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We no longer think of the stars as points of light on the tapestry of the night but now know that they're burning balls of gas billions of miles away in the black expanse of space (Credit: NASA and H. Richer (University of British Columbia))

Two weeks ago I asked readers to weigh in on why they like science. Two submissions caught my eye. This first essay is from a friend, Sandy Lee, who is the IT support specialist for the Phillips Collection, an art museum here in Washington, D.C., as well as an amateur artist. His personal and professional lives often give him reason to like science, he writes:

Science is the partner of Art. There is an inherent beauty in the mathematical progression of an arpeggio, the molecular structure of a graphene molecule and the resident harmony of a finely tuned Formula One engine at full throttle.

Science is also the quest for truth. While I may not be the most skeptical of persons, I marvel at our capacity to continually ask the question, “Why?” and to seek the answers existing at the edges of the universe and deep within ourselves. Because “just because” is not a good enough answer.

Science is tragic. Masterpieces from forgotten civilizations are ravaged by time, elements and human vanity. Countless lab hours are spent in search of a medical cure that is still unknown. Computer viruses decimate invaluable data on a global scale, and scores of people braver than I gave everything they could in the name of science.

Science is sexy. We all dream of having that one “EUREKA!” moment, when it all comes together, works like it should and validates the countless hours of research. Sure, it’s simply a behavioral reaction caused by adrenaline and dopamine, but isn’t that what it’s all about?

This second essay is from Leo Johnson, a 19-year-old biology and secondary education student at Louisiana State University. “I was previously a pre-veterinary major,” he writes, “but decided I would make more of a difference teaching kids science than taking care of sick animals.” It’s great when teachers are passionate about their subjects, and that’s obvious from this explanation of why he likes science:

I was going to attempt to write something eloquent and awe-inspiring, but science is already those things. Science, when you truly understand it, is truly magnificent and astounding. Science has shown me that because of the unique combination of my parents’ DNA that came together to form me, I’m one of more than 70 trillion potential combinations that could’ve been made.

Science tells me just how amazing the world and the things in it are. All the animals I see everyday are the products of billions of years of evolution, of change. I’m the product of that change.

Science somehow takes the mystery out of things but also makes them more magical. We no longer think of the stars as points of light on the tapestry of the night but now know that they’re burning balls of gas billions of miles away in the black expanse of space. This, to me, is more fantastic and amazing than anything someone could’ve made up.

Science, simply, is both factual and fantastic. All the things science tells us are supported by facts and results. The facts say that the universe we live in is more amazing than we could ever imagine and we’re lucky enough to be able to have science to show us this.

It’s because of this that I like science so much. Science allows me to discover and understand. It shows me things I would never know, or be able to know without it. Science provides me with answers, and if my question hasn’t been answered yet, I can be assured that someone is working on answering it. It’s the understanding that allows us to question. Science is the gift that keeps on giving; the more we understand, the more we seek to understand. The broader our knowledge, the more we want to expand it. Science makes the world more fantastic, and the more we already know, the more we’ll soon discover.

If you’d like to participate in our Why I Like Science series, send a 200- to 500-word essay to WhyILikeScience@gmail.com; I’ll publish the best entries in future posts on Surprising Science.

A glowing kitty may help in the fight against AIDS (credit: Mayo Clinic)

Cat owners might find a glow-in-the-dark kitty to be fairly useful—you’ll never trip over the cat at night again—but the Mayo Clinic scientists who created this glowing cat had a bigger goal in mind: fighting AIDS.

The substance that makes the cat glow is a version of the green fluorescent protein that lights up the crystal jelly, a type of jellyfish that lives off the West Coast of the United States. Years ago scientists realized that the gene for GFP is a perfect marker when they insert another new gene into an organism. By inserting a version of GFP along with their gene of choice, they could easily see if they were successful because the organism would glow. Since the technique was first developed, researchers have made many glowing animals, including pigs, mice, dogs, even fish you can buy in the pet store.

In this latest bit of research, published in Nature Methods, the Mayo Clinic scientists inserted a version of the GFP gene along with a gene from the rhesus macaque that blocks the feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV)—the virus that causes feline AIDS—into the unfertilized eggs of a cat. After those eggs were fertilized, they produced kitties that glowed green, showing that they also had the anti-FIV gene. Even better, subsequent generations of cats also glowed and had the anti-FIV gene.

The researchers still have more work to do to determine whether the anti-FIV gene works in the cats. “We haven’t shown cats that are AIDS-proof,” study co-author Eric Poeschla told LiveScience. “We still have to do infection studies involving whole cats. That the protection gene is expressed in the cat lymphoid organs, where AIDS virus spread and cell death mostly play out, is encouraging to us, however.”

The ultimate goal of this line of research, though, is to figure out how to make humans resistant to HIV, the virus that causes human AIDS. “We want to see if we can protect the domestic cat against its AIDS virus, if we can protect any species, eventually including ours, against its own AIDS virus,” Poeschla told LiveScience.

Without science, we wouldn't know that prehistoric creatures, like this short-necked plesiosaur (at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum) were real (courtesy of flickr user owillis)

Science is under siege these days. Some politicians proudly proclaim that evolution is just a theory and that climate change is a conspiracy among scientists. Health gurus advocate homeopathy or “natural” remedies rather than modern medicine. Parents ignore the advice of doctors and experts and refuse to vaccinate their children against deadly diseases. People who are quite happy to reap the benefits of science—new medical treatments, for example, or sci-fi-like technological devices—advocate for schools to teach religion in science class.

And so I think it’s time for the rest of us to speak up. Let’s explain what it is about science that satisfies us, how science improves our world and why it’s better than superstition. To that end, I’m starting a new series here on Surprising Science: Why I Like Science. In coming months, I’ll ask scientists, writers, musicians and others to weigh in on the topic. And I’m also asking you, the readers, why you like science. If you’d like to participate, send a 200- to 500-word essay to WhyILikeScience@gmail.com; I’ll publish the best.

And to start us off, here’s why I like science:

When we are little, we ask “why.” “Why is the sky blue?” “Why do balls fall down and not up?” “Why can’t my fish live outside water?” Good parents root their answers in science. The sky is blue due to the way light is scattered in the atmosphere. Balls fall down because of gravity. Your fish doesn’t have lungs, and gills only work in water.

But science doesn’t just give us answers to the why’s of our childhoods; it gives us the tools we need to keep answering them as we grow up.

Science is the tool I use to understand the world around me. It provides logic and sense and order in what might otherwise seem chaotic. And though the answer to the why’s of my adulthood may sometimes be “we don’t know,” it’s really just “we don’t know yet”—the answer will eventually be found, with science.

And then there’s the act of finding those answers, putting the methods of science into action, that I find more fascinating than any bit of fiction. There are astronomers who use telescopes to peer back in time. Biologists who discover new species in both familiar and faraway places and struggle to figure out how to save others from extinction. Even a non-scientist sitting at a computer can help to solve molecular structures, hunt for planets or decipher ancient Egyptian texts during lunch break. Science is often, simply, fun.

Science is also the light that keeps us out of the dark ages. It may not solve all of our problems, but it usually shows us the path to the solutions. And the more we know, the more questions we find. It’s a never-ending search for answers that will continue for as long as the human race exists. And guaranteed satisfaction for the little girl inside me, the one that still asks “why.”

A screenshot from The Great Flu, an online game.

I’m looking forward, with some trepidation, to seeing the movie Contagion, which comes out in theaters tomorrow. The subject is scarier than any made-up horror flick–a realistic scenario of a killer pandemic virus. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University and an expert consultant on the new film, gave me real reason to worry about the scenario dreamed up by the moviemakers, telling Salon: “We know that if we were to have some sort of an outbreak—or pandemic, worse yet—in the United States, we don’t at present have the tools that are required to rapidly ramp up some sort of a strategy for making vaccines and distributing them. Those are just the cold, hard facts.” After watching Contagion, we’re all going to either want to hide away in our homes and/or start calling our congresspeople to take action so we’re better prepared for something like this.

Or we could just play games. Here are five games to play after watching the movie:

Sneeze: The goal of this mini online game is to sneeze at just the right time and in just the right direction to transfer a virus to others who then transfer it to others and so on, eventually reaching as many individuals as possible. It’s a simple demonstration of how easy it is to transmit a virus when people don’t cover their mouths when they sneeze (and one out of four people in one study didn’t bother).

Pandemic, The Board Game: In this cooperative game, two to four players work together to cure four diseases. Each player takes on a role—such as scientist or medic—and on each turn travels the world, treating people, building research centers and finding cures for the diseases. If you find the cures, everyone wins. If not, you’re all dead. The message of the game is that if this happens in real life, we’re all going to have to work together to fight a pandemic or we’ll all end up dead.

Pandemic 2: This is another mini online game (and not related to the board game, despite the name), and the goal is to wipe out the world. Pick a virus, bacteria or parasite and let it loose. As more people become infected (and eventually die), you earn points that you can use to buy new traits for your disease, such as symptoms, drug resistance and modes of transmission. Can you evolve your disease faster than humans can develop and deploy a vaccine? This game excels at demonstrating how the various traits of a disease can affect where and how quickly it spreads and how virulent and deadly it becomes.

The Great Flu: Choose from one of five viruses (difficulty levels) in this online game and then pick through a selection of strategies to defeat it. You can stockpile vaccines and antiviral medicines, spend money on research facilities and teams, shut down schools or airports, distribute face masks, or isolate infected individuals. Trying to contain the disease in a single country is not easy, and the numbers of infected and dead can quickly pile up. This game is an interesting simulation of some of the realistic options available to those fighting a pandemic disease.

Killer Flu: This game, from the U.K. Clinical Virology Network, should give us all a little hope. The UK CVN developed the game, in part, to demonstrate just how hard it is for a flu virus to mutate, spread and kill. And that adds a layer of difficulty to the game, in which you try to make a flu virus spread from person to person and city to city, infecting as many people as possible, and makes it that much more fun.

In this GOES satellite image taken on August 24, the eye Hurricane Irene, traveling over the Bahamas, can be clearly seen (Credit: NOAA/NASA GOES Project)

Not that long ago, people got little to no warning about hurricanes. They couldn’t know when the winds would kick up, when the surge of water would arrive, what kind of destruction a storm might bring. But now we have satellites orbiting overhead, powerful computers that can forecast a track days in advance and plenty of scientists to make sense of a wealth of data. We may not be invulnerable, but we can, at least, limit the amount of destruction and loss of life. (If anyone asks, “what good is science?” here’s a great example.)

And because this is mostly government-funded science, the public gets plenty of access to information and tools to help us better understand hurricanes and prepare for them.

“Understanding the history of hurricane landfalls in your community is an important step toward assessing your vulnerability to these potentially devastating storms,” says Ethan Gibney, a senior geospatial analyst for NOAA. He’s one of the developers of NOAA’s Historical Hurricane Tracks online mapping application. Users can map the tracks of storms around the world and get detailed information about tropical cyclones going back to 1842.

Information about Irene (as well as Tropical Depression 10, brewing in the Atlantic) is available from the National Hurricane Center. Most of us will be satisfied with the array of maps, advisories, podcasts and videos produced by the center, but even more detailed analysis tools are also available to those who are interested and understand it.

NASA monitors storms from above the Earth and publishes the best of its imagery online. Instruments on the GOES and Terra satellites provide great visible images along with temperature (of both air and sea surface), pressure, wind and cloud data. The TRMM satellite, meanwhile, measures the hurricane’s rainfall and gives insight into the storm’s structure.

And anyone who lives near Irene’s projected path should consult FEMA’s hurricane site and learn what they should do to prepare.

Check out the entire collection of Surprising Science’s Pictures of the Week and get more science news from Smithsonian on our Facebook page. And apologies for the East-Coast-centric coverage the last few days; we’ll go back to regular science blogging once the Smithsonian office is no longer plagued by natural disasters. Good luck to all who sit in Irene’s path.