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Friday Science Stack
Author: BobR    Date: 11/18/2011 13:46:13

With all of the news coverage of Occupy Wall St., I am beginning to feel a bit of OWS-overload. Sure, it's a big important movement that may change life as we know it, but there are other things going on in the world (and outside our world) that are interesting, and variety is the spice of life. So - as part of an occasional ongoing series, I present today's Friday Science Stack.

This may seem an odd choice for what is essentially a political blog. Republicans, however, have politicized science. That animosity towards science can be from a religious viewpoint, or an economic one, or a mind/body-control aspect, but they certainly have certain areas of science in their crosshairs.

One of those areas involves stem cells. Painting a fabricated picture of embryos created solely to be "killed" (referring to unused fertilized eggs in clinics as "snow babies"), Republicans ensured that the U.S. government would not fund research that utilized embryonic stem cells, thus ceding this important research to other countries. One California-based biotech firm decided to proceed anyway, funding the research themselves. After working for a year to study repair of spinal cord injuries, though, they have halted their research to focus on more revenue-producing projects:
The first-ever trial using human embryonic stem cells to treat paralysis has been halted due to high costs and the company will focus instead on new cancer treatments, Geron said Tuesday.

The California-based biotech firm, which had bypassed federal funding to get its pioneering but controversial trial off the ground in October 2010, said it was also cutting 66 full-time jobs, or 38 percent of its workforce.

This is what we get when we let religion dictate governmental policy (see Republicans vis-a-vis abortion, contraception, and rape).

Republicans are also loathe to embrace climate change and global warming, because their oil company benefactors are afraid of the consequences. Thus, any attempts to control it are met with knee-jerk resistance. If you think the weather has been bad lately, get ready - it's going to get worse:
The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new special report on global warming and extreme weather after meeting in Kampala, Uganda. This is the first time the group of scientists has focused on the dangers of extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods, droughts and storms. Those are more dangerous than gradual increases in the world's average temperature.
[..]
The report said "a changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration, and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events." And it said that some — but not all — of these extreme events are caused by the increase of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

This isn't just going to be bad for the tropics either. Another group predicted that New York needs to prepare for serious climate change:
The study predicts average annual temperatures in New York state will rise by 4 to 9 degrees by 2080 and precipitation will rise by 5 to 15 percent, with most of it in the winter. It predicts that along the seacoast and tidal portion of the Hudson River, the sea level will rise by 1 to 5 inches by the 2020s and 8 to 23 inches by the 2080s. If melting of polar ice caps is factored in, sea level is projected to rise 37 to 55 inches by the 2080s, the report says.

Among the specific regional effects predicted in the report are:
  • Native brook trout and Atlantic salmon will decline, but bass will flourish in warmer waters.
  • Great Lakes water levels will fall.
  • Apple varieties such as McIntosh and Empire will fare poorly, but vineyards will benefit.
  • Milk production will decrease.
  • Coastal wetlands will be inundated and saltwater will extend farther up the Hudson River.
  • Adirondack and Catskill spruce-fir forests will disappear.
  • Invasive insects, weeds and other pests will increase.
  • Electrical demand will increase in warm months.

So what can we do? Education is the first step. Most people understand the idea of global warming, but climate change is harder to explain. For that, we need good teachers, and teachers that inspire people. Northrop-Grumman is trying to help by giving teachers a ride on the Vomit Comet:
The 30 classroom professionals donned blue "astronaut" jumpsuits to defy gravity in the skies above California, in a project designed to help them capture the imagination of young science students.
[..]
During the flight — in which a specially-decked out plane does a series of parabolic climbs and dives, the only way to experience weightlessness without going into space — the body is subject to 1.8 G forces.
[..]
Promoting science as a vocation is the main aim of the flight program, run by the Northrop Grumman Foundation, which has organized the zero-gravity flights for some 1,300 teachers over six years.

"We started this program as a way to give teachers a boost in the classroom. Really give young people the opportunity to see that science can be fun, that it can be cool," said Sandra J. Evers-Manly, president of the Foundation.

"We know that fewer and fewer young people are engaged in maths and science… Young people learn through the eyes of their teachers," she added.

Maybe some of them will even go on to be astronauts and be awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, like John Glenn and the crew of Apollo 11. We can only hope.
 

63 comments (Latest Comment: 11/18/2011 19:50:03 by TriSec)
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