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.

Modern genetic researchers say there is no biological basis for the concept of race, that the average genetic differences between geographic groups such as Japanese, Europeans, and East Africans are too small to be significant. But if race is not a scientific concept, is it still a culturally valid one?

Joanne Rizzi, an exhibit and program developer and visiting Osher Fellow to the Exploratorium, explored the misunderstandings and realities of race with an exhibition she helped develop with the American Anthropological Association and the Science Museum of Minnesota. RACE: Are We So Different? covers the myth and meaning of race. There are obvious differences in the way we look, in skin color and hair for instance, but is race really only skin deep? What about the human experience of race and culture—is it possible to reconcile or at least acknowledge the two concepts?

Joanne told a group of us at the Exploratorium that she was initially reluctant to work on the exhibition because she didn’t think a purely scientific exploration of race would be broad enough to embrace the cultural reality and history of race and racism in America. But the Science Museum of Minnesota kept asking her until she finally agreed to come onboard. While on the exhibit team she initiated a community advisory panel that would become part of the development process and co-developed a series of programs. It was tough going, many people of color were suspicious that the exhibition wouldn’t tell the truth about racism and power. One advisor quit over the prominence of a map, based on genetic evidence, that all humans on earth originally came out of Africa. A Native American, his religious and cultural beleifs conflicted with the scientific views so he left the project.

But eventually what they created allowed many voices and viewpoints into the exhibition. One especially powerful public program were the “talking circles” which brought together groups of people to share ideas about the exhibition with a process that allows everyone to speak. Now the exhibition is on tour, currently in Detroit and spreading out across the U.S.

July 7, 2007 will mark the global concert Live Earth, which features bands on all seven continents rocking out with a call to arms for combating global warming. San Francisco residents can watch the satellite feed at the Exploratorium, along with a screening of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. Web audiences can tune into MSN’s Live Earth webcast here.

Among the dozens of headliners, which include The Police, Shakira, and Linkin Park, Live Earth will launch the Indie band Nunatak onto the world stage. Made up of scientists at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, Nunatak will record a concert with a live audience of only 17, the full contingent of scientists and support personnel manning the station in the dead of winter. You can check out a rehearsal video on YouTube that features some pretty decent fiddling by Tris Thorne, the communications engineer at Rothera Station.

There’s a long tradition of do-it-yourself entertainment in Antarctica. Among the earliest explorers, who spent up to 18 months or more on the ice, it was the only choice they had. Costumes and wigs were part of the cargo on all of Shackleton’s expeditions and his crew competed in talent shows that starred cross-dressing sailors. Even today, with cable TV and DVDs available, there is plenty of homegrown arts and culture on the ice. During our expedition in 2001/2, we were lucky enough to catch “Ice Stock,” the New Years’ celebration of garage bands, arts, and chili-cook-off competition at McMurdo, the largest NSF research station in Antarctica.

That concert line-up in 2002 included a pro in the mix, guitarist Henry Kaiser pictured here in red with one of McMurdo’s house bands (written up in his Antarctica blog).

I spent a couple of days in Boulder, Colorado visiting Mickey Glantz, Exploratorium Osher Fellow, friend and collaborator at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In his 30 years at NCAR, Mickey has concentrated on the social side of climate research shuttling between the world of science and communities of people worldwide who are affected by climate change. His usable science workshops help farmers, fishermen, small business owners, and community leaders make sense of, and prepare for, changes in the weather including extreme events like hurricanes, droughts, floods, and other disasters associated with climate fluctuations like El Nino and La Nina.

During my visit, we talked about his recent visit to China and meetings there with scientists at the polar research center in Beijing who are enlisting Mickey’s help in setting up a polar affairs center. China is among 60-some countries participating in the International Polar Year which started this spring and continues until March 2009. Canada is another of the participating countries and, while I was in Boulder, I went to a talk at the University of Colorado by a researcher, Shari Gearheard, who lives in the Canadian Arctic.

Shari is a remarkable young social scientist who occasionally sleeps in an iglo and is an apprentice dog musher, a necessary skill for traveling to her research sites on the ice. She is documenting native knowledge in an Inuit village of 800 residents, collecting observations of climate and environmental change and helping mediate that knowledge with scientific studies of the region. (In this photo, Shari is with Ilkoo Angutikjuak, Inuit Elder and hunter from Clyde River, Nunavut, with whom she has worked closely since 2000 on environmental change research). Arctic communities are experiencing more dramatic climate change than anywhere else on earth, but the patterns aren’t uniform across the North. On Baffin Island, houses aren’t falling into the sea as they are in some places in Alaska, but the Inuit are still facing changes that affect their traditional way of life. Indigenous Arctic hunters depend on stable ice, predictable seasonal and daily weather patterns, and productive ecosystems, all of which are threatened by global warming.

In her talk, Shari described the last three years living among her indigenous Arctic colleagues. Shari has deep respect for the Inuit people and spoke of all she’s learned from the hunters and their families, including patience, humor, courage, and deep, precise knowledge of the environment. It may be an exaggeration that Arctic peoples have 100 different words for snow, but there is precision in their language that can communicate subtle variations in wind direction and speed, ice thickness and stability, and changing weather conditions, all of which tells a hunter whether it’s safe or perilous to venture out on the ice. Shari talked about their curiosity and eagerness to participate in the scientific research happening around them, in many cases Inuit knowledge has preceded the science and is proving valuable in helping track both the extent and impacts of climate change in the Arctic.

Shari created a CD-ROM of her work in Clyde River, which you can order here.

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.

For the past week, crowds along the Sacramento Delta east of San Francisco have marveled at the spectacle, and fretted over the fate, of a mother humpback whale and her calf who are headed away from rather than toward the ocean. Biologists have been trying to herd them back to the sea to no avail and now their health appears to be deteriorating.

It’s a quirk of human nature that the public (and media) care more about two individuals that can be captured on TV or seen with their own eyes than about the lives of tens of thousands of whales that hang in the balance pending a vote by the International Whaling Commission this month in Anchorage. Twenty years ago, commercial whaling was banned by the IWC, but Japan is lobbying to lift that ban to satisfy their market for whale meat. The Japanese and some of their pro-whaling supporters claim that scientific studies have shown that whale populations have recovered enough to support commercial whaling. They probably don’t have the votes needed to overturn the ban this year, thanks to some intense lobbying by conservation groups in Britain, Australia and New Zealand (those countries seem much more attentive to the issue than the U.S.)

The IWC meetings started early in May with the scientific committees meeting first. David Ainley, who’s been studying penguins in Antarctica for 20 years, presented some papers there about the interactions between whales and penguins in Antarctica’s Ross Sea. (We did a webcast with him from his research camp at Cape Royds late last year.) David, who took this picture of a minke whale at left, said the IWC conference was the only biology meeting he’s ever been to with armed guards at the door. Japanese whaling vessels were in the Ross Sea this year, killing minke whales as part of their “scientific whaling” program. The whales are cut open on the ships and data on fat stores and stomach contents is collected. It’s doubtful whether Japanese scientists would kill whales for research if there was no market for the meat and David says that nearly all biologists at the IWC meeting question the need to sacrifice whales at all since there are non-lethal ways to study them.

I’ll keep you posted what happens with the IWC meeting and writing more about the spectacular Ross Sea and David’s research there.

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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.