Rational take on the Bermuda Triangle

Much has been said about the Bermuda Triangle. Here's Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, popular science commentator from Australia, who won the 2002 differently prestigious Ig Nobel Award by the Harvard univ, rationalising or attemtping to do so. Follows...

When you compare it to the rest of the world, the Bermuda Triangle is big enough, but its reputation is enormous. Geographically speaking, it runs between the Bermuda Islands, Puerto Rico and Miami in Florida. But the myth of the vanishings associated with the Bermuda Triangle is so powerful that books, TV documentaries and even movies have been made about it.
The seeds of the myth began at 2.10 PM, on 5th December, 1945, when a flight of 5 Avenger Torpedo Bombers lifted off from the Naval Base airstrip at Fort Lauderdale in Florida, on a routine bombing training run. The story then goes that in perfectly clear weather, these experienced aviators became mysteriously disorientated, and in a series of increasingly panicked radio transmissions, asked for help. The last radio transmission from Flight 19 was at 7.04 PM. By 7.20 PM a Martin Mariner rescue plane was dispatched - and it too vanished without a trace. By the way, the missing pilots and their missing planes made a brief appearance in the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where it was implied that they had been abducted by aliens.
But the myth claims that it's not just planes that vanish there. Many ships apparently came to foul ends in the Bermuda Triangle, including the 19th century sailing ship, the Marie Celeste, which was supposedly found drifting and abandoned, in perfect sailing condition. And the Bermuda Triangle has moved with the times, and since then, many more ships, including the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion, have vanished there without a trace.
The real story is more prosaic.
First, the Bermuda Triangle is huge - over one million square kilometres, or one fifth the area of Australia ( the contiguous continental USA).
Second, it's just north of the birthplace of most of the Atlantic hurricanes that lash the east coast of the USA. The Gulf Stream, that "river in a sea", flows swiftly and turbulently through the Bermuda Triangle, dumping huge amounts of energy there. Many wild storms can suddenly burst into existence, and can, just as suddenly, fade away.
Third, the undersea landscape is incredibly varied, ranging from shallow continental shelf to the deepest depths of the Atlantic, about 30,000 feet deep. This means that some wrecks would be very difficult to find.
Fourth, it's one of the heaviest-travelled pleasure craft routes in the world, so you would expect to find many nautical mishaps there.
Fifth, a survey by Lloyds of London shows that, on a percentage basis, there are no more ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle, than anywhere else in the world.
When you look at the stories more closely, the myth unravels even more.
The Marie Celeste was found abandoned on the other side of the Atlantic, between Portugal and the Azores. Contrary to legend, its sails were in very poor condition, and it was listing badly - definitely not in near perfect condition. The USS Scorpion was found, sunk, near the Azores, again, a long way from the Bermuda Triangle.
The story of Flight 19 on December 5, 1945, is the key.
The naval aviators were not experienced. They were all trainees, apart from the Commander, a Lt. Charles Taylor. Reports say that he was suffering from a hangover, and tried unsuccessfully to get another commander to fly this mission for him. The weather was not clear - rather, a sudden storm raised 15-metre waves. The Avenger Torpedo Bombers simply ran out of fuel and sank in the storm, after dark, and in high seas. One of Commander Taylor's colleagues wrote, "...they didn't call those planes 'Iron Birds' for nothing. They weighed 14,000 pounds (over 6 tonnes) empty. So when they ditched, they went down pretty fast."
The Martin Mariner rescue plane sent to look for the Avengers did not vanish without trace. These rescue planes were flying fuel tanks, because they had to remain aloft for 24 hours continuously. And prior to this incident, they had a reputation for leaking petrol fumes inside the cabin. The crew of the SS Gaines Mill actually saw this Mariner breaking up in an explosion about 23 seconds after take-off, and saw debris floating in the stormy seas. After this Mariner exploded, the Navy grounded the entire fleet of Mariners.
The myth of the malevolent supernatural powers hiding in the Bermuda Triangle began when Vincent H. Gaddis wrote rather creatively about Flight 19 in the February 1964 issue of Argosy : Magazine of Masterpiece Fiction in a story called, The Spreading Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. But it really took off in 1974, when Charles Berlitz released his best-seller The Bermuda Triangle, an even more imaginative account.
Exotic explanations for these disasters include power crystals from Atlantis, hostile aliens hiding under the waters, violent vortices from other dimensions, and evil humans using anti-gravity machines.
But it turns out that there is something mysterious, and potentially dangerous, and potentially very useful, under the ocean floor of the Bermuda Triangle, and I'll talk about that, next time...
Last time I talked about the myth of the Bermuda Triangle, that triangle of ocean between Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Miami, where ships supposedly vanish for no good reason. But when you look at the statistics, the sinkings are on a par with any other similarly-trafficked area of ocean real estate anywhere else on the planet. The extra sinkings are not real. But there is something very strange lurking under the floor of the Bermuda Triangle - an ice that burns.
In fact, this bizarre ice exists in many other places around the world as well. It's called a "methane hydrate". Basically, it's a single molecule of methane trapped in a cage of six water molecules. Methane has the chemical formula of CH4, which means one atom of carbon is surrounded by four atoms of hydrogen, while water is your standard H2O. If you have methane and water together in the same place, and if the pressure is high enough and the temperature is low enough, you can get a methane hydrate. If you bring a lump of methane hydrate to the surface, the icy water melts releasing the methane, which will burn quite nicely. In one sense, these methane hydrates are kind of like vampires - they will fall to pieces if you bring them out into the light.
These hydrates have been a scientific curiosity for about two centuries. It was only in the late 1960s that Russian scientists discovered natural hydrates in the freezing Siberian permafrost. In the 1970s methane hydrates were discovered at the bottom of The Black Sea. The Black Sea is loaded with these methane hydrates. In fact, sailors have long reported seeing bolts of lightning set fire to the methane on the surface of the sea - methane that had spontaneously bubbled up from below the ocean floor. And since then, they've been found in many many places under the ocean floor, including the notorious Bermuda Triangle.
In fact, there's a huge amount of methane down there. For example, about 330 kilometres off the coast of North Carolina, and three kilometers below the surface of the ocean, is a uprising on the ocean floor called Blake Ridge. This Blake Ridge covers around 100,000 square kilometres of the ocean floor. One quarter of it, just 25,000 square kilometers, holds methane equivalent to around 35 billion tonnes of carbon. In plain English, that deposit of methane would be enough to cover the entire natural gas consumption of the USA for a hundred years. And yet this is just one small area of methane hydrates.
Where did all this methane come from? The answer starts with all the dead bodies of various sea creatures floating down to form a mud on the ocean floor. Strange creatures like bacteria called Archaea, live down there, and eat these dead bodies. If you think that ice-that-burns is weird, these Archaea are even weirder.
Back in the old days, about a quarter-of-a-century ago, the biologists divided life into Five Kingdoms - plants, animals, fungi, protists (single-celled creatures with separate nuclei) and bacteria (single-celled creatures without separate nuclei). But in the late 1970s, Dr. Carl Woese and his colleagues from the University of Illinois started looking at these creatures from the point-of-view of their DNA. They found that some bacteria didn't really belong neatly with the other bacteria. They were small, like regular bacteria, but they had major differences in the DNA, in their cell membranes, and in a whole lot of other areas. These weird bacteria-like creatures often lived in extreme conditions where bacteria could not - temperatures over 100oC, extreme pressure or extreme saltiness. They called these weird bacteria, Archaebacteria, which they later shortened to Archaea. After a while, these scientists realized that all living creatures could be separated into three Domains - the bacteria, the Archaea, and everything else.
It seems that some of these Archaea have been around since the very first days of life on our planet, about 3.8 billion years ago, long before there was any oxygen in the atmosphere.
Some of these Archaea make methane, while others eat it, and sometimes, there's enough methane left over to form these methane hydrates. If these little methane eaters didn't exist, there'd be an extra 300 million tonnes of methane each year bubbling up from the ocean floor. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, about 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and that would set off some pretty significant warming on our little planet. So we're lucky that these methane producers live next to methane eaters.
There seems to be a lot of them around. Some scientists have calculated that the primitive Archaea and other bacteria-like creatures living on the ocean floor make up one third of all the biomass of living creatures on our planet. So in about quarter-of-a-century, these Archaea have gone from completely unknown, to making up one third of the biomass on the planet!
Now sure, a bit of methane bubbling up to the surface can burn in a pretty way if it's hit by lightning - but it can be a lot more dangerous than that, and I'll talk about that, next time...
Or The Ice That Burns
Last time I talked about bizarre creatures, that were not even discovered a quarter-of-a-century ago, and that make up about one third of all the biomass on the planet. Some of them live in the mud on the ocean floor. These creatures, which look like bacteria, but which are as different from bacteria as we humans are, date back to the ancient time, before there was any oxygen on the planet. They live in a methane-rich environment on the ocean floor, and they both make and eat methane. They even release the methane gas, which then burps its way up to the surface - and when it gets there, this methane gas can be quite dangerous.
Sure, a bit of methane bubbling up to the surface can burn prettily if it's hit by lightning.
But methane in water can be much more dangerous than that. Ships float nicely in water, but if you try to make them float in a mix of water and bubbles, they sink like a set of car keys. There's an area of the ocean called Witch Ground, about 150 kilometres north east of Aberdeen in Scotland. We know that methane bubbles up from time to time, leaving pock marks in the ocean floor. Witchs Hole is a large pock mark on the ocean floor, in Witch's Ground, about 100 metres across. And recently, a trawler has been discovered sitting underwater, perfectly upright, in the middle of this small 100-metre wide methane production hole (or pockmark). It's a steel-built vessel around 25 metres long, built somewhen between 1890 and 1930. We're guessing, but if a large burst of methane bubbles rose up, the trawler would lose all flotation, and just sink, perfectly level, until it bottomed out on the ocean floor.
And if some really large bubbles of methane gas were to rise in the atmosphere and then get sucked into the engines of a jet, they could make a nasty explosion.
This Methane Bubbling Effect, which happens in the Bermuda Triangle, could also explain some of the strange disappearances.
But the Disaster Scenarios get even more extreme than that. Some scientists reckon that about 55.5 million years ago, about one trillion tonnes of methane bubbled to the surface over a very short period, about 1,000 years (that's about 30 tonnes per second), and heated up the planet by about 2°C. Other scientists agree, but crank up the drama by suggesting that a lot of this methane burnt in massive firestorms. Regardless of how extreme this was, it goes under the official name of the Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum.
These deposits of methane hydrates are not cold chunks of ice, making up lifeless deserts, on the ocean floor. Recently, worms around two to five centimeters long have been discovered living happily in the methane hydrates. These pastel pink creepers are flat, segmented worms, with two rows of bristly feet on each side, like oars, which let them move through the canary yellow frozen ice.
These methane hydrates are now the largest untapped source of fossil fuels left here on Earth. But there are a few problems with using them as fuel. First, remember that methane has the chemical formula of CH4 - that's four hydrogen atoms surrounding one carbon atom. When you burn carbon, you get carbon dioxide, and off goes the Greenhouse Effect again. Second, you use up such a huge source of energy without having some flow-on effects, somewhere else in the environment. What they will be, we have no idea.
The methane hydrates stay as solid inert frozen lumps, because of the weight of the ocean above them. But anytime there's an ice age, the ocean height drops by roughly 100 metres. This might then release the pressure on some of the methane hydrates and let the methane bubble to the surface. This would set off a Mini Greenhouse Effect, which would then help reverse the ice age - yet another case of the Earth bringing itself back to its original state, through a negative feedback loop.
At the moment, we're roughly half way through all the easily available and commercially extractable oil. Perhaps these methane hydrates, which are estimated to hold twice as much carbon as all the other fossil energy sources put together, will be the fuel of the 21st Century. Or perhaps we'll be able to do something more sensible than just burn them, and instead, extract the hydrogen to use in fuel cells.
Or maybe a more sensible thing would be to look at the genetic code of these strange methane-producing creatures. They could give us new drugs, or teach us new ways to modify existing chemicals. One thing is certain, this exotic frozen ice, and other secrets of the deep, will have a big influence in the 21st century.

Swallowed magnets attract trouble in boy's stomach

Surgeons Urge Vigilance

Four-year-old Braden Eberle was worried. “Mom, I swallowed something,” said the San Jose boy. His mother, Jill, reassured him when she learned that it was just a tiny magnet that had slipped loose from a construction-type toy. But the next day, he swallowed another.“I didn’t think anything of it at first,” said Jill Eberle, but she threw away the building set after the second incident. Braden had been holding the pieces in this mouth when the pencil eraser-sized magnets came loose and slipped down his throat. “They were so tiny, I thought they would just pass through.”

The next day, Friday, Braden began to complain of an intermittent stomachache severe enough to wake him from sleep. On Saturday morning, Eberle took her son to the emergency room—purely as a precautionary measure. “I thought it was probably the flu, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the magnets,” Eberle said.

“Braden didn’t really look that sick,” agreed Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital pediatric surgeon Sanjeev Dutta, MD, who evaluated Braden at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose the Saturday before Easter 2007. “But when I heard he’d swallowed two magnets at two different times, I became concerned.” X-rays revealed that the powerful rare-earth magnets had snapped together in Braden’s intestinal tract and were pinching the delicate tissue. Braden needed immediate surgery.

“Dr. Dutta was adamant,” said Eberle, who hadn’t expected such a drastic response. “He wasn’t messing around.” Within two hours, the surgery was over. Dutta used minimally invasive laparoscopic techniques to remove the magnets through just three small incisions, and Braden recovered quickly.

Dutta describes the case in a study published in the February issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine as a cautionary tale for other physicians. The report urges clinical vigilance and early surgical consultation when magnets are swallowed—even if the child exhibits few symptoms of distress.

Many of the magnets in today’s toys contain neodymium, a metal with an unusually strong magnetic force.

“These rare-earth magnets are so much more powerful than the magnets we used to play with as kids,” said Dutta, who is also an assistant professor of pediatric surgery at the Stanford School of Medicine. “Kids swallow things all the time. Even one magnet can cause a problem if the child has swallowed something else made of metal.” Intestinal tissue pinned between the objects can disintegrate, causing an infection or digestive issues. In addition, the affected length of intestine can twist, cutting off the blood supply and killing that portion of the bowel.

“The fact that kids have died or gotten very sick from swallowing these magnets is a big concern to me, and a primary reason why I wanted to publish Braden’s case,” said Dutta.

“These magnet toys are ubiquitous. They’re recommended for older children, but many of these kids have younger siblings.” Braden had been playing with his older brother’s set.

Older children may also be at risk. Less than two weeks after Braden’s surgery, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued an update to an earlier warning about toys containing magnets like those Braden swallowed. At that time, one death and 27 intestinal injuries like Braden’s had been reported due to such magnets. At least 10 of those injuries involved children between the ages of 6 and 11.

Several magnet-based construction sets have been recalled by the commission. In many, the tiny, powerful magnets are affixed to plastic building pieces such as 1.5-inch squares, 1-inch triangles, cylinder rods, flexors, connectors, x-tenders and curves. The sets come in an assortment of colors. Other types of toys and games with the magnets have been subjected to similar recalls during the past year.

“I can’t believe they use these magnets in children’s toys,” said Eberle, who has banned all such magnets from her house. That is, all but two—the two Dutta removed from Braden’s intestine. Those she keeps as a reminder of what could have happened.

“The fact that Braden knew to tell me he had swallowed something may have saved his life,” she said. “I never would have known. I would have assumed it was the flu. It’s so scary how it happens so fast.”

Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?-SciAm debate

The following is an interesting article that is opened for comments by Scientific American:
The debate is about whether wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not.

The explosively growing World Wide Web has rapidly transformed retailing, publishing, personal communication and much more. Innovations such as e-commerce, blogging, downloading and open-source software have forced old-line institutions to adopt whole new ways of thinking, working and doing business.
Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers--and not just the younger ones--have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open blogs, wikis and social networks of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement--yet--their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based "Science 2.0" is not only more collegial than the traditional variety, but considerably more productive.
"Science happens not just because of people doing experiments, but because they're discussing those experiments," explains Christopher Surridge, editor of the Web-based journal, Public Library of Science On-Line Edition (PLoS ONE). Critiquing, suggesting, sharing ideas and data--communication is the heart of science, the most powerful tool ever invented for correcting mistakes, building on colleagues' work and creating new knowledge. And not just communication in peer-reviewed papers; as important as those papers are, says Surridge, who publishes a lot of them, "they're effectively just snapshots of what the authors have done and thought at this moment in time. They are not collaborative beyond that, except for rudimentary mechanisms such as citations and letters to the editor."
The technologies of Web 2.0 open up a much richer dialog, says Bill Hooker, a postdoctoral cancer researcher at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Portland, Ore., and the author of a three-part survey of open-science efforts in the group blog, 3 Quarks Daily. "To me, opening up my lab notebook means giving people a window into what I'm doing every day. That's an immense leap forward in clarity. In a paper, I can see what you've done. But I don't know how many things you tried that didn’t work. It's those little details that become clear with open notebook, but are obscured by every other communication mechanism we have. It makes science more efficient." That jump in efficiency, in turn, could have huge payoffs for society, in everything from faster drug development to greater national competitiveness.
Of course, many scientists remain highly skeptical of such openness--especially in the hyper-competitive biomedical fields, where patents, promotion and tenure can hinge on being the first to publish a new discovery. From that perspective, Science 2.0 seems dangerous: using blogs and social networks for your serious work feels like an open invitation to have your online lab notebooks vandalized--or worse, have your best ideas stolen and published by a rival.
To Science 2.0 advocates, however, that atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust is an ally. "When you do your work online, out in the open,” Hooker says, “you quickly find that you're not competing with other scientists anymore, but cooperating with them."

Rousing Success
In principle, says PLoS ONE's Surridge, scientists should find the transition to Web 2.0 perfectly natural. After all, since the time of Galileo and Newton, scientists have built up their knowledge about the world by "crowd-sourcing" the contributions of many researchers and then refining that knowledge through open debate. "Web 2.0 fits so perfectly with the way science works, it's not whether the transition will happen but how fast," he says.
The OpenWetWare project at MIT is an early success. Launched in the spring of 2005 by graduate students working for MIT biological engineers Drew Endy and Thomas Knight, who collaborate on synthetic biology, the project was originally seen as just a better way to keep the two labs' Web sites up to date. OpenWetWare is a wiki--a collaborative Web site that can be edited by anyone who has access to it; it even uses the same software that underlies the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Students happily started posting pages introducing themselves and their research, without having to wait for a Webmaster to do it for them.
But then, users discovered that the wiki was also a convenient place to post what they were learning about lab techniques: manipulating and analyzing DNA, getting cell cultures to grow. “A lot of the 'how-to' gets passed around as lore in biology labs, and never makes it into the protocol manuals," says Jason Kelly, a graduate student of Endy's who now sits on the OpenWetWare steering committee. "But we didn't have that." Most of the students came from a background in engineering; theirs was a young lab with almost no mentors. So whenever a student or postdoc managed to stumble through a new protocol, he or she would write it all down on a wiki page before the lessons were forgotten. Others would then add whatever new tricks they had learned. This was not altruism, notes steering-committee member Reshma Shetty. "The information was actually useful to me." But by helping herself, she adds, "that information also became available around the world."
Indeed, Kelly points out, "Most of our new users came to us because they'd been searching Google for information on a protocol, found it posted on our site, and said 'Hey!' As more and more labs got on, it became pretty apparent that there were lots of other interesting things they could do."
Classes, for example. Instead of making do with a static Web page posted by a professor, users began to create dynamically evolving class sites where they could post lab results, ask questions, discuss the answers and even write collaborative essays. "And all stayed on the site, where it made the class better for next year," says Shetty, who has created an OpenWetWare template for creating such class sites.
Laboratory management benefited too. "I didn't even know what a wiki was," recalls Maureen Hoatlin of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, where she runs a lab studying the genetic disorder Fanconi anemia. But she did know that the frenetic pace of research in her field was making it harder to keep up with what her own team members were doing, much less Fanconi researchers elsewhere. "I was looking for a tool that would help me organize all that information," Hoatlin says. "I wanted it to be Web-based, because I travel a lot and needed to access it from wherever I was. And I wanted something my collaborators and group members could add to dynamically, so that whatever I saw on that Web page would be the most recently updated version."
OpenWetWare, which Hoatlin saw in the spring of 2006, fit the bill perfectly. "The transparency turned out to be very powerful," she says. "I came to love the interaction, the fact that people in other labs could comment on what we do and vice versa. When I see how fast that is, and its power to move science forward--there is nothing like it."
Numerous others now work through OpenWetWare to coordinate research. SyntheticBiology.org, one of the site's most active interest groups, currently comprises six laboratories in three states, and includes postings about jobs, meetings, discussions of ethics, and much more.
In short, OpenWetWare has quickly grown into a social network catering to a wide cross-section of biologists and biological engineers. It currently encompasses laboratories on five continents, dozens of courses and interest groups, and hundreds of protocol discussions--more than 6100 Web pages edited by 3,000 registered users. A May 2007 grant from the National Science Foundation launched the OpenWetWare team on a five-year effort to transform OpenWetWare to a self-sustaining community independent of its current base at MIT. The grant will also support development of many new practical tools, such as ways to interface biological databases with the wiki, as well as creation of a generic version of OpenWetWare that can be used by other research communities such as neuroscience, as well as by individual investigators.

Skepticism Persists
For all the participants' enthusiasm, however, this wide-open approach to science still faces intense skepticism. Even Hoatlin found the openness unnerving at first. "Now I'm converted to open wikis for everything possible," she says. "But when I originally joined I wanted to keep everything private"--not least to keep her lab pages from getting trashed by some random hacker. She did not relax until she began to understand the system's built-in safeguards.
First and foremost, says MIT's Kelly, "you can't hide behind anonymity." By default, OpenWetWare pages are visible to anyone (although researchers have the option to make pages private.) But unlike the oft-defaced Wikipedia, the system will let users make changes only after they have registered and established that they belong to a legitimate research organization. "We've never yet had a case of vandalism," Kelly says. Even if they did, the wiki automatically maintains a copy of every version of every page posted: "You could always just roll back the damage with a click of your mouse."
Unfortunately, this kind of technical safeguard does little to address a second concern: Getting scooped and losing the credit. "That's the first argument people bring to the table," says Drexel University chemist Jean-Claude Bradley, who created his independent laboratory wiki, UsefulChem, in December 2005. Even if incidents are rare in reality, Bradley says, everyone has heard a story, which is enough to keep most scientists from even discussing their unpublished work too freely, much less posting it on the Internet.
However, the Web provides better protection that the traditional journal system, Bradley maintains. Every change on a wiki gets a time-stamp, he notes, “so if someone actually did try to scoop you, it would be very easy to prove your priority--and to embarrass them. I think that's really what is going to drive open science: the fear factor. If you wait for the journals, your work won't appear for another six to nine months. But with open science, your claim to priority is out there right away."
Under Bradley's radically transparent "open notebook" approach, as he calls it, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication. "A simple wiki makes an almost perfect lab notebook," he declares. The time-stamps on every entry not only establish priority, but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration.
Bradley concedes that there are sometimes legitimate reasons for researchers to think twice about being so open. If work involves patients or other human subjects, for example, privacy is obviously a concern. And if you think your work might lead to a patent, it is still not clear that the patent office will accept a wiki posting as proof of your priority. Until that is sorted out, he says, "the typical legal advice is: do not disclose your ideas before you file."
Still, Bradley says the more open scientists are, the better. When he started UsefulChem, for example, his lab was investigating the synthesis of drugs to fight diseases such as malaria. But because search engines could index what his team was doing without needing a bunch of passwords, "we suddenly found people discovering us on Google and wanting to work together. The National Cancer Institute contacted me wanting to test our compounds as anti-tumor agents. Rajarshi Guha at Indiana University offered to help us do calculations about docking--figuring out which molecules will be reactive. And there were others. So now we're not just one lab doing research, but a network of labs collaborating."

Blogophobia
Although wikis are gaining, scientists have been strikingly slow to embrace one of the most popular Web 2.0 applications: Web logging, or blogging.
"It's so antithetical to the way scientists are trained," Duke University geneticist Huntington F. Willard said at the April 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, one of the first national gatherings devoted to this topic. The whole point of blogging is spontaneity--getting your ideas out there quickly, even at the risk of being wrong or incomplete. "But to a scientist, that's a tough jump to make," says Willard, head of Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. "When we publish things, by and large, we've gone through a very long process of drafting a paper and getting it peer reviewed. Every word is carefully chosen, because it's going to stay there for all time. No one wants to read, 'Contrary to the result of Willard and his colleagues…’."
Still, Willard favors blogging. As a frequent author of newspaper op-ed pieces, he feels that scientists should make their voices heard in every responsible way possible. Blogging is slowly beginning to catch on; because most blogs allow outsiders to comment on the individual posts, they have proved to be a good medium for brainstorming and discussions of all kinds. Bradley's UsefulChem blog is an example. Paul Bracher's Chembark is another. "Chembark has morphed into the water cooler of chemistry," says Bracher, who is pursuing his Ph.D. in that field at Harvard University. "The conversations are: What should the research agencies be funding? What is the proper way to manage a lab? What types of behavior do you admire in a boss? But instead of having five people around a single water cooler you have hundreds of people around the world."
Of course, for many members of Bracher's primary audience--young scientists still struggling to get tenure--those discussions can look like a minefield. A fair number of the participants use pseudonyms, out of fear that a comment might offend some professor's sensibilities, hurting a student’s chances of getting a job later. Other potential participants never get involved because they feel that time spent with the online community is time not spent on cranking out that next publication. "The peer-reviewed paper is the cornerstone of jobs and promotion," says PLoS ONE's Surridge. "Scientists don't blog because they get no credit."
The credit-assignment problem is one of the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of blogging or any other aspect of Science 2.0, agrees Timo Hannay, head of Web publishing at the Nature Publishing Group in London. (That group's parent company, Macmillan, also owns Scientific American.) Once again, however, the technology itself may help. "Nobody believes that a scientist's only contribution is from the papers he or she publishes," Hannay says. "People understand that a good scientist also gives talks at conferences, shares ideas, takes a leadership role in the community. It's just that publications were always the one thing you could measure. Now, however, as more of this informal communication goes on line, that will get easier to measure too."

Collaboration the Payoff
The acceptance of any such measure would require a big change in the culture of academic science. But for Science 2.0 advocates, the real significance of Web technologies is their potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus on priority and publication, toward the kind of openness and community that were supposed to be the hallmark of science in the first place. "I don't see the disappearance of the formal research paper anytime soon," Surridge says. "But I do see the growth of lots more collaborative activity building up to publication." And afterwards as well: PLoS ONE not only allows users to annotate and comment on the papers it publishes online, but to rate the papers' quality on a scale of 1 to 5.
Meanwhile, Hannay has been taking the Nature group into the Web 2.0 world aggressively. "Our real mission isn't to publish journals, but to facilitate scientific communication," he says. "We've recognized that the Web can completely change the way that communication happens." Among the efforts are Nature Network, a social network designed for scientists; Connotea, a social bookmarking site patterned on the popular site del.icio.us, but optimized for the management of research references; and even an experiment in open peer review, with pre-publication manuscripts made available for public comment.
Indeed, says Bora Zivkovic, a circadian rhythm expert who writes at Blog Around the Clock, and who is the Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE, the various experiments in Science 2.0 are now proliferating so rapidly that it is almost impossible to keep track of them. "It's a Darwinian process," he says. "About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread."
"I wouldn't like to predict where all this is going to go," Hooker adds. "But I'd be happy to bet that we're going to like it when we get there."

Enjoy!

Study challenges glacial melt-global warming theory!

Here we are. A roller-coaster ride that climate scientists subject us to.
The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has injected fears of a doomsday approaching us.
No sooner has the Nobel gone to the protagonists of such a theory, a study at the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography have come out with a shocker.
But that shocker may well pave the way for climate scientists to employ newer study strategies and approach the topic in a different way.
The researchers (Richard Norris, professor of paleobiology at Scripps Oceanography, and Andre Bornemann, a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps Oceanography and who continues the research at Universitat Leipzig in Germany) have found that though temperatures were much higher during the Cretaceous period (about 90 million years ago in the time of the dinosaurus) glaciers continued to be formed.
The temperatures then were found to be 35-37°C (95-98.6°F), about 10°C (18°F) warmer than today, thus creating a supergreenhouse climate.
Now this goes against the conventional thinking so far put forth and held by protagonists of the doomsday climatic changes.
What supports this research is that at least two other studies, one in Russia and other in New Jersey, found that sea level during that age actually fell by as much as about 25-40 m (82-131 feet).
The IPCC, in fact, has put out alerts saying that sea-levels would actually rise in the present age due to global warming. How then did sea levels 90 million years back fall despite the world simmering at 10°C more than present temperatures?
The new study, "Isotopic Evidence for Glaciation During the Cretaceous Supergreenhouse" is published in the January 11th issue of the journal Science.
It examined geochemical and sea level data retrieved from marine microfossils deposited on the ocean floor 91 million years ago during the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum.
They used two independent isotopic techniques and studied microfossils to gather geochemical data on the growth and eventual melting of large Cretaceous ice sheets. The researchers compared stable isotopes of oxygen molecules (d18O) in bottom-dwelling and near-surface marine microfossils, known as foraminifera, to show that changes in ocean chemistry were consistent with the growth of an ice sheet. The second method in which an ocean surface temperature record was subtracted from the stable isotope record of surface ocean microfossils yielded the same conclusion.
These independent methods provided them evidence to conclude that an ice sheet about 50-60 percent the size of the modern Antarctic ice cap existed for about 200,000 years.
Norris wonders how even the super-warm climates of the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum were not warm enough to prevent ice growth.
Then what about now?
The researchers suspect that past greenhouse climates may have aided ice growth by increasing the amount of moisture in the atmosphere and creating more winter snowfall at high elevations.
As humans continue to add large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that accelerate the heating of the atmosphere and oceans, research on Earth's past climate conditions is critical to predict what will happen as Earth's climate continues to warm.
Will this new study warrant a change in an approach of scientists in taking what happened during the Cretaceous period as an input to current studies?
Maybe, we have missed something crucial!

Indian Science 'Circus' 2008 is like a 'wide ball'

What a comic affair the 95th Indian Science Congress in Vishakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) has turned out to be! Nobel Laureates are treated like film stars without a word of what they said being understood, and sessions are featuring recycled presentations, in many cases straight downloads from the Net.
The 95th Indian Science Congress in Vishakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) potrayed what Indians are known for best -- over-excited lot of jokers, when it comes to science and technology. More of noise than anything else.
Take the sessions, for instance. Each of the sessions were nothing but idiotic normative analysis, when its should have been scientists telling people what new things are being done that are applicable as solutions to instant problems indians face in every corner of the country.
That is not to be. Sadly, the event's theme -- ''Knowledge-based society using environmentally sustainable science and technology'' -- is too broad-based for any long-lasting impact made by the five-day event on any specific area of science.
In keeping with such a chaotic event, scientists appear to be just rambling off presentations that have been made over and over again in the past. So much so, that even the much celebrated Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists made a mediocre presentation on the second day when they told a motley group of delegates about the power of space technologies in solving the mess that Indian educations lies in.
No prizes for guessing what the space scientists had to say -- that satellite-based technologies are a sure-shot solution for reaching out to school drop-outs in remote villages, that the space technology could also help in increasing the number of PhDs and MTechs who are short by as much as 30,000 and 40,000 respectively, and of course in helping doctors in a remote village be connected with specialists in the respective field to operate upon hapless persons needing to go under the knife urgently.
It is a lop-sided effort.
What these technologies do not do is convince school drop-outs to return to school. How can a student determined to begin working by stopping school to earn his family some (lots!) money be convinced by space technology to attend classes that are relayed via satellite links?
Or, how are people expected to just walk into a room where space tech is bringing material to help people complete PhDs and MTechs, when in the first place those very people are voluntarily looking at more lucrative professions, not to end up as lecturers and professors with meagre incomes in comparison with what MNCs have to offer?
The Science Congress is like a ''wide ball'' bowled by an erratic bowler. A systematic tackling of the ''lack-of-interest-in-science'' issue should begin by making science teaching an interesting exercise in schools. That requires expert teachers who have the ability to hold rapt attention of the students through unique teaching methods.
Unfortunately, what is holding the rapt attention of students today is the process of making a quick buck. Nothing scientific about that.
ISRO's chairman Madhavan Nair once rightly said only those who have a passion for research would survive being in the scientific community despite the lure of attractive pay packages offered by MNCs.
But how do you find those kind of people?
I think the science congresses should first focus on this issue -- generate more people with passion for research. Only then such events would fill up with people who come with solutions, or who have already come up with solutions for the masses.
Only then would science congress mean a more interesting event attracting more youth to its folds. This in turn would be able to popularise science, which is the very objective of the Indian Science Congress Association.
Otherwise, just forget future science congresses that have the blessing of the Union Government through a Rs 1 crore grant that comes its way every year.