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The International Year of Chemistry is about to begin

The United Nations has dubbed 2011 the International Year of Chemistry, with the unifying theme “Chemistry—our life, our future.”

The goals of IYC2011 are to increase the public appreciation of chemistry in meeting world needs, to encourage interest in chemistry among young people, and to generate enthusiasm for the creative future of chemistry. The year 2011 will coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize awarded to Madame Marie Curie—an opportunity to celebrate the contributions of women to science. The year will also be the 100th anniversary of the founding of the International Association of Chemical Societies, providing a chance to highlight the benefits of international scientific collaboration.

There will be lectures, conferences and exhibits that examine the role of chemistry in global issues and, of course, a party or two. But what is exciting me the most is all the hands-on experiments for schoolkids around the world, particularly what they are calling a global experiment, “Water: A Chemical Solution,” the world’s biggest chemistry experiment ever.

Millions of schoolkids around the world will perform four experiments in two categories:

Measurement of water quality:
i. pH: students collect data measuring the pH of a water body, using indicator solutions (and pH meters if available).
ii. Salinity: students explore the salinity of their local water body

Water purification:
i. Filtration and disinfection: students will learn how chemistry is used to help provide safe drinking water
ii. Desalination: Students will construct a solar still from household materials and experiment with its use to purify water.

The activities, which can be performed as stand-alone experiments in class or incorporated into a larger curriculum, are not only relevant to kids in every country, but they are also simple enough to be undertaken by children of all ages and even in developing nations where resources may be scarce (although toolkits will be provided). Schools can then upload the results of their experiments to a website (not yet online), which should then provide an interesting data set for anyone interested in water issues.

The IYC2011 kicks off next month with opening ceremonies on January 27 and 28 at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. I look forward to seeing what the organizers have in store.

It’s the end of the year, so you know what that means—it’s time for the parade of “year in review” articles. Start with Smithsonian.com’s Top 10 Stories of 2010, which features lots of science, and then move on to these others:

This image of odd dunes on Mars, made by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HIRISE camera, appears on more than one "best of" list (Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

* Discover magazine picked the top 100 stories of 2010 (and my brother was on the team behind #32!)

* Science highlighted Insights of the Decade, chose their Breakthrough of the Year and picked their Top 10 ScienceNOWs

* Nature picked Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, as their Newsmaker of the Year in their 2010 Year in Review

* New Scientist picked the Best Videos of 2010 and their 12 Best Pictures of 2010

* Bad Astronomy chose Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010

* Discoblog featured the Weirdest of the Weird

* Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science is writing a multi-part year in review

* The Guardian has a Review of 2010 wildlife photographic awards (I loved #12!)

* Scientific American created a slideshow of their top 10 science stories, and their 60-Second Earth blog looked at the Earth in 2010, complete with a podcast

* Discovery News has the Top 10 Stories of 2010, as chosen by their readers

* Popular Science picked their 100 Innovations of the Year in their Best of What’s New issue

* Greg Laden chose his Top Ten Science Stories of 2010

* Confessions of a Science Librarian has a series of Best Science Books 2010 posts

* My fellow Smithsonian blogger, Brian Switek, found the Top Dinosaur Books of 2010

* Australia’s Cosmos magazine has their top 10 science news stories

* Space.com has the top 7 space stories of the year

* Chemical & Engineering News published their Chemical Year in Review

* Physics World picked its top 10 breakthroughs for 2010

* Popular Mechanics featured the Top Weird Science Stories of 2010

* The Scientist has a whole series of top 10 lists, including the top retractions of the year and the five highest-ranked papers in biology

* And the New York Times Magazine featured plenty of science and technology in their 10th Annual Year in Ideas issue

(Thanks to the KSJ Tracker for their List of Lists)

Is your office rather empty this week? Looking for something to read to fill the time? How about some great science and nature stories from Smithsonian? Here are my ten favorites from the past year:

Did you read the cover story about lions?

The Truth About Lions (January): Staff writer Abigail Tucker visits Craig Packer, who has been running the Serengeti Lion Project, the most extensive carnivore study ever conducted, for more than three decades. In Tanzania, these kings of beasts are on the decline because of one pervasive problem—people.

The Human Family’s Earliest Ancestors (March): New fossil finds in Africa are expanding the human family tree and changing what we think about what our earliest ancestor’s looked like and how they moved.

Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe (April): Seventy-three percent of the universe consists of dark energy. Writer Richard Panek traveled to Antarctica to see how scientists are trying to discover just what that mysterious stuff is.

How Our Brains Make Memories (May): Our memories aren’t as permanent and unchanging as we may think (or like), but this idea has important implications for dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder.

A Puffin Comeback (June): A biologist is testing methods for reintroducing bird species by luring puffins, those adorable black-and-white birds with outsized, stripey beaks, back to Maine.

Jellyfish: The Next King of the Sea (July/August): Fish, coral and plenty of other sea creatures—including most of the tasty ones—aren’t doing so well under threats like ocean acidification. But jellyfish are thriving and appear poised for a takeover.

The Origins of Life (October): Scientists have a good idea of how evolution works, but how life began is still fuzzy. Writer Helen Fields visited a mineralogist who thinks he’s figured out where to look for the origins of life—rocks.

The Colorado River Runs Dry (October): The Colorado River ran from the Rockies to the sea for six million years. Why doesn’t it now? Dams, irrigation and climate change.

How Male Elephants Bond (November): Biologist Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell writes about her research findings that male elephants are far from loners. They have a complex society of their own.

Dinosaurs’ Living Descendants (December): Fossil finds in faraway China have been key to the conclusion that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs millions of years ago.

See the family resemblance between this Asian elephant (in Sri Lanka) and the woolly mammoth? (Photo credit: Amanda Perez, Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

Are you getting impatient for scientists to resurrect an extinct species? Me, too. Jurassic Park popularized the idea that ancient DNA could be used to reanimate dinosaurs. The cloning of Dolly the sheep provided a plausible mechanism, and the discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur bones and the recovery of still-meaty mammoth fossils in Siberia made the possibility even more tantalizing.

But while we wait, the study of ancient DNA has led to some surprising discoveries. It’s not exactly routine to recover genetic material from an extinct species, but there is a standard method. It’s been used to reveal the evolutionary history and family trees of extinct species such as the dodo (its distant relative, somewhat disappointingly, is the pigeon) and to track the population decline of the cave bear to understand why it went extinct. Svante Paabo is pretty much the king of ancient hominid DNA; his team recently reported that a previously unknown species of hominid, the Denisovans, lived alongside Neanderthals and modern humans in Asia tens of thousands of years ago. If the discovery holds up, it will be the first species designation based more on DNA than on bones.

Now scientists have used DNA from an extinct animal to better understand living species: the elephants. You’d think there wouldn’t be much left to learn about a species that big and conspicuous, but people are still discovering new behaviors in some elephant groups, such as unexpected bonding among males. One longstanding question is just how many elephant species there are, and a genetic study incorporating DNA from woolly mammoths reveals one additional branch in the family tree.

Mitochondrial DNA studies had suggested that woolly mammoths and Asian elephants are closely related, but the new work was possible because the researchers made the most complete reconstruction ever of mammoth nuclear DNA (that is, the stuff you’d need to clone a mammoth, ahem). (They tried to analyze DNA from American mastodons as well, but that species is older and more distantly related to today’s elephants, and the DNA was too incomplete for the analysis.) The new study showed that woolly mammoths are Asian elephants’ closest relatives—closer even than African elephants.

Even more surprising was the discovery that, according to DNA, African forest elephants and African savanna elephants, sometimes considered two populations of the same species, are two separate species as far removed from each other in evolutionary time as are Asian elephants and woolly mammoths.

The authors are just beginning to figure out what these patterns reveal about ancient ecosystems: what was the geographic or biological boundary between forest and savanna elephants? Can male dispersal explain some of the patterns in the DNA? But in the meantime, it’s somehow satisfying to know that woolly mammoths were so closely related to a living, trumpeting species. That’s got to make them even easier to clone, right?

Why do the needles fall off a live Christmas tree? (photo courtesy of flickr user the jof)

Putting up a live Christmas tree can be a lot of work. You have to make sure that the tree has plenty of water, sometimes having to crawl beneath the branches while trying not to dislodge any of the breakable ornaments. And then there’s the clean-up. No matter what you do, the tree is going to shed needles destined to become lodged in the bottom of your foot. Now scientists from Canada, reporting in the journal Trees, have figured out why those needles fall off, and they’ve come up with a couple of solutions that could keep needles on longer.

There are plenty of myths advising how you can better keep the needles on your tree. When the Mythbusters tested several of them—adding fertilizer, Viagra or bleach to the water, for example, or coating the entire tree with hairspray or polyurethane—most of the home remedies weren’t much help, or they turned the tree a sickly color. But these solutions don’t address what the scientists now say is the cause of the needle loss: ethylene, a plant hormone. That’s the same molecule that ripens many fruits, and the reason why adding a ripe banana to a bag full of green tomatoes will turn them red. In the balsam fir trees of the recent study, ethylene is produced around 10 days after the tree is cut and signals to the tree that it should drop its needles. And by 40 days after cutting, the branches were bare.

The researchers then tried two ways of interfering with the ethylene. First they added 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) gas to the chamber where they had put cut fir branches in water. Needle retention rose to 73 days. 1-MCP blocks ethylene receptors in the cell and is used by ornamental horticulture and apple industries to prolong the life of their products, and it could be used during the transport of Christmas trees from field to market.

In their second test, they added amino-ethoxyvinylglycine (AVG), which inhibits the production of ethylene, to the water in which the fir branches sat. Needle retention rose to 87 days. Because AVG can be easily dissolved in the tree’s supply of water, it’s more likely to find use in the home.

The scientists caution that they have yet to scale up their experiment from single cut branches to whole trees, but “what is really encouraging is that we managed to double the needle retention period of the branches,” says study co-author Seeve Pepin of the Universite Laval.