Smithsonian.com

This seems like it should be a simple question: Where is the center of the universe? But as Varoujan Gorjian of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains in this video from the Spitzer Science Center, this question doesn’t have an easy answer. Looking out from Earth, it appears that we’re sitting at the center, but is this true? Watch the video to find out.

A nurse administers a vaccine to an infant (Photo Credit: James Gathany, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

It’s rare in science and science writing to make definitive statements, particularly about causation. We like to add what I call “wishy washy” words like “may” and “probably” and “perhaps.” So when scientists or science writers make definitive statements like “vaccines don’t cause autism” and “vaccines save lives,” it’s because we have overwhelming evidence to back it up.

But 25 percent of parents in a recent University of Michigan poll agreed with the statement “some vaccines cause autism in healthy children” and 11.5 percent have refused at least one vaccination for their child. This is worrisome.

The now-discredited link between autism and vaccines was proposed by British scientist Andrew Wakefield in a 1998 paper in the Lancet. No one was ever able to reproduce the results of that study, and the paper has since been retracted by the journal. A recently concluded investigation of Wakefield found that he had conducted unapproved and unnecessary tests on children and even paid children at his son’s birthday party for providing blood samples. Wakefield has since resigned from the autism center he began in Texas.

Other studies that have examined childhood vaccines and autism have failed to find any link. When the Institute of Medicine reviewed the issue six years ago, they concluded “the body of epidemiological evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism” and recommended “a public health response that fully supports an array of vaccine safety activities.”

No one should die from a preventable disease like measles or pertussis, but they do, even here in the United States, when parents choose to leave their children unvaccinated.

Vaccines work. They don’t cause autism. Now, perhaps, scientists can spend their resources on figuring out what does instead of wasting them on a debunked theory.

(For more information on vaccines, read A Brief History and How Vaccines Work, Success Stories and A History of Vaccine Backlash from our Vaccine Week coverage last year.)

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.

Speed skating requires technique, good physiology and state-of-the-art technology (courtesy of flickr user daniel_dimarco)

I’ve always been a fan of the Winter Olympics, but a bout with the flu in 2002 that kept me at home watching TV for a week made me an addict. But it’s not just about watching hours of skiing and skating. There’s science, too, and it seems to be everywhere this year. Here are some good resources and news stories that find the science in the Winter Games:

Science of the Olympic Winter Games: This site, from NBC Learn and the National Science Foundation, has videos explaining a host of subjects, from the physics of the hockey slapshot to how friction works in curling. (Lesson plans are available here.)

Winter Olympics: Sport & Science: Montana State University provides mini-courses on three Olympic themes–sports nutrition, physics and biomechanics, and physiology and psychology.

The New York Times Learning Network blog has suggestions for a 2010 Winter Olympics Teaching and Learning Extravaganza. And Teachervision has even more resources.

In recent news, CTV in Canada explored The Science of Long Track Speed Skating and found that a winning skater must combine good technique with physiology and technology.

Wind resistance plays a role in any race, including skeleton, that crazy sport in which “sliders” hurl themselves down the tube-like course head first. To get an advantage this year, the U.S. team studied sled forces in a high-tech simulator, as Scientific American reported yesterday.

How about the Science of Curling? Apparently the sweeping is very important and even though it might not appear taxing, curlers can develop fatigue.

And USA Today reexamined a 2005 study that had found that red-clad boxers at the Olympics did better than their fellows in blue. It turns out that a key assumption in the study–that red and blue attire was randomly assigned–was wrong. On second look, wearing red didn’t affect the outcome of a bout.