For months I’ve been carrying around a fuzzy little sea creature, depriving it of a rightful home among fellow reef denizens. I hate giving up the crenulated critter because it was hand made by my mother, it’s beautiful and it feels so good in the hand, like a wooly worry bead.

The blue wool sea slug was created for a community art project, called the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. The project is the brainchild of Margaret Wertheim, a science writer and founder of the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles. The reef project has been traveling around from city to city, most recently Manhattan where it caught the attention of a New York Times reporter.

Margaret came to the Exploratorium last July to give a workshop on hyperbolic crotchet, a method of creating mathematically complex forms using strands of wool and a crotchet hook. We also did a Webcast with Margaret about hyperbolic crotchet and her coral reef project, which was created to bring attention to the environmental threats facing the Great Barrier Reef in Margaret’s native Australia.

My mother dropped in for part of the Exploratorium workshop and made a few sea slugs, one of which I’m supposed to send to Margaret. Maybe I’ll do that if the crotchet coral reef comes to San Francisco…

The New York Times had a story in the Science Times today that made me flinch at first. A scientist from the Jet Propulsion Lab decided to test NASA’s clean rooms—labs where the air is filtered and employees wear sterile “bunny suits” and masks to prevent contamination of equipment and vehicles intended for space travel– to see whether these environments might harbor life forms of their own. NASA found a surprise: lots of very hardy bacteria–including species previously unknown to science–find a way to survive in the clean rooms.

The reason I flinched is that we did a live Webcast from Goddard Space Flight Center a few years ago as part of our Origins project. I spent a lot of time in the NASA center’s giant clean room, alongside new cameras and a full-scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope, filming and interviewing engineers and technicians as they prepared equipment for a space shuttle servicing mission of the telescope. Did I get exposed to some super-hardy dangerous microbe? Such is the stuff of science-fiction fantasies.

Well, NASA is a lot more concerned about contaminating planets and other space environments with its space vehicles than with sickening the earth-bound humans visiting clean rooms but it seems there wasn’t much for me to worry about anyway. The so-called extreme organisms survive on trace nutrients in the air and unlikely surfaces such as paint. By just playing with an Exploratorium exhibit this morning, I was exposed to many more bacterial species that thrive on human skin and in our bodies. Come to think of it, I’ll go wash my hands now, just to be on the safe side.

I’m starting to really love Web 2.0 although I have much to learn about how to really become part of the community. And admittedly, I haven’t gotten much feedback from folks who are on the nastier side, maybe I wouldn’t like it so much if I did.

But I love the positive, decidedly unnasty vibes from the many science bloggers out there. There was a wonderfully rich post on the Cocktail Party Physics blog about the Exploratorium and our Iron Science Teacher Webcasts that we hold during the Summer Institute for middle and high school science teachers. We’ve been holding these competitions since 1999 and they’ve gotten quite popular on the Web (with lots of hits from Japan where its inspiration “Iron Chef” originated). I met the energetic and passionate blog author, Jennifer Oullette at a recent science communication conference in Lincoln Nebraska of all places. She gave an inspiring talk about how to get young women interested in physics by leveraging from popular culture. She wrote the book “Physics of the Buffyverse,” and has done talks using karate masters demonstrating the laws of motion. That’s the kind of creative educational approach we need more of to expand the appetite for science to new young audiences.

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.