The demise of the AAAS meetings have been rumored for as long as the nearly 20 years I’ve been attending them and probably even before then. Journalists grump that there’s not enough breaking news, scientists say not enough of their colleagues attend, organizers fret that the registration numbers are flat even as other more specialized science meetings have mushroomed in recent years. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about this year’s conference rehashes the old debate, with no news of its own to contribute.

But I love AAAS, for its science celebrities, its smorgasborg of different disciplines, its parties and networking opportunities, and the meeting’s focus on science policy and public engagement. The organizers take all these things seriously and the results are a unique cross-roads of science and society that seem ever more relevant to those of us who love research and want to share it with our audiences. I collect business cards, brainstorm new ideas with colleagues, recruit scientists to visit and give talks at the Exploratorium, and dance at the annual science writer party (this being Boston it was held at Fenway Park with a fantastic Motown cover band).

This year I got to see, if not shake hands with, Ken Miller of Brown (one of the witnesses in the victorious evolution trials of Dover, Pennsylvania and recipient of the Exploratorium’s outstanding educator award), Barry Barrish (founding directors of LIGO and now heading up the troubled but not abandoned International Linear Collider), Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist and author of “The Physics of Star Trek”), Dan Gilbert (Harvard psychology professor, author of Stumbling on Happiness and son of Walter Gilbert, who we interviewed during our DNA webcasts), and Andy Revkin (NYTimes climate reporter and blogger).

I attended sessions on the climate history of the Arctic, global warming and the media, memory and imagination, gigantic international physics collaborations, and science in a religious America. The latter was organized by our friend Matthew Nisbet of American University and he put together a stellar panel of folks in the large middle ground of the debate where most people live. Matt and the panelists don’t feel that religion undermines science, and argued that both can co-exist in modern society, if not the hearts and minds of some scientists and Catholics. Of course that means he’s attacked by people on the edges: the “new atheists” who feel that religious thought should never be tolerated, but rather should be campaigned against by the educated (their words) and religious fundamentalists and politicians who say that accepting evolution means that humans have no moral foundation on which to stand. All did agree that Intelligent Design isn’t based on evidence and therefor isn’t science and that only evolution should be taught in biology classrooms. So that is the bright shining line that even tolerant scientists won’t tolerate.

No, this isn’t a dire climate prediction from one of Al Gore’s disciples. This description was of the Arctic’s distant past given by a paleo-oceanographer during the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science, being held this year in Boston (brrr, baby it’s cold outside). This particular scientist, Henk Brinkhuis from Utrecht University in The Netherlands, also said that 50 million years ago the Arctic was “stinky, swampy and freaking warm.”

Scientists know this because a few years ago an international consortium mounted the first ever deep ocean drilling expedition to the ice-covered Arctic Ocean. The ice-breaking drill ship pulled up sediment cores that represent climate history back to a time when Earth was a “greenhouse world” with no ice caps at the poles. Their 2004 expedition is written up in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) website. It was actually a feat to drill through thick sea ice to the ocean floor below and it took three ice breakers to do the job: a nuclear icebreaker from Russia to break up the floes, a Swedish ice breaker to grind them into slush, and a third ship to deploy the drill string.

Sediment cores are a time machine, scientists pore over the mud looking for fossil fragments, ancient microbes, pollen, and other pieces of evidence that give clues about the temperatures of the ocean and atmosphere. We know from the ANDRILL sediment coring project in Antarctica, covered in our Ice Stories website, diatoms and other plankton are good indicators of past climate because they are very particular about the environments they live in, including the temperature of the water.

Scientists at the session were quick to say that they don’t expect palm trees and crocodiles anytime soon in the Arctic. In fact, from these ocean cores it appears that ice started forming 40 million years ago, shortly after the maximum warm period, and as been an important climate driver in the Arctic Ocean since then. With recent thinning and changing sea ice cover around the North Pole, Kate Moran, a leader on the arctic drilling expedition, said “As scientists, it’s important to point out the issues that demontrate the vulnerability of our planet, that we could destroy this in 200 years.”

photo credit:
H Pälike © ECORD/IODP

Maybe you noticed I haven’t been posting lately; the last few months have been a blur as the Explo team, with fresh funding from the National Science Foundation, launched a major Web project about polar research. Called Ice Stories it features the research of scientists working in the Arctic and Antarctic. We launched the site last November and equipped some Antarctic scientists with video cameras to document their work and send back dispatches.

We got first-hand reports about flooding of penguin nests from melting glaciers in the Ross Sea, heard a raging storm from a glacier camp in West Antarctica, and, in a live webcast, spoke with scientists collecting sediment cores at a sea-ice drilling camp out of McMurdo Station.

What’s really wonderful about Ice Stories is the personal connection with scientists working in such remote, challenging field sites. It’s a thrill to get a call from a glaciologist in the middle of Antarctica updating us about a close encounter with an ice crevasse (her exact quote: “one of our team discovered a crevasse with his foot”). The combination of adventure and current research in these ongoing narratives gives a real picture of what it’s like to be a polar scientist. In most cases, they’ll tell you it’s just plain fun.

The New York Times had a story in the Science Times today that made me flinch at first. A scientist from the Jet Propulsion Lab decided to test NASA’s clean rooms—labs where the air is filtered and employees wear sterile “bunny suits” and masks to prevent contamination of equipment and vehicles intended for space travel– to see whether these environments might harbor life forms of their own. NASA found a surprise: lots of very hardy bacteria–including species previously unknown to science–find a way to survive in the clean rooms.

The reason I flinched is that we did a live Webcast from Goddard Space Flight Center a few years ago as part of our Origins project. I spent a lot of time in the NASA center’s giant clean room, alongside new cameras and a full-scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope, filming and interviewing engineers and technicians as they prepared equipment for a space shuttle servicing mission of the telescope. Did I get exposed to some super-hardy dangerous microbe? Such is the stuff of science-fiction fantasies.

Well, NASA is a lot more concerned about contaminating planets and other space environments with its space vehicles than with sickening the earth-bound humans visiting clean rooms but it seems there wasn’t much for me to worry about anyway. The so-called extreme organisms survive on trace nutrients in the air and unlikely surfaces such as paint. By just playing with an Exploratorium exhibit this morning, I was exposed to many more bacterial species that thrive on human skin and in our bodies. Come to think of it, I’ll go wash my hands now, just to be on the safe side.

Global warming has been called, with good reason, the biggest environmental challenge the world has ever faced and the bad news about the impacts of climate change just keeps piling up. Summer arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than even the most pessimistic scientists ever predicted, villages in Alaska are tumbling into the sea, the beloved polar bear is at risk of extinction and Adelie penguin populations on the Antarctic Peninsula have been declining as temperatures there have risen an average of 6 degrees Celsius in the winter.

The losses are mounting, but is there good news for some? Anyone who has read Andrew Revkin’s series of stories about the land rush in the Arctic knows that some oil and shipping interests will benefit from an opening of the fabled Northwest passage across the Arctic Ocean. (However, these short-term gains will inevitably lead to long-term losses by the rest of the human and natural world as NCAR’s Michael Glantz so eloquently writes about in his blog Fragile Ecologies).

But did you know that residents of Greenland can now enjoy locally grown potatoes and brocolli? And that in the Ross Sea region of Antarctica, Adelie penguin populations are actually increasing, unlike the penguins of the Antarctic peninsula? That was the subject of a recent talk at the Exploratorium by David Ainley, a biologist who has been studying the intrepid Adelie penguin for nearly thirty years and reports on his research in the Penguin Science website.

The story, David says, is more complex than the view that a warming earth melts ice and destroys the habitat for all animals that live on or near frozen sea or ground. In reality, global warming does more than melt ice and heat up the air, it also changes wind patterns which can affect the extent and movement of floating sea ice. For Adelies, which nest on bare rock near the coast, increasing winds push sea ice farther offshore and give the penguins access to ocean feeding grounds without having to walk across kilometers of ice. That makes them better able to feed their chicks, increases reproductive success and has meant a steadily rising population of Adelie penguins in Eastern Antarctica. At the same time, this loss of sea ice threatens the Emperor Penguin, the heroes of “March of the Penguin” and “Happy Feet.” These large birds need a stable platform of sea ice to lay their eggs and hatch chicks. They do this in winter, rather than summer, and the caretakers do not return to sea while they are raising chicks, as the Adelie penguins do. Emperor penguins are vulnerable to shifting sea ice and have suffered population declines as much as 50% as increasing winds have destabilized their breeding habitat and swept chicks and eggs out to sea. The very bad news for Emperor Penguins is that climate models are forecasting even stronger winds in a warming Antarctica, making them climate losers.

I’m starting to really love Web 2.0 although I have much to learn about how to really become part of the community. And admittedly, I haven’t gotten much feedback from folks who are on the nastier side, maybe I wouldn’t like it so much if I did.

But I love the positive, decidedly unnasty vibes from the many science bloggers out there. There was a wonderfully rich post on the Cocktail Party Physics blog about the Exploratorium and our Iron Science Teacher Webcasts that we hold during the Summer Institute for middle and high school science teachers. We’ve been holding these competitions since 1999 and they’ve gotten quite popular on the Web (with lots of hits from Japan where its inspiration “Iron Chef” originated). I met the energetic and passionate blog author, Jennifer Oullette at a recent science communication conference in Lincoln Nebraska of all places. She gave an inspiring talk about how to get young women interested in physics by leveraging from popular culture. She wrote the book “Physics of the Buffyverse,” and has done talks using karate masters demonstrating the laws of motion. That’s the kind of creative educational approach we need more of to expand the appetite for science to new young audiences.

For the past two weeks, we’ve been hosting Matt Nisbet as an Osher Fellow to the Exploratorium. Matt is well known in the blogging community for his Framing Science site on ScienceBlog and his cross-country speaking tour with Chris Mooney. They’ve been talking about science controversies and about ways that scientists can reach the public by framing or contextualizing their work in ways that are meaningful for different audiences. An example he gives is that of the religious community embracing global warming as an issue that needs to be addressed for moral reasons.

Of course, this is something that the museum world is also interested in, especially in ways to reach audiences that don’t traditionally come to science museums. Much of our audience is well-educated, middle-class adults, families, and even senior citizens who have time and money to come to the Exploratorium. Like all museums, we would like more diversity in our audience and to make science appealing to girls, minorities, and other underserved audiences. Matt’s dance card in his residency here has been filled with staff interested in talking to him about ways to communicate to broader audiences and to increase the appreciation for science through “incidental exposure” essentially taking advantage of science angles to popular topics like entertainment or sports. For instance, we were recently featured in a front page article in the San Francisco Chronicle, coinciding with the All Star Game, about the science of baseball. One of our educators demonstrated the physics of pitching and the story was linked to a Web site that we developed as part of our Accidental Scientist series (which also included gardening, music and cooking).

There’s been a backlash though from some bloggers and science communicators that accuse Matt of distorting science, of advocating manipulative tactics similar to that of political operatives. One online comment in a piece by The Scientist says that under no circumstances should anyone “spin” science which is how he interprets framing. The poster, Earl Holland of Ohio State, goes on to say that scientists should stick to their work, running experiments and distilling the facts, and leave the communication to the professionals. I think this shortchanges the abilities of many scientists to tell compelling stories about their work and make it understandable and relevant to everyday people. Science is multi-dimensional and the implications of the enterprise go well beyond ”the facts” and into realms of politics, policy, culture, education, the economy, and everyday life. Wading into these realms may make some scientists uncomfortable, but it is the right of citizens in a democracy to know what their tax money is supporting and its relevance to their lives and interests. The Exploratorium has a long tradition, beginning with our founder Frank Oppenheimer, of working with scientists fully capable of explaining their work to public audiences and discussing its implications and context in a larger world. The more scientists there are who embrace this more public role, the better we are as a society.

Modern genetic researchers say there is no biological basis for the concept of race, that the average genetic differences between geographic groups such as Japanese, Europeans, and East Africans are too small to be significant. But if race is not a scientific concept, is it still a culturally valid one?

Joanne Rizzi, an exhibit and program developer and visiting Osher Fellow to the Exploratorium, explored the misunderstandings and realities of race with an exhibition she helped develop with the American Anthropological Association and the Science Museum of Minnesota. RACE: Are We So Different? covers the myth and meaning of race. There are obvious differences in the way we look, in skin color and hair for instance, but is race really only skin deep? What about the human experience of race and culture—is it possible to reconcile or at least acknowledge the two concepts?

Joanne told a group of us at the Exploratorium that she was initially reluctant to work on the exhibition because she didn’t think a purely scientific exploration of race would be broad enough to embrace the cultural reality and history of race and racism in America. But the Science Museum of Minnesota kept asking her until she finally agreed to come onboard. While on the exhibit team she initiated a community advisory panel that would become part of the development process and co-developed a series of programs. It was tough going, many people of color were suspicious that the exhibition wouldn’t tell the truth about racism and power. One advisor quit over the prominence of a map, based on genetic evidence, that all humans on earth originally came out of Africa. A Native American, his religious and cultural beleifs conflicted with the scientific views so he left the project.

But eventually what they created allowed many voices and viewpoints into the exhibition. One especially powerful public program were the “talking circles” which brought together groups of people to share ideas about the exhibition with a process that allows everyone to speak. Now the exhibition is on tour, currently in Detroit and spreading out across the U.S.

July 7, 2007 will mark the global concert Live Earth, which features bands on all seven continents rocking out with a call to arms for combating global warming. San Francisco residents can watch the satellite feed at the Exploratorium, along with a screening of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. Web audiences can tune into MSN’s Live Earth webcast here.

Among the dozens of headliners, which include The Police, Shakira, and Linkin Park, Live Earth will launch the Indie band Nunatak onto the world stage. Made up of scientists at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, Nunatak will record a concert with a live audience of only 17, the full contingent of scientists and support personnel manning the station in the dead of winter. You can check out a rehearsal video on YouTube that features some pretty decent fiddling by Tris Thorne, the communications engineer at Rothera Station.

There’s a long tradition of do-it-yourself entertainment in Antarctica. Among the earliest explorers, who spent up to 18 months or more on the ice, it was the only choice they had. Costumes and wigs were part of the cargo on all of Shackleton’s expeditions and his crew competed in talent shows that starred cross-dressing sailors. Even today, with cable TV and DVDs available, there is plenty of homegrown arts and culture on the ice. During our expedition in 2001/2, we were lucky enough to catch “Ice Stock,” the New Years’ celebration of garage bands, arts, and chili-cook-off competition at McMurdo, the largest NSF research station in Antarctica.

That concert line-up in 2002 included a pro in the mix, guitarist Henry Kaiser pictured here in red with one of McMurdo’s house bands (written up in his Antarctica blog).

I spent a couple of days in Boulder, Colorado visiting Mickey Glantz, Exploratorium Osher Fellow, friend and collaborator at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In his 30 years at NCAR, Mickey has concentrated on the social side of climate research shuttling between the world of science and communities of people worldwide who are affected by climate change. His usable science workshops help farmers, fishermen, small business owners, and community leaders make sense of, and prepare for, changes in the weather including extreme events like hurricanes, droughts, floods, and other disasters associated with climate fluctuations like El Nino and La Nina.

During my visit, we talked about his recent visit to China and meetings there with scientists at the polar research center in Beijing who are enlisting Mickey’s help in setting up a polar affairs center. China is among 60-some countries participating in the International Polar Year which started this spring and continues until March 2009. Canada is another of the participating countries and, while I was in Boulder, I went to a talk at the University of Colorado by a researcher, Shari Gearheard, who lives in the Canadian Arctic.

Shari is a remarkable young social scientist who occasionally sleeps in an iglo and is an apprentice dog musher, a necessary skill for traveling to her research sites on the ice. She is documenting native knowledge in an Inuit village of 800 residents, collecting observations of climate and environmental change and helping mediate that knowledge with scientific studies of the region. (In this photo, Shari is with Ilkoo Angutikjuak, Inuit Elder and hunter from Clyde River, Nunavut, with whom she has worked closely since 2000 on environmental change research). Arctic communities are experiencing more dramatic climate change than anywhere else on earth, but the patterns aren’t uniform across the North. On Baffin Island, houses aren’t falling into the sea as they are in some places in Alaska, but the Inuit are still facing changes that affect their traditional way of life. Indigenous Arctic hunters depend on stable ice, predictable seasonal and daily weather patterns, and productive ecosystems, all of which are threatened by global warming.

In her talk, Shari described the last three years living among her indigenous Arctic colleagues. Shari has deep respect for the Inuit people and spoke of all she’s learned from the hunters and their families, including patience, humor, courage, and deep, precise knowledge of the environment. It may be an exaggeration that Arctic peoples have 100 different words for snow, but there is precision in their language that can communicate subtle variations in wind direction and speed, ice thickness and stability, and changing weather conditions, all of which tells a hunter whether it’s safe or perilous to venture out on the ice. Shari talked about their curiosity and eagerness to participate in the scientific research happening around them, in many cases Inuit knowledge has preceded the science and is proving valuable in helping track both the extent and impacts of climate change in the Arctic.

Shari created a CD-ROM of her work in Clyde River, which you can order here.