Blogs / Discoblog

For those of us who learned to drink whisky in the traditional “shoot it and wait for the burn” school of liquor consumption, a whisky “tasting” session seems like an exercise in futility—whiskies all have the same heat and nose hair-singeing astringency, so what’s the point? But “The Science of Scotch” was the final installment of the New York Academy of Science’s “Science of Food” series—I had sadly missed coffee, chocolate, and champagne—and I figured I could use a little guidance for enjoying this liquid sunshine.

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On Sunday at New York’s Javits Center, hundreds of teens gathered to compete in the finals of the FIRST Robotics Competition regionals. The winners will go on to the National Competition in Atlanta—for the rest, this competition was the end of the assembly line.

On the track, the competition was fierce and students eyed each others’ handiwork warily. But behind the scenes in the pit, where goggle-clad kids wielded screwdrivers and tinkered with their machines, the students shared their knowledge with each other, with experienced groups often lending a hand to first-timers. The Capri-Sun flowed freely.

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Robots burned rubber in the ring today at the Javit’s Center for the regional championship of FIRST (An acronym DISCOVER can get behind: “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”). Keep checking in on Discoblog for a full recap of the event. For now, here is a recap in photos of the innovation, competition, and robotic mayhem that took place today among high schoolers and engineers showing off their circuitry skills.

There are three objects in this game: 1) Be quick—the more laps, the more points 2) Knock down balls. 3) Pick the balls back up and place them on top of the bars or shoot them over.

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Over one thousand high school students scurry around 64 robots along about the floor of the Javits Center in New York City. They are here to compete in the NYC regional contest to prove they have what it takes to put together the fittest, most agile, robot to rule them all. In this year’s competition the students, with the help of their teachers and outside engineers, designed robots that will fight—well, let’s say “compete”—to move on to the nationals (and get a shot at scholarship money) in a game of Overdrive.

The goal is simple: two teams of three robots each race around a 1500-square foot track, earning points for successfully completing each lap. On top of this teams can get points for manipulating huge red and blue balls that sit atop a 6-ft-plus scaffold in the middle of the track. The robots get 6 points for bringing the balls down and 8 points if they can hoist them back up.

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Tuna has been getting a lot of attention lately, but for all the wrong reasons. In January, a popular front-page article in the New York Times found frighteningly high levels of mercury in tuna from Manhattan sushi restaurants. The consumer’s response? It still tastes good (and it’s not like we’re eating thermometers). New Yorkers were wise to detect an element of sensationalist scaremongering in the Times article, but now there’s a genuine, urgent reason to avoid that succulent sushi: Tuna is facing regional extinction. Thanks to worldwide demand for “the chicken of the sea,” tuna populations have been plummeting despite efforts at sustainable fishing.

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Kids in developing countries don’t drop out of school because they have to work the fields or care for their younger siblings, Nicholas Negroponte said in his plenary lecture at AAAS. They drop out because they’re bored. Just after he got laptops to all the kids at a rural schoolhouse in Cambodia–one of the inspirations for his nonprofit, One Laptop per Child–there was a 100% increase in attendance. No one dropped out. (Parents were fans, too, mainly because the laptop screens were the brightest light in the house.)

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Why do some people smoke for a short time and develop lung cancer, while others who smoke for decades live to a ripe old age, cancer-free? And why do some women with BRCA mutations develop breast cancer, while others don’t? Our genes and our environment both contribute to our cancer risks, but exactly how these interactions work is a mystery.

Cheryl Walker of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center says that clues to the puzzle can be found in the environment we were in before we were born. Her work shows that while developing in its mother’s uterus, a fetus may be exposed to estrogen, which can greatly impact the way the cells of the body respond when exposed to estrogen later in life. (more…)

Biofuels have their problems, surely, (competition with agriculture, a high carbon footprint, and incompatibility with gas engines, to name a few) but maybe that’s because we aren’t focusing on the right type of fuel. The answer lies in butanol, says James Liao of the University of California at Los Angeles in order to skirt many of the issues biofuels have brought to the table. By focusing on the technical and policy perspective on “Biomass-to-Biofuels Conversion” Liao establishes butanol as the non-agricultural, fast growing alternative within the alternative fuel industry.

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As sharks face intense fishing–with over a million killed each year for their prized fins and for meat–shark researchers sketched out the state of the ocean’s top predators and wondered about their future.

Julia Baum studies the great sharks: large top predators including hammerheads, tiger sharks, great whites, bull and dusky sharks, oceanic whitetips, blues, threshers, and mako. All of these species have declined more than 80% in just the last 20 years, and many species have been cut down by 90% or more. Many are already listed as vulnerable or endangered by the IUCN.

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Alas, in a big election year, even an international science conference isn’t safe from politics. (more…)

Psychologists and neuroscientists got together today for a dive into the imaginitive mind. What parts of our brains allow us to experience the past, the future, and the perspective of others? What goes on in our brains during those processes? (more…)

News about climate change has skyrocketed in recent years, but how good is the information that reaches audiences? Do newspapers, magazines, and TV accurately reflect the science behind the issue? Is reporting “balanced,” and what does that term mean for an issue where most scientists agree about the big picture, though differences on the details abound?

Scientists and journalists gathered at today’s conference to look at how global warming plays out in the media (though, as one commenter noted, the simplistic term “global warming” has fallen from favor, replaced by the all-encompassing “climate change”).

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For all their mystery, we know two things about the world’s oceans pretty well: One, they’re huge, and two, they do a lot for human beings (producing food, storing carbon, allowing travel and shipping, and scads of other good stuff). But just how much is a particular patch of healthy, functioning ocean real estate worth to humanity? And how can we decide on the places that are most important to protect, and how to balance the dozens of competing demands on the waters around us? This morning’s Marine Symposium saw a line-up of top marine ecologists grappling with how to start quantifying and valuing the “ecosystem services” performed by ocean environments. (more…)

For anyone other than their parents, infants can be a bore. Beyond cooing, crying, and absorbing their world babies are all sleep and bodily functions. But deep inside those cute, fuzzy little heads, infants are performing scores of staggering statistical feats. Bombarded with a bewildering range of sounds since birth, they possess mechanisms that scour these signals for statistical regularity, allowing them to emerge with something quite astonishing: an understanding of spoken language.

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Anyone who’s frozen up during a job interview, a grade-school theater performance, or what would otherwise have been an irresistibly suave and witty pick-up line knows how paralyzing it is to truly be “at a loss for words.” Luckily, the experience is a temporary one, and before long the language that has inundated your life since you were little comes flooding back. But what if you grew up without any words at all? It’s pretty much impossible to imagine living in a world without words, but here at AAAS, “Thinking With and Without Language” took a peek at the thoughts of some people who happened to grow up without the privileges of language.

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It may not be long before sharks invade Antarctic waters. Due to global warming the Antarctic seas are changing and becoming an inviting ground for sharks that will soon turn to the prey-rich southern waters, says Cheryl Wilga of the University of Rhode Island.

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If you’ve ever wondered: Are there drugs in my Wheaties? I can assure you there are not—at least not unless your very shady trainer is trying to get you to win the Tour de France. But if the talk today at AAAS (“Drugs in Our Corn Flakes? Our Health and the Economic Risks of ‘Pharma’ and Industrial Crops”) is at all a marker of things to come with the marriage of pharmaceuticals and agriculture, that breakfast of champions might require a prescription.

The idea of pharmaceuticals made out of plants is not a new one, it’s about as new as, well, the idea that we could genetically engineer our plants to provide more of those things that we want—bug repellents, big ears, and higher oil content. All these things have been done and so far they have caused no physical harm to anyone (let us note here that the results of this giant experiment with our food is quite preliminary).

Today, Paul Gepts, Robert Wizner, and Charles Arntzen give us mixed messages on whether or not we should be tampering with the genes of our food sources for the greater good. Here are two tales from the discussion: a cautionary tale and a tale of hope.

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Today at the Hynes Convention Center in the heart of Boston, AAAS went “Into the Deep” with a symposium exposing deep-sea coral as an ancient organism (older than you’d think), a tool that can be used to measure climate change, and a victim of trawling, disappearing at an alarming rate.

Deep-sea corals may be the oldest known organisms in the ocean, says Brendan Roark, a geochemist from Stanford University. The oldest among them were once thought to be about 1,800 years old, but Roark’s new radio carbon dating studies show they can be as old as 4,200 years. The key to the new evidence was provided in the finding that these corals grow much more slowly than previously thought–it takes one species over 700 years to grow an inch. Flying in the face of conventional thinking, Alberto Lindner of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil says that deep-sea corals are actually the ancestors of their shallow-water cousins. Warm, sunlit shallow seas were once thought to be the cradles of coral diversity. But Lindner’s DNA evidence shows that the more familiar shallow water corals, such as those that form the Great Barrier Reef, are actually the new comers on the evolutionary scene. (more…)

Welcome to the biggest science conference on earth from the world’s largest science society—the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Discover is here in Boston, exploring Science and Technology from a Global Perspective, blogging on four days of lectures, presentations, interviews, and discussion from hundreds of researchers, thinkers, and developers of science and technology. Keep your eye on Discoblog for updates from AAAS on the latest work with satellites and climate change, a look at sharks’ key roles in the ocean, new ways to get rid of nuclear waste, how statistics—not steroids—have ruined baseball, robotic development, and a variety of other topics we’ll be covering.