The demise of the AAAS meetings have been rumored for as long as the nearly 20 years I’ve been attending them and probably even before then. Journalists grump that there’s not enough breaking news, scientists say not enough of their colleagues attend, organizers fret that the registration numbers are flat even as other more specialized science meetings have mushroomed in recent years. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about this year’s conference rehashes the old debate, with no news of its own to contribute.

But I love AAAS, for its science celebrities, its smorgasborg of different disciplines, its parties and networking opportunities, and the meeting’s focus on science policy and public engagement. The organizers take all these things seriously and the results are a unique cross-roads of science and society that seem ever more relevant to those of us who love research and want to share it with our audiences. I collect business cards, brainstorm new ideas with colleagues, recruit scientists to visit and give talks at the Exploratorium, and dance at the annual science writer party (this being Boston it was held at Fenway Park with a fantastic Motown cover band).

This year I got to see, if not shake hands with, Ken Miller of Brown (one of the witnesses in the victorious evolution trials of Dover, Pennsylvania and recipient of the Exploratorium’s outstanding educator award), Barry Barrish (founding directors of LIGO and now heading up the troubled but not abandoned International Linear Collider), Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist and author of “The Physics of Star Trek”), Dan Gilbert (Harvard psychology professor, author of Stumbling on Happiness and son of Walter Gilbert, who we interviewed during our DNA webcasts), and Andy Revkin (NYTimes climate reporter and blogger).

I attended sessions on the climate history of the Arctic, global warming and the media, memory and imagination, gigantic international physics collaborations, and science in a religious America. The latter was organized by our friend Matthew Nisbet of American University and he put together a stellar panel of folks in the large middle ground of the debate where most people live. Matt and the panelists don’t feel that religion undermines science, and argued that both can co-exist in modern society, if not the hearts and minds of some scientists and Catholics. Of course that means he’s attacked by people on the edges: the “new atheists” who feel that religious thought should never be tolerated, but rather should be campaigned against by the educated (their words) and religious fundamentalists and politicians who say that accepting evolution means that humans have no moral foundation on which to stand. All did agree that Intelligent Design isn’t based on evidence and therefor isn’t science and that only evolution should be taught in biology classrooms. So that is the bright shining line that even tolerant scientists won’t tolerate.

For the past two weeks, we’ve been hosting Matt Nisbet as an Osher Fellow to the Exploratorium. Matt is well known in the blogging community for his Framing Science site on ScienceBlog and his cross-country speaking tour with Chris Mooney. They’ve been talking about science controversies and about ways that scientists can reach the public by framing or contextualizing their work in ways that are meaningful for different audiences. An example he gives is that of the religious community embracing global warming as an issue that needs to be addressed for moral reasons.

Of course, this is something that the museum world is also interested in, especially in ways to reach audiences that don’t traditionally come to science museums. Much of our audience is well-educated, middle-class adults, families, and even senior citizens who have time and money to come to the Exploratorium. Like all museums, we would like more diversity in our audience and to make science appealing to girls, minorities, and other underserved audiences. Matt’s dance card in his residency here has been filled with staff interested in talking to him about ways to communicate to broader audiences and to increase the appreciation for science through “incidental exposure” essentially taking advantage of science angles to popular topics like entertainment or sports. For instance, we were recently featured in a front page article in the San Francisco Chronicle, coinciding with the All Star Game, about the science of baseball. One of our educators demonstrated the physics of pitching and the story was linked to a Web site that we developed as part of our Accidental Scientist series (which also included gardening, music and cooking).

There’s been a backlash though from some bloggers and science communicators that accuse Matt of distorting science, of advocating manipulative tactics similar to that of political operatives. One online comment in a piece by The Scientist says that under no circumstances should anyone “spin” science which is how he interprets framing. The poster, Earl Holland of Ohio State, goes on to say that scientists should stick to their work, running experiments and distilling the facts, and leave the communication to the professionals. I think this shortchanges the abilities of many scientists to tell compelling stories about their work and make it understandable and relevant to everyday people. Science is multi-dimensional and the implications of the enterprise go well beyond ”the facts” and into realms of politics, policy, culture, education, the economy, and everyday life. Wading into these realms may make some scientists uncomfortable, but it is the right of citizens in a democracy to know what their tax money is supporting and its relevance to their lives and interests. The Exploratorium has a long tradition, beginning with our founder Frank Oppenheimer, of working with scientists fully capable of explaining their work to public audiences and discussing its implications and context in a larger world. The more scientists there are who embrace this more public role, the better we are as a society.

I haven’t been posting much because technically I’m on vacation. Last week I attended the Santa Fe Science Writers Workshop in, you guessed it, Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’ve been wanting to go to this gathering for years, as much to hang out with other science writers as to tune up my writing skills from the cabal of New York Times editors and science writers who run the workshop. One of the other attendees posted this wonderful blog entry, complete with drawings of a visit to Bandelier National Monument, an archaeological site of ancient cliff dwellings. The weather was gorgeous and we got to visit the Santa Fe Institute and hear from two very different scientists there. The first was Bette Korber, who talked to us about her work on an HIV vaccine, which involved creating an artificial version of HIV based on the theoretical ancestor of this highly mutating virus. But what she was most passionate about was what she describes as the growing public distrust of vaccines in general and the ways in which conspiracy theories involving pharmaceutical companies, coupled with what she judges as media misconceptions, can undo the work of research scientists and public health doctors. The second speaker, Eric Smith, described his work on the origin of life, which he hypothesizes started with energy-producing, or metabolic, chemistry rather than the self-replicating, protein-making molecules of RNA. Like Bette, he also seemed aggrieved but directed his displeasure at other scientists, the so-called “RNA-first” contingent, who are centered at UC-San Diego (he called them the San Diego mafia, that’s how personal these scientific disagreements can sometimes get.). If you want to read more about “metabolism first” theories, here’s an article in Public Library of Science, an online science journal.

I’ve also been negligent in keeping up with my friends in the blogging world. This is old news to many of you, but American University Communications Professor and Exploratorium Osher Fellow Matt Nisbet and his partner in science persuasion, Seed Magazine writer Chris Mooney, have started their speaking tour about the importance of framing science topics in ways that are meaningful to the public. It started as an article in Science Magazine and has expanded from there with appearances in Kansas and New York. Their talk is posted on YouTube and it’s been the subject of lots of blogerly discussions already. I think their arguments make a lot of sense but as a first step, I’m happy to encourage more scientists to simply try communicating directly with the public about their research. If they can make their own work accessible to a lay audience, then they can hone their talks to focus on broader issues involving policy, controversy, and public welfare. From its founding in 1969 by physicist Frank Oppenheimer, the Exploratorium has worked with working research scientists to create exhibits and programs that bring the world of science to a larger audience. Science museums in general are great places for scientists to get their communication sea legs with a receptive public before branching out to tougher, less interested, audiences. We’ll be talking strategies for broader science communication with Matt when he continues his fellowship at the Exploratorium this July and August.

It looks like the wayward whales found their way through the Golden Gate and back home to the Pacific without so much as a tail wave goodbye. It was quite a rescue operation and it looks like biologists might also have gotten some good data about humpback whales from their extended time in the Sacramento Delta.

That’s a nice ending but we’re still waiting to hear about the vote at the International Whaling Commission meetings in Anchorage. Quotas and approval for subsistence whaling by Arctic native groups have been approved, but the vote on whether to resume commercial whaling awaits. Meanwhile, Japan is working to keep their whaling industry afloat. They are lobbying to overturn the ban on commercial whaling and to disband the International Whaling Commission as an ineffective, unnecessary regulator. They are also pleading the case that certain coastal communities should be granted permission to hunt for cultural reasons as do the Arctic subsistence whalers. The distinction is that subsistence hunters consume all the whale products themselves and don’t sell them on the commercial market, as the Japanese whalers do. Greenpeace is protesting, but their efforts aren’t generating much U.S. press (maybe they should try raising awareness in Japan). The media will probably pick it up big time if commercial whaling is approved, so no news is good news.

My three-year-old knows something about gravity but that’s not what makes him special. Even babies grasp the fact that unsupported objects tend to fall downward. Endless experimentation launching sippy cups off high chairs and dropping balls to the floor teaches youngsters how gravity works. But it’s just this experience that makes it hard for them to believe that the earth is a sphere, according to a recent article in Science Magazine (May 18, 2007) about the childhood origins of adult resistance to science. Until about age nine, children have difficulty comprehending a spherical earth because they can’t understand why people on the other side don’t fall off.

Eventually kids accept earth’s shape, in large part because trusted information sources, such as teachers and parents, confidently tell them so. They might also see space photographs of the “blue marble” earth, evidence that helps reinforce the concept. Eventually most students develop a more sophisticated understanding about the gravitational attraction of large objects that reconciles experience with learned knowledge.

Other scientific concepts that are complex or that go against common sense are more difficult to dislodge, especially in a society where debate about these topics create uncertainty. Young children are especially susceptible to believing that things have a purpose and a design, a belief system that is clearly not based on evidence or scientific understanding. The Science article, written by Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Weisberg, describes children’s propensity for “promiscuous teleology” as the belief, for example, that clouds are for raining and lions are for going to the zoo.

We run into problems as a society when these misconceptions about science persist into adulthood. For children, the simplest explanation for the origins of plants and animals is a creationist belief. Good science education should supplant this belief with an understanding of how natural selection and evolution works, but the Science authors make the point that the current debate over teaching evolution gives the public, and students, an easy out. Rather than go through the hard work of evaluating the strong, deep and complex evidence of how mutations over time lead to new species, they can rely on non-science information sources, such as clergy, politicians, media personalities, or other authority figures, to come to a simpler concept that God (i.e. an intelligent designer) created all species on earth.

We hope to give folks a different way of answering the question: how do we know what we know? I’m on an NSF-funded project team at the Exploratorium that is digging into the ways that scientists use evidence, data and observations to understand the natural world. We’ve spent some time with scientists in Kamchatka investigating organisms that live in extreme environments, which might eventually provide clues about the early history, if not the origin, of life on earth. Later this year, we’ll launch an interactive Evidence Website that highlights the work of scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Max Planck geneticists, anthropologists, linguists, cognitive psychologists, and primatologists use multiple lines of evidence, from DNA, to research on Great Apes, to fossilized skulls, bones and teeth, to investigate what makes us human and different from our primate relatives.

We’ll show the experiments, data and video interviews with scientists and will also include an interactive section that will allow online visitors to investigate the ways that they as individuals arrive at their knowledge and compare their belief systems to others. Rather than just rely on authority figures, including scientists, visitors can investigate the evidence and the methods that scientists use to understand nature, including human nature. If we are going to “believe” in anything, maybe it should be in the cumulative and self-correcting process of evidence-based science.

I often hear complaints that science, writ large, changes its mind a lot. One study says salt is bad for you, another says it isn’t so harmful after all. What people often don’t understand is that the process of science is a provisional and a cumulative one, which makes it self-correcting over time. A small study of a population indicates that sodium intake may increase blood pressure, which is an indicator for a higher risk of heart disease. A later, larger study may show that other factors, like a high-fat diet, are more important predictors of what makes a ticker go bad. Another study indicates that genetic pre-disposition together with diet and exercise habits may be the best predictor for who will have heart attacks and who probably won’t. All the studies may be valid, but the results are provisional and our understanding may continue to evolve as new research is conducted. Human bodies are complicated, individualistic and variable machines so the answers about health and physiology are rarely completely straight-forward and universally applicable. The more we learn about human health and biology, however, the more we understand these complexities and variations.

And so we come to climate, another complex system with many interlocking, interacting parts. For decades, oceanographers and climate scientists have been studying what’s known as the North Atlantic Current, an extension of the Gulf Stream, which carries warm, equatorial waters to North America and Europe. We did a webcast recently on the basics of this phenomenon, hosted by Exploratorium senior scientist Charles Carlson (scroll down to 4-21-2007). As recently as 12,000 years ago, this conveyor belt of warm salty water shut down when a flood of fresh water from melting glaciers poured into the ocean, plunging Europe and North America into a mini ice age (which was also the premise of a recent disaster film, “Day After Tomorrow.”) Scientists have been worried that global warming and the subsequent melting of ice sheets in Greenland would cause a similar disruption of the North Atlantic Current, but the recent IPCC report backed away from this prediction, reports Walter Gibbs in the New York Times. I asked Charlie to comment on this recent finding, here’s what he had to say:

“We can all remove one possible disaster scenario from our fears about global warming. The latest scientific evidence, coupled with more sophisticated computer climate modeling, doesn’t support a northern hemisphere plunge into a mini-ice age, as the Gulfstream current fails. Since the late ’70’s oceanographers have observed that the Gulfstream has periodically and dramatically varied in flow over the earth’s history, and that these variations are associated with major climatic shifts, like ice-ages. Such current fluctuations certainly could account for climatic shifts, since the North Atlantic current accounts for moving about 30% of the equatorial heat towards the poles significantly warming the northern latitudes, making Europe and North America more habitable. But a closer look has revealed that such a current failure isn’t all that likely. It would take a major catastrophic melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and that’s not in the earth’s current climate cards. So no “Day After” ice-age, we’ll all slowly warm instead.”

Last Sunday’s New York Times had a book review of Al Gore’s version of Inconvenient Truth for kids. The review was written by Robert Coontz, Deputy News Editor for Science Magazine (full disclosure, Robert is an old grad school classmate and good friend of mine).

Robert praised the book for its concise language and organization, an improvement over Gore’s original book for adults. He chides Gore a bit about painting too much certainty about global warming as the culprit behind Hurricane Katrina, a claim that most scientists are uncomfortable making. But Robert also says that in many ways the book does not go far enough. Because the main message is already out there that humans are impacting climate, now we need to fill in the gaps and explain the uncertainties and complexities of climate science. We should be introducing the scientists and how they use and make sense of data, especially as new findings come out and refine our understanding (and sometimes overturn previous scientific interpretations).

This gap is where formal and informal educational institutions can step in to provide context by helping our audiences make sense of the basics of climate science and the new information coming out. The Exploratorium developed the Global Climate Change Research Explorer that shows real observational data and how scientists interpret these observations to understand the mechanisms of climate change. We also produced a series of Polar Science Webcasts that introduced basic concepts about climate systems and some of the scientists, many of them working in the earth’s polar regions, who are piecing together climate history to help us understand what is happening now and may happen in the future.

We’re in the grips of a weird weather pattern known in Southern California as Santa Ana conditions. Along the coast of California the normal pattern is for high-pressure regions to develop over the ocean, where it’s cool, and low pressure over the interior valleys and deserts, where it’s warm. Air flows from high to low pressure in the form of winds, so the pressure differential pulls sea breezes and often fog into the hot interior valleys, cooling off the whole region. In Santa Ana conditions, a strong high-pressure region develops over the interior and the air flow is reversed, so we experience hot, often very dry winds from the east. In the autumn, when the hills are brown and dry, these desert winds can fuel devastating wild fires, like the Oakland Hills fire in 1991. But in San Francisco this translates into beach weather, where tourists and locals alike can frolic in bathing suits at Chrissy Field across from the Exploratorium (I took this picture this morning and it was 75 degrees and gorgeous at the beach… making it tough to stay in the office).

I became a weather weenie a few years ago when I wrote the book… err, wrote a book, about weather and atmospheric physics called “Watching Weather”. Since we usually have the ocean as a natural air conditioner, most people who live in coastal parts of the bay area don’t have central air. We depend on sea breezes and maybe a fan to help move air around and cool our houses and offices. But I’ve often wondered whether it’s better to place a fan so that it sucks hot air out of a room or pulls cool air into a room. An unscientific poll of physicists around the Exploratorium concludes that it’s better to push hot air out, since pulling in cool air doesn’t uniformly displace the hot air, especially in the corners of the room. That’s of course assuming that it’s colder outside than inside a room, which is usually the case in the evening when the house is much hotter than the outside air. If you have a better rationale for how to cool a room, send a comment.

If you’re a weather weenie too, here’s a link to our current weather information and rooftop cam (you can point the cam to see conditions at Chrissy Field, especially useful for wind and kite surfers).

As a museum, the Exploratorium has been on the Web since 1994 and we’ve developed online exhibits, artworks, live Webcasts, and other experiments. Before blogging was recognized as such we wrote expedition journals in Antarctica and dispatches from science conferences, like the AAAS meetings in 2001 and a couple of NCAR “usable science workshops” on La Nina and El Nino in the Galapagos.

But these early experiments in proto-blogging have been eclipsed by a robust community of folks who write about science and society, about the museum’s role in the public understanding of science, and who share tips about developing exhibits, communicating research, and getting in touch with our diverse audiences. So, some of us at the Exploratorium have been mulling it over and we decided to launch our own blogging experiment. (I should mention that much of what we do here can be described as experimental, we like to think of ourselves as a learning and research institution which thankfully means that we can chalk up failed experiments as learning experiences and move on.)

I’m the first out of the blocks and I hope you’ll bear with me as I figure out how I fit into this interesting online ecosystem. My goal is to contribute something interesting and unique that reflects the richness of what happens at the Exploratorium. I want to share some behind the scenes glimpses as we develop new projects for the museum floor and the web—in part because I’m often asked by scientists and others at conferences about what we’re working on and whether they can get involved in or partner with us on museum programs. I also want to reflect some of the compelling conversations and the fascinating people who walk through the door and interact with our staff and the public audience. In my job as director of the Osher Fellowship program, I’ve had the great privilege of hosting visits by some incredible scientists, artists, and scholars including E.O. Wilson, Elizabeth Blackburn, Christian deDuve, Cynthia Kenyon, Fred Wilson, and Lewis Hyde. I want to introduce these folks to you and share some of the interesting discussions we have with them. I’m also compelled in this effort by our director, Dennis Bartels, who wants the Exploratorium to be both an outside in and an inside out organization. So some of the blog will be devoted to giving you a peek behind the curtain at what we’re doing but we also want to invite our audience to contribute ideas and feedback that will help us to be more responsive to your interests, needs and ideas. As we think about our local, national and international audiences, we want to continue developing programs and projects that help make science accessible and relevant to everyday life. And we’ll invite you to get involved as we figure out ways to make sense of some of the most socially important, controversial, and complex science issues of the day, such as stem cell research, global warming, and the evolution wars. At the same time, we won’t lose sight of the fun parts of science, the everyday cool stuff that the Exploratorium is known for. So, please I want to hear from you and hope this opens a fun and fruitful dialog.