenmann, president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Those are: climate change, depleting natural resources, the loss of biodiversity, mining soil, aging farmers, and the end of cheap energy. As it stands, modern farming relies on a stable climate, endless supplies of fertilizers and water as well as being “enormously dependent on energy,” Kirschenmann noted at the conference. “It takes 10 kilocalories of energy for every calorie of food we produce. It’s the least efficient system we’ve ever had.”

In essence, modern industrial farmers strip mine fields to produce a commodity, yellow stuff as I’ve heard corn called; they are not paid to manage the soil or other resources. The present system kills diversity—whether it be microbial biodiversity or actual crop diversity—while providing cheap food on the backs of cheap labor. Ninety-five percent of the agricultural land in Iowa produces just two crops: corn and soy. But other systems are on offer, whether it be organic methods or Argentina’s unique agriculture focused on reducing energy use in the field.

In a poll taken at the outset of the one-day meeting, convenience beat out “green as it gets,” per the text message survey. And that highlights the bigger problem: if even food savvy folk require convenience above all then what hope is there to turn back the tide of agribusiness, which offers, above all, convenience?

To square that circle, the New America Foundation and its partners imported Midwestern experts (after all, farming is largely a boutique enterprise in the Northeast compared to the massive irrigated crop circles in the dry West or sprawling cornfields of the Middle West) and fed them a light breakfast of yogurt with granola and fruit. (At the energy conference, it was donuts.) Then they were turned loose on the obvious “silver bullet”: genetic modification, or breeding on steroids.

Yet genetic techniques alone likely will not be enough to adapt crops to a changed world, though the science of genetic modification is also likely to be one of the tools needed to deal with drought, heat tolerance, yield and the like. “Some of those promoting improved seed as a silver bullet, it’s a little bit like getting really high octane gas in a car whose tires are all punched out,” noted Sara Scherr, president of EcoAgriculture Parners, a non-governmental organization striving to ensure that farming landscapes work for farmers and biodiversity. That’s because more than a billion subsistence farmers around the world live with severe soil and water degradation and even the best, most advanced seeds need good soil and water to survive, let alone produce.

So perhaps a new round of domestication is needed? Salt- or heat-tolerant species could be turned to crops, repeating the trick of turning weedy inedible teosinte into maize, or the “most remarkable feat of genetic modification we ever accomplished,” in the words of biologist Nina Fedoroff of Penn State University. But then there’s the need to convince people to eat them (see GMOs).

Perhaps it’s organics that will save us? A switch to organic methods would require both increased research into how to get the best yields from these techniques (and optimizing crops to respond to them) as well as a global re-education campaign. It’s the switch from an industrial method (farmer as factory worker and supervisor) to an artisanal mode (farmer as, well, farmer). “Organic takes a lot of inputs—brain inputs,” noted entomologist Hans Herren, president of the Millennium Institute and winner of the World Food Prize for his work to employ biological controls (wasps) on cassava-killing pests.

Of course, the bulk of the world’s farmers already use organic practices—for lack of access to anything else, which suggests farming could be part of the solution to global poverty. A better route to more equitable economic development might be allowing these poorest farmers to sell their food on a global market, one undistorted by agricultural subsidies. They may even teach us something about how to adapt to climate change: the farmers of the Sahel region of Africa, to take but one example, have been adapting to weird weather for decades by planting trees to shade wilting crops and retain water. And the mobile phone revolution is helping to spread that hard-won agricultural knowledge, whether through cow care apps like iCow or simple market price reports. “People don’t sit there waiting to die,” noted geogrpaher Edward Carr of the University of South Carolina and a climate change advisor to U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), who has spent years studying the ebb and flow of economic growth in Ghana. “Do not underestimate how smart these farmers are.”

Another core message: we’ll all need to be smart as we’ll be asking the land to support producing food, feed, fiber and even fuels for us as well as serving as a home for whatever life can survive along with us. Already “half of the world’s wild species are only present in agricultural lands,” Scherr noted. “So agricultural lands need to play a role in habitat.” Yet there are more people in jail than farming in the U.S., according to filmmaker Graham Meriwether, director of “American Meat,” who was man enough to admit that he didn’t know a potato grew underground until after an experience working at a friend’s farm. That is how divorced the average American has become from the process that feeds us.

The lunch menu featured wraps: ham, turkey, avocado, grilled veggies, plus big bowls of fruit unlikely to have ripened in the metropolitan D.C. hinterlands in April. But local food is a distraction when it comes to climate change. The miles that food travels are insignificant compared to the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture generally, whether it be cutting down trees in Brazil or methane emissions from rice paddies in Asia. Or all that American beef (pork and chicken) production and its attendant methane. The ubiquitous plastic water bottles served to keep speakers’ throats wet were more significant from a climate change perspective than the apples shipped across the continent and cooled en route, which is why liquid purveyors like Coke and Pepsi are trying to create plastics from plants.

In June in Rio, the world will mark the anniversary of pledges to curb climate change, preserve biodiversity and slow deforestation, among other environmental aims. “That promise has proved hollow,” noted journalist Mark Hertsgaard, who convened the conference as a New America Foundation fellow. “My daughter and the other 2 billion young people born since Jim Hansen’s testimony [on climate change in 1988] are fated to spend the rest of their lives coping with the hottest and most volatile climate humans have ever faced since we started practicing agriculture 10,000 years ago.”

In fact, Kirschenman’s challenges are not imminent, they are already here: food prices remain volatile, oil prices are high and extreme weather events wreak havoc on crops. But solutions are also already available or have been identified: turn annual crops into perennials. Turn waste (animal and, yes, human) into food. Focus on the soil, nurture its biodiversity, spike it with biochar and stop it from washing away (partially by stopping the wholesale slaughter of microbial life with pesticides). “We need more awareness of what is going on in the soil and the need to have a living soil,” noted farmer Martin Kleinschitt of the Center for Rural Affairs, a Nebraska non-profit focused on salvaging family farms.

As for me, I took a water bottle and an apple for the road—a trip by Acela train back to New York City. At least I saved the carbon dioxide emissions from yet another flight, even one powered in the future by biofuels from our farms. As long as humans garden on a grand scale—the practice we know as agriculture—there will be hope for our own climate sins. After all, growing plants pull CO2 from the atmosphere and, under the right conditions, can lock it away. That’s what fossil fuels are made of in the end, and that will solve our fossil fuel pollution problem in the end, with us or without us. “We can do without automobiles, we can do with computers and, if we have to, we can do without underpants,” Kirschenmann said. “We can’t do without food.”

Image: Courtesy of George Alexander / Flickr.com

Anthropologists examine casts of human fossils from around the world at the 2012 meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Portland, Ore. Image: Kate Wong

In a hotel ballroom in Portland, Or., this past April, the tables were laid not with silverware and china, but replicas of some of the most important human fossils in the world. Seasoned paleoanthropologists and graduate students alike milled among them, pausing to examine a cutmarked Neandertal skull from Croatia, the bizarre foot bones of nearly two-million-year-old Australopithecus sediba from South Africa, a rarely seen pinky finger bone from Siberia whose DNA hints at a previously unknown lineage of humans who were contemporaries of  our own Homo sapiens ancestors. Although perhaps a curious sight to a casual passer-by, the gathering shouldn’t have been an especially momentous occasion. The attendees were simply scientists attending a professional meeting and sharing data with their peers. This is how science is supposed to work. And yet this 1.5-hour open lab night was arguably the most important event of the entire three-day conference.

Human origins researchers commonly complain about a lack of access to certain fossil specimens for study—a state of affairs that has fueled the discipline’s cloak-and-dagger reputation and hindered scientific progress. The fossil-sharing event at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, along with other recent developments—including a planned shift in Ethiopia’s policies governing access to human fossils–hints that paleoanthropology may finally be evolving.

At the anthropology meeting in Portland, I sat down with John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, who chaired the open lab session, to learn more about how it came to be. Hawks explained that the impetus came in 2011, when Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, donated casts of the recently discovered remains of A. sediba to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. The move inspired the association’s vice president and program committee chair, Karen Rosenberg of the University of Delaware, to propose inviting other researchers and curators to bring casts of other fossil hominins (humans and their extinct relatives) to the meeting and make an event of it. Rosenberg then asked Hawks to organize the event, which became the plenary session of the meeting.

Hawks, who has long advocated for open access in paleoanthropology, was happy to oblige. “When I was a graduate student,” he recalls, “I accepted that there were [questions] I just couldn’t investigate” because certain fossils were unavailable for study. He decided to focus on Neandertals, because he could get access to their remains, and he pursued genetics, because it is more open than paleoanthropology.

Fossils may be kept under wraps for various reasons. The researchers who put in the hard work to find the remains typically want first dibs on publishing on them. If they share the fossils with outsiders, so the thinking goes, rivals could beat them to press and steal their thunder. Governments, too, may have an interest in restricting access to fossils found on their country’s turf. Distributing physical replicas or digital data from computed tomographic scans could, in theory, discourage international scholars from bringing their research funding into the country of origin to study the original fossils.

And yet a recent example suggests that there are ways around these issues, and that open access policies might have effects that are quite the opposite of those that many have feared. Soon after Berger found A. sediba in 2008,  he decided that he wanted to make the study of the remains an open access project. To date he has sent dozens of sets of casts of the remains—including bones his own team has yet to publish on–to institutions around the world in hopes of generating interest in the fossils and attracting researchers to come to Johannesburg to see the originals. Every scientist who has asked to see the remains has been granted access.

The strategy has paid off. Researchers have flocked to South Africa in droves to check out the remains, Berger’s research team has grown to include more than 80 members, and within just a few years of getting the bones out of the ground the team has already published a raft of high-profile scientific papers, with more in the pipeline.

“What [Berger] has shown in South Africa is that when you work with the government to open access to things, that has huge benefits for the country,” Hawks observes. “The amount of attention South Africa has gotten for sediba is more than any other country got since Lucy,” he says, referring to the iconic 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis that Donald Johanson of Arizona State University discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. “Such positive attention is hard to come by.”

From the sounds of things, Ethiopia would like to bask in that spotlight once again. In recent years scientists have expressed considerable frustration about the difficulty of getting access to the country’s rich collection of human fossils. That situation is apparently changing. According to Johanson, this past January Yonas Desta, director general of the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Ethiopia, convened a meeting in Addis Ababa during which he announced that the rules and regulations for research in Ethiopia are currently being rewritten with aim of attracting more scholars to Ethiopia to study the fossils. (Full disclosure: I co-wrote a book with Johanson called Lucy’s Legacy.) To encourage this, Ethiopia is developing a casting program to create replicas of published material to distribute to researchers around the world.

When I emailed Desta to ask him about the policy change, he replied that he hopes it “will provide more and equitable access to fossils and will make Ethiopia a center of excellence.” The new regulation is still being finalized, he noted, and will be approved in a couple of months.

“I’m encouraged that there appears to be a return to a more open-door policy in sharing fossils than there has been for some time,” says Johanson of these recent events in paleoanthropology.  “Access to fossils is absolutely critical and essential to anyone doing primary research, and the availability of casts is often extremely important for people planning a research trip to at least make preliminary observations and develop a strategy for work on original fossils.”

And by facilitating better project planning, access to casts and digital data would also cut down on unnecessary handling of the fragile remains. Tracy Kivell of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, who is involved in an initiative to make 3D surface models of a collection of fossils from the South African site of Kromdraai available to scientists, notes that the teeth of the famous Taung child, a 2.6-million- to 2.8-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus fossil from South Africa, are visibly shorter than they used to be, because of damage from the calipers generations of paleoanthopologists have used to measure them. Another A. africanus specimen, dubbed Mrs. Ples, has a substantial dent in her skull from repeated measurements with calipers. With 3D surface models of fossils, scientists can take their measurements virtually, without laying a finger on the fossils themselves.

Kivell thinks concerns about sharing fossil data are misplaced. “You don’t have to worry about getting scooped,” she says, explaining that a lot of the science of interpreting fossils lies in comparing them with other fossils, which is time-consuming work. “Good science in paleoanthropology is highly comparative, highly descriptive and cannot be done fast,” Hawks agrees. “If it’s not done with extensive comparison and careful description, it’s not going to be good.”

Hawks observes that genetics had the same problem paleoanthropology has with making data accessible. But eventually the geneticists “got over it as a culture.” Indeed, it has become standard practice among geneticists to upload new sequence data to a public database before submitting a paper on the findings to a journal for publication. “I really think most people want to see things more open than they are,” Hawks says. “[Paleoanthropology] should be a real science just like genetics is a real science.”

This idealistic urge remains powerful. A few weeks ago at the workshop I’m attending on black holes, I talked to Eliezer Rabinovici, a theoretical physicist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He and his colleagues may well be the only people on the planet to have gotten Arabs, Iranians, Turks and Israelis to agree on anything. Nearly every country in the Middle East has signed onto their project to build a particle accelerator for joint use: SESAME. The decades-long effort has made understanding the nature of space, time, and matter look trivial.

“I had a vision to try and work with our neighbors, to do something for our common humanity,” Rabinovici says. “That sounds bombastic, but that’s what SESAME is all about.”

Born in Jerusalem in 1946, Rabinovici has been reaching out for much of his professional life. He lobbied the Israel government to reopen Palestinian universities it had shut. He worked with the Middle East Scientific Collaboration, an organization founded by Italian theoretical physicist Sergio Fubini, to organize a physics conference in Egypt in 1995 attended by the likes of Ed Witten, Roman Jackiw and Giovanni Veneziano. In a Bedouin tent in the resort town of Dahab (shown in the photograph above), Arabs and Israelis alike stood in honor of Yitzhak Rabin, who had been assassinated three weeks before.

“But then the buses began to explode,” Rabinovici recalls. With the resumption of terrorism and war, the conference proved a one-off. Individual scientists could no longer commune without taking their lives into their hands. Rabinovici and his colleagues wove together a network of high-level political patrons and got the project back on track with a concrete offer of a hand-me-down synchrotron from the German laboratory BESSY. Once everyone was on board, they ratcheted up their ambitions to a brand-new instrument.

The SESAME project has managed to hang together despite the tumult of the past two decades. It chose a laboratory site in Jordan in 2000, built the building in 2008, and settled on the synchrotron design. It is not really a particle physics project, but a general source of radiation for chemistry, biology, pharmaceutical development and other fields—a diversity that is matched to region’s needs.

In March, the Iranian, Turkish, Jordanian, and Israeli governments pledged $20 million for the main accelerator. The project has now gone cap in hand to the U.S. and European Union for the balance, about $15 million. He laments that the E.U. in particular has been dragging its feet: “They lecture Israel, yet fail to follow up.”

In 1954 European scientists founded CERN so that German, French, British and other ex-adversaries would have a place to shoot particles rather than bullets. “It was one of the places where Europe was reborn,” Rabinovici says. SESAME arguably has the tougher task, since the adversaries are not yet “ex”. Another Israeli theorist, Ramy Brustein, compares it to “climbing on an ice wall.” But in 1987, everyone thought the same of cultural exchanges across the Berlin Wall.

Eliezer Rabinovici at Dahab physics conference, November 19, 1995. Courtesy of Eliezer Rabinovici

But, in reality, it never ended.

The continuing celebration of all things brain extends, once more, with the unveiling of a mammoth Web site devoted to neuroscience.

Brainfacts.org—funded with $1.53 million project over six years by the Gatsby and  Kavli Foundations—amasses basic information from leading organizations, ranging from the National Institutes of Health to the International Brain Research Organization in France, chronicling both how the brain works as well as major brain diseases. The information is  intended for parents, educators, students and policymakers. The Society for Neuroscience is the third partner in the collaboration.

When a new discovery emerges, the site, vetted by scientists, will deploy background information about the new findings, in addition to links to media reports. The site, however, is not a news aggregator.

BrainFacts.org  has plans to expand its content. In September, neuroscientists will start blogs, which will enable interaction with readers.

Source: BrainFacts.org

Divya Sirdeshpande (left), a sophomore at Hempfield High School, shows me her project using mushroom mycelia to make biodegradable packaging.

As my Amtrak train rolled past the “Lancaster” sign, the window view alighted on the upright figure of an Amish farmer and his mule-team-pulled hand plow, working the verdant Pennsylvania land just as his forefathers have done here for more than two centuries. I remembered that I was only some 33 miles from Dover, Pa., which in 2005 was the site of a widely reported trial over teaching intelligent design in schools (the judge ultimately ruled against the idea).

In this region wrapped in tradition and homespun values, however, I was about to see some examples of how vibrant the local science also is—both in many school-age children and as an adult enterprise.

As President Obama noted in his 2011 State of the Union address, if our nation wants to improve  student performance in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), one thing we can do is celebrate the winners of science fairs. “We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair,” he said. I’d been asked by Marian Bechtel to speak at a dinner to do just that: we would fete the local Champions of Science, category winners, in grades 7 through 12, of a countywide science fair. (Marian was herself a past Champion, among other honors.) Each fall, some 70 teachers, 25 schools and 1,000 students register to participate, ultimately resulting in about 750 written project proposals submitted for review. Most of the 750 go on to local science fairs, and the winners become part of the countywide program, which has been organized by Lancaster’s North Museum of Natural History & Science for the past few years. The countywide fair is an affiliate of the International Science and Engineering Fair—and a number of competing Champions go to other national science competitions as well.

As I walked through the exhibit area before the Champions dinner, I talked to each of the students about their posters and research. Among the impressive projects I saw were a biodegradable packaging material made from mushroom mycelia (photo), a frictionless gear created with magnets, a study of ecosystem differences in urban and rural areas of the Conestoga River, and a way to convert municipal waste to ethanol. An audience of 200, including these youngsters, their parents and their teachers, then supped and swapped tales about science. In my remarks, I talked to them about how to nurture their inner scientist throughout their lives—even if, like me, they ultimately don’t end up practicing research.

The next morning, I visited the state-of-the-art but homey Clinic for Special Children, whose genetics research and therapies were recently profiled in an article in the journal Nature, “Rare Diseases: Genomics Plain and Simple” (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group). The post-and-beam building, the structure of which was raised in a day with the help of local Amish community members, is decorated with hand-sewn quilts—and well stocked with modern lab equipment for genetic testing and analysis. Through the center’s efforts, more than 120 genetic ailments of Amish and Mennonites have been identified, along with many pioneering treatments. To a visitor, the connection between traditional, community-based patient care and modern personalized medicine and research appeared laudably seamless.

Last on my brief Lancaster tour, I spoke over lunch to a few dozen members and friends of the North Museum of Natural History. I was peppered with insightful questions about what Scientific American is doing to help foster an appreciation of science in young people and the public in general—and got some new ideas about doing so as well. (My favorite was to try to add hands-on activities to our stories where we can.)

I left the area feeling uplifted and grateful to all the individuals who generously spent time with me during my visit because of their love of science and education. Who says science isn’t a spiritually nourishing endeavor?

(Credit: Ferris Jabr)

PHILADELPHIA—In the summer of 2011 I began working on a feature article about a book that most people have never heard of—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a reference guide for psychiatrists and clinicians. Most of the DSM‘s pages contain lists of symptoms that characterize different mental disorders (e.g. schizophrenia: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech and so on). The DSM not only defines mental illness, it often determines whether patients receive treatment—in many cases, insurance companies require an official DSM diagnosis before they subsidize medication or other therapies.

For the first time in 30 years the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is substantially revising the DSM to make diagnoses more accurate and make the book more user-friendly (1994′s DSM-IV did not differ dramatically from 1980′s DSM-III). The association plans to publish a brand new edition of the manual, the DSM-5, in May 2013.

When I was reporting my feature article, published in the May/June issue of Scientific American MIND, I spent a lot of time on the phone with members of the APA Task Force—the group of psychiatrists and researchers who oversee the revisions to the DSM. This weekend I attended the APA’s annual meeting here in Philadelphia to hear some of these researchers speak in person and to learn more about the DSM-5. I was particularly excited about results from the “field trials”—dry runs of the new DSM-5 diagnoses at universities and clinics around the country. The field trials are primarily concerned with one question: do different psychiatrists using the revised DSM-5 diagnoses reach the same conclusion about the same patient? If they do, the updated lists of symptoms have high “reliability”—a good thing in medicine. If not, the new diagnoses are unreliable and the revisions are a failure.

The APA has not yet published the results of the field trials, but at the annual meeting in Philly the association gave a preview of the findings during a Saturday symposium. It was a first glimpse at extremely important data that many people have been waiting a long time to see.

Some of the results—and the way in which the speakers presented them—frustrated and concerned me.

To understand why, it’s helpful to first discuss some statistics. I’ll keep it simple. The APA uses a statistic called kappa to measure the reliability of different diagnoses. The higher the value of kappa, the more reliable the diagnosis, with 1.0 representing perfect reliability. The APA considers a diagnosis with a kappa of 0.8 or higher miraculously reliable; 0.6 to 0.8 is excellent; 0.4 to 0.6 is good; 0.2 to 0.4 “could be accepted” and anything below 0.2 is unacceptably unreliable. Low reliability is a big problem for clinicians, patients and researchers alike: it means that only a minority of clinicians agree when diagnosing a disorder and that researchers who want to study a particular disorder will have a very hard time identifying participants who truly have the disorder in question. If no one agrees, it is hard to make progress of any kind.

Darrel Regier, vice chair of the APA’s DSM-5 Task Force, presented kappas for various DSM-5 diagnoses—the first publicly released results from the field trials. Fortunately, the kappas for many of the DSM-5 diagnoses look strong. Field trials of the new autism spectrum disorder (ASD), for example—which collapses DSM-IV diagnoses for autistic disorder, Asperger’s and other developmental conditions into one category—yielded a kappa of 0.69. However, two pitiful kappas shocked me. The kappa for generalized anxiety disorder was about 0.2 and the kappa for major depressive disorder was about 0.3.

These numbers are way too low according to the APA’s own scales—and they are much lower than kappas for the disorders in previous versions of the DSM. Regier and other members of the APA emphasized that field trial methodology for the latest edition is far more rigorous than in the past and that kappas for many diagnoses in earlier editions of the DSM were likely inflated. But that doesn’t change the fact that the APA has a problem on its hands: its own data suggests that some of the updated definitions are so flawed that only a minority of psychiatrists reach the same conclusions when using them on the same patient. And the APA has limited time to do something about it.

Although the APA has been working on the DSM-5 for more than 11 years now, field trials only started within the last year. While reporting my feature, I asked members of the APA why they waited so long to conduct the field trials. After all, only one year remains until scheduled publication of the DSM-5 and we still do not know whether the revised diagnoses are reliable and whether they are a genuine improvement over their predecessors. I never received a satisfactory answer

To make an analogy, consider a baker who spends months developing a recipe for the ultimate chocolate cake in his head and—a day before he has to deliver the cake—finally tries out the recipe only to discover that the cake tastes awful. He has one day to come up with something else. The APA has placed itself in a similarly desperate position. The final drafts of the new manual are due December of this year, which means the APA has less than 8 months to implement what it has learned from the field trials if it wants to publish on schedule. New field trials would take years to arrange and at least one additional year to conduct. Either the association delays publication of the DSM-5 for several more years, revises the diagnoses yet again and conducts new field trials—or it goes forward with the current schedule and publishes a significantly flawed DSM-5.

If the APA has a plan of action—beyond vague statements like “continuing to analyze our data”—the association did not make it clear at the symposium. The presenters hardly seemed troubled by the alarming results. Even worse, they sometimes came off as oblivious.

Eve Moscicki of the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education gave the final presentation in the symposium. Moscicki helped coordinate the field trials in clinics. For some reason, Moscicki decided to spend more than half her allotted time on irrelevant details—such as the benefits of a good technical support team—before getting to the actual field trial results. Finally she pulled up some colorful bar graphs showing what clinicians and patients thought about the new DSM-5 diagnoses. The bars showed what percentage of respondents thought that the new definitions were Extremely Useful, Very Useful, Moderately Useful, Slightly Useful or Not at All Useful. Infographic enthusiasts know that bar graphs are a weak way to present data like this—it’s difficult to make visual comparisons across so many categories at the same time. A pie chart would have been much clearer. **(See Edited to Add below for corrections and clarification).**

“Well, yes, it looks to me like the majority thought it was very or extremely useful,” Moscicki said of the one revised diagnoses.

“That’s incorrect,” I said, standing up. “37 percent plus 7 percent does not equal more than 50 percent.” In fact, the majority of respondents thought that the new criteria were somewhere between moderately to not at all useful. “You can’t present this data as a bar graph. It’s deceptive,” I added. It was the third time that Moscicki had made such a mistake, overestimating the percentage of positive responses and glossing over the DSM-5‘s shortcomings apparent in the results.

“Well, umm, just remember this is a first look…”

“Totally deceptive,” I said. I swung my backpack over one shoulder and walked out of the room.

In retrospect, I should not have called the graph deceptive, although I do still think that the data was poorly presented. I wish I had stuck around for the final minutes of the presentation, but I was too upset to remain in the room any longer. Perhaps I overreacted. After reflecting on the experience, however, I remain genuinely concerned about the future of the DSM.

Moscicki is right about one thing: this is just a first look. Until the APA officially publishes the results of the field trials, nobody outside the association can complete a proper analysis. What I have seen so far has convinced me that the association should anticipate even stronger criticism than it has already weathered. In fairness, the APA has made changes to the drafts of the DSM-5 based on earlier critiques. But the drafts are only open to comment for another six weeks. And so far no one outside the APA has had access to the field trial data, which I have no doubt many researchers will seize and scour. I only hope that the flaws they uncover will make the APA look again—and look closer.

**Edited to Add**

A few people have pointed out that a pie chart is not necessarily clearer than a bar graph when it comes to presenting the data I discussed. That’s true. I realize now I did not explain my meaning correctly. What bothered me is that Moscicki was guesstimating. She was eyeballing the percentages represented by different bars and adding them together in her head to see if, combined, the Very and Extremely useful percentages were greater than the rest of the categories. Instead, she should have graphically combined the data into two categories for clear comparison—whether as two wedges in a pie chart or as two bars—before her presentation. The solution that popped into my mind at the time was a pie chart in which the wedge representing the combined Very and Extremely useful percentages was clearly less than half of the pie and the wedge representing the combined Moderately, Slightly and Not at All useful categories was clearly more than half. In the grand scheme of things, this particular point is a quibble—but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. My frustration had been building throughout the symposium and I could not stand for what I perceived as glib treatment of crucial data.

Brain as Icon

“Superwoman has been rumbled,” declared a Daily Telegraph article in 2001 that chronicled how the human brain’s inability to “multitask” undercuts the prospects for a woman to juggle career and family with any measure of success. The brain as media icon has emerged repeatedly in recent years as new imaging techniques have proliferated—and, as a symbol, it  seems to confuse as much as enlighten.

The steady flow of new studies that purport to reduce human nature to a series of illuminated blobs on scanner images have fostered the illusion that a nouveau biological determinism has arrived. More often than not, a “neurobiological correlate”— tying together brain activity with a behavioral attribute (love, pain, aggression)—supplies the basis for a journal publication that translates instantly into a newspaper headline. The link between blob and behavior conveys an aura of versimilitude that often proves overly seductive to the reporter hard up to fill a health or science quota. A community of neuroscience bloggers, meanwhile, has taken on the responsibility of rectifying some of these misinterpretations.

A study published last week by University College of London researchers—“Neuroscience in the Public Sphere”—tried to imbue this trend with more substance by quantifying and formally characterizing it. “Brain-based information possesses rhetorical power,” the investigators note. “Logically irrelevant neuroscience information [the result of the multitude of correlations that turn up] imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.”

The study, a content analysis of three broadsheets and three tabloids in Great Britain that spanned the political spectrum from right to left, found the number of neuroscience-related articles climbed steadily overall from January of 2000 to the end December in 2010, nearly doubling, despite drops in 2007 and 2010. Most compelling was the classification of the newspaper stories into three broad memes.

—The Brain as Capital: As the repository of self—a secular surrogate for the soul—the brain is a resource to be optimized through pills, food and training—and, not least, parenting: a consultation with the neuro literature before deciding on the proper punishment for your child? The ever-present theme of brain training methods, for which little proof exists, consumed untold linear inches in news articles throughout the 2000s. “…by stretching the brain with regular crossword and sudoku puzzles, you can make your brain appear up to 14 [count them] years younger.”—Daily Mail, Sept. 13, 2005.

—The Brain as Index of Difference: In this narrative, neuroscience explains distinctions among groups, that men and women are wired differently, and that drug addicts, criminals, gays and the obese are special in ways that correspond to prevailing stereotypes. “Addiction is viewed as a mental disorder, and gays are known to be at higher risk of anxiety, depression, self-harm and drug abuse. Most studies suggest that these problems are brought on by years of discrimination and bullying. But there is another controversial thesis—that gays lead inherently riskier lives. Gambling stimulates the dopamine system in the brain; illicit drugs pep up the same system. Are gays dopamine junkies?—Times, Dec. 18, 2006.

—The Brain as Biological Proof: The neurobiological basis for a behavior—often a brain region that lights up during the course of a particular task—is taken as a means to establish a  “rightful place in the natural order.” Back to super heros: “Superwoman has been rumbled. Juggling a career and an active social life is quite literally a waste of time, according to scientists. A study reveals today that attempting several tasks at once is inefficient and could even be dangerous. The findings challenge the notion of women ‘having it all’.”‑Daily Telegraph, Aug. 6, 2001.

The authors conclude that, though it was impossible to determine precisely how the original studies and the media coverage diverged, their analysis confirmed that “research was being applied out of context to create dramatic headlines, push thinly disguised ideological arguments, or support particular policy agendas.” The study ends with an entreaty that researchers should come forward at the time of publication to elucidate ways in which their work could be misused “as a vehicle for espousing particular values, ideologies or social divisions”—and to ensure that policy debates surrounding neuroscience remain substantive and bereft of rhetorical fluff.

The study pinpoints an undeniable tendency toward neurohype. But the bigger picture transcends the oversimplifying that occurs in the popular media. For the truly interested amateur brain buff, more information—more good (and free) information—exists today than at any point since Santiago Ramón y Cajal penned his stunning line drawings of neurons.

In fact, there has never been a better time for the brain aficionado. The best among the contingent of expert bloggers that read and critique the neuroscience literature approximates a cadre of investigative reporters armed with PhDs in psychology and physiology. Scientific American’s own Scicurious penned a blog on May 2 that describes how a study on high-fat diets and depression that received coverage in the general media could have been much better than it was.

This isn’t an advertisement for ourselves. There are plenty of others worthy of mention who do not count in the Scientifc American stable of bloggers. Neuroskeptic logged in on the same day as Scicurious with an excellent entry on how fMRI studies could be giving false-positive results. And the combing of the literature for what’s important is another service to be had for nothing more than the price of a monthly Internet IP provider. I found “Neuroscience in the Public Sphere” after reading Neurobonkers, an anonymous freelance science writer who flagged the study in his blog. Outside (or maybe even inside) of a graduate-school seminar, this kind of information is really hard to come by. (Also this just in for neurophiles: the giga site, BrainFacts.org—a joint venture of the Kavli Institute, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and the Society for Neuroscience—is scheduled to launch on Monday morning, a repository for all things brain.)

Quibbles abound from the standpoint of journalistic convention: some neuro bloggers remain behind the wall of a pseudonym. And, of course, the question can be asked about whether you can trust the bona fides of any given writer who hangs out a cyber shingle. But the same sort of query, as the University College of London researchers point out, can be directed in spades toward the Daily Mail or The Times. And, if you’re asking for my vote on who to trust for a verdict on Super Woman and brain games, I’d pick Scicurious and Neuroskeptic any day.

Source: Wikimedia Commons