Arquivo da tag: ciência

The Paradox of the Proof (Project Wordsworth)

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By Caroline Chen

MAY 9, 2013

On August 31, 2012, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers on the Internet.

The titles were inscrutable. The volume was daunting: 512 pages in total. The claim was audacious: he said he had proved the ABC Conjecture, a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades.

Then Mochizuki walked away. He did not send his work to the Annals of Mathematics. Nor did he leave a message on any of the online forums frequented by mathematicians around the world. He just posted the papers, and waited.

Two days later, Jordan Ellenberg, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, received an email alert from Google Scholar, a service which scans the Internet looking for articles on topics he has specified. On September 2, Google Scholar sent him Mochizuki’s papers: You might be interested in this.

“I was like, ‘Yes, Google, I am kind of interested in that!’” Ellenberg recalls. “I posted it on Facebook and on my blog, saying, ‘By the way, it seems like Mochizuki solved the ABC Conjecture.’”

The Internet exploded. Within days, even the mainstream media had picked up on the story. “World’s Most Complex Mathematical Theory Cracked,” announced the Telegraph. “Possible Breakthrough in ABC Conjecture,” reported the New York Times, more demurely.

On MathOverflow, an online math forum, mathematicians around the world began to debate and discuss Mochizuki’s claim. The question which quickly bubbled to the top of the forum, encouraged by the community’s “upvotes,” was simple: “Can someone briefly explain the philosophy behind his work and comment on why it might be expected to shed light on questions like the ABC conjecture?” asked Andy Putman, assistant professor at Rice University. Or, in plainer words: I don’t get it. Does anyone?

The problem, as many mathematicians were discovering when they flocked to Mochizuki’s website, was that the proof was impossible to read. The first paper, entitled “Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory I: Construction of Hodge Theaters,” starts out by stating that the goal is “to establish an arithmetic version of Teichmuller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve…by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the etale theta function, and log-shells.”

This is not just gibberish to the average layman. It was gibberish to the math community as well.

“Looking at it, you feel a bit like you might be reading a paper from the future, or from outer space,” wrote Ellenberg on his blog.

“It’s very, very weird,” says Columbia University professor Johan de Jong, who works in a related field of mathematics.

Mochizuki had created so many new mathematical tools and brought together so many disparate strands of mathematics that his paper was populated with vocabulary that nobody could understand. It was totally novel, and totally mystifying.

As Tufts professor Moon Duchin put it: “He’s really created his own world.”

It was going to take a while before anyone would be able to understand Mochizuki’s work, let alone judge whether or not his proof was right. In the ensuing months, the papers weighed like a rock in the math community. A handful of people approached it and began examining it. Others tried, then gave up. Some ignored it entirely, preferring to observe from a distance. As for the man himself, the man who had claimed to solve one of mathematics’ biggest problems, there was not a sound.

For centuries, mathematicians have strived towards a single goal: to understand how the universe works, and describe it. To this objective, math itself is only a tool — it is the language that mathematicians have invented to help them describe the known and query the unknown.

This history of mathematical inquiry is marked by milestones that come in the form of theorems and conjectures. Simply put, a theorem is an observation known to be true. The Pythagorean theorem, for example, makes the observation that for all right-angled triangles, the relationship between the lengths of the three sides, a, b and c is expressed in the equation a2+ b2= c2. Conjectures are predecessors to a theorem — they are proposals for theorems, observations that mathematicians believe to be true, but are yet to be confirmed. When a conjecture is proved, it becomes a theorem and when that happens, mathematicians rejoice, and add the new theorem to their tally of the understood universe.

“The point is not to prove the theorem,” explains Ellenberg. “The point is to understand how the universe works and what the hell is going on.”

Ellenberg is doing the dishes while talking to me over the phone, and I can hear the sound of a small infant somewhere in the background. Ellenberg is passionate about explaining mathematics to the world. He writes a math column for Slate magazine and is working on a book called How Not To Be Wrong, which is supposed to help laypeople apply math to their lives.

The sounds of the dishes pause as Ellenberg explains what motivates him and his fellow mathematicians. I imagine him gesturing in the air with soapy hands: “There’s a feeling that there’s a vast dark area of ignorance, but all of us are pushing together, taking steps together to pick at the boundaries.”

The ABC Conjecture probes deep into the darkness, reaching at the foundations of math itself. First proposed by mathematicians David Masser and Joseph Oesterle in the 1980s, it makes an observation about a fundamental relationship between addition and multiplication. Yet despite its deep implications, the ABC Conjecture is famous because, on the surface, it seems rather simple.

It starts with an easy equation: a + b = c.

The variables a, b, and c, which give the conjecture its name, have some restrictions. They need to be whole numbers, and a and b cannot share any common factors, that is, they cannot be divisible by the same prime number. So, for example, if a was 64, which equals 26, then b could not be any number that is a multiple of two. In this case, b could be 81, which is 34. Now a and b do not share any factors, and we get the equation 64 + 81 = 145.

It isn’t hard to come up with combinations of a and b that satisfy the conditions. You could come up with huge numbers, such as 3,072 + 390,625 = 393,697 (3,072 = 210 x 3 and 390,625 = 58, no overlapping factors there), or very small numbers, such as 3 + 125 = 128 (125 = 5 x 5 x5).

What the ABC conjecture then says is that the properties of a and b affect the properties of c. To understand the observation, it first helps to rewrite these equations a + b = c into versions made up of the prime factors:

Our first equation, 64 + 81 = 145, is equivalent to 26+ 34= 5 x 29.

Our second example, 3,072 + 390,625 = 393,697 is equivalent to  210 x 3 + 58 = 393,697 (which happens to be prime!)

Our last example, 3 + 125 = 128, is equivalent to 3 + 53= 27

The first two equations are not like the third, because in the first two equations, you have lots of prime factors on the left hand side of the equation, and very few on the right hand side. The third example is the opposite — there are more primes on the right hand side (seven) of the equation than on the left (only four). As it turns out, in all the possible combinations of a, b, and c, situation three is pretty rare. The ABC Conjecture essentially says that when there are lots of prime factors on the left hand of the equation then, usually, there will be not very many on the right side of the equation.

Of course, “lots of,” “not very many,” and “usually” are very vague words, and in a formal version of the ABC Conjecture, all these terms are spelled out in more precise math-speak. But even in this watered-down version, one can begin to appreciate the conjecture’s implications. The equation is based on addition, but the conjecture’s observation is more about multiplication.

“It really is about something very, very basic, about a tight constraint that relates multiplicative and additive properties of numbers,” says Minhyong Kim, professor at Oxford University. “If there’s something new to discover about that, you might expect it to be very influential.”

This is not intuitive. While mathematicians came up with addition and multiplication in the first place, based on their current knowledge of mathematics, there is no reason for them to presume that the additive properties of numbers would somehow influence or affect their multiplicative properties.

“There’s very little evidence for it,” says Peter Sarnak, professor at Princeton University, who is a self-described skeptic of the ABC conjecture. “I’ll only believe it when it’s proved.”

But if it were true? Mathematicians say that it would reveal a deep relationship between addition and multiplication that they never knew of before.

Even Sarnak, the skeptic, acknowledges this.

“If it’s true, then it will be the most powerful thing we have,” he says.

It would be so powerful, in fact, that it would automatically unlock many legendary math puzzles. One of these would be Fermat’s last theorem, an infamous math problem that was proposed in 1637, and solved only recently by Andrew Wiles in 1993. Wiles’ proof earned him more than 100,000 Deutsche marks in prize money (equivalent to about $50,000 in 1997), a reward that was offered almost a century before, in 1908. Wiles did not solve Fermat’s Last Theorem via the ABC conjecture — he took a different route — but if the ABC conjecture were to be true, then the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem would be an easy consequence.

Because of its simplicity, the ABC Conjecture is well-known by all mathematicians. CUNY professor Lucien Szpiro says that “every professional has tried at least one night” to theorize about a proof. Yet few people have seriously attempted to crack it. Szpiro, whose eponymous conjecture is a precursor of the ABC Conjecture, presented a proof in 2007, but it was soon found to be problematic. Since then, nobody has dared to touch it, not until Mochizuki.

When Mochizuki posted his papers, the math community had much reason to be enthusiastic. They were excited not just because someone had claimed to prove an important conjecture, but because of who that someone was.

Mochizuki was known to be brilliant. Born in Tokyo, he moved to New York with his parents, Kiichi and Anne Mochizuki, when he was 5 years old. He left home for high school, attending Philips Exeter Academy, a selective prep school in New Hampshire. There, he whipped through his academics with lightning speed, graduating after two years, at age 16, with advanced placements in mathematics, physics, American and European history, and Latin.

Then Mochizuki enrolled at Princeton University where, again, he finished ahead of his peers, earning his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in three years and moving quickly onto his Ph.D, which he received at age 23. After lecturing at Harvard University for two years, he returned to Japan, joining the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Kyoto University. In 2002, he became a full professor at the unusually young age of 33. His early papers were widely acknowledged to be very good work.

Academic prowess is not the only characteristic that set Mochizuki apart from his peers. His friend, Oxford professor Minhyong Kim, says that Mochizuki’s most outstanding characteristic is his intense focus on work.

“Even among many mathematicians I’ve known, he seems to have an extremely high tolerance for just sitting and doing mathematics for long, long hours,” says Kim.

Mochizuki and Kim met in the early 1990s, when Mochizuki was still an undergraduate student at Princeton. Kim, on exchange from Yale University, recalls Mochizuki making his way through the works of French mathematician Alexander Grothedieck, whose books on algebraic and arithmetic geometry are a must-read for any mathematician in the field.

“Most of us gradually come to understand [Grothendieck’s works] over many years, after dipping into it here and there,” said Kim. “It adds up to thousands and thousands of pages.”

But not Mochizuki.

“Mochizuki…just read them from beginning to end sitting at his desk,” recalls Kim. “He started this process when he was still an undergraduate, and within a few years, he was just completely done.”

A few years after returning to Japan, Mochizuki turned his focus to the ABC Conjecture. Over the years, word got around that he believed to have cracked the puzzle, and Mochizuki himself said that he expected results by 2012. So when the papers appeared, the math community was waiting, and eager. But then the enthusiasm stalled.

“His other papers – they’re readable, I can understand them and they’re fantastic,” says de Jong, who works in a similar field. Pacing in his office at Columbia University, de Jong shook his head as he recalled his first impression of the new papers. They were different. They were unreadable. After working in isolation for more than a decade, Mochizuki had built up a structure of mathematical language that only he could understand. To even begin to parse the four papers posted in August 2012, one would have to read through hundreds, maybe even thousands, of pages of previous work, none which had been vetted or peer-reviewed. It would take at least a year to read and understand everything. De Jong, who was about to go on sabbatical, briefly considered spending his year on Mochizuki’s papers, but when he saw height of the mountain, he quailed.

“I decided, I can’t possibly work on this. It would drive me nuts,” he said.

Soon, frustration turned into anger. Few professors were willing to directly critique a fellow mathematician, but almost every person I interviewed was quick to point out that Mochizuki was not following community standards. Usually, they said, mathematicians discuss their findings with their colleagues. Normally, they publish pre-prints to widely respected online forums. Then they submit their papers to the Annals of Mathematics, where papers are refereed by eminent mathematicians before publication. Mochizuki was bucking the trend. He was, according to his peers, “unorthodox.”

But what roused their ire most was Mochizuki’s refusal to lecture. Usually, after publication, a mathematician lectures on his papers, travelling to various universities to explain his work and answer questions from his colleagues. Mochizuki has turned down multiple invitations.

“A very prominent research university has asked him, ‘Come explain your result,’ and he said, ‘I couldn’t possibly do that in one talk,’” says Cathy O’Neil, de Jong’s wife, a former math professor better known as the blogger “Mathbabe.”

“And so they said, ‘Well then, stay for a week,’ and he’s like, ‘I couldn’t do it in a week.’

“So they said, ‘Stay for a month. Stay as long as you want,’ and he still said no.

“The guy does not want to do it.”

Kim sympathizes with his frustrated colleagues, but suggests a different reason for the rancor. “It really is painful to read other people’s work,” he says. “That’s all it is… All of us are just too lazy to read them.”

Kim is also quick to defend his friend. He says Mochizuki’s reticence is due to being a “slightly shy character” as well as his assiduous work ethic. “He’s a very hard working guy and he just doesn’t want to spend time on airplanes and hotels and so on.”

O’Neil, however, holds Mochizuki accountable, saying that his refusal to cooperate places an unfair burden on his colleagues.

“You don’t get to say you’ve proved something if you haven’t explained it,” she says. “A proof is a social construct. If the community doesn’t understand it, you haven’t done your job.”

Today, the math community faces a conundrum: the proof to a very important conjecture hangs in the air, yet nobody will touch it. For a brief moment in October, heads turned when Yale graduate student Vesselin Dimitrov pointed out a potential contradiction in the proof, but Mochizuki quickly responded, saying he had accounted for the problem. Dimitrov retreated, and the flicker of activity subsided.

As the months pass, the silence has also begun to call into question a basic premise of mathematical academia. Duchin explains the mainstream view this way: “Proofs are right or wrong. The community passes verdict.”

This foundational stone is one that mathematicians are proud of. The community works together; they are not cut-throat or competitive. Colleagues check each other’s work, spending hours upon hours verifying that a peer got it right. This behavior is not just altruistic, but also necessary: unlike in medical science, where you know you’re right if the patient is cured, or in engineering, where the rocket either launches or it doesn’t, theoretical math, better known as “pure” math, has no physical, visible standard. It is entirely based on logic. To know you’re right means you need someone else, preferably many other people, to walk in your footsteps and confirm that every step was made on solid ground. A proof in a vacuum is no proof at all.

Even an incorrect proof is better than no proof, because if the ideas are novel, they may still be useful for other problems, or inspire another mathematician to figure out the right answer. So the most pressing question isn’t whether or not Mochizuki is right — the more important question is, will the math community fulfill their promise, step up to the plate and read the papers?

The prospects seem thin. Szpiro is among the few who have made attempts to understand short segments of the paper. He holds a weekly workshop with his post-doctoral students at CUNY to discuss the paper, but he says they are limited to “local” analysis and do not understand the big picture yet. The only other known candidate is Go Yamashita, a colleague of Mochizuki at Kyoto University. According to Kim, Mochizuki is holding a private seminar with Yamashita, and Kim hopes that Yamashita will then go on to share and explain the work. If Yamashita does not pull through, it is unclear who else might be up to the task.

For now, all the math community can do is wait. While they wait, they tell stories, and recall great moments in math — the year Wiles cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem; how Perelman proved the Poincaré Conjecture. Columbia professor Dorian Goldfeld tells the story of Kurt Heegner, a high school teacher in Berlin, who solved a classic problem proposed by Gauss. “Nobody believed it. All the famous mathematicians pooh-poohed it and said it was wrong.” Heegner’s paper gathered dust for more than a decade until finally, four years after his death, mathematicians realized that Heegner had been right all along. Kim recalls Yoichi Miyaoka’s proposed proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1988, which garnered a lot of media attention before serious flaws were discovered. “He became very embarrassed,” says Kim.

As they tell these stories, Mochizuki and his proofs hang in the air. All these stories are possible outcomes. The only question is – which?

Kim is one of the few people who remains optimistic about the future of this proof. He is planning a conference at Oxford University this November, and hopes to invite Yamashita to come and share what he has learned from Mochizuki. Perhaps more will be made clear, then.

As for Mochizuki, who has refused all media requests, who seems so reluctant to promote even his own work, one has to wonder if he is even aware of the storm he has created.

On his website, one of the only photos of Mochizuki available on the Internet shows a middle-aged man with old-fashioned 90’s style glasses, staring up and out, somewhere over our heads. A self-given title runs over his head. It is not “mathematician” but, rather, “Inter-universal Geometer.”

What does it mean? His website offers no clues. There are his papers, thousands of pages long, reams upon reams of dense mathematics. His resume is spare and formal. He reports his marital status as “Single (never married).” And then there is a page called Thoughts of Shinichi Mochizuki, which has only 17 entries. “I would like to report on my recent progress,” he writes, February 2009. “Let me report on my progress,” October 2009. “Let me report on my progress,” April 2010, June 2011, January 2012. Then follows math-speak. It is hard to tell if he is excited, daunted, frustrated, or enthralled.

Mochizuki has reported all this progress for years, but where is he going? This “inter-universal geometer,” this possible genius, may have found the key that would redefine number theory as we know it. He has, perhaps, charted a new path into the dark unknown of mathematics. But for now, his footsteps are untraceable. Wherever he is going, he seems to be travelling alone.

Matemática evolutiva (Folha de S.Paulo)

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Hélio Schwartsman

26 de janeiro de 2015

SÃO PAULO – Para quem gosta de matemática, uma boa leitura é “Mathematics and the Real World” (matemática e o mundo real), de Zvi Artstein, professor do Instituto Weizmann, de Israel.

O autor começa dividindo a matemática em duas, uma mais natural, que a evolução nos preparou (e também a outros bichos) para compreender, e outra totalmente abstrata, cuja intelecção exige refrear todas as nossas intuições. No primeiro grupo estão a aritmética e parte da geometria. No segundo, destacam-se lógica formal, estatística, teoria dos conjuntos e o grosso do material sobre o qual se debruçam hoje os matemáticos.

Egípicios, babilônios, indianos e outros povos da Antiguidade desenvolveram razoavelmente bem a matemática natural. Fizeram-no por razões práticas, como facilitar o comércio e o cálculo astrológico. Foram os gregos, contudo, que, tentando escapar ao que consideravam ilusões de ótica do mundo sensível, resolveram fiar-se na matemática para descobrir o “real”. É aqui que a matemática ganha autonomia para florescer para além das intuições.

Na sequência, Artstein traça uma interessantíssima história da ciência, destacando quais transformações foram necessárias na matemática para que pudessem firmar-se teorias e modelos como heliocentrismo, gravitação universal, relatividade, mecânica quântica, cordas etc. Não foge, embora nem sempre desenvolva muito, das implicações filosóficas.

O autor discute também assuntos mais classicamente matemáticos, como incerteza, caos, infinito, os teoremas da incompletude de Gödel. Numa concessão ao mundo prático, aborda quase apressadamente algumas questões da sociologia e da computação. Finaliza advogando por reformas no ensino da matemática.

O bacana do livro é que Artstein consegue transformar um assunto potencialmente árido num texto que se lê com a fluidez de um romance. Não é para qualquer um.

Dahr Jamail | Mourning Our Planet: Climate Scientists Share Their Grieving Process (Truthout)

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Sunday, 25 January 2015 00:00 By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | News Analysis 

Scientists write their feelings about climate change

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)

I have been researching and writing about anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) for Truthout for the past year, because I have long been deeply troubled by how fast the planet has been emitting its obvious distress signals.

On a nearly daily basis, I’ve sought out the most recent scientific studies, interviewed the top researchers and scientists penning those studies, and connected the dots to give readers as clear a picture as possible about the magnitude of the emergency we are in.

This work has emotional consequences: I’ve struggled with depression, anger, and fear. I’ve watched myself shift through some of the five stages of grief proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance I’ve grieved for the planet and all the species who live here, and continue to do so as I work today.

I have been vacillating between depression and acceptance of where we are, both as victims – fragile human beings – and as perpetrators: We are the species responsible for altering the climate system of the planet we inhabit to the point of possibly driving ourselves extinct, in addition to the 150-200 species we are already driving extinct.

Can you relate to this grieving process?

If so, you might find solace in the fact that you are not alone: Climate science researchers, scientists, journalists and activists have all been struggling with grief around what we are witnessing.

To see more stories like this, visit “Planet or Profit?”

Take Professor Camille Parmesan, a climate researcher who says that ACD is the driving cause of her depression.

“I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost,” Parmesan said in the National Wildlife Federation’s 2012 report. “It’s gotten to be so depressing that I’m not sure I’m going to go back to this particular site again,” she said in reference to an ocean reef she had studied since 2002, “because I just know I’m going to see more and more of the coral dead, and bleached, and covered with brown algae.”

Last year I wrote about the work of Joanna Macy, a scholar of Buddhism, eco-philosophy, general systems theory and deep ecology, and author of more than a dozen books. Her initiative, The Work That Reconnects, helps people essentially do nothing more mysterious than telling the truth about what we see, know and feel is happening to our world.

In order to remain able to continue in our work, we first must feel the full pain of what is being done to the world, according to Macy.” Refusing to feel pain, and becoming incapable of feeling the pain, which is actually the root meaning of apathy, refusal to suffer – that makes us stupid, and half alive,” she told me. “It causes us to become blind to see what is really out there.”

I recently came across a blog titled, Is This How You Feel? It is an extraordinary compilation of handwritten letters from highly credentialed climate scientists and researchers sharing their myriad feelings about what they are seeing.

The blog is run and operated by Joe Duggan, a science communicator, who described his project like this: “All the scientists that have penned letters for this site have a sound understanding of climate change. Some have spent years designing models to predict changing climate, others, years investigating the implications for animal life. More still have been exploring a range of other topics concerning the causes and implications of a changing climate. As a minimum, they’ve all achieved a PhD in their area of expertise.”

With Joe’s permission, I am happy to share the passages below. In the spirit of opening the door to a continuing dialog among readers about our collective situation, what follows are the – often very personal – thoughts and feelings of several leading climate scientists.

Frustration

“Like many others I feel frustrated with the current state of public discourse and I’m dismayed by those who, seemingly motivated by their own short-term self interest, have chosen to hijack that discussion,” wrote Dr. John Fasullo, a project scientist in the climate analysis section of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, on the Is This How You Feel? blog. “The climate is changing and WE are the primary cause.”

Professor Peter B. deMenocal with Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory shared an analogy to the climate scientist’s predicament, comparing it to how a medical doctor would feel while having to inform their patient, who is an old, lifelong friend, of a dire but treatable diagnosis. The friend goes on to angrily disregard what you have to say, for a variety of very human reasons, as you watch helplessly as their pain and illness unfold over the rest of their now-shortened life. “Returning to our patient, I feel frustrated that my friend won’t listen,” he concluded.

Dr. Helen McGregor, a research fellow at the Australian National University’s Research School of Earth Sciences, shared a very emotionally honest letter about her experience as a climate scientist. Here is what she wrote in full:

I feel like nobody’s listening. Ok Sure, some people are listening but not enough of our leaders are listening – those that make decisions that influence all our lives. And climate change is affecting and will continue to affect all our lives.

I feel perplexed at why many of our politicians, business leaders, and members of the public don’t get that increased CO2 in the Earths atmosphere is a problem. The very premise that CO2 traps heat is based on fundamental physics – the very same physics that underpins so much of modern society. The very same physics that has seen higher C02 linked with warmer periods in the geological past. And sure, there have been warm periods in the past and the Earth weathered the storm (excuse the pun) but back then there weren’t millions of people, immovable infrastructure, or entire communities in harms way.

I feel astonished that some would accuse me of being part of some global conspiracy to get more money – if I was in it for the money I would have stayed working as a geologist in the mining industry. No, I do climate research because I find climate so very interesting, global warming or not.

I feel both exasperation and despair in equal measure, that perhaps there really is nothing I can do. I feel vulnerable, that perhaps by writing this letter I expose myself to trolling and vitriol – perhaps I’m better off just keeping quiet.

Hope

Dr. Jennie Mallela with the Research Schools of Biology and Earth Sciences at the Australian National University shared a range of emotions, including optimism.

“I believe people are capable of amazing things and I do believe that climate change can be halted and even reversed,” she wrote. “I just hope it happens in my lifetime. I don’t want to become the generation that future children talk of as having destroyed the planet. I’d like to be the generation that fought back (and won) against human induced climate change. The generation that worked out how to live in harmony with the planet – that generation!”

She wasn’t alone.

“So whilst there is enough good and committed people we can change our path of warming,” wrote Dr. Jim Salinger, an honorary research associate in climate science with the University of Auckland’s School of Environment. However, he went on to add, “I am always hopeful – but 4 to 5 degrees Celsius of change will be a challenge to survive.”

I asked Dr. Ira Lefier, an Atmospheric/Oceanic Scientist whose research has focused on methane how he felt about our current situation. He expressed his concerns and frustration, but also optimism.

“I find the current situation is highly distressing, in that the facts regarding global warming have been known for many decades, because like an aircraft carrier avoiding a collision, course changes can easily be managed well in advance, but become impossible at the last minute – inertia seals the future destiny,” he said. “And I ask myself, what did we (scientists and activists and concerned citizens of the planet), how did we get here, so close to the midnight? And I think that there was a tragic underestimate based on the successful campaign to save the Ozone Layer through the fight against CFCs – a gas with almost no political lobby, that the global society could easily accept the widespread changes needed to address global climate change through reducing CO2 emissions – which affects almost everyone on the planet. And that political change could be engendered simply by scientists presenting their facts and observations.

“So yes, I find it highly distressing that we are having a societal discussion on whether to take climate change seriously, half a century late. Still, I refuse not to be an optimist, – it is not yet too late. I continue to do whatever I can both scientifically and by communicating with the public, firstly, because it is the right thing to do, and secondly, in the hope and belief that even now, positive action will reduce the damage from ma warming climate to the ecosystem. I refuse to accept ‘apres moi le deluge’ [after me comes the flood].”

Concern

“As a human-being, and especially as a parent, I feel concerned that we are doing damage to the planet,” wrote Professor Peter Cox, of the University of Exeter, on the blog. “I don’t want to leave a mess for my children, or anyone else’s children, to clear-up. We are currently creating a problem for them at an alarming rate – that is worrying.”

Professor Gabi Hegerl, a professor of climate system science with the University of Edinburgh, wrote, “I look at my children and think about what I know is coming their way and I worry how it will affect them.”

Dr. Sarah Perkins, a climate scientist and extreme events specialist with the University of New South Wales, shared both her concern and hope about our Earth.

For sometime now I’ve been terribly worried. I wish I didn’t have to acknowledge it, but everything I have feared is happening. I used to think I was paranoid, but it’s true. She’s slipping away from us. She’s been showing signs of acute illness for quite a while, but no one has really done anything. Her increased erratic behavior is something I’ve especially noticed. Certain behaviors that were only rare occurrences are starting to occur more often, and with heightened anger. I’ve tried to highlight these changes time and time again, as well as their speed of increase, but no one has paid attention.

It almost seems everyone has been ignoring me completely, and I’m not sure why. Is it easier to pretend there’s no illness, hoping it will go away? Or because they’ve never had to live without her, so the thought of death is impossible? Perhaps they cannot see they’ve done this to her. We all have.

To me this is all false logic. How can you ignore the severe sickness of someone you are so intricately connected to and dependent upon. How can you let your selfishness and greed take control, and not protect and nurture those who need it most? How can anyone not feel an overwhelming sense of care and responsibility when those so dear to us are so desperately ill? How can you push all this to the back of your mind? This is something I will never understand. Perhaps I’m the odd one out, the anomaly of the human race. The one who cares enough, who has the compassion, to want to help make her better.

The thing is we can make her better!! If we work together, we can cure this terrible illness and restore her to her old self before we exploited her. But we must act quickly, we must act together. Time is ticking, and we need to act now.

Sharing both his frustration and concern, Dr. Alex Sen Gupta with the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales wrote:

I feel frustrated. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. We know what’s going on, we know why it’s happening, we know how serious things are going to get and still after so many years, we are still doing practically nothing to stop it. I feel concerned that unmitigated our inaction will cause terrible suffering to those least able to cope with change and that within my lifetime many of the places that make this planet so special – the snows on Kilimanjaro, the Great Barrier Reef, even the ice covered Arctic will be degraded beyond recognition – our legacy to the next generation.

Anger

“My overwhelming emotion is anger; anger that is fuelled not so much by ignorance, but by greed and profiteering at the expense of future generations,” wrote Professor Corety Bradshaw, the director of ecological modeling at the University of Adelaide. “I am not referring to some vague, existential bonding to the future human race; rather, I am speaking as a father of a seven year-old girl who loves animals and nature in general. As a biologist, I see irrefutable evidence every day that human-driven climate disruption will turn out to be one of the main drivers of the Anthropocene mass extinction event now well under way.”

The rest of his letter is worth reading in full:

Public indifference and individual short-sightedness aside, I am furious that politicians like Abbott and his anti-environment henchman are stealing the future from my daughter, and laughing about it while they line their pockets with the figurative gold proffered by the fossil-fuel industry. Whether it is sheer stupidity, greed, deliberate dishonesty or all three, the outcome is the same – destruction of the environmental life-support system that keeps us all alive and prosperous. Climates change, but the rapidity with which we are disrupting the current climate on top of the already heavily compromised environmental health of the planet makes the situation dire.

My frustration with these greedy, lying bastards is personal. Human-caused climate disruption is not a belief – it is one of the best-studied phenomena on Earth. Even a half-wit can understand this. As any father would, anyone threatening my family will by on the receiving end of my ire and vengeance. This anger is the manifestation of my deep love for my daughter, and the sadness I feel in my core about how others are treating her future.

Mark my words, you plutocrats, denialists, fossil-fuel hacks and science charlatans – your time will come when you will be backed against the wall by the full wrath of billions who have suffered from your greed and stupidity, and I’ll be first in line to put you there.

“The Pivotal Psychological Reality of Our Time”

Joe told me the response to his project has been, in general, positive.

“I have received emails from all over the world from people of all walks of life thanking me for establishing the website – from retired grandmothers through to undergraduate university students,” he said. “The letters have been picked up by various social media sites like Science Alert…and have subsequently reached massive audiences.”

He was happy to add that the responses from scientists have been positive, and said his question of “How does climate change make you feel?” is “something they have not been asked before.”

“Of course there have been some very vocal opponents to my work,” Joe added. “This is to be expected. As I have said in the past, there is a small but very vocal group of people out there whose sole goal is to misinform and mislead the general public about climate change. These people don’t have to use the facts, they don’t have to even use the real data. They can cherry-pick from graphs, or even tell flat-out lies in an attempt to mislead the greater public. To what end, who knows? ITHYF [Is This How You Feel] does not exist to change the minds of deniers. It exists to provide an avenue through which every day people can relate to climate change.”

The term “climate change deniers,” then, has an entirely new – and ever more relevant – meaning when viewed through the lenses of the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief, given that “denial” is literally one of the five stages.

Joe is now asking laypeople to send in their letters about how they feel, and plans to publish those as well.

“This approach is not the only way to communicate on climate change, but it is one way, and I certainly feel that it is effective,” he concluded.

The practice of scientists sharing their feelings runs contrary to the dominant consumer capitalist culture of the West, which guards against – and attempts to divert attention from – the prospect of people getting in touch with feelings provoked by witnessing the wholesale destruction of the planet.

In fact, Joanna Macy believes it is not in the self-perceived interest of multinational corporations, or the government and the media that serve them “for us to stop and become aware of our profound anguish with the way things are.”

Nevertheless, these disturbing trends of widespread denial, disinformation by the corporate media, and the worsening impacts of runaway ACD, which are all increasing, are something she is very mindful of. As she wrote in World as Lover, World as Self, “The loss of certainty that there will be a future is, I believe, the pivotal psychological reality of our time.”

We don’t know how long we have left on earth. Five years? 15 years? 30? Beyond the year 2100? But when we allow our hearts to be shattered – broken completely open – by these stark, cold realities, we allow our perspectives to be opened up to vistas we’ve never known. When we allow ourselves to fully experience the crisis in this way, we are then able to truly see it through new eyes.

Like reaching new heights on a mountain, we can see things we’ve never seen before. Our thinking, attitudes, and outlook on life changes dramatically. It is a new consciousness, one in which we realize the pivotal stage in history we find ourselves in.

Perhaps, within this new consciousness, we can live in this time with grace, dignity, and caring. Perhaps, here, we can find ways to save habitat for a few more species, while we share this precious lives and this precious time with loved ones, in the wild places we love so much, on this rare and precious world.

The Paradoxes That Threaten To Tear Modern Cosmology Apart (The Physics Arxiv Blog)

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Some simple observations about the universe seem to contradict basic physics. Solving these paradoxes could change the way we think about the cosmos

The Physics arXiv Blog on Jan 20

Revolutions in science often come from the study of seemingly unresolvable paradoxes. An intense focus on these paradoxes, and their eventual resolution, is a process that has leads to many important breakthroughs.

So an interesting exercise is to list the paradoxes associated with current ideas in science. It’s just possible that these paradoxes will lead to the next generation of ideas about the universe.

Today, Yurij Baryshev at St Petersburg State University in Russia does just this with modern cosmology. The result is a list of paradoxes associated with well-established ideas and observations about the structure and origin of the universe.

Perhaps the most dramatic, and potentially most important, of these paradoxes comes from the idea that the universe is expanding, one of the great successes of modern cosmology. It is based on a number of different observations.

The first is that other galaxies are all moving away from us. The evidence for this is that light from these galaxies is red-shifted. And the greater the distance, the bigger this red-shift.

Astrophysicists interpret this as evidence that more distant galaxies are travelling away from us more quickly. Indeed, the most recent evidence is that the expansion is accelerating.

What’s curious about this expansion is that space, and the vacuum associated with it, must somehow be created in this process. And yet how this can occur is not at all clear. “The creation of space is a new cosmological phenomenon, which has not been tested yet in physical laboratory,” says Baryshev.

What’s more, there is an energy associated with any given volume of the universe. If that volume increases, the inescapable conclusion is that this energy must increase as well. And yet physicists generally think that energy creation is forbidden.

Baryshev quotes the British cosmologist, Ted Harrison, on this topic: “The conclusion, whether we like it or not, is obvious: energy in the universe is not conserved,” says Harrison.

This is a problem that cosmologists are well aware of. And yet ask them about it and they shuffle their feet and stare at the ground. Clearly, any theorist who can solve this paradox will have a bright future in cosmology.

The nature of the energy associated with the vacuum is another puzzle. This is variously called the zero point energy or the energy of the Planck vacuum and quantum physicists have spent some time attempting to calculate it.

These calculations suggest that the energy density of the vacuum is huge, of the order of 10^94 g/cm^3. This energy, being equivalent to mass, ought to have a gravitational effect on the universe.

Cosmologists have looked for this gravitational effect and calculated its value from their observations (they call it the cosmological constant). These calculations suggest that the energy density of the vacuum is about 10^-29 g/cm3.

Those numbers are difficult to reconcile. Indeed, they differ by 120 orders of magnitude. How and why this discrepancy arises is not known and is the cause of much bemused embarrassment among cosmologists.

Then there is the cosmological red-shift itself, which is another mystery. Physicists often talk about the red-shift as a kind of Doppler effect, like the change in frequency of a police siren as it passes by.

The Doppler effect arises from the relative movement of different objects. But the cosmological red-shift is different because galaxies are stationary in space. Instead, it is space itself that cosmologists think is expanding.

The mathematics that describes these effects is correspondingly different as well, not least because any relative velocity must always be less than the speed of light in conventional physics. And yet the velocity of expanding space can take any value.

Interestingly, the nature of the cosmological red-shift leads to the possibility of observational tests in the next few years. One interesting idea is that the red-shifts of distant objects must increase as they get further away. For a distant quasar, this change may be as much as one centimetre per second per year, something that may be observable with the next generation of extremely large telescopes.

One final paradox is also worth mentioning. This comes from one of the fundamental assumptions behind Einstein’s theory of general relativity—that if you look at the universe on a large enough scale, it must be the same in all directions.

It seems clear that this assumption of homogeneity does not hold on the local scale. Our galaxy is part of a cluster known as the Local Group which is itself part of a bigger supercluster.

This suggests a kind of fractal structure to the universe. In other words, the universe is made up of clusters regardless of the scale at which you look at it.

The problem with this is that it contradicts one of the basic ideas of modern cosmology—the Hubble law. This is the observation that the cosmological red-shift of an object is linearly proportional to its distance from Earth.

It is so profoundly embedded in modern cosmology that most currently accepted theories of universal expansion depend on its linear nature. That’s all okay if the universe is homogeneous (and therefore linear) on the largest scales.

But the evidence is paradoxical. Astrophysicists have measured the linear nature of the Hubble law at distances of a few hundred megaparsecs. And yet the clusters visible on those scales indicate the universe is not homogeneous on the scales.

And so the argument that the Hubble law’s linearity is a result of the homogeneity of the universe (or vice versa) does not stand up to scrutiny. Once again this is an embarrassing failure for modern cosmology.

It is sometimes tempting to think that astrophysicists have cosmology more or less sewn up, that the Big Bang model, and all that it implies, accounts for everything we see in the cosmos.

Not even close. Cosmologists may have successfully papered over the cracks in their theories in a way that keeps scientists happy for the time being. This sense of success is surely an illusion.

And that is how it should be. If scientists really think they are coming close to a final and complete description of reality, then a simple list of paradoxes can do a remarkable job of putting feet firmly back on the ground.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1501.01919 : Paradoxes Of Cosmological Physics In The Beginning Of The 21-St Century

O que esperar da ciência em 2015 (Zero Hora)

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Apostamos em cinco coisas que tendem a aparecer neste ano

19/01/2015 | 06h01

O que esperar da ciência em 2015 SpaceX/Youtube
Foto: SpaceX/Youtube

Em 2014, a ciência conseguiu pousar em um cometa, descobriu que estava errada sobre a evolução genética das aves, revelou os maiores fósseis da história. Miguel Nicolelis apresentou seu exoesqueleto na Copa do Mundo, o satélite brasileiro CBERS-4, em parceria com a China, foi ao espaço com sucesso, um brasileiro trouxe a principal medalha da matemática para casa.

Mas e em 2015, o que veremos? Apostamos em cinco coisas que poderão aparecer neste ano.

Foguetes reusáveis


Se queremos colonizar Marte, não adianta passagem só de ida. Esses foguetes, capazes de ir e voltar, são a promessa para transformar o futuro das viagens espaciais. Veremos se a empresa SpaceX, que já está nessa, consegue.

Robôs em casa


Os japoneses da Softbank começam a vender, em fevereiro, um robô humanoide chamado Pepper. Ele usa inteligência artificial para reconhecer o humor do dono e fala quatro línguas. Apesar de ser mais um ajudante do que um cara que faz, logo logo aprenderá novas funções.

Universo invisível


O Grande Colisor de Hádrons vai voltar a funcionar em março e terá potência duas vezes maior de quebrar partículas. Uma das possibilidades é que ele ajude a descobrir novas superpartículas que, talvez, componham a matéria escura. Seria o primeiro novo estado da matéria descoberto em um século.

Cura para o ebola


Depois da crise de 2014, pode ser que as vacinas para o ebola comecem a funcionar e salvem muitas vidas na África. Vale o mesmo para a aids. O HIV está cercado, esperamos que a ciência finalmente o vença neste ano.

Discussões climáticas


2014 foi um dos mais quentes da história e, do jeito que a coisa vai, 2015 seguirá a mesma trilha. Em dezembro, o mundo vai discutir um acordo para tentar reverter o grau de emissões de gases em Paris. São medidas para ser implementadas a partir de 2020. Que sejam sensatos nossos líderes.

CNPq cria Rede para otimizar produção de animais em laboratórios (JC)

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Rebiotério prevê estimular produção e assegurar qualidade nos biotérios

Ao mesmo tempo em que corre para desenvolver métodos alternativos a fim de reduzir o número de animais em testes de laboratórios –  pela chamada Rede Nacional de Métodos Alternativos (RENAMA) – o governo decidiu criar uma Rede para adequar a produção em biotérios de todos os animais para propósitos científicos e didáticos, como ratos, camundongos e coelhos.

A intenção é atender de forma adequada e organizada à demanda nacional. O entendimento é de que o uso de animais ainda é imprescindível nos testes in vivo e que hoje existe um desequilíbrio entre a oferta e a procura no País, em razão do aumento considerável da produção científica nacional.

Na  prática, o Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), principal agência financiadora de pesquisa experimental do País, criou a chamada Rede Nacional de Biotérios de Produção de Animais para Fins Científicos, Didáticos e Tecnológicos (Rebiotério), informou Marcelo Morales, diretor da área de Ciências Agrárias, Biológicas e da Saúde do CNPq e que comandará a rede, com exclusividade ao Jornal da Ciência.

A Rebiotério, segundo Morales, vai mapear, monitorar,   otimizar e dar suporte à produção de animais utilizados em experimentos científicos e em sala de aula. Todos  os biotérios distribuídos pelo País serão cadastrados na rede. Para Morales, essa é uma tentativa de atender aos anseios da comunidade científica pela pesquisa de qualidade envolvendo animais.

Sem querer estimar o número de animais produzidos hoje em laboratórios, para fins científicos, Morales destaca a atual necessidade da produção qualificada de animais em biotérios de produção para atender a demanda científica. Hoje, segundo disse, pesquisadores aguardam na fila um período de dois a cinco meses para receber animais com qualidade (principalmente os desprovidos de patógenos, Specific Pathogen Free – SPF) e que possam ser utilizados em experimentos científicos.  Atualmente,  a produção com qualidade é vinculada apenas a alguns biotérios que os produzem para atender as próprias necessidades e poucos são aqueles que produzem para outras Instituições.   Além disso, a importação desses animais se torna inviável, diante de barreiras sanitárias e do alto custo de importação.

No caso de roedores, responsáveis por cerca de 70% do total de animais utilizados em pesquisas científicas, Morales afirmou que a necessidade estimada de produção é de 5 milhões/ano desses animais.

Normas e legislações 

Além de propor políticas de fomento para a produção de animais em biotérios qualificados, a Rebiotério prevê, ainda, acompanhar a implementação efetiva de normas e legislações especificas adotadas para uso de animais em experimentos científicos, conjuntamente com o  Conselho Nacional de Controle de Experimentação Animal (Concea). Deverá também estimular a qualidade de produção nos  biotérios e atender aos padrões internacionais de boas práticas de bem-estar animal.

Outra função é assegurar o controle sanitário e genético, averiguando o nível de patógenos, por exemplo, e reforçar os padrões éticos adotados para os animais produzidos em biotérios.

Capacitação profissional

Para garantir a qualidade de produção dos biotérios, a Rebiotério terá o papel, dentre outros, de estimular a capacitação e qualificação de profissionais da área no exterior e no Brasil (bioteristas, veterinários, pesquisadores e etc). Assim, garantir que a produção de animais seja compatível com os padrões internacionais.

“Nossa intenção é fortalecer a produção de animais de experimentação, com ética e qualidade, fazendo com o que o País torne-se referência nessa área no mundo”, disse Morales, também professor associado da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), ex-coordenador do Conselho Nacional de Controle de Experimentação Animal (Concea) e ex-presidente da Sociedade Brasileira de Biofísica (SBBF).

Para fazer frente a tais desafios, o CNPq aprovou a viabilidade de parcerias internacionais que possam assegurar a produção sustentável e de qualidade nos biotérios. A intenção é ampliar o interesse de empresas internacionais, com expertise em tal área, que hoje já organizam e negociam instalação no Brasil.

Segundo Morales, a parceria com empresas estrangeiras pode ser por intermédio de transferência de tecnologia relacionada às práticas modernas de bioterismo; e pelo apoio à formação de pesquisadores e técnicos brasileiros dessa área no exterior.

Sem querer entrar no mérito do orçamento do CNPq, Morales informou que a qualificação desses profissionais pode ocorrer também pelas bolsas do Programa Ciência sem Fronteiras.

Composição da Rebiotério

Além do CNPq, a Rebiotério será composta pela comunidade científica, pela Secretaria de Políticas e Programas de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento do Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (Seped/MCTI); e Secretaria de Ciência, Tecnologia e Insumos Estratégicos do Ministério da Saúde (SCTIE), do Ministério da Saúde. Terá ainda participação do Conselho Nacional de Controle de Experimentação Animal (CONCEA), órgão vinculado ao MCTI, e de membros da Finep (Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos).

Da comunidade científica, haverá representantes da Sociedade Brasileira de Ciência em Animais de Laboratórios (SBCAL), da Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência (SBPC), da Academia Brasileira de Ciências (ABC) e do Conselho Nacional das Fundações Estaduais de Amparo à Pesquisa (Confap).

“Nossa intenção é que a rede tenha uma abrangência nacional”, observa Morales.

(Viviane Monteiro/ Jornal da Ciência)

Time for the social sciences (Nature)

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Governments that want the natural sciences to deliver more for society need to show greater commitment towards the social sciences and humanities.

30 December 2014

Nature 517, 5 (01 January 2015) doi:10.1038/517005a

Physics, chemistry, biology and the environmental sciences can deliver wonderful solutions to some of the challenges facing individuals and societies, but whether those solutions will gain traction depends on factors beyond their discoverers’ ken. That is sometimes true even when the researchers are aiming directly at the challenge. If social, economic and/or cultural factors are not included in the framing of the questions, a great deal of creativity can be wasted.

This message is not new. Yet it gets painfully learned over and over again, as funders and researchers hoping to make a difference to humanity watch projects fail to do so. This applies as much to business as to philanthropy (ask manufacturers of innovative crops).

All credit, therefore, to those who establish multidisciplinary projects — for example, towards enhancing access to food and water, in adaptation to climate change, or in tackling illness — and who integrate natural sciences, social sciences and humanities from the outset. The mutual framing of challenges is the surest way to overcome the conceptual diversities and gulfs that can make such collaborations a challenge.

All credit, too, to leading figures in policy who demonstrate their commitment to this multidimensional agenda. And all the more reason for concern when governments show none of the same comprehension.

Such is the case in the United Kingdom. Research-wise, the country is in a state that deserves a bit of attention from others and certainly merits some concern from its own citizens. Its university funders last month announced the results of a unique exercise in nationwide research assessment — the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which will have a major impact on the direction of university funding. Almost simultaneously, its government released a strategy document: ‘Our plan for growth: science and innovation’. And in November, its government’s chief science adviser published a wide-ranging annual report that reflects the spirit of inclusiveness mentioned above. Unfortunately, the government’s strategy does not.

The importance of inclusivity

Whatever the discipline, a sensible research-assessment policy puts a high explicit value both on outstanding discovery and scholarship, and on making a positive impact beyond academia. In that spirit, the REF (www.ref.ac.uk) aggregatedthree discretely documented aspects of the research of each university department: the quality and importance of the department’s academic output, given a 65% weighting in the overall grade; the quality of the research environment (15%); and the reach and significance of its impact beyond academia (20%).

The influences of the data and panel processes that went into the REF results will not be analysed publicly until March. The signs are that the impacts component of assessment has allowed some universities to rise higher up the rankings than they would otherwise. But the full benefits and perverse incentives of the system will take deeper analysis to resolve.

“If you want science to deliver for society, you need to support a capacity to understand that society.”

A remarkable and contentious aspect of UK science policy is the extent to which the REF rankings will determine funding. The trend has been for such exercises to concentrate funding sharply towards the upper tiers of the rankings.

Most important in the current context is whether an over-dependence on funding formulae will undermine the nation’s abilities to meet its future needs. A preliminary analysis by a policy magazine, Research Fortnight, reaches a pessimistic conclusion for those who believe that the social sciences are strategically important: given the REF results, the social sciences will gain a smaller slice of the pie than the size of the community might have suggested. If that reflects underperformance in social science at a national scale, and given the strategic importance of these disciplines, a national ambition in, for example, sociology, anthropology and psychology that reaches beyond the funding formula needs to be energized.

A reader of the government’s science and innovation strategy (go.nature.com/u5xbnx) might reach the same conclusion. Its fundamental message is to be welcomed: understandably focusing on enhancing economic growth, it highlights the need for support of fundamental research, open information, strategic technologies and stimuli for business engagement and investment. But there is just one sentence that deals with the social sciences and humanities: a passing mention in the introduction that they are included whenever the word ‘science’ is used.

Credit to both chief science adviser Mark Walport and his predecessor, John Beddington, for their explicit and proactive engagement with the social sciences. This year’s report, ‘Innovation: managing risk, not avoiding it’ (see go.nature.com/lwf1o7), demonstrates a commitment to inclusivity: it is a compendium of opinion and reflection from experts in psychology, behavioural science, statistics, risk, sociology, law, communication and public engagement, as well as natural sciences.

An example of the report’s inclusive merits can be found in the sections on uncertainty, communication, conversations and language, in which heavyweight academics highlight key considerations in dealing with contentious and risk-laden areas of innovation. Case studies relating to nuclear submarines, fracking and flood planning are supplied by professionals and advocates directly involved in the debates. This is complemented by discussions of the human element in estimating risk from the government’s behavioural insights team, as well as discussions of how the contexts of risk-laden decisions play a part. Anyone who has a stake in science or technology that is in the slightest bit publicly contentious will find these sections salutary.

The report’s key message should be salutary for policy-makers worldwide. If you want science to deliver for society, through commerce, government or philanthropy, you need to support a capacity to understand that society that is as deep as your capacity to understand the science. And your policy statements need to show that you believe in that necessity.

Can science prove the existence of God? (Starts with a bang!)

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What it means if there’s no life anywhere else in the Universe, and what we know so far.

Ethan Siegel on Dec 30, 2014

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” –Winston Churchill

This past weekend, Eric Metaxas lit up the world with his bold article in the Wall Street Journal, Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God. What he argues, specifically is that to the best of our knowledge, this is our planet:

Image credit: ISS expedition 25, via http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=46820.

while this is every other planet out there.

Image credit: Mars Spirit Rover, NASA/JPL/Cornell.

Which is to say, we live in a particularly privileged place. We live on a planet that has all the right ingredients for life, including:

  • We’re at the right distance from our Sun so that temperatures are conducive to life.
  • We have the right atmospheric pressure for liquid water at our surface.
  • We have the right ingredients — the right balance of heavy elements and organic molecules — for life to arise.
  • We have the right amount of water so that our world has both oceans and continents.
  • And life started on our world very early, sustained itself for our planet’s entire history, and gave rise to us: sentient, self-aware creatures.

This, he argues, is incredibly rare. In fact, he goes beyond arguing that it’s just a rare occurrence in our Universe, claiming instead that it’s so outlandishly unexpected, given all the factors that needed to occur in just the right confluence of circumstances, that our Universe must have been designed specifically to give rise to us, otherwise the odds of us coming to be would be so infinitesimally small that it’s unreasonable to believe it could have happened by chance.

Image credit: Cosmos (1980) / Carl Sagan.

This is a very compelling argument for many people, but it’s important to ask ourselves three questions to make sure we’re approaching this honestly. We’ll go through them one at a time, but here are the three, so we know what we’re getting into.

  1. What are, scientifically, the conditions that we need for life to arise?
  2. How rare or common are these conditions elsewhere in the Universe?
  3. And finally, if we don’t find life in the places and under the conditions where we expect it, can that prove the existence of God?

These are all big questions, so let’s give them the care they deserve.

Image credit: NOAA/PMEL Vents Program, via http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/eoi/.

1.) What are, scientifically, the conditions that we need for life to arise? In other words, things did occur in a very specific way here on Earth, but how many of them does life-as-we-know-it require, versus how many of them happened in a particular way here, but could have easily happened under different conditions elsewhere?

The things I listed earlier are based on the assumption that any life that’s out there is going to be like us in the sense that it will be based on the chemistry of atoms and molecules, occur with liquid water as a basic requirement of its functioning, and won’t be in an environment that we know to be toxic to all terrestrial life.

For those criteria alone, we already know there are billions of planets in our galaxy alone that fit the bill.

Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech, via http://kepler.arc.nasa.gov/news/nasakeplernews/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=165.

Our studies of exoplanets — of worlds around stars beyond our own — have shown us that there’s a huge variety of rocky planets orbiting at the right distance from their central stars to have liquid water on their surfaces if they have anything akin to atmospheres like our own. We are starting to approach the technological capabilities of detecting exo-atmospheres and their compositions around worlds as small as our own; currently, we can get down to about Neptune-sized worlds, although the James Webb Space Telescope will advance that further in under a decade.

Image credit: David A. Aguilar, CFA.

But aren’t there other things we need to worry about? What if we were too close to the galactic center; wouldn’t the high rate of supernovae fry us, and sterilize life? What if we didn’t have a planet like Jupiter to clear out the asteroid belt; wouldn’t the sheer number of asteroids flying our way wipe any life that manages to form out? And what about the fact that we’re here now, when the Universe is relatively young? Many stars will live for trillions of years, but we’ve only got about another billion or two before our Sun gets hot enough to boil our oceans. When the Universe was too young, there weren’t enough heavy elements. Did we come along at just the right time, to not only make it in our Universe, but to witness all the galaxies before dark energy pushes them away?

Image credit: Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) composite, via http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/image_galleries/MSX/galactic_center.html.

Probably not, to all of these questions! Metaxas throws these out there to illustrate how unlikely it is that we would have come into existence, but none of these points say what he uses them to mean. If we were closer to the galactic center, yes: the star formation rate is higher and the rate of supernovae is higher. But the main thing that means is that large numbers of heavy elements are created faster there, giving complex life an opportunity starting from earlier times. Here in the outskirts, we have to wait longer!

And as for sterilizing a planet, you’d have to be very close to a supernova for that to happen — far closer than stars typically are to one another near the galactic center — or else in the direct path of a hypernova beam. But even in this latter case, which would still be incredibly rare, you’re likely to only sterilize half your world at once, because these beams are short-lived!

Image credit: NASA / JPL.

Their atmospheres wouldn’t be blown off entirely, deep-ocean life should still survive, and there’s every reason to believe that no matter how bad it got, the conditions would be ripe for complex life to make a comeback.

Once life takes hold on a world, or gets “under its skin” as some biologists say, it’s very hard to annihilate it entirely. And this simply won’t do.

Image credit: NASA/ESA/A. Feild, STScI.

Same deal for asteroids. Yes, a solar system without a Jupiter-like planet would have many more asteroids, but without a Jupiter-like planet, would their orbits ever get perturbed to fling them into the inner solar system? Would it make extinction events more common, or rarer? Moreover, even if there were increased impacts, would that even make complex/intelligent life less likely, or would the larger number of extinction events accelerate the differentiation of life, making intelligence more likely?

The evidence that we need a Jupiter for life is specious at best, just like the evidence that we need to be at this location in our galaxy is also sparse. But even if those things were true, we’d still have huge numbers of worlds — literally tens-to-hundreds of millions — that met those criteria in our galaxy alone.

https://medium.com/media/484354df8584c453c106596e0daa7a77?maxWidth=640

And finally, we did come along relatively early, but the ingredients for stars and solar systems like our own were present in large abundances in galaxies many billions of years before our own star system formed. We’re even finding potentially habitable worlds where life may be seven-to-nine billion years old! So no, we’re probably not first. The conditions that we need for life to arise, to the best we can measure, seem to exist all over the galaxy, and hence probably all over the Universe as well.

Image credit: © Lisa Kaltenegger (MPIA).

2.) How rare or common are these conditions elsewhere in the Universe?

Scientists didn’t help themselves with overly optimistic estimates of the Drake equation: the equation that is most commonly used to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. Of all the science presented in Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos series, his estimates of the Drake equation represented possibly the worst science in the series.

So let’s run through the actual numbers to the best that science knows — complete with realistic uncertainties — and see what we come up with.

Image credit: Christian Joore of http://kindaoomy.com/ (L), NASA (R).

As best as we can tell — extrapolating what we’ve discovered to what we haven’t yet looked at or been able to see — there ought to be around one-to-ten trillion planets in our galaxy that orbit stars, and somewhere around forty to eighty billion of them are candidates for having all three of the following properties:

  • being rocky planets,
  • located where they’ll consistently have Earth-like temperatures,
  • and that ought to support and sustain liquid water on their surfaces!

So the worlds are there, around stars, in the right places! In addition to that, we need them to have the right ingredients to bring about complex life. What about those building blocks; how likely are they to be there?

Image credit: NASA / ESA and R. Humphreys (University of Minnesota).

Believe it or not, these heavy elements — assembled into complex molecules — are unavoidable by this point in the Universe. Enough stars have lived and died that all the elements of the periodic table exist in fairly high abundances all throughout the galaxy.

But are they assembled correctly? Taking a look towards the heart of our own galaxy is molecular cloud Sagittarius B, shown at the top of this page. In addition to water, sugars, benzene rings and other organic molecules that just “exist” in interstellar space, we find surprisingly complex ones.

Image credit: Oliver Baum, University of Cologne.

Like ethyl formate (left) and n-propyl cyanide (right), the former of which is responsible for the smell of raspberries! Molecules just as complex as these are literally in every molecular cloud, protoplanetary disk and stellar outflow that we’ve measured. So with tens of billions of chances in our galaxy alone, and the building blocks already in place, you might think — as Fermi did — that the odds of intelligent life arising many times in our own galaxy is inevitable.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

But first, we need to make life from non-life. This is no small feat, and is one of the greatest puzzles around for natural scientists in all disciplines: the problem of abiogenesis. At some point, this happened for us, whether it happened in space, in the oceans, or in the atmosphere, it happened, as evidenced by our very planet, and its distinctive diversity of life.

But thus far, we’ve been unable to create life from non-life in the lab. So it’s not yet possible to say how likely it is, although we’ve taken some amazing steps in recent decades. It could be something that happens on as many as 10–25% of the possible worlds, which means up to 20 billion planets in our galaxy could have life on them. (Including — past or present — others in our own Solar System, like Mars, Europa, Titan or Enceladus.) That’s our optimistic estimate.

But it could be far fewer than that as well. Was life on Earth likely? In other words, if we performed the chemistry experiment of forming our Solar System over and over again, would it take hundreds, thousands, or even millions of chances to get life out once? Conservatively, let’s say it’s only one-in-a-million, which still means, given the pessimistic end of 40 billion planets with the right temperature, there are still at least 40,000 planets out there in our galaxy alone with life on them.

Image credit: © 2002, ReefNews, Inc.

But we want something even more than that; we’re looking for large, specialized, multicellular, tool-using creatures. So while, by many measures, there are plenty of intelligent animals, we are interested in a very particular type of intelligence. Specifically, a type of intelligence that can communicate with us, despite the vast distances between the stars!

So how common is that? From the first, self-replicating organic molecule to something as specialized and differentiated as a human being, we know we need billions of years of (roughly) constant temperatures, the right evolutionary steps, and a whole lot of luck. What are the odds that such a thing would have happened? One-in-a-hundred? Well, optimistically, maybe. That might be how many of these planets stay at constant temperatures, avoid 100% extinction catastrophes, evolve multicellularity, gender, become differentiated and encephalized enough to eventually learn to use tools.

Or, there could be plentyof life out there, but it could all look like this. Image credit: BURGESS SHALE FAUNA (1989) Carel Brest van Kempen.

But it could be far fewer; we are not an inevitable consequence of evolution so much as a happy accident of it. Even one-in-a-million seems like it might be too optimistic for the odds of human-like animals evolving on an Earth-like world with the right ingredients for life; I could easily imagine that it would take a billion Earths (or more) to get something like human beings out just once.

Image credit: Original source Dennis Davidson for http://www.nss.org/, retrieved from Brian Shiro at Astronaut For Hire.

If we take the optimistic estimate of the optimistic estimate above, perhaps 200 million worlds are out there capable of communicating with us, in our galaxy alone. But if we take the pessimistic estimate about both life arising and the odds of it achieving intelligence, there’s only a one-in-25,000 chance that our galaxy would have even one such civilization.

In other words, life is a fantastic bet, but intelligent life may not be. And that’s according to reasonable scientific estimates, but it assumes we’re being honest about our uncertainties here, too. So the conditions for life are definitely everywhere, but life itself could be common or rare, and what we consider intelligent life could be common, rare or practically non-existent in our galaxy. As science finds out more, we’ll learn more about that.

And finally…

Image credit: Victor Bobbett.

3.) If we don’t find life in the places and under the conditions where we expect it, can that prove the existence of God?

Certainly, there are people that will argue that it does. But to me, that’s a terrible way to place your faith. Consider this:

Do you want or need your belief in a divine or supernatural origin to the Universe to be based in something that could be scientifically disproven?

I am very open about not being a man of faith myself, but of having tremendous respect for those who are believers. The wonderful thing about science is that it is for everybody who’s willing to look to the Universe itself to find out more information about it.

Why would your belief in God require that science give a specific answer to this question that we don’t yet know the answer to? Will your faith be shaken if we find that, hey, guess what, chemistry works to form life on other worlds the same way it worked in the past on this one? Will you feel like you’ve achieved some sort of spiritual victory if we scour the galaxy and find that human beings are the most intelligent species on all the worlds of the Milky Way?

Image credit: Serge Brunier of The World At Night, viahttp://twanight.org/newTWAN/photos.asp?ID=3001467.

Or, can your beliefs — whatever they are — stand up to whatever scientific truths the Universe reveals about itself, regardless of what they are?

In the professional opinion of practically all scientists who study the Universe, it is very likely that there is life on other worlds, and that there’s a very good chance — if we invest in looking for it — that we’ll be able to find the first biological signatures on other worlds within a single generation. Whether there’s intelligent life beyond Earth, or more specifically, intelligent life beyond Earth in our galaxy that’s still alive right now, is a more dubious proposition, but the outcome of this scientific question in no way favors or disfavors the existence of God, any more than the order of whether fish or birds evolved first on Earth favors or disfavors a deity’s existence.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons / Lucianomendez.

The truths of the Universe are written out there, on the Universe itself, and are accessible to us all through the process of inquiry. To allow an uncertain faith to stand in as an answer where scientific knowledge is required does us all a disservice; the illusion of knowledge — or reaching a conclusion before obtaining the evidence — is a poor substitute for what we might actually come to learn, if only we ask the right questions. Science can never prove or disprove the existence of God, but if we use our beliefs as an excuse to draw conclusions that scientifically, we’re not ready for, we run the grave risk of depriving ourselves of what we might have come to truly learn.

So as this year draws to a close and a new one begins, I implore you: don’t let your faith close you off to the joys and wonders of the natural world. The joys of knowing — of figuring out the answers to questions for ourselves — is one that none of us should be cheated out of. May your faith, if you have one, only serve to enhance and enrich you, not take the wonder of science away!

This Lawyer’s New Job Is Defending Climate Scientists From Political Attacks (Climate Progress)

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BY EMILY ATKIN, POSTED ON NOVEMBER 10, 2014 AT 2:57 PM

“This Lawyer’s New Job Is Defending Climate Scientists From Political Attacks”

Lauren Kurtz, the new Executive Director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.

Lauren Kurtz, the new Executive Director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. CREDIT: CLIMATE SCIENCE LEGAL DEFENSE FUND

Lauren Kurtz, a once-budding biologist turned accomplished attorney, is frustrated. She thinks it’s ridiculous that climate scientists have become targets of politically motivated attacks.

“I think science is very important, and I think the increased politicization of climate science is a really horrible turn of events,” Kurtz, the new Executive Director of theClimate Science Legal Defense Fund, told ThinkProgress. “I am really excited to be able to combat that.”

On Monday, Kurtz became the first-ever Executive Director of the CSLDF, a group that works to stem and prevent harassment of climate scientists. In her new position there, Kurtz says she hopes to expand the group’s network of attorneys who will volunteer to represent embattled climate scientists in court free of charge. The end goal, she said, is to help climate scientists do their jobs without fear of politically motivated retaliation.

“One of our main goals is educating scientists on their legal rights and what they’re up against,” Kurtz said. “If and when things arise, we want to move as quickly as possible.”

The problem Kurtz hopes to address is a real one. Scientists who perform climate-related research have increasingly been the subject of personal attacks — email hacking, copiousonline abuse, a dead rat left on a scientists’ doorstep. At least one prominent scientist has been the subject of a failed lawsuit by a right-wing policy group, alleging manipulation of data, and demanding copies of personal emails and other communications under the Freedom of Information Act.

Many climate scientists say these attacks are political, perpetrated by people who can’t accept the policy solutions to the problem of human-caused global warming.

“I firmly believe that I would now be leading a different life if my research suggested that there was no human effect on climate,” said climate scientist Benjamin D. Santer during a Congressional hearing in 2010. “We need to follow the research wherever it leads us, without fear of the consequences of speaking truth to power.”

The CSLDF was founded with that goal in mind. It was created in 2011 by Professors Scott Mandia and John Abraham, after they learned that climate scientist Michael Mann was using his personal funds to defend himself against the now-infamous lawsuitbrought by the American Tradition Institute. Mandia and Abraham formed the group, and in 24 hours raised $10,000 to allow Mann to continue his research while fighting the case.

Mann, who eventually won his case, told ThinkProgress he was happy to see Kurtz in the CSLDF’s new leadership position.

“From what I have seen, she is a premier litigator,” he said. “I’m sure she’ll serve CSLDF well as their new executive director.”

Kurtz does come from a prestigious background in law. To take the new job at CSLDF, she left her job of more than four years as a litigator for Dechert LLP, a high-ranking global law firm with more than 900 attorneys. Before that, she worked at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, first as a policy associate and then as a law clerk.

Though her career ended up in law, it began in science. It evolved, however, when she realized how difficult it was to get anything done with the scientific results of her studies. Kurtz, who received her undergraduate degree in biology from Bryn Mawr College, remembers specifically how she felt while working on a conservation biology study of population decline of native bee populations.

“I felt really frustrated at the time that I was studying this, that there was a well-documented decline [in bee populations], but politically it didn’t seem to be going anywhere,” she said.

The feeling of wanting to change the political environment drove her to study environmental law and policy. She eventually received her Masters degree in environmental policy from the University of Pennsylvania, then went on to receive her law degree there as well.

“I have an immense amount of respect for scientists and I think it’s an interesting area to study, but ultimately what I was more passionate about was promoting science in a policy area,” she said. “This position’s got a similar thread, which is making sure policy decisions reflect what the science says, and separating people’s thoughts on science from what their political agendas are.”

Programa irá financiar cinco projetos na área de desastres naturais (Capes)

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5060, 6 de novembro de 2014

Programa irá financiar cinco projetos na área de desastres naturais

A divulgação aconteceu nesta quarta-feira (05/11)

A Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Capes) divulga nesta quarta-feira, 5, o resultado final da seleção do Programa de Apoio ao Ensino e à Pesquisa Científica e Tecnológica em Desastres Naturais (Pró-Alertas).Foram aprovados cinco projetos.

O pró-Alertas tem como objetivo estimular e apoiar a realização de projetos conjuntos de pesquisa no país para a formação de recursos humanos em nível de pós-graduação stricto sensu acadêmico, por meio do desenvolvimento de pesquisa científica e tecnológica interdisciplinares na área de Desastres Naturais.

A iniciativa enquadra-se nas diretrizes da Capes de indução temporária de áreas estratégicas da política brasileira de ciência, tecnologia e inovação. A iniciativa conta com apoio do Ministério de Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (MCTI) e pretende contribuir para a consolidação do Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alertas de Desastres Naturais (CEMADEN).

Benefícios
Os projetos aprovados receberão recursos para bolsas de iniciação científica, doutorado e pós-doutorado, além de passagens aéreas para missões de pesquisa no Brasil ou no exterior e diárias para participação em eventos acadêmicos em temas relacionados ao projeto no exterior.

Acesse o resultado.

(CCS/Capes)

http://www.capes.gov.br/sala-de-imprensa/noticias/7213-programa-ira-financiar-cinco-projetos-interdisciplinares-na-area-de-desastres-naturais

Here comes the story of the Dylan fans (ki.se)

Uncategorized,

Updated on 2014-09-25. Published on 2014-09-25

Dylan fans: Jonas Frisén, Konstantinos Meletis, Jon Lundberg, Kenneth Chien and Eddie Weitzberg. Photo: Gustav Mårtensson

An internal contest has been ongoing between a little band of researchers at Karolinska Institutet. And the one who succeeds in quoting Bob Dylan in most scientific articles before going into retirement is the winner.

The story begins 17 years ago. Jon Lundberg and Eddie Weitzberg, today both professors at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at KI, had an article published in Nature Medicine with the title: ‘Nitric Oxide and Inflammation: The answer is blowing in the wind’.

“We both really like Bob Dylan so when we set about writing an article concerning the measurement of nitric oxide gas in both the respiratory tracts and the intestine, with the purpose of detecting inflammation, the title came up and it fitted there perfectly,” says Eddie Weitzberg.

Some years later they saw an article written by Jonas Frisén, Professor at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, together with Konstantinos Meletis, Research Assistant at the Department of Neuroscience. The subject of the article was whether blood cells can change and become nerve cells.

“The title was ‘Blood on the tracks: a simple twist of fate’; this is the name of the album on the one hand, and a song of Bob Dylan on the other, and the article contained additional Dylan references,” points out Eddie Weitzberg.

Jon Lundberg and Eddie Weitzberg then succeeded in introducing ‘The times they are a-changin’ into the title in a separate article and, at the same time, sent an email to Jonas Frisén and announced the launch of an internal competition.

“The one who has written most articles with Dylan quotes, before going into retirement, wins a lunch at the Solna restaurant Jöns Jacob,” explains Jon Lundberg.

Jonas Frisén and a colleague responded with the article ‘Eph receptors tangled up in two’ in Cell Cycle the same year, 2010, the title of which is inspired by Bob Dylan’s song ‘Tangled up in blue’. The following year, Jon Lundberg and Eddie Weitzberg countered with ‘Dietary nitrate – a slow train coming’ in The Journal of Physiology.

“This article also concluded with a paraphrase of Dylan: ‘We know something is happening, but we don’t know what it is – Do we, Dr Jones?’ where we jokingly addressed a British colleague with the same surname,” says Jon Lundberg.

Moreover, Kenneth Chien, Professor of Cardiovascular Research at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology and the Department of Medicine, Huddinge, has also been quoting Bob Dylan but – until very recently – was completely unaware of the articles of the others. ‘Tangled up in blue: Molecular cardiology in the postmolecular era’was published in Circulation 1997; the same year that Lundberg’s and Eddie Weitzberg’s first article with a  Dylan quote was published.

When the five researchers met up in August to have their photo taken for this article, Bob Dylan is the obvious subject of conversation. They discuss eagerly who has read the Bob Dylan autobiography entitled Chronicles and enquire about the internal competition.

“The contest is open for everyone,” says Jon Lundberg. He goes on to explain that they usually draw attention to one another’s new articles via email.

The researchers also point out that it is primarily in review articles and commentaries that it is possible to use quotes since these articles are often slightly lighter in tone (less heavyweight) than others.

“But it’s important that the quote is linked to the scientific content, that it reinforces the message and raises the quality of the article as such, not the reverse,” says Jonas Frisén.

What then is so special about Bob Dylan? Eddie Weitzberg thinks he merits a Nobel prize for Literature while Kenneth Chien compares him to a modern Shakespeare, though in music. But the researchers also draw parallels between Bob Dylan’s music and the world of research.

“A musician who merely continues down the same highway for 30 years is not one who many want to listen to. Good music is innovative, like Bob Dylan’s. And the same thing applies to good research. A researcher must also try to find new and different paths,” says Konstantinos Meletis.

Text: Lisa Reimegård

In the photo:

Jonas Frisén, Professor of stem cell research at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology. Member of The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet.

Konstantinos Meletis, Research Associate at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.

Jon Lundberg, Professor of Nitric Oxide Pharmacologics at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet.

Kenneth Chien, Professor at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, and the Department of Medicine.Karolinska Institutet. Before Dr. Kenneth Chien  was recruited to Karolinska Institutet he was a Professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University in Cambridge.

Eddie Weitzberg, Professor of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet.

Para IPCC, evitar aquecimento de 2°C ainda é possível (Folha de S.Paulo)

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Desde segunda-feira, representantes de países debatem em Copenhague a redação final do 4º Relatório Síntese do IPCC

O último documento a ser produzido pelo painel do clima da ONU no ano deve adotar um tom menos pessimista com relação à possibilidade de o planeta evitar um acréscimo de temperatura superior a 2°C neste século, limite considerado perigoso.

Veja a matéria completa: http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/cienciasaude/193066-para-ipcc-evitar-aquecimento-de-2c-ainda-e-possivel.shtml

(Folha de S.Paulo)

*   *   *

Ano de 2014 pode ser o mais quente da história do planeta

Meses de 2014, à exceção de fevereiro, tiveram as mais altas temperaturas desde 1880, quando começaram os relatórios da Administração Nacional Oceânica e Atmosférica

Quem enfrentou o calor senegalês de janeiro, o inverno de araque em julho e um outubro com cara de verão sentiu na pele os sintomas de um planeta mais aquecido. Não foi uma simples sensação: de fato, é grande a possibilidade de 2014 desbancar 2010 e se tornar o ano mais quente da história, tanto em terra como nas superfícies dos oceanos.

A estimativa é da Administração Nacional Oceânica e Atmosférica (NOAA), agência americana de estudos meteorológicos que computa dados climáticos desde 1880. À exceção de fevereiro, todos os meses do ano até agora bateram recordes como os mais quentes de que se tem notícia.

O conteúdo na íntegra está disponível em: http://zh.clicrbs.com.br/rs/noticias/noticia/2014/10/ano-de-2014-pode-ser-o-mais-quente-da-historia-do-planeta-4631023.html

(Zero Hora)

Antropoceno, Capitaloceno, Cthulhuceno: o que caracteriza uma nova época? (ClimaCom)

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28/10/2014

A proposta de formalização de uma nova época da Terra levanta questões sobre utilidade, responsabilidade e formas alternativas de narrar a história do mundo em que vivemos

Por Daniela Klebis

Os impactos das ações humanas sobre o planeta nos últimos 200 anos têm sido tão profundos que podem justificar a definição de nova época para a Terra, o Antropoceno. No último dia 17 de outubro, a Comissão Internacional sobre Estratigrafia (ICS, na sigla inglês), reuniu-se em Berlim para dar continuidade às discussões sobre a formalização dessa nova época terrena, cuja decisão final será votada somente em 2016. A despeito dos processos burocráticos, o termo já foi informalmente assimilado por filósofos, arqueólogos, historiadores, ambientalistas e cientistas do clima e, nesse meio, o debate segue, para além da reunião de evidências físicas, no sentido de compreender sua utilidade: estamos prontos para assumir a época dos humanos?

A história da Terra se divide em escalas de tempo geológicas, que são definidas pela ICS, com sede em Paris, na França. Essas escalas de tempo começam com grandes espaços de tempos chamados éons, que se dividem em eras (como a Mezozóica), e então em períodos (Jurássico, Neogeno),  épocas e por fim, em idades. Quem acenou pela primeira vez a necessidade de definir uma nova época, baseada nos impactos indeléveis das ações humanas sobre a paisagem terrestre foi o químico atmosférico Paul J. Crutzen, prêmio Nobel de química em 1995. Cutzen sugeriu o termo Antropoceno durante o encontro  do Programa Internacional de Geofera e Biosfera (IGBP, na sigla em inglês), no México, em 2000. O evento tinha por objetivo discutir os problemas do Holoceno, a época em que nos encontramos há cerca de 11700 anos,desde o fim da era glacial.

A hipótese sustentada pelos defensores da nova denominação baseia-se nas observações sobre as mudanças iniciadas pelo homem sobre o ambiente desde 1800, cujas evidências geológicas  possuem impacto a  longo prazo na história da Terra.  E quais são as evidências que podem justificar a adoção do termo Antropoceno?  “O que nós humanos mais fizemos nesses dois séculos foi criar coisas que não existiram pelos 4,5 bilhões de anos da história da Terra”, denuncia o geólogo Jan Zalasiewicz, presidente do grupo de trabalho sobre o Antropoceno da ICS, em colóquio em Sidney, na Autrália, em março deste ano.

antropoceno1

Minerais sintéticos, fibras de carbono, plásticos, concreto, são alguns exemplos de novos elementos criados pelo homem. O concreto, um material produzido pela mistura de cimento, areia, pedra e água, vem se espalhando na superfície de nosso planeta a uma velocidade de 2 bilhões de quilômetros por ano, conforme aponta o geólogo.  Abaixo da superfície, escavações em busca de minérios e petróleo já abriram mais de 50 milhões de quilômetros em buracos subterrâneos.

Além das mudanças físicas, a emissão exagerada de dióxido de carbono e outros gases de efeito estufa, resultantes da ação humana, provocam mudanças químicas na atmosfera, como aquecimento global, descongelamento de calotas polares e acifidificação dos oceanos. A biosfera é também analisada, já que mudanças resultantes da perda de habitats, atividades predatórias e invasão de especies também provocam mudanças na composição química e física dos ambientes.

As evidências do impacto da ação humana,que vêm sendo consistentemente apontadas em estudos climáticos, foram reforçadas pelo 5º. Relatório do Painel Intercontinental de Mudanças Climáticas (IPCC), publicado no início do ano, com um consenso de 97% dos cientistas. Mais recentemente, no dia 30 de setembro, um relatório publicado no publicado pela WWF (World Wildlife Fund, em inglês), em parceria com a Sociedade Zoológica de Londres, apontou ainda que, nos últimos 40 anos, 52% da população de animais vertebrados na Terra desapareceu. Ao mesmo tempo, os seres humanos dobraram em quantidade. “Estamos empurrando a biosfera para a sua 6ª. extinção em massa”, alerta Hans-Otto Pörtner, do Instituto Alfred Wegener de Pesquisa Marinha e Polar, em Bremerhaven, Alemanha, e co-autor do capítulo sobre ecossistema do relatório do IPCC publicado nesse ano. Pörtner refere-se às cinco grandes extinções em massa registradas nos últimos 540 milhões de anos, caracterizadas por palentólogos como períodos em que mais de 75% das espécies foram extintas do planeta em um curto intervalo geológico.

“Há 200 anos, a coisas começaram a mudar o suficiente para visivelmente impactar o planeta: a população cresceu, assim como as emissões de CO2”, destaca Zalasiwicz. Segundo ele, o uso de energia cresceu 90 vezes entre 1800 e 2010, e já queimamos cerca de 200 milhões de anos de fósseis, entre carvão, óleo e gás. “Os humanos correspondem a 1/3 de todos os vertebrados da terra. Mas a dominação sem precedentes sobre todos os outros seres vivos, faz dessa a er a humana”, conclui.

Eileen Crist pesquisadora do Departamento de Ciências e Tecnologia na Sociedade, no Virginia Tech, no EUA, desafia a escolha do termo, defendendo que o discurso do Antropoceno deixa de questionar a soberania humana para propor, ao contrário, abordagens tecnológicas que poderiam tornar o domínio humano sustentável. “Ao afirmar a centralidade do homem – tanto como uma força causal quanto como objeto de preocupação – o Antropoceno encolhe o espaço discursivo para desafiar a dominação da biosfera, oferecendo, ao invés disso, um campo técnico-científico para a sua racionalização e um apelo pragmático para nos resignarmos à sua atualidade”, argumenta a pesquidadora em um artigo publicado em 2013.

O Antropoceno, dessa forma, entrelaça uma série de temas na formatação de seu discurso, como, por exemplo, o aumento acelerado da população que chegará a superar os 10 bilhões de habitantes; o crescimento econômico e a cultura de consumo enquanto modelo social dominante; a tecnologia como destino inescapável e, ao mesmo tempo, salvação da vida humana na Terra; e, ainda, o pressuposto de que o impacto humano é natural e contingente da nossa condição de seres providos de inteligência superior. Crist aponta que esse discurso mascara a opção de racionalizar o regime totalitátio do humano no planeta. “Como discurso coeso, ele bloqueia formas alternativas de vida humana na Terra”, indica.

antropoceno2

Relacionalidade

Donna Haraway, professora emérita da Universidade da Califórina em Santa Cruz, EUA, comentou, em participação no Colóquio Os Mil Nomes de Gaia, em setembro, que essa discussão é um dos “modos de buscar palavras que soam muito grandes, porém, não são grandes o suficiente para compreender a continuidade e a precariedade de viver e morrer nessa Terra”. Haraway é também umas das críticas do termo Antropoceno. Segundo ela, o Antropoceno implica um homem individual, que se desenvolve, e desenvolve uma nova paisagem de mundo, estranho a todas as outras formas de vida: uma percepção equivocada de um ser que seria capaz existir sem se relacionar com o resto do planeta. “Devemos compreender que para ser um, devemos ser muitos. Nos tornamos com outros seres”, comenta.

Para Haraway, épreciso, problematizar essa percepção, e endereçar a responsabilidade pelas mudanças, que está justamente no sistema capitalista que criamos. Este sim tem impulsionado a exploração, pelos homens, da Terra: “A história inteira poderia ser Capitaloceno, e não Antropoceno”, diz. Tal percepção, de acordo com a filósofa, pemite-nos resistir ao senso inescapabilidade presente nesse discurso, como Crist mencionou acima. “Estamos cercados pelo perigo de assumir que tudo está acabado, que nada pode acontecer”, diz.

Haraway aponta, entretanto, que é necessário evocar um senso de continuidade (ongoingness,em inglês),a partir de outras possibilidades narrativas e de pensamento.Uma delas, seria o Cthulhuceno, criado pela filósofa. A expressão vem de um conto de H.P.Lovecraft, O chamado de Cthulhu, que fala sobre humanos que têm suas mentes deterioradas quando, em rituais ao deus Cthulhu – uma mistura de homem, dragão e polvo que vive adormecido sob as águas do Pacífico Sul – conseguem vislumbrar uma realidade diferente da que conheciam.  No início da história, o autor norte-americano descreve o seguinte: “A coisa mais misericordiosa do mundo, acho eu, é a incapacidade da mente humana de correlacionar tudo que ela contém”.  A partir desse contexto, Donna Haraway explica que é necessário “desestabilizar mundos de pensamentos, com mundos de pensamentos”. O Cthulhuceno não é sobre adotar uma transcendência, uma ideia de vida ou morte: “trata-se de abraçar a continuidade sinuosa do mundo terreno, no seu passado​​, presente e futuro. Entretanto, tal continuidade implica em assumir que existe um problema muito grande e que ele precisa ser enfrentado. Devemos lamentar o que aconteceu, pois não deveria ter ocorrido. Mas não temos que continuar no mesmo caminho”, sugere.

Some Fear Ebola Outbreak Could Make Nation Turn to Science (The New Yorker)

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Borowitz Report
OCTOBER 16, 2014
BY ANDY BOROWITZ

Borowitz-Ebola-Scientists-690CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLIAM THOMAS CAIN/GETTY

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—There is a deep-seated fear among some Americans that an Ebola outbreak could make the country turn to science.

In interviews conducted across the nation, leading anti-science activists expressed their concern that the American people, wracked with anxiety over the possible spread of the virus, might desperately look to science to save the day.

“It’s a very human reaction,” said Harland Dorrinson, a prominent anti-science activist from Springfield, Missouri. “If you put them under enough stress, perfectly rational people will panic and start believing in science.”

Additionally, he worries about a “slippery slope” situation, “in which a belief in science leads to a belief in math, which in turn fosters a dangerous dependence on facts.”

At the end of the day, though, Dorrinson hopes that such a doomsday scenario will not come to pass. “Time and time again through history, Americans have been exposed to science and refused to accept it,” he said. “I pray that this time will be no different.”

Crise da água afronta a ciência brasileira (Mundo Sustentável)

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23/10/2014 – 03h29

por André Trigueiro*

Sistema Cantareira atinge volume zero em 2014 mes de junho20140515 0002 1024x682 Crise da água afronta a ciência brasileira

Não foi por falta de aviso.

Além do seu incomensurável capital natural, o Brasil construiu ao longo do tempo um robusto estoque de conhecimento científico a respeito de seus biomas, ecossistemas e bacias hidrográficas.

Gente do calibre de José Lutzenberger, Augusto Ruschi e Aziz Ab’Saber (dentre tantos outros que descortinaram novos e importantes horizontes de investigação científica) revelaram que a natureza se comporta como um sofisticado sistema interligado, onde certos gêneros de intervenção, aparentemente inofensivos, podem causar gigantescos estragos.

Não fosse a genialidade e o respeito que impuseram a partir de seus trabalhos científicos, seriam massacrados pelos poderosos da época.

Não foram poucos os políticos inescrupulosos e empresários gananciosos que tentaram a todo custo “desconstruir” (para usar uma palavra da moda) suas reputações.

Deixaram um legado reconhecidamente importante que deveria inspirar uma nova ética no modelo de desenvolvimento, especialmente mais cuidado na forma como certas políticas públicas são concebidas e aplicadas.

Portanto, é curioso imaginar o que Lutz, Ruschi e Ab’Saber diriam hoje sobre essa crise hídrica sem precedentes na história do Brasil?

Em 1980, ao publicar o livro com o sugestivo título “O Fim do Futuro?”, José Lutzenberger denunciava que “a perda da capa vegetal protetora, além de significar o desaparecimento dos habitats essenciais à sobrevivência da fauna e das espécies vegetais mais especializadas e preciosas, causa o desequilíbrio hídrico dos corpos d`água (…) Estamos preparando para o nosso país o mesmo destino que o do cordão subsaariano”.

Um dos primeiros a prever a escassez de água no mundo, Augusto Ruschi denunciava em sucessivos alertas, como nesse texto de 1986, os impactos causados pelo desmatamento sobre a vazão de água dos rios, especialmente na Amazônia:

“Há 35 anos, escrevi que estávamos caminhando para construir na Amazônia o segundo maior deserto do mundo. Hoje, a previsão vai se confirmando. No primeiro ano, depois que desmatam, é uma beleza: o solo continua fértil, produz-se muito. Mas, depois, a matéria orgânica é lixiviada para as profundezas do solo e planta nenhuma vai lá embaixo buscá-la. Forma-se o cerrado, depois a caatinga, e finalmente, o deserto”.

Um dos mais respeitados cientistas brasileiros, Aziz Ab’Saber denunciou abertamente o absurdo do novo Código Florestal ter sido aprovado há quase três anos no Congresso Nacional sem o respaldo da ciência. E previu consequências trágicas para os recursos hídricos.

“Trata-se de desconhecimento entristecedor sobre a ordem de grandeza das redes hidrográficas do território intertropical brasileiro” (…) Em face do gigantismo do território e da situação real em que se encontram os seus macro biomas – Amazônia Brasileira, Brasil Tropical Atlântico, Cerrados do Brasil Central, Planalto das Araucárias, e Pradarias Mistas do Brasil Subtropical – e de seus numerosos minibiomas, faixas de transição e relictos de ecossistemas, qualquer tentativa de mudança do Código Florestal tem que ser conduzido por pessoas competentes bioeticamente sensíveis”.

Como se sabe, não foi assim que aconteceu. Prevaleceram os interesses da bancada ruralista.

Em tempo: o desmatamento na Amazônia entre agosto e setembro aumentou 191%, segundo dados apurados pelo Instituto Imazon.

E os candidatos à Presidência, o que dizem?

Bem, a cada novo dia de campanha eleitoral o Brasil tem menos água e menos floresta. E as prioridades continuam sendo outras.

Mas o legado de Lutz, Ruschi e Ab’Saber segue incomodando. Até que alguém resolva prestar atenção e evitar uma catástrofe ainda maior.

Ouça o comentário sobre este assunto na Rádio CBN.

* André Trigueiro é jornalista com pós-graduação em Gestão Ambiental pela Coppe-UFRJ onde hoje leciona a disciplina geopolítica ambiental, professor e criador do curso de Jornalismo Ambiental da PUC-RJ, autor do livro Mundo Sustentável – Abrindo Espaço na Mídia para um Planeta em Transformação, coordenador editorial e um dos autores dos livros Meio Ambiente no Século XXI, e Espiritismo e Ecologia, lançado na Bienal Internacional do Livro, no Rio de Janeiro, pela Editora FEB, em 2009. É apresentador do Jornal das Dez e editor chefe do programa Cidades e Soluções, da Globo News. É também comentarista da Rádio CBN e colaborador voluntário da Rádio Rio de Janeiro.

** Publicado originalmente no site Mundo Sustentável.

(Mundo Sustentável)

Disponíveis em versão português diretrizes internacionais sobre uso de animais (Jornal da Ciência)

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Uma das diretrizes é melhorar o relato da investigação feita com animais

O Conselho Nacional de Controle de Experimentação Animal (CONCEA) divulgou, versão em português, as diretrizes  elaboradas pelo Centro para Substituição, Aperfeiçoamento e Redução de Animais em Pesquisa (NC3Rs, na sigla em inglês) informando como relatar, em artigos científicos, dados relevantes sobre o uso animal para fins científicos, seguindo os parâmetros internacionais.

As diretrizes ARRIVE guidelines (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) foram desenvolvidas como parte de uma iniciativa do NC3Rs para melhorar o desenho, a análise e o manuscrito de investigação com animais – maximizando a informação publicada e minimizando estudos desnecessários. As diretrizes foram publicadas na revista PLOS Biology em Junho 2010 e são atualmente endossadas por revistas científicas, agências de financiamento e sociedades científicas.

Uma das diretrizes é melhorar o relato da investigação feita com animais. Outra é melhorar a comunicação das observações científicas para toda comunidade científica.

Acesse as diretrizes ARRIVE em português.

(Jornal da Ciência)

Plantio de florestas é estratégia de enfrentamento do aquecimento global (Fapesp)

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08 de outubro de 2014

Por Karina Toledo

Agência FAPESP – Em um artigo publicado na seção de opinião do jornal norte-americano The New York Times, em 19 de setembro, Nadine Unger, professora da Yale University, afirmou serem fracas as evidências científicas sobre os benefícios proporcionados pelo reflorestamento e pela redução do desmatamento na mitigação das mudanças climáticas.

O texto causou forte reação na comunidade científica. No dia 22 de setembro, um grupo formado por 31 pesquisadores – vários deles membros do Painel Intergovernamental de Mudanças Climáticas (IPCC) da Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU) – divulgou uma carta aberta na qual discordam veementemente das declarações feitas por Unger.

Uma versão resumida do texto foi publicada na seção de opinião do The New York Times no dia 23 de setembro, mesma data em que começou em Nova York a Cúpula da Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU) sobre o Clima.

Na carta resposta, o grupo de cientistas contesta a afirmação de Unger, de que estaria incorreta a “sabedoria convencional” segundo a qual o plantio de árvores auxilia no combate ao aquecimento global. Na avaliação dela, a medida poderia até mesmo agravar o problema climático.

De acordo com os cientistas, as florestas promovem um efeito de resfriamento do clima porque armazenam vastas quantidades de carbono em troncos, galhos, folhas e são capazes de manter esse elemento químico fora da atmosfera enquanto permanecerem intactas e saudáveis.

Segundo o grupo, as florestas também resfriam a atmosfera porque convertem a energia solar em vapor d’água, o que aumenta a refletividade da radiação solar por meio da formação de nuvens, fato negligenciado no trabalho de Unger. Concordam, em parte, com a afirmação da professora de Química Atmosférica em Yale, de que “as cores escuras das árvores absorvem maior quantidade de energia solar e aumentam a temperatura da superfície terrestre”.

Unger afirmou que plantar árvores nos trópicos poderia promover o resfriamento, mas em regiões mais frias causaria aquecimento.

“Ela (Unger) aponta corretamente que florestas refletem menos energia solar do que a neve, as pedras, as pastagens ou o solo, mas ignora o efeito das florestas de aumentar a refletividade do céu acima da terra, por meio das nuvens. Esse efeito é maior nos trópicos”, afirmaram os cientistas.

Unger disse não haver consenso científico em relação aos impactos da mudança de uso da terra promovida pela expansão da agricultura e se o desmatamento resultante teria contribuído para esfriar ou aquecer o planeta.

“Não podemos prever com certeza que o reflorestamento em larga escala ajudaria a controlar as temperaturas em elevação”, disse ela. Argumentos semelhantes já haviam sido apresentados pela cientista em artigo publicado em agosto na Nature Climate Change.

Ainda segundo Unger, os compostos orgânicos voláteis (VOCs, na sigla em inglês) emitidos pelas árvores em resposta a estressores ambientais interagem com poluentes oriundos da queima de combustíveis fósseis aumentando a produção de gases-estufa como metano e ozônio.

Por último, a cientista de Yale afirmou que o carbono sequestrado pelas árvores durante seu crescimento retorna à atmosfera quando elas morrem e que o oxigênio produzido durante a fotossíntese é consumido pela vegetação durante a respiração noturna. “A Amazônia é um sistema fechado que consome seu próprio carbono e oxigênio”, argumentou.

Benefícios indiscutíveis

A carta resposta divulgada pelos cientistas ressalta que os próprios estudos de Unger mostraram que qualquer potencial efeito de resfriamento promovido pela redução das emissões de compostos orgânicos voláteis resultante do corte de árvores seria superado pelo efeito de aquecimento promovido pelas emissões de carbono causadas pelo desmatamento.

“Esta semana, as negociações das Nações Unidas sobre o clima abordam a importância de dar continuidade aos esforços para frear a degradação das florestas tropicais, que são uma contribuição essencial e barata para a mitigação das mudanças climáticas. A base científica para essa importante peça da solução do problema climático é sólida. Nós discordamos fortemente da mensagem central da professora Unger. Concordamos, no entanto, com a afirmação feita por ela de que as florestas oferecem benefícios indiscutíveis para a biodiversidade”, concluem os cientistas.

O grupo de autores é liderado por Daniel Nepstad, diretor executivo do Earth Innovation Institute, dos Estados Unidos, um dos fundadores do Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (Ipam) e um dos autores do quinto relatório divulgado pelo IPCC.

Também fazem parte do grupo Reynaldo Victoria, professor da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) e membro da coordenação do Programa FAPESP de Pesquisa sobre Mudanças Climáticas Globais, e Paulo Artaxo, professor da USP e um dos autores do quinto relatório do IPCC.

“O artigo divulgado por Unger na revista Nature Climate Change tem erros elementares e não leva em conta aspectos fundamentais, como a importância das florestas tropicais na formação de nuvens, que altera a refletividade da superfície e também atua no controle do ciclo hidrológico”, disse Artaxo à Agência FAPESP.

“Esse episódio mostra como a ciência, quando negligencia aspectos importantes, pode ser muito prejudicial do ponto de vista de políticas públicas. Reflorestamento e redução do desmatamento são umas das melhores estratégias de redução dos efeitos do aquecimento global”, afirmou.

Can Big Data Tell Us What Clinical Trials Don’t? (New York Times)

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OCT. 3, 2014

Illustration by Christopher Brand

By VERONIQUE GREENWOOD

When a helicopter rushed a 13-year-old girl showing symptoms suggestive of kidney failure to Stanford’s Packard Children’s Hospital, Jennifer Frankovich was the rheumatologist on call. She and a team of other doctors quickly diagnosed lupus, an autoimmune disease. But as they hurried to treat the girl, Frankovich thought that something about the patient’s particular combination of lupus symptoms — kidney problems, inflamed pancreas and blood vessels — rang a bell. In the past, she’d seen lupus patients with these symptoms develop life-threatening blood clots. Her colleagues in other specialties didn’t think there was cause to give the girl anti-clotting drugs, so Frankovich deferred to them. But she retained her suspicions. “I could not forget these cases,” she says.

Back in her office, she found that the scientific literature had no studies on patients like this to guide her. So she did something unusual: She searched a database of all the lupus patients the hospital had seen over the previous five years, singling out those whose symptoms matched her patient’s, and ran an analysis to see whether they had developed blood clots. “I did some very simple statistics and brought the data to everybody that I had met with that morning,” she says. The change in attitude was striking. “It was very clear, based on the database, that she could be at an increased risk for a clot.”

The girl was given the drug, and she did not develop a clot. “At the end of the day, we don’t know whether it was the right decision,” says Chris Longhurst, a pediatrician and the chief medical information officer at Stanford Children’s Health, who is a colleague of Frankovich’s. But they felt that it was the best they could do with the limited information they had.

A large, costly and time-consuming clinical trial with proper controls might someday prove Frankovich’s hypothesis correct. But large, costly and time-consuming clinical trials are rarely carried out for uncommon complications of this sort. In the absence of such focused research, doctors and scientists are increasingly dipping into enormous troves of data that already exist — namely the aggregated medical records of thousands or even millions of patients to uncover patterns that might help steer care.

The Tatonetti Laboratory at Columbia University is a nexus in this search for signal in the noise. There, Nicholas Tatonetti, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics — an interdisciplinary field that combines computer science and medicine — develops algorithms to trawl medical databases and turn up correlations. For his doctoral thesis, he mined the F.D.A.’s records of adverse drug reactions to identify pairs of medications that seemed to cause problems when taken together. He found an interaction between two very commonly prescribed drugs: The antidepressant paroxetine (marketed as Paxil) and the cholesterol-lowering medication pravastatin were connected to higher blood-sugar levels. Taken individually, the drugs didn’t affect glucose levels. But taken together, the side-effect was impossible to ignore. “Nobody had ever thought to look for it,” Tatonetti says, “and so nobody had ever found it.”

The potential for this practice extends far beyond drug interactions. In the past, researchers noticed that being born in certain months or seasons appears to be linked to a higher risk of some diseases. In the Northern Hemisphere, people with multiple sclerosis tend to be born in the spring, while in the Southern Hemisphere they tend to be born in November; people with schizophrenia tend to have been born during the winter. There are numerous correlations like this, and the reasons for them are still foggy — a problem Tatonetti and a graduate assistant, Mary Boland, hope to solve by parsing the data on a vast array of outside factors. Tatonetti describes it as a quest to figure out “how these diseases could be dependent on birth month in a way that’s not just astrology.” Other researchers think data-mining might also be particularly beneficial for cancer patients, because so few types of cancer are represented in clinical trials.

As with so much network-enabled data-tinkering, this research is freighted with serious privacy concerns. If these analyses are considered part of treatment, hospitals may allow them on the grounds of doing what is best for a patient. But if they are considered medical research, then everyone whose records are being used must give permission. In practice, the distinction can be fuzzy and often depends on the culture of the institution. After Frankovich wrote about her experience in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2011, her hospital warned her not to conduct such analyses again until a proper framework for using patient information was in place.

In the lab, ensuring that the data-mining conclusions hold water can also be tricky. By definition, a medical-records database contains information only on sick people who sought help, so it is inherently incomplete. Also, they lack the controls of a clinical study and are full of other confounding factors that might trip up unwary researchers. Daniel Rubin, a professor of bioinformatics at Stanford, also warns that there have been no studies of data-driven medicine to determine whether it leads to positive outcomes more often than not. Because historical evidence is of “inferior quality,” he says, it has the potential to lead care astray.

Yet despite the pitfalls, developing a “learning health system” — one that can incorporate lessons from its own activities in real time — remains tantalizing to researchers. Stefan Thurner, a professor of complexity studies at the Medical University of Vienna, and his researcher, Peter Klimek, are working with a database of millions of people’s health-insurance claims, building networks of relationships among diseases. As they fill in the network with known connections and new ones mined from the data, Thurner and Klimek hope to be able to predict the health of individuals or of a population over time. On the clinical side, Longhurst has been advocating for a button in electronic medical-record software that would allow doctors to run automated searches for patients like theirs when no other sources of information are available.

With time, and with some crucial refinements, this kind of medicine may eventually become mainstream. Frankovich recalls a conversation with an older colleague. “She told me, ‘Research this decade benefits the next decade,’ ” Frankovich says. “That was how it was. But I feel like it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 5, 2014, on page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Dr. Data.

Futures of the Past – The Appendix

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Futures of the Past

July 2014 – Volume 2, Number 3

“Futures of the Past” is an issue about how past generations have reckoned their collective futures. But it’s also about how the razor’s edge of the present comes up against the haziness of futurity, and what happens when that hazy future becomes inscribed, remembered, and—eventually—forgotten. We’re interested here in the work that the future does in shaping history—as a utopian dream, a set of collective anxieties, or simply as a story that we tell about where we come from and where we hope to end up.

Chapter 1: Bad Predictions

Chapter 2: Futures Past

Chapter 3: The Politics of the Future

The cultural side of science communication (Northwestern University)

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30-Sep-2014

Hilary Hurd Anyaso

New research explores how culture affects our conceptions of nature

EVANSTON, Ill. — Do we think of nature as something that we enjoy when we visit a national park and something we need to “preserve?” Or do we think of ourselves as a part of nature? A bird’s nest is a part of nature, but what about a house?

The answers to these questions reflect different cultural orientations. They are also reflected in our actions, our speech and in cultural artifacts.

A new Northwestern University study, in partnership with the University of Washington, the American Indian Center of Chicago and the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin, focuses on science communication and how that discipline necessarily involves language and other media-related artifacts such as illustrations. The challenge is to identify effective ways of communicating information to culturally diverse groups in a way that avoids cultural polarization, say the authors.

“We suggest that trying to present science in a culturally neutral way is like trying to paint a picture without taking a perspective,” said Douglas Medin, lead author of the study and professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern.

This research builds on the broader research on cultural differences in the understanding of and engagement with science.

“We argue that science communication — for example, words, photographs and illustrations — necessarily makes use of artifacts, both physical and conceptual, and these artifacts commonly reflect the cultural orientations and assumptions of their creators,” write the authors.

“These cultural artifacts both reflect and reinforce ways of seeing the world and are correlated with cultural differences in ways of thinking about nature. Therefore, science communication must pay attention to culture and the corresponding different ways of looking at the world.”

Medin said their previous work reveals that Native Americans traditionally see themselves as a part of nature and tend to focus on ecological relationships. In contrast, European-Americans tend to see humans as apart from nature and focus more on taxonomic relationships.

“We show that these cultural differences are also reflected in media, such as children’s picture books,” said Medin, who co-authored the study with Megan Bang of the University of Washington. “Books authored and illustrated by Native Americans are more likely to have illustrations of scenes that are close-up, and the text is more likely to mention the plants, trees and other geographic features and relationships that are present compared with popular children’s books not done by Native Americans.

“The European-American cultural assumption that humans are not part of ecosystems is readily apparent in illustrations,” he said.

The authors went to Google images and entered “ecosystems,” and 98 percent of the images did not have humans present. A fair number of the remaining 2 percent had children outside the ecosystem, observing it through a magnifying glass and saying, “I spy an ecosystem.”

“These results suggest that formal and informal science communications are not culturally neutral but rather embody particular cultural assumptions that exclude people from nature,” Medin said.

Medin and his research team have developed a series of “urban ecology” programs at the American Indian Center of Chicago, and these programs suggest that children can learn about the rest of nature in urban settings and come to see humans as active players in the world ecosystems.

Concea abre consulta pública para guia de uso de animais (MCTI)

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Sociedade pode sugerir mudanças em propostas de manuais para pesquisa e ensino com primatas e estudos clínicos fora das instalações convencionais.

O Conselho Nacional de Controle de Experimentação Animal (Concea) abriu nesta quinta-feira (25), ao publicar  no Diário Oficial da União (DOU), uma consulta pública de 21 dias para dois capítulos do Guia Brasileiro de Produção e Utilização de Animais para Atividades de Ensino ou Pesquisa Científica.

Aprovado por etapas, o guia em elaboração contempla tópicos destinados a aves, cães, gatos, lagomorfos (como coelhos e lebres) e roedores, entre outros grupos taxonômicos.

Os capítulos sob consulta tratam de “primatas não humanos” e “estudos clínicos conduzidos a campo”. Sugestões de mudanças nos textos devem ser detalhadas e justificadas por meio do preenchimento de formulários disponíveis na página do conselho e, então, encaminhadas ao endereço eletrônico consultapubl.concea@mcti.gov.br.

“Essa participação da sociedade é importante porque o guia será a base para a definição dos requisitos necessários para a solicitação do licenciamento de atividades de pesquisa e ensino com animais, sem o qual o uso de determinada espécie não será permitido, conforme estabelecido na Lei Arouca”, destaca o coordenador do Concea, José Mauro Granjeiro.

Os dois capítulos devem incorporar considerações da sociedade antes da 26ª Reunião Ordinária do Concea, em 26 e 27 de novembro, quando a instância colegiada planeja apreciar o conteúdo e aprovar os documentos finais, a serem publicados no DOU. Nos meses seguintes, outros trechos do guia têm previsão de passar por consulta pública, abrangendo outros grupos taxonômicos como peixes, ruminantes, equinos, suínos, répteis e anfíbios.

Também nesta quinta, foi publicada uma lista com 17 métodos para substituir ou reduzir o uso de animais em testes toxicológicos. Divididos em sete grupos, as técnicas servem para medir o potencial de irritação e corrosão da pele e dos olhos, fototoxicidade, absorção e sensibilização cutânea, toxicidade aguda e genotoxicidade.

Primatas – Com 73 páginas, o capítulo acerca de primatas não humanos aborda a relevância desse conjunto de animais em análises sobre doenças virais e pesquisas biomédicas. O texto associa a “estreita relação filogenética com o homem” à utilização para estudos comparativos em enfermidades humanas.

O guia detalha requisitos mínimos para as instalações, da estrutura física dos alojamentos às áreas de criação e experimentação, passando por condições ambientais, além de procedimentos de manejo, como alimentação adequada, higienização de gaiolas e objetos, formas de contenção física, enriquecimento ambiental e medicina preventiva. Métodos experimentais, cuidados veterinários e princípios de bem-estar animal também compõem o capítulo sobre primatas.

“De uma forma geral, independentemente da finalidade da criação de primatas, o alojamento deve ser composto por um recinto complexo e estimulante, que promova a boa saúde e o bem-estar psicológico e que forneça plena oportunidade de interação social, exercício e manifestação a uma variedade de comportamentos e habilidades inerentes à espécie”, indica o texto. “O recinto satisfatório deve fornecer aos animais um espaço suficiente para que eles mantenham seus hábitos normais de locomoção e de comportamento”.

Estudos a campo – A intenção do outro documento sob consulta pública é orientar pesquisadores e definir requisitos mínimos necessários para a condução de “estudos clínicos conduzidos a campo” – aqueles realizados fora das instalações de uso animal –, quanto a aspectos éticos ligados ao manejo e ao bem-estar das espécies.

“Considerando que uma das missões do Concea é garantir que os animais utilizados em qualquer tipo de pesquisa científica tenham sua integridade e bem-estar preservados, a condução dos estudos fora dos ambientes controlados das instalações para utilização de animais em atividades de ensino ou pesquisa devem se adequar às regras aplicáveis”, afirma o guia.

Criado em 2008, o Concea é uma instância colegiada multidisciplinar de caráter normativo, consultivo, deliberativo e recursal. Dentre as suas competências destacam-se, além do credenciamento das instituições que desenvolvam atividades no setor, a formulação de normas relativas à utilização humanitária de animais com finalidade de ensino e pesquisa científica, bem como o estabelecimento de procedimentos para instalação e funcionamento de centros de criação, de biotérios e de laboratórios de experimentação animal.

(MCTI)

What’s next for climate science beyond the IPCC? (Sci Dev Net)

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23/09/14

Lou Del Bello

Audio

In lead to December’s 20th UN Conference of Parties on climate change, scientists and policymakers are reflecting on the future of climate science. Many are questioning whether the existing mechanisms that feed scientific evidence into international politics are working well enough.

In this interview Ilan Kelman argues that, despite its important work, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with its consensus-based approach, is no longer suited to the new challenges posed by climate change.