Smithsonian.com

The winners of the 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge—an annual contest sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science—were announced last week. The image above, “Flower Power” from Russell Taylor, Briana K. Whitaker and Briana L. Carstens of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, received an honorable mention in the photography category.

Accidents can sometimes be beautiful. Briana Whitaker and Briana Carstens of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, snapped this photograph as a quality-control step in their experiments to study the forces that cells, such as those that stitch together skin wounds, exert. They visualize these forces by watching how forests of 10-micrometer-tall polymer pillars bend when they place the cells on top of them. Ideally, the pillars should stand straight up, but on this occasion most of the pillars had fallen over. Amazingly, though, they’d all collapsed into a flowerpetal-like pattern.

Check out the entire collection of Pictures of the Week on our Facebook fan page.

Hurricane Isabel as seen from space (courtesy of NASA)

Living in a city where “snow” is the latest four-letter-word to be added to the list of obscenities, I was rather frightened to read the phrase “permanent El Niño” in today’s issue of the journal Nature. That’s because it’s El Niño—not some kind of crazy global cooling—that’s been responsible for our series of snowpocalypses this winter. I might have breathed a slight sigh of relief when I realized that the scientists were writing about the Pliocene Epoch, 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago, except that’s the time in the Earth’s past thought to be the best analogue for our current pattern of climate change. Uh-oh.

Unlike today, when El Niño comes and goes, during the Pliocene it was always an El Niño year: warm water in the mid-Pacific, severe weather across much of North America. Scientists aren’t sure what started the permanent El Niño, but the new study proposes how it might have persisted. Researchers from Yale and M.I.T. used computer models of the atmosphere and oceans to find that hurricanes during the Pliocene occurred at about twice the frequency they do today. More of those storms—and their associated ocean mixing—would have led to warmer waters in the eastern Pacific, which would have led to more atmospheric warming, which would have led to more hurricanes, a deadly cycle (had humans been alive).

What does this mean for our current climate change problem? The study’s scientists are quick to caution that it may mean nothing for our future. They admit they don’t know how the Pliocene warming began or what made it end. But the information can be useful when modeling future climate and it reinforces the notion that hurricanes are not stand-alone events and can have a greater effect than the damage we can see.

So on the one hand, I’m happy to hear that a permanent El Niño may never happen, but on the other, I’m kind of worried that it remains a possibility. I moved south, in part, to avoid the snow. Any farther, and I’d likely have to deal directly with the hurricanes.

A few months after the purchase of my iPhone, I’ll admit it: I’m an app addict. Luckily, there are plenty of great free apps out there. And here’s some of my favorites in science:

View pictures on the NASA app (image courtesy of NASA)

NASA App: Lots of pictures, a launch schedule, mission updates and plenty of videos to keep you up-to-date with the space agency.

Space Images: View images from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory of everything from Earth to the Universe. Browse by planet or search the database for your favorites.

NASA Lunar Electric Rover Simulator: Maneuver the LER across the surface of the Moon, through a lunar camp and pretend to be a future astronaut.

Planets: A personal planetarium in your pocket. Just go outside at night and start up the program. It will produce a chart the sky at your location.

Dinosaurs: The American Museum of Natural History developed this app, which lets you explore their collection of photos of fossils. (For more dinosaur apps, see our sister blog.)

Geotimescale: A handy geologic time scale from Tasa geology.

The Chemical Touch, Lite Edition: An easy-to-use periodic table of elements.

Molecules: View three-dimensional renderings of molecules. Rotate them up and down, left and right. The app comes preloaded with a few—including DNA and insulin—but more can be downloaded easily from the RCSB Protein Data Bank.

3D Brain: Rotate the brain, explore various structures and learn more about what each does.

Skeptical Science: If confronted with a global warming skeptic, pull this app up on your phone and you’ll have counterarguments at the ready.

Science Friday: Podcasts and videos from the Friday afternoon show on public radio.

Clouds form in shipping lanes because of emissions from ships' smokestakes. Image courtesy of NASA

One of the most contentious sessions at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting this past weekend in San Diego was on geoengineering, the study of ways to engineer the planet to manipulate climate. Intentional ways to do so, I should say—as many of the speakers pointed out, we’ve already pumped so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the planet is warming and will continue to warm throughout this century, even if we started reducing emissions today. This isn’t a political opinion, it’s a fundamental property of the chemistry and longevity of carbon dioxide.

So, what is to be done? Every speaker endorsed reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere. As session chair Alan Robock said at the beginning, “just so we’re clear, all of us strongly urge mitigation as the solution for global warming.”

But that’s where the agreement ended.

The disagreements mainly concerned whether it’s more dangerous to propose, test and deploy geoengineering strategies—or to do nothing.

The danger of doing nothing, David Keith pointed out, is that the full consequences of having so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are “deeply uncertain.” If there are massive droughts and at the end of the century due to climate change (“an unacceptably huge response” to carbon dioxide), we need to be ready to do something. And according to his research, “if we wanted to, we could do this.”

What could we do? Well, one cheap and easy way to bring down global temperatures would be to scatter sulfur particles in the stratosphere, mimicking the effects of volcanic eruptions and blocking some sunlight. The plume from the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption spread across the upper atmosphere and brought down global temperatures for a few years, and aircraft could deliver comparable amounts of sulfur compounds. Calculating the costs of engineering tweaks to existing technologies, Keith says, he found that the technology would be “so cheap it doesn’t matter.”

Another approach is seeding clouds—the thicker and whiter they are, the more sunlight they reflect and the less heat they allow to accumulate in the lower atmosphere. We’re already seeding clouds inadvertently—if you look at satellite images of the oceans, you can see clouds forming in shipping lanes. Emissions from the ships’ smokestacks have particles that cause water vapor to condense as clouds. Philip Rasch calculated ways to manipulate these emissions to maximize clouds, at least in models.

Fiddling with the ocean works, too. Kenneth Coale has been conducting “ocean enrichment” experiments for years, in which he and his collaborators dump iron into the open ocean. Iron spurs more phytoplankton to grow, and phytoplankton take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They eventually die and release carbon dioxide, but some of the carbon is tied up into solid particles (diatom shells and other detritus) that sink to the bottom of the ocean. There have been 15 iron enrichment experiments at many different latitudes, and it seems to work (although they haven’t directly measured long-term carbon storage)—but there’s a downside. (There always is.) The diatoms that dominate the phytoplankton blooms produce demoic acid, a.k.a. the active ingredient in amnesic shellfish poisoning, which can cause neurological damage in people and marine mammals.

And it’s the unintended consequences that make philosopher Martin Bunzl say that people shouldn’t be experimenting with geoengineering at all. “My argument is that no amount of small-scale, limited experimentation will prepare for large-scale implementation.” There’s just no way to get enough data from small tests to tell what geoengineering will do across the planet, and the risks (of disrupting the Asian monsoon cycle, of causing more hurricanes, etc.) are too great to accept.

One risk of even talking about geoengineering came up again and again: moral hazard. The idea is that if people know that there are cheap and easy ways to counter some of the effects of climate change, they won’t bother to do the hard work of reducing what Rasch called “our carbon transgressions.”

Historically, James Fleming pointed out, people have been fantasizing about manipulating the atmosphere for decades (a PDF of his recent Congressional testimony). They fall into two categories: “commercial charlatans and serious but deluded scientists.”

It’s hard to tell how much of an impact these discussions about the technology, risks and ethics of geoengineering will have in the public at large. The geoengineering sessions attracted their own protesters this year—usually it’s the genetically modified crops people who get all the protesters’ attention—but the protesters were less concerned about moral hazard or Asian tsunamis than they were about their pet conspiracy theories.

The dolphin: smart enough to be a "non-human person"? (courtesy of flickr user Phil Blackburn)

The American Association for the Advancement of Science hosted its annual festival in San Diego this past weekend. It’s a serious scientific meeting complete with plenary sessions, lots of PowerPoint presentations and rows of posters, but it’s also a big party for people who care about the big picture of science. Unlike most conferences, which are focused on a specific field, this one brings together scientists from all fields of research as well as people involved in policy, ethics, international diplomacy and, at least when the meeting is held in Southern California, the entertainment industry.

The movie people came to the meeting to endorse a new collaboration between the University of Southern California’s film school and the National Science Foundation. Details on the collaboration were sparse. Ron Howard stopped by, though, to say that he gained a new appreciation for the story-telling importance of science when he was directing Apollo 13. When he tested various cuts of the movie before focus groups, he found that audiences were “hungry for the details” about the space program. (He also said that, on the television show Happy Days, “Fonzie would tap on the jukebox and make it go, but we didn’t delve into the physics of that.”)

The liveliest sessions were about geoengineering, strategies to manipulate the oceans or atmosphere to try to compensate for some of the effects of climate change. More on that tomorrow.

Today, here are some highlights from the meeting: In keeping with the Hollywood theme, a session on the science of superheroes suggested that any given superhero should have only one superpower. Other teams are working on batteries made out of paper, finding that sleep deprivation is contagious, or uncovering the “biology of misfortune” by which early childhood poverty can have health effects that last a lifetime. Researchers say we can learn about diabetes by studying dolphins and a philosopher thinks dolphins are so intelligent that we should think of them as non-human persons.