For those expecting President Barack Obama to expound on the accomplishments of his laundry list of science and innovation policy he outlined in last year’s State of the Union, there were a few nods to but no specifics in this third State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.

As Forbes reported this morning for those interested in science and science policy the President’s address “offered some pretty thin gruel.”

The President stayed loyal to his pet issues of investment in basic research, jobs creation, education, clean energy and innovation.

With an expected mention of Steve Jobs he tied basic research to innovation. He said…

“Innovation also demands basic research. Today, the discoveries taking place in our federally financed labs and universities could lead to new treatments that kill cancer cells but leave healthy ones untouched. New lightweight vests for cops and soldiers that can stop any bullet. Don’t gut these investments in our budget. Don’t let other countries win the race for the future. Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the Internet; to new American jobs and new American industries.”

As in previous years President Obama focused his remarks around preparing and educating the country to create new jobs, new industries, innovate new energy sources, safeguard our security and find national prosperity. But in this speech, the President bookended his address with salutes to military achievements — first of getting U.S. troops out of an autonomous Iraq and then in ridding the world of Osama Bin Laden. And in the end he proclaimed…

This nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we are joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

But where is the meat of science policy that dotted previous addresses?

Last year the President kept the commitment he made in his State of the Union by submitting to Congress a budget with increases to National Science Foundation as a way to bolster basic research.

This year, he said…

Don’t gut these investments in our budget.

Last year President Obama set an ambitious goal: By 2035, he wants 80 percent of U.S. electricity to come from clean energy sources.

This year he focused on natural gas being extracted from shale in the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing. He said…

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years. And my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. And I’m requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. Because America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy. And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of 30 years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock –- reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.

Now, what’s true for natural gas is just as true for clean energy. In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries. Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled, and thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

Like last year the President found a 55-year-old furniture maker in need of job retraining. Last year it was North Carolinia’s Kathy Proctor who moved into the biotechnology field. This year he featured Bryan Ritterby from Michigan to tell the story of how a luxury yacht factory was converted to make wind turbines, which enabled Bryan to get a new job.

He also featured Jackie Bray, a single mom from North Carolina who went from being a mechanic to community college where she was retrained in lasers and robotics and now works for a gas turbine factory owned by Siemen’s in Charolotte.

President Obama made a clear point. The economy is changing and so must the way we educate people and prepare them for a new kind of workforce. He said…

Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job. Think about that –- openings at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work. It’s inexcusable. And we know how to fix it.

One way he proposes fixing it is by allowing students who come to the U.S. to study or those born here but to undocumented worker parents to become full citizens. He said…

Let’s also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: the fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else.

That doesn’t make sense.

If those words sound familiar, you’re right. President Obama said almost the same thing last year. Then he said, “Today, there are hundreds of thousands of students excelling in our schools who are not American citizens. Some are the children of undocumented workers, who had nothing to do with the actions of their parents. They grew up as Americans and pledge allegiance to our flag, and yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others come here from abroad to study in our colleges and universities. But as soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense.”

Like last year, the President renewed his call for foreign students who are trying to obtain advanced degrees to be allowed to stay in the U.S. once they finish their studies.

Last year, he said, “But tonight, let’s agree to make that effort. And let’s stop expelling talented, responsible young people who could be staffing our research labs or starting a new business, who could be further enriching this nation.”

This year, he said…

But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away.

On a final environmental note, President Obama recognized that comprehensive climate change legislation is not even on the political table this year. In a stern voice he threw down the gauntlet and challenged Congress to take a baby step. He said…

The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change. But there’s no reason why Congress shouldn’t at least set a clean energy standard that creates a market for innovation. So far, you haven’t acted. Well, tonight, I will.”

The President announced that the Department of Defense is making a large clean energy commitment. He says the Navy is purchasing one gigawatt of wind energy electricity capacity, enough to power 250,000 homes each year. He also unveiled an executive plan to develop enough clean energy opportunities on public land to power three million homes.

But following a State of the Union last year that got many us all excited about the role in science in the Administration there were some conspicuous absences.

Like increasing access to taxpayer-funded research. Last year the President talked about openness and transparency in government that would allow taxpayers to see where research dollars go. But there was no mention of that commitment this year.

Alex Knapp, a reporter at Forbes adds to the list of missed State of the Union mentions. He asks the President, “Why not a program for building more makerspaces in public libraries? Why not build more on the contests the government has been running to solve certain scientific problems? How about broadening access to taxpayer-funded research and doing more to let the public and entrepreneurs out there know what discoveries are ripe for developing into economic opportunities? How about anything besides a banal platitude?”

SOTU Factoids:

Number of times Science mentioned 2
Number of times Technology mentioned 2
Number of times Engineering mentioned 1
Number of times Math mentioned 0
Number of times Climate mentioned 1
Number of times Innovation mentioned 6
Number of times Energy mentioned 23
Number of times Education mentioned 8

Republican Rebuttal Factoids:

Number of times Science mentioned 0
Number of times Technology mentioned 1
Number of times Engineering mentioned 0
Number of times Math mentioned 2
Number of times Climate mentioned 0
Number of times Innovation mentioned 0
Number of times Energy mentioned 2
Number of times Education mentioned 1

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave an important math prize to two U.S. mathematicians for their pioneering work in harmonic analysis.

Professor Anders Bjorner from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm says, “These are two of the best problem-solvers alive and even on an historic scale this is totally unique that so many important problems have been solved by individuals as is the case for each one of these.”

Jean Bourgain from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Terence Tao from UCLA claim the 2012 Crafoord Mathematics Prize for, “their brilliant and groundbreaking work in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, ergodic theory, number theory, combinatories, functional analysis and theoretical computer science.”

What is unique with these two laureates is they worked in so many areas and they very quickly moved from one part of mathematics to another and see connections and solve big problems in many areas.

Dr. Bjorner says, “It is like coming back from the Olympics with 20 gold medals in different sports.”

But the common mathematical thread the Drs. Bourgain and Tao share is an area of math called harmonic analysis. In a nutshell that sub-discipline is the ability to find patterns in seemingly random masses of information.

By studying overlapping integer multiples, mathematicians can better sense the world. For example if f stands for a frequency in music (a note), then multiples of that frequency 2f, 3f, 4f and so on would be considered the corresponding harmonics.

Terence Tao

Tao initially said it was an impossible task. Then within a few minutes he told applied mathematician Emmanuel Candes that he was on to something. The next day, Tao had solved the problem himself, creating compressive sampling in the process.

As a result of the Candes-Tao quick collaboration engineers are busy building faster MRI scanners and one-pixel cameras. Tao is not an engineer but he saw a connection that no engineer noticed.

Candes says, “Whenever he touches a subject, it becomes gold very quickly.”

Ben Green, who collaborated on him with the prime number problem says, “Terry is unusual in how open-minded he is.”

That ability to follow an idea wherever it may roam has allowed him to be named the youngest full professor in UCLA history, to collect every notable math prize, including the coveted Field’s Medal, known as the Nobel Prize of math.

Jean Bourgain won the Shaw Mathematical Prize in 2010 for his work on psuedorandomness, the kind of math that generates random numbers used in advanced cryptography, slot machines and videogames.

Alex Kontorovich, one of Bourgain’s post doc research fellows says, “He is one of the 21st Century’s absolute giants of mathematics.”

Jean Bourgain, Institute for Advanced Studies Mathematician

Bourgain describes himself as a pure mathematician who says his greatest contribution to the field of mathematics is psuedorandomness.

He says, “The question is how to produce something that has many features of the truly random coin flipping. This is where the mathematics comes in.”

While conventional math theory holds that having a larger period between repeating sets of numbers, the greater the appearence of randomness. Take a slot machine for example. A computerized one-armed bandit has software that spits out billions of binary digits, ones and zeroes. That determines who wins and who loses. But those random number generators appear less predictable if there is a greater period between repeating sequences of numbers. At least that’s what most mathematicians thought.

But Bourgain shows that random number generators can be equally strong using shorter periods. Selecting jurors, compiling statistics or generating a quote of the day on a website are just a few applications that random number generators have found in the digital age. They can also be used to encrypt secrets or simulate weather patterns. The numbers are considered pseudorandom because they aren’t quite as random as flipping a coin.

He has found that he can create short sequences that seem just as random as long sequences.

He says, “My contribution is to show mathematically that you still have a lot of randomness when this period becomes much smaller.”

In awarding the Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says that Bourgain and Tao “have solved an impressive number of important problems in mathematics. Their deep mathematical erudition and exceptional problem-solving ability have enabled them to discover many new and fruitful connections and to make fundamental contributions to current research in several branches of mathematics.”

Principia Mathematica, Original Manuscript

Cambridge University Library houses the Newton Papers, which includes the 17th Century thinker’s papers, research and the writings. In a combined grant with the Newton Project at University of Sussex, Cambridge is unveiling many never before seen writings by the man who revolutionized science in the 17th Century.

Grant Young helped digitize the Newton Papers and says that before the works went online this week researchers would have to write to the university librarian and get special permission to go to Cambridge to look at the documents. Now, people from all over the world can see the same documents, written in tight, tiny prose from the comfort of their own homes.

Cambridge librarian Anne Jarvis says, “Cambridge University Library contains evidence of some of the greatest ideas and discoveries over two millennia. We want to make our collections accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a thirst for knowledge.”

Since 1998 the Newton Project has created a place for Newton’s work online. It now contains 4.8 billion words comprising over 130 of Newton’s documents, correspondence and notebooks.

Isaac Newton Notes on What Becomes Calculus

The project to put Cambridge’s science superstars online began last year and will continue through 2013 thanks to a generous donation from Dr. Leonard Polonsky.

The Newton Papers is the first foray for the university but will be followed by other science luminaries. In addition to the extensive Newton collections, the library holds the papers of Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Adam Sedgwick, J.J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, James Clerk Maxwell and Sir George Gabriel Stokes. The Library also holds the archives of Cambridge’s famous Cavendish Laboratory and is the repository of the Royal Greenwich Observatory archives, which includes the papers of the Astronomers Royal and the Board of Longitude.

Young tells the BBC, “Anyone, wherever they are, can see at the click of a mouse how Newton worked and how he went about developing his theories and experiments.”

The university says that another 8,000 pages of the Newton Papers will be added over the next few months so the archive will be grow over time until most of Newton’s works are online.

Nature has been doing things for billions of years without issue. Over time plants and animals have refined the way they live to reflect the optimal situation given the conditions they have to endure. This is the nature of evolution. The fittest survive but what fit means to nature may be different than our definition. Why is it that when humans came along we thought we could do it better? We forgot that nature has been doing this longer and better than we have.

In her TED Talk on biomimicry, Janine Benyus tells a story of her young neighbor in Montana who is very connected with nature. She says he sees life from his back looking up as he watches the sky, the grass and on one particular day, a wasp nest. Most people knock down the nests before they get very big but Benyus let nature take its course and let the wasps build a big one.

Her young and curious friend asked her, “How did you build that?” referring to the wasp nest. Even at such a young age Benyus says the neighbor boy assumed that she had built this feat of nature. She was saddened by the realization that the boy — like many of us — sees something elegant, artful and highly efficient and jumps to the conclusion that it is man-made.

She says, “Nature’s been doing just fine for 3.8 billion years.”

We just need to remember that and use nature as a point of inspiration to solve our biggest societal problems. And we must learn to crack the natural code.

So far great mathematical minds have discovered a few of nature’s mysteries by observing the repetition of patterns. Spanish artist Cristóbal Vila created this video featuring 3D animation to show a glimpse of what man has learned about the geometry of the natural world. In nature, numbers create beauty, reinforce structure, maximize efficiency and minimize resources. They combine form with function and infuse wonder and a little bit of awe.

Some even see the hand of God in the exquisite creations that nature concocts.

We can and will learn a lot of nature’s secrets if we just stop to take the time to look and listen. Perhaps whenever undertaking a big civic project city planners should begin by asking the question “How would nature do this?”

The Ask Nature project grew out of that notion. Guided by Benyus and her Biomimicry Institute, Ask Nature takes information gathered from E.O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life and filters out one question that every scientist answers, “What can we learn from this organism?”

The answer? A lot. More than we can even fathom. Just look around and behold the natural solutions to the man-made problems we face.

Benyus says, “What we are doing in a TED-esque way is to organize all biological information by design and engineering function.”

We see the magic of nature through a series of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence.

Fibonacci Numbers

Leonardo Bigollo is a 12th Century mathematician who is also known as Fibonacci. He introduced the concept to western math even though something similar dates back to ancient India.

Fibonacci created the following scenario to demonstrate his idea. Though biologically unrealistic, he used rabbits to explain the system.

He envisions the growth of an idealized rabbit population, assuming that: a newly born pair of rabbits, one male, one female, are put in a field; rabbits are able to mate at the age of one month so that at the end of its second month a female can produce another pair of rabbits; rabbits never die and a mating pair always produces one new pair (one male, one female) every month from the second month on. The puzzle that Fibonacci posed was: how many pairs will there be in one year?

At the end of the first month, they mate, but there is still only 1 pair.
At the end of the second month the female produces a new pair, so now there are 2 pairs of rabbits in the field.
At the end of the third month, the original female produces a second pair, making 3 pairs in all in the field.
At the end of the fourth month, the original female has produced yet another new pair, the female born two months ago produces her first pair also, making 5 pairs.

At the end of the nth month, the number of pairs of rabbits is equal to the number of new pairs (which is the number of pairs in month n − 2) plus the number of pairs alive last month (n − 1). This is the nth Fibonacci number.

Fibonacci Sequence, courtesy of Wikipedia

Fibonacci Blocks, where the squares are successive Fibonacci numbers in length

Fibonacci Spiral, created by drawing circular arcs connecting the opposite corners of squares in the Fibonacci tiling using squares of sizes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34.

In modern math Fibonacci numbers can be found in Pascal’s triangle, in the sequence of binary strings in computer science, and in a Pythagorean triple.

And the number, similar to the Golden Ratio, can be found widely in nature. It can be seen in the branching of trees or blood vessels in the lungs, in the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern. Fibonacci sequences can be found in pine cones, the spirals of shells, the curve of waves and the head of a sunflower.

Fibonacci Plants, the rose, the pinecone and the sunflower

We just have to remember.

Seven billion is a big number. It looks like this: 7,000,000,000. According to National Geographic magazine If you started counting out loud to 7 billion, it would take you 200 years. And, If you took 7 billion steps it would take you around the globe 133 times.

By the end of October, that’s how many people will inhabit Earth. This symbolic population milestone comes with a list of caveats and some opportunities as well. The lucky 7 billionth planetary citizen will likely be born in India or China, the leaders in global population.

We add 80 million people per year as water tables are falling, soil is eroding, glaciers are melting, and fish stocks are vanishing.

China is number one with 1.34 billion, followed closely by India with over 1.2 billion while the U.S. is a distant third with 312 million.

However, demographers at the United Nations Population Fund estimate that we are adding 219,000 people to the planet per day, which puts on target to reach 8 billion by 2025 and 10 billion people by 2083.

With all those people and a finite supply of space and resources, there are some challenges that lie ahead. Namely, poverty, access to food and water and a hope for a clean environment.

In Sub-Saharan Africa 900 million people suffer under the double burden of the world’s highest birthrates and the world’s deepest poverty. In 40 years that region will house almost 2 billion people, accounting for almost half of the projected growth, according to the New York-based Population Council.

Rural families flock to cities. Now 21 cities have populations larger than ten million. Over 335 cities have more than one million. And only 9 of those cities are in the U.S.

John Bongaarts, a spokesman for the research organization tells the Associated Press, “Most of that growth will be in Africa’s cities, and in those cities it will almost all be in slums where living conditions are horrible.”

The International Water Management Institute predicts that by 2025 1.8 billion people will live in places from severe water scarcity.

Many African nations are realizing that smaller families are more favorable for food production and access to water.

Lagos, Nigeria is about to overtake Cairo, Egypt as Africa’s biggest city. There, the former Nigerian health minister says reaching the 7 billion global population number should be a wake up call. He supports formal education for girls, getting teenage girls to stay in school and for women to control the number of children they have.

Babatunde Osotimehin says, “It’s an opportunity to bring the issues of population, women’s rights and family planning back to center stage.” He says there are over 215 million women worldwide who need family planning but don’t have access. He adds, “If we can change that, and these women can take charge of their lives, we’ll have a better world.”

But around the world, the challenges of a growing population are different. In Europe population numbers are barely growing and that’s only because of immigration, which in itself is highly controversial. The death rates in developed countries are outpacing birthrates. But shifting populations from around the world are offsetting those losses and creating steady population growth.

In India, there is a population imbalance. More than half of India’s population is under 35. This “youth dividend” could either be a boon to the Indian economy or it could zap their resources and slow the nation’s population growth, which by 2025 could be 1.6 billion people, making it the most populous country.

A population demographer in New Delhi says, “If the young population remains uneducated, unskilled and unemployable, then that dividend would be wasted.”

India also has a growing gender gap, where boys are outpacing girls in the latest census data. Indian families are showing a preference for sons and because of a surge in sex selection tests, many female fetuses are being aborted.

In China, after decades of forced family planning where urban families are allowed on child and rural families two children, the population growth has slowed rapidly. Perhaps too rapidly. Soon, China will have a shortage of young people to take care of a massive elderly population.

Like India, China has a gender gap. The United Nations says there are 43 million missing Chinese girls because parents restricted to one child opted to abort female fetuses.

In the western world France and the U.S. have the steadiest growth rates, both bolstered by immigration. Italy and Spain are both facing people shortages to help with a rapidly aging population. For the last consecutive four years more people have died in Italy than have been born.

But Lagos, Nigeria is clipping along at a six percent annual population growth. With 15 million and growing in the capital city, Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country with over 160 million. In Nigeria, 60 percent of the population is under 30 and needs education, training and access to healthcare.

Ndyanabangi Bannet, the U.N. Populations Fund’s representative in Nigeria says, “It is a plus if it is taken advantage of but if it is not harnessed, it can be a challenge, because imagine what hordes of unemployed young people can do.”

A recent article in the journal Nature suggests that with drastic changes in agriculture we can accommodate a bigger population. University of Minnesota ecologist Jonathan Foley says there are five key changes we need to make to boost food output and accommodate a bigger global population.
1. Stop farming in places like tropical rainforests, which have high ecological value and low food output
2. Improve crop yields in regions of Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe where farmland isn’t meeting its potential
3. Change farming practices to better manage water, nutrients, and chemicals
4. Shift diets away from meat
5. Stop wasting food (up to one-third of all food grown is wasted either in production, transport, or after purchase)

But with 696,000,0000 million able bodies under the age of 30 in India and Nigeria alone, we have the opportunity to change the world for the better before the next 3 billion arrive.

Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Shechtman “for the discovery of quasicrystals.”

Until his 1982 discovery, Dr. Shechtman, who has joint appointments at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology and Iowa State University believed that crystalline matter was defined as a regular and repeating pattern of atoms tightly packed within a material. Chemists used that belief to explain why crystals only come in certain shapes.

But then Dr. Shechtman discovered crystals with forbidden shapes, ones that science determined were impossible.

His discovery came after he observed a mix of aluminum and manganese under an electron microscope. What he saw he thought was impossible. He saw a distinct pattern — similar to that of traditional Islamic mosaics — that seemed to contradict what chemists understood as the laws of nature.

Instead of thinking that he had erred, as is so common among scientists making big discoveries, he concluded that the science was wrong. That didn’t go over very well with his colleagues, who mocked him and expelled him from his own research team.

It took years for chemists to consider the impossible not only possible but useful. Now as a result of this Nobel Prize winning discovery, quasicrystals have been found in the most durable kinds of steel, which are made into products like razor blades and thin needles used in eye surgery. They are also being studied for use in new materials that convert heat to electricity. And, in 2009 quasicrystals were first discovered in nature in Russia.

Despite initial ridicule and rejection by the scientific community the Nobel Prize committee says Shechtman’s discovery, “fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter.”

After receiving the big news this morning, Dr. Shechtman told a news conference, “The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist not one that is sure 100 percent in what he reads in the textbooks.”

After wrestling with his discovery, the chemistry community eventually realized that he had stumbled on an entirely new type of matter, a quasicrystal. Atomic patterns show a more subtle type of repetition than traditional crystals which allows for so-called forbidden shapes.

Quasi Crystal Gallery

According to a new study it could take 1,200 years, 300,000 researchers and $364 billion to identify and catalog all the species on Earth.

New research in the online journal PLoS Biology, a publication of the Public Library of Science uses a new way of calculating just how many plants and animals inhabit Earth. So far of the estimated 8.8 million we have discovered just 1.9 million.

Recent discoveries have been small and weird. They include a psychedelic frogfish, a dime-sized lizard and a blind, hairy lobster found on the ocean floor near Antarctica. Some scientists are actively searching for species to fill in the big gaps on the species pyramid. Others just happen across new species.

Describing the wild world in which we live biologist and study co-author Boris Worm from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia says, “We are fairly ignorant of the complexity and colorfulness of this amazing planet.”

Scientists from the U.S. and Canada who are part of the Census of Marine Life released the study this week. It found the previous estimate of global species a bit too difficult to pin down. The range of 3 million to 100 million didn’t sit well and researchers have been trying to narrow the number.

Using a new computer modeling method Dr. Worm and Camilo Mora from the University of Hawaii now believe the number to be somewhere between 7.5 million and 10.1 million. Even with the more improved method for counting the study admits it could be off by as much as 1.3 million.

In 1758 Carl Linnaeus built the system that is still used today to name, describe and catalog species. In the 253 years since, about 1.25 million species — roughly 1 million on land and 250,000 in the oceans — have been described and entered into central databases. But there are about 700,000 more species that have yet to reach the central databases. They are sitting in limbo between discovery and classification, many waiting patiently in backroom of major museums like the Smithsonian.

Based on the new way of estimating the number of species on Earth, the biologists estimate there are 6.5 million species found on land and 2.2 million or 25 percent living in the ocean depths. They suggest that about 86 percent of all species on land and 91 percent of those in the seas have yet to be discovered, described and catalogued.

According to the Associated Press, evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges from Penn State University says the new study isn’t good enough and could be off by millions. He thinks there are many tiny species lurking in corners of the unexplored Earth. And he should know. In 2001 while rooting around in dead leaves in the Dominican Republic in 2001 he found the world’s smallest lizard, a half-inch long Caribbean gecko. And then in 2008 he discovered a four-inch snake in Barbados that lays a very long egg.

Who Cares?

Scientists don’t want to classify every living creature on Earth just for the sake of saying they did it. They are trying to identify new species which could potentially have benefits for humans, ranging from medicine to climate adaptation.

Famed biologist E.O. Wilson says undiscovered species need to be found before they disappear taking possible cures with them. He says, “We won’t know the benefits to humanity from these species, which potentially are enormous.”

In order to advance medical and other science he says we need to know what’s in the environment.

Dr. Mora says, “Many species may vanish before we even know of their existence, of their unique niche and function in ecosystems, and of their potential contribution to improved human well-being.”

Lord Robert May, a past president of the British Royal Society praised the new system for estimating species numbers. He says, “It is a remarkable testament to humanity’s narcissism that we know the number of books in the U.S. Library of Congress on 1 February 2011 was 22,194,656, but cannot tell you — to within an order-of-magnitude — how many distinct species of plants and animals we share our world with.”

But fledgling projects like the Census of Marine Life and the Encyclopedia of Life are trying to speed the process given that human activity appears to be hastening the demise of habitats that could contain undiscovered species.

If the 8.8 million number is right, Erick Mata says, “Those are brutal numbers.” The executive director for the Encyclopedia of Life says even with an accelerated rate of discovery, “We could spend the next 400-500 years trying to document the species that actually inhabit our planet.”

Do Something that Counts

The International Union for Conservation of Nature monitors 59,508 species and classifies 19,625 as somehow threatened. Right now this is the most sophisticated system for monitoring known species and it is only looking at about one percent of the entire list.

That’s where citizen scientists come in. Scientists believe that some of the yet-to-be-discovered species could be found in our own backyards.

What will you do to help find, describe and catalog species that scientists discover?

What started out as an educational lesson turned into real-world adventure for five high school students from Sagniaw, Michigan. The students from Arthur Hill High School, near Michigan’s Shipwreck Alley on Lake Huron located two missing ships at the bottom of the lake.

In a science outreach collaboration called Project Shiphunt, Sony and Intel partnered with NOAA’s Dr. Mark Delgado, the chief scientist responsible for mapping the Titanic wreck and invited the students to map the lake bottom in an effort to locate the Merrick and the Laurentian, both of which sank in the late 1800s.

Much to their surprise the students were able to find the exact location of the shipwrecks after creating millions of sonar data points and mapping the bottom of Lake Huron. They then directed divers and a submersible robot with a camera to go inspect the wreckage.

Tiesha Anderson researched historic shipping lanes on Lake Huron and the other Great Lakes before embarking on their ship hunt. The students learned how to plot possible shipwreck locations. James Willett helped plot possible wreck locations with the help of Stan Stock, a local shipwreck hunter.

After eliminating several locations to narrow the search, the students worked with a hydrographer to learn about tracking coordinates before hitting the water to look for the ships.

The teen team consisted of James Willett, Cody Frost, Tiesha Anderson, Yer Vang and Tirrea Billings.

17-year-old sophomore James Willett dabbles with guitar when he isn’t searching for shipwrecks. In school he likes math and is going to try out for the football team this year. He wants to be a video game designer.

A Junior at Arthur Hill, Cody Frost helps out his dad at the family-run auto body shop when he’s not busy looking for 100 year old ships. He describes himself as a laid back, glass half-full kind of guy. Rather than worrying about not having enough he focuses on what he can do with what he has.

Tiesha Anderson is a 15 year old sophomore who has been playing basketball since she was in 3rd Grade. That instilled a competitive drive in her that has motivated her to be a straight-A student. She likes science because she is a curious person with a big imagination. She is hoping that finding ships will help her decide what she wants to do in life. She just knows it will be in the sciences.

Yer Vang struggled her first year of high school because she was quiet. But her sophomore year she helped find two ships and discovered that high school can be pretty fun. She’s not sure if she wants to be an astronaut but she definitely wants to ride a rocket into space some day.

Tirrea Billings is a 16 year old junior who loves math and science. She is interested in how the environment is being destroyed by pollution and forest degradation. Until Project Ship Hunt she had never been on a ship and says she really had no intention of going on one.

The rest of their story will be told in a one-hour documentary about the project on August 30 on Current TV.

In 1978, Charles and Ray Eames, the husband and wife duo who are known for their mid 20th Century furniture, movie making and other design projects, decided to map the visible world.

Their film, Powers of Ten showed the perspective of moving one order of magnitude every ten seconds. Beginning with a picnic in a park in Chicago, the clever team shows the vastness of the universe, reaching toward the furthest point of our understanding at 10 to the 24th meters.

Then a quick two-second per power return to the picnic before plunging into the microworld beneath the skin of a picnicker and into the subatomic world of electrons and their component parts.

Eames Demetrios, the grandson of Charles and Ray Eames, is the curator of the Eames Office and has recently launched the Powers of Ten website where he placed an interactive journey of each step shown in the film.

In 2007, to mark the 100th Birthday of his grandfather, Charles, Eames paid a loving tribute to the creative genius of his grandparents.

Gender stereotypes about math and science abound. Boys are known for performing better in math and science while girls tend to excel in history and language arts. Though the U.S. still leads the world in scientific discovery and vision, another stereotype is that the U.S. education system is failing students and allowing other countries to out compete citizens for global jobs.

The results of the six-month long Google Science Fair blew both of those stereotypes right out of the water. Three girls, all from the U.S. won the first annual science competition. They beat out 10,000 other students from 90 countries, demonstrating female and U.S. prominence in science.

But perhaps more notable than breaking stereotypes is the potential real science that these young women are doing. One has discovered a way to make ovarian cancer treatments more effective. Another wants to revise the Clean Air Act using her model, quantifying air pollution among asthmatics. And the third winning project could lead to a barbeque meat marinade that reduces carcinogens.

Shree Bose, Age 17

When not in the cancer lab, Bose enjoys a good cattle drive near her home of Fort Worth, Texas.

For her ground-breaking science project, she won $50,000 from Google as well as a trip to the Galapagos Islands on the National Geographic Discovery research ship. She will also have an opportunity to have a once in a lifetime internship experience at CERN, the nuclear physics lab in Switzerland.

Alice Bell, one of the judges for the Google Science Fair and a writer for the UK paper The Guardian says that the teens she met through the judging process are not the public. She says, “It is perhaps best to think of schoolchildren as holding a liminal position with respect to science and the rest of society. They are not quite inside the scientific community or squarely outside it either. They are both science and ‘the public’, and they are neither of these things, yet. Their lives could go in a range of directions.”

One thing is for sure, after winning this new scientific accolade, none of these girls lives will ever be the same.

Naomi Shaw, Age 16

In her project she quotes a common saying among environmentalists, “The genetic make-up is like loading a gun. The environmental pollutants represent the trigger!”

Shah noticed that doctors are quick to prescribe steroids and other inhalers, instead of addressing the quality of the air asthma sufferers are breathing. She learned that’s because nobody had figured out how much air pollution affects lung function. So she did.

Online environmental magazine Grist calls Shah awesome, not because she is a budding scientist but because she “let’s her green flag fly.” Shah describes herself as an environmentalist as well as an objective scientist in training.

She says, “Air quality doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves, and should be one of the top sustainability goals for the coming future.”

Shah took first place at the Intel Science Fair earlier this year. Since then she has sent President Obama and Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Lisa Jackson a letter asking for her mathematical model to be used to revise the Clean Air Act.

Lauren Hodge, Age 14

She found that lemon juice and brown sugar cut the level of carcinogens sharply, while soy sauce increased them.

Shah and Hodge each received $25000 scholarships and internships at Google and LEGO.

Girl power ruled the day at the first Google Science Fair.

Bose is proud of that fact. She told the New York Times, “Personally I think that’s amazing, because throughout my entire life, I’ve heard science is a field where men go into.” She added, “It just starts to show you that women are stepping up in science, and I’m excited that I was able to represent maybe just a little bit of that.”

Google science fair judge Vint Cerf was secretly pleased by the female sweep in all three age groups. Of the 15 finalists, there were 9 boys and 6 girls.

Though the competition was completely gender neutral, he says, “I was secretly very pleased to see that happen. This is just a reminder that women are fully capable of doing same or better quality work than men can.”

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien sits down with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to discuss why learning math and science is the beginning of a chain that leads to job growth.

Even if you don’t use your 10th Grade trigonometry skills in the real world, Dr. Tyson says just having learned the math will make you a better problem solver and a more valuable employee.

Not everyone will go into the STEM fields. But knowing and appreciating science, technology, engineering and math will give people the option to pursue the careers they want and allow them the freedom to follow their dreams.

“Innovations and creativity in science, technology, engineering and math will be the drivers of tomorrow’s economy.” — Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium

When he was nine years old, Dr. Tyson knew he wanted to be an astrophysicist. His path was clear. For many that isn’t the case. But a scientifically literate society keeps those options open, especially as fields become more technical and specialized.

In his State of the Union address this year, President Obama said that the U.S. needs to invest in education because science, technology, math and engineering will guide the nation’s future.

“Maintaining our leadership in research and technology is crucial to America’s success … if we want innovation to produce jobs in America and not overseas, then we also have to win the race to educate our kids.” — President Barack Obama, January 25, 2011 State of the Union

In the CNN special report Don’t Fail Me: Education in America examines why the financial future of the country is at risk if students can’t do well in science and math.

The 2011 State of the Union address, delivered by President Barack Obama, painted a solid picture of the future. Not surprisingly the President finds a secure and prosperous future filled with scientific and technological innovation. To create more jobs, he stresses better education including concentration on math and science. He emphasizes energy innovation and more investments in basic research. But overall he pressed all citizens to be creative and use their imaginations to conceive a better and brighter future where responsible government is open and accessible to the citizenry and where all people are given the same freedoms and choices.

Here’s a science, technology, engineering and math snapshot of our state of the union. Excerpts from President Obama’s January 25, 2011 speech before Congress and the American people.

Race to be #1 in Science
The U.S. is not going to be able to hold its lead over other nations as long as we lag behind in education and investment in research and technology. During his speech, the President said…

“Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They’re investing in research and new technologies. Just recently, China became the home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer.” (13:32-14:00)

Applied Materials Solar Technology Center is the biggest solar research facility in the world. And it’s located in Xi’an, China. Although, Applied Materials is a California-based company, it operates in 21 different countries.

Last fall American parts helped China speed past the U.S. in the computer race. It’s not quite as exciting as the space race 50 years ago but it’s still a mark of status to have the world’s fastest computer. And now that honor lies with Tianhe-1A which has a 2.507 petaflop system. That is currently 30 percent faster than any U.S. machine.

Though the U.S. had a hand in helping China reach these milestones, President Obama called for the U.S. to start innovating. He said…

“We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” (15:59-16:02)

“Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it’s not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout our history, our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That’s what planted the seeds for the Internet. That’s what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS.” (17:39-18:01)

New Moon Shot
During his speech the President called upon all Americans to dig deep and be creative to help build a stronger economy. He said…

“Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t even there yet. NASA didn’t exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.”
“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. And in a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology.” (18:10-19:08)

Ready for the Challenge
The President told the American people that it’s up to the scientists, engineers, teachers and entrepreneurs, not the government to solve the big problems we face. He said…

“We’re not just handing out money. We’re issuing a challenge. We’re telling America’s scientists and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo projects of our time.” (20:12-20:25)

He added…

“At the California Institute of Technology, they’re developing a way to turn sunlight and water into fuel for our cars.” (20:27-20:34)

Sossina Haile at Cal Tech is taking a chemical ordinarily used in self-cleaning ovens — called cerium oxide — and is using it to concentrate solar energy in order to turn carbon dioxide and water into fuel. He said…

“At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, they’re using supercomputers to get a lot more power out of our nuclear facilities.” (20:36-20:40)

The Jaguar supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory may have slipped to #2 in the world of speed but it’s still number 1 for many scientists, including those using it to build a virtual nuclear reactor to simulate ways for future reactors to last longer and burn at a higher energy efficiently rate and with less waste.

Revive Alt Energy
The President reached across the political aisle while talking about energy. The energy future requires all types of alternative energy, from solar and wind to clean coal and natural gas. He said…

“With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.” (20:41-20:52)

With the $4 billion President Obama says will be cut from annual oil subsidies, he will direct that money into electric car development. That includes:

$7,000 instant rebate when purchasing an electric car
30 percent increase in R&D for vehicle technology, including an energy innovation hub for batteries and storage
30 communities will get $10 million grants once they demonstrate a concrete plan to streamline regulations, develop infrastructure, make fleet conversions or offer electrical vehicle incentives, such as commuter lane access

He said…

“So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: By 2035, 80 percent of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources. Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all — and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen.” (21:42-22:15)

STEM the Education System
All of the innovation the President envisions won’t be possible without future generations of competent workers. And that all starts in schools, which are not keeping students competitive, globally. President Obama said…

“The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. America has fallen to ninth in the proportion of young people with a college degree.” (22:58-23:08)

Before the State of the Union, the 2009 report card on the nation’s schools was released. Secretary Arne Duncan was disappointed with the results, especially in math and science.

He says, “When only 1 or 2 percent of children score at the advanced levels on NAEP, the next generation will not be ready to be world-class inventors, doctors, and engineers.”

In one of the few standing ovations of the evening during his State of the Union address, President Obama said to celebrate science not celebrity. He said…

“We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.”(23:39-23:46)

Get to Work
As test scores show that the U.S. is slipping behind other countries and losing its leading educational edge, the President told people to go to work and become teachers or get retrained and work in biotechnology. He said…

“And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.” (27:21-27:33)

“One mother of two, a woman named Kathy Proctor, had worked in the furniture industry since she was 18 years old. And she told me she’s earning her degree in biotechnology now, at 55 years old, not just because the furniture jobs are gone, but because she wants to inspire her children to pursue their dreams, too. As Kathy said, “I hope it tells them to never give up.” (29:18-29:44)

We are a nation of immigrants. And those who come here are looking for a better life and for opportunity. Our schools still provide that service for foreign students. President Obama said…

“Others come here from abroad to study in our colleges and universities. But as soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense.” (30:55-31:06)

“But tonight, let’s agree to make that effort. And let’s stop expelling talented, responsible young people who could be staffing our research labs or starting a new business, who could be further enriching this nation.” (31:42-31:55)

Infrastructurovation
Building new roads, transportation and technology infrastructure have been endeavors that the U.S. has always done first and best. But our aging systems are causing us to lose ground to other nations. The President said…

“Our infrastructure used to be the best, but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation’s infrastructure, they gave us a “D.” (32:34-32:49)

South Korea offers its citizens the Internet everywhere and as a result 95.9% of Koreans enjoy that connectivity. In the U.S. the number of people with Internet access is growing but only at 63.5% of the population has an Internet connection.

China is investing 9 percent of its gross domestic product in roads and railways while Europe is investing 5 percent. The U.S. is only spending two percent of GDP on transportation infrastructure. But with the largest GDP in the world — at $15.2 trillion — our two percent is equal to $304 billion a year. China and Europe are still investing more at $576 billion and $805 billion respectively.

The Future Will be Open
With all the technology that has been created and built in the last 30 years now able to connect people more with the government, President Obama pledges to let the people see where the money is being spent. He said….

“Because you deserve to know exactly how and where your tax dollars are being spent, you’ll be able to go to a website and get that information for the very first time in history.” (49:57-50:07)

“The 21st century government that’s open and competent. A government that lives within its means. An economy that’s driven by new skills and new ideas. Our success in this new and changing world will require reform, responsibility, and innovation.” (50:50-51:17)

The American Dream
Every year a quintessential American story highlights the President’s address. This year a Pennsylvania drill operator held the dream. After hearing that the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped underground last August wouldn’t be freed until Christmas he knew his company had the technology to drill a hole through the hard, volcanic rock much faster. President Obama highlighted the tale of the American who helped save the Chilean miners last year. He said…

“And that dream is the story of a small business owner named Brandon Fisher. Brandon started a company in Berlin, Pennsylvania, that specializes in a new kind of drilling technology. And one day last summer, he saw the news that halfway across the world, 33 men were trapped in a Chilean mine, and no one knew how to save them.

But Brandon thought his company could help. And so he designed a rescue that would come to be known as Plan B. His employees worked around the clock to manufacture the necessary drilling equipment. And Brandon left for Chile.

Along with others, he began drilling a 2,000-foot hole into the ground, working three- or four-hour — three or four days at a time without any sleep. Thirty-seven days later, Plan B succeeded, and the miners were rescued. (Applause.) But because he didn’t want all of the attention, Brandon wasn’t there when the miners emerged. He’d already gone back home, back to work on his next project.
And later, one of his employees said of the rescue, “We proved that Center Rock is a little company, but we do big things.”(64:33-66:07)

And, science helps us do big things.

Here are a few future leaders, who had the privilege of sitting in the First Lady’s box during the State of the Union.

Amy Chyao
Richardson, TX

Amy, a sixteen-year-old high school junior from Richardson, Texas, has developed a photosensitizer for photodynamic therapy (PDT), an emerging cancer treatment that uses light energy to activate a drug that kills cancer cells. With her work, Amy won the first place Gordon E. Moore Award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a program of Society for Science & the Public, in May 2010. Amy met the President at the October 2010 White House Science Fair.

Brandon Ford
Philadelphia, PA

Brandon, a junior at West Philadelphia High School, is a leader of the West Philly Hybrid X Team, which includes students from an afterschool program at the West Philadelphia High School Academy of Automotive and Mechanical Engineering. Brandon and the Hybrid X team recently entered two cars in the Progressive Automotive X PRIZE competition, a global challenge that sought to deliver production-ready, highly fuel efficient vehicles. They successfully went head-to-head with corporations, universities and other well-funded organizations, even advancing to an elimination round with their Ford Focus that got an official 65.1 MPGe.

Mikayla Nelson
Billings, MT

Mikayla Nelson is currently a freshman at Central Catholic High School in Billings, Montana. As a middle schooler at Will James Middle School, she led her Science Bowl team to a 1st place finish at the National Science Bowl for the design document of their solar car. They also won 5th place in the U.S. Dept of Energy’s Junior Solar Sprint. Mikayla met the President at the October 2010 White House Science Fair where she represented her Science Bowl team and exhibited their solar car.

Kathy Proctor
Winston-Salem, NC

Kathy Proctor grew up in Trinity, North Carolina where, after graduating, she went to work in the furniture industry like many others in the area. When she was laid off in 2009, Kathy began taking classes in biotechnology at Forsyth Technical Community College. Kathy will graduate in July 2011, with an Associate Degree in Science, and hopes to attain a job working as a bio-fuels analyst. Kathy met the President when he visited Forsyth Tech in early December 2010.

Diego Vasquez
Phoenix, AZ

Diego Vasquez, currently a freshman at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, was a member of the team from Cesar Chavez High School in Laveen, Arizona that won a grant through the Lemelson-MIT Program’s InvenTeams initiative for their design of a fully adjustable motorized chair for persons who could primarily use it for physical therapy. Diego met the President at the October 2010 White House Science Fair where he represented his team and demonstrated their chair.

An Ankeny, Iowa sixth grader surprised his teacher and his classmates when he took a classroom challenge to the extreme. During the annual memorization of pi — the non-repeating number that represents the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter — one student just kept going. The number that begins with 3.14159… intrigued Marcus Francis and now he’s memorized over 300 digits and is adding more every day.

In 2005, a Japanese man set the world’s record for reciting the most digits in pi. Then the magic number was 83,341. A year later the same record holder bested himself by reciting the first 100,000 digits.

Routinely, students–mostly teenagers–take on the big number. Now YouTube videos of their recitations appear online. Some students can rattle off over 8,000 digits, proving an aptitude for memorizing large chunks of information.

But computers still are beating people in the race to quantify pi. In 2002 a Japanese super computer calculated pi out to over one trillion digits. But last year a Frenchman set a new record of 2.7 trillion decimal places. Then in August of this year a Japanese and American duo smashed all previous records by using a souped up desktop PC and 20 hard drives to calculate pi out 5 trillion places. The count took three months.

Getting girls interested in math and science can be a daunting task. But for child actress and star of the Wonder Years TV show Danica McKellar is working to excite girls about math and science. She’s written three books and now is teaming up with DeVry University to get girls to take a second look at science and engineering careers.

The race is on to humanize scientists. Mad, messy-haired white men in white coats in a dark, cold laboratory are out. Long distance running, singer-photographer, daredevils are in. These are the new faces of science.

mechanical engineer and an all-purpose daredevil, Nate Ball is also an accomplished jazz pianist, a NCAA champion pole-vaulter, and a grandmaster beatboxer. And he hosts a reality TV show on the side

The PBS NOVA series The Secret Lives of Scientists & Engineers is an online series that tries to show that there is more to scientists than their science.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is a familiar face and host of PBS’ NOVA. But this expert on the cosmos also enjoys a little whimsy. Dr. Tyson is an avid tie collector. His cosmological clothing choices put a new spin on this astrophysicist.

2004 Miss Massachusetts Erika Ebbel is a biochemist who went on to compete in the Miss America beauty pageant. The MIT graduate is now pursuing her PhD at Boston University School of Medicine. But she is an accomplished pianist and an expert at waving.

Well known climate scientist Gavin Schmidt is juggling an amazing amount of data in his quest to build a 3-D model of Earth to better understand how the climate is changing. So it’s no wonder he juggles balls, pins and beanbags in his offtime.

More scientists are getting out of the lab and showing what else makes them tick.

Teen astronomer Caroline Moore is an avid singer. Roboticist Colin Angle is an extreme athlete while ethnobotanist Ina Vandebroek is a salsa dancer.

Movies and TV are embracing the scientist-as-person phenomenon. Shows like the Big Bang Theory and even a band of smarties, including a chemist and a biologist on the reality TV series Big Brother.

Do you know a scientist who has a really cool job or one that does something surprising when not trying to understand how the world works? If so send your nominees to tips@realscience.us.

San Francisco Bay area teachers are using the 2010 Winter Olympics to teach kids about math and science.

The Silicon Valley Education Foundation teamed up with NBC Learn — the educational arm of NBC News — and the National Science Foundation to provide free lesson plans and video clips.

For more information, visit Lessonopoly.org.

Here’s the gist of the kitchen sink hoax. It starts with the end of the Mayan calendar, adds a mystery planet on a crash-course with Earth. Then there is some nonsense about the planets aligning on Dec. 21, 2012, heralding the end of the world. There are about six different pieces to this hoax, which seems to be gaining public momentum.

But the science just doesn’t hold up. Only a few pieces–yes, we will be experiencing a solar maximum and we will be in the galactic plane during this time–are actually true.

Here’s the hoax sorted out. Listen for yourself.

Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps is standing tall — all 4,810.45 metres of it. That’s only 45 centimetres less than when it was last measured four years ago, but three metres above the height French schoolchildren have long been taught. Scientists carried out new measurements in September — and on Thursday announced some surprising finds from the top of the summit straddling France and Italy.

Brilliant minds have been challenging people to embrace math for centuries. But one man made recreational math fun and has been inspiring legions of followers for decades.

His name? Martin Gardner. This mathemagician has been transforming frightening formulas into fun.

But recreational math doesn’t just fill free time. It challenges the mind and even informs real science.

The Zebra Puzzle--a famous math puzzle

The following puzzle is a fine example of a detective math puzzle. Based on clues supplied in a narrative, answer a question by applying simple, man-on-the-street logic to the information (not all of it relevant) supplied.

On an odd little street in the town of Somewhere, there are five house in a row. Each house is a different color, each is inhabited by a woman of different nationality, and the owners of the houses also have their differences: each owner has a different pet, prefers a different drink and works in a different profession. A detective, charged with the task of discovering who drinks water and who owns the Zebra, gathered the following information, itemized for your convenience:

1. The Englishwoman lives in the red house.
2. The Spaniard owns a dog.
3. Coffee is drunk in the green house
4. The Ukrainian drinks tea.
5. The green house is immediately to the right of the Ivory house.
6. The engineer owns the snail.
7. The diplomat lives in the yellow house.
8. Milk is drunk in the middle house.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house on the left.
10. The doctor lives next to the owner of the fox.
11. The diplomat lives next to the owner of the horse.
12. The teacher drinks orange juice.
13. The carpenter is Japanese.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

Now it’s your job to find out Who owns the zebra and who drinks water.

While most serious scientists are wringing their hands, wondering who will win the Nobel prizes, a different group of scientists is celebrating the lighter–but just as bona fide–side of science.

The 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony shined a silly look at science at Harvard last week. Here’s a breakdown of the winners in each category. The Ig Nobel goes to…

Economics:
Icelandic bank management and auditors–for demonstrating how to bankrupt a national economy.

Math:
Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank–for printing currency ranging from one cent to 100 trillion dollars.

Public Health:
Elena Bodnar–for inventing a bra that’s good during an emergency.

Physics:
Katherine Whitcome, Daniel Lieberman and Liza Shapiro–for answering the question: Why don’t pregnant women tip over?

Medicine:
Donald Unger–for proving his mother wrong and discovering that knuckle cracking doesn’t cause arthritis.

Veterinary Medicine:
Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson–for discovering that cows with names give more milk at dairy farms.

Peace:
Stephan Bollinger–for determining that empty beer bottles will do more damage then full ones when smashed over someone’s head.

Chemistry:
Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor Castano–for making diamonds out of tequila.

Biology:
Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei–for finding a bacteria in panda poop that eats kitchen garbage.

Literature:
Ireland’s Police Service–for writing more than 50 traffic tickets to Prawo Jazdy, the most frequent driving offender in Ireland. The name in Polish means…”Driving License.”

Just over a year old, the Apple iTunes App Store is churning out–or rather independent developers are–applications to calculate tips, find restaurants and even play countless games. But there is little for the science-interested smart phone users.

Oh sure, among the tens of thousands of applications currently available there are a handful of sci apps but relatively few. The subject doesn’t even merit its own category.

But several lists have been generated, touting the few useful science applications currently available.

And, we’ve tried to separate the intelligent from the app crap.

Listen here.

A few Select SciApps:
Atoms in a Box
Molecules
EleMints
Starmap
Formul8
Genetic Decoder
Get All the Science
The Extraordinaires

The Extraordinaires–on-demand volunteering for citizen scientists

Story written and produced by Michelle Ma

For 35 years, the Rubik’s Cube has been puzzling people and teaching science. Starting with its inventor, Erno Rubik, first used his “magic cube” to demonstrate three-dimensional design to his architecture students.

Now mathematicians across the world are employing the brightly-colored plastic puzzle to demonstrate algebraic theories to high school students and even use the cube as a model for distributed computing.

Story written and produced by: Lee Fehrenbacher.

Listen here.

Summer is no time for idle minds. About 70 Georgia girls are getting a crash course in crime scene investigation, astronomy, dinosaurs and chemistry, neuroscience, computer science and mathematics.

The goal of the Women in the Sciences summer camp is to interest young women in pursuing careers in science.

Other summer science camps for girls.

Sally Ride Summer Camp

Summer Days Math and Science Camp

Girls and Science Summer Camp (GAS)

Girl Start

In a move to take science from the lab and place it in the public square, the World Science Festival is about to start its second year of inciting curiosity.

REALscience talked with organizer and physicist Brian Greene to hear what we can expect at this year’s festival.

Photo: Physicist and Co-Founder Brian Greene
Credit: Suzie Horgan for World Science Festival

Listen here.

Buy Tickets (if you are in the New York City area.)

REALscience correspondent Richard Romano will have a full report from the festival next week.

Festival highlights:
Opening Gala to celebrate E.O. Wilson’s 80th Birthday.

Pioneers in Science, a discussion with Harold Varmus and Sylvia Earle led by New York City high school students.

Transparent Brain, a neurological exploration of how close we are to reading the mind of others.

Watching Wilson and Watson, actress Anna Deavere Smith’s trip down the rabbit hole and into the minds of these two mega scientists.

Notes & Neurons, a musical adventure with Bobby McFerrin (of Don’t Worry, Be Happy fame.)

World Science Festival Street Fair, an all-day outdoor science fair with the Math Midway, Discovery Labs, CSI, and much, much more.

Science is in the air across the nation as students showcase their discoveries, research projects and compete for scholarships. The biggest science and engineering fair is underway in Reno, Nevada.

Visit the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair to learn more.

Students from all over the Pacific Northwest will gather in Bellevue, WA for the annual Student Biotech Expo later this month.

Here’s a full list of Science Fairs around the nation and the world.

Photo: Dayan Li, Philip Streich and Dmitry Vaintrob, 2007 Intel Science and Engineering Fair winners.

The battle line in the math wars separates reform math from traditional. It pits new, fuzzier, inquiry-based learning against rote memorization of fundamental math facts. And, it’s been boiling in school districts across the country for over 30 years.

The latest battleground is Seattle, WA, where the largest district in the state adopted an inquiry-based learning method called Discovering Mathematics.

As the battle over how to teach math rages on, the U.S. continues to lose its international lead in math and science education.

Dr. Cliff Mass, University of Washington atmospheric scientist notices disturbing trend in math.

Famed mathematician Stephen Hawking has been rushed to a hospital and is seriously ill, Cambridge University said Monday.

Technology and treasure are pushing people to get out and explore parks, mountain peaks and back alleys in cities. It’s all part of geocaching, a nine-year-old GPS adventure game that is becoming a popular global sport.

And, while geocaching has its roots in navigation and exploration it is backyard science with the whole world as the back yard.

Listen here.

Photos from the opening of GPS Adventures at Pacific Science Center in Seattle.

Over 1,200 Geocachers in Seattle

Stan Orchard, Bryce Seidl and Larry Fox at GPS Adventures Opening

Cathy and George–AKA Blooming Idiot and The Jester

Groundspeak founder Jeremy Irish

Jon Stanley, AKA Moun10bike

Original video by Dave Ulmer, the father of geocaching.

Visit geocaching.com for more information or to start caching, yourself.

Special thanks to Fish Soup.

Kurt Godden is a General Motors in an Operations Research scientist with a daughter who loves pi. Not the kind with berries or cream. But the number that starts with 3.14….and goes and goes and goes. Here she recites the first 500 numbers of pi but she memorized the first 2,000 digits.

Let’s see if she is correct. Below is pi with the first 500 digits. Compare her memory to the number below.

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062
86208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408
12848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196442881097566593344612
84756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491
41273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530
54882046652138414695194151160943305727036575959195309218611738193261179310
511854807446237996274956735188575272489122793818301194912…

Fun Pi Facts:

The Egyptians and the Babylonians are the first cultures that discovered about 4,000 years ago.

Pi is an irrational number. That means that it can not be written as the ratio of two integer numbers.

Pi has been calculated with a precision containing more than one billion digits, i.e., more that 1,000,000,000 digits! (How many have you memorized?)

Dr. Mario Livio, an astrophysicist at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, loves numbers and sees them everywhere, in nature and in the cosmos.

But where does math, the complex language of numbers come from? Has it always been there for us to find or is mathematics just another human creation?

This is the overarching question he poses in his new book.

When faced with a shortfall in his copying budget, math teacher Tom Farber decided to pay for the paper he puts his calculus tests on by selling ad space on them.

Scientists are worried that the Internet is becoming a clogged superhighway, complete with bottlenecks where information seems to disappear.

These electronic misfires are called Internet black holes. And, they seem to be a result of limited routing architecture.

But a team at University of California, San Diego is trying to uncover the hidden shape of the overall network to help open up the information arteries that get information across the globe in just a few seconds.

A new math model is based on the 1990s party game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which uses a sociology theory called the “small-world” paradigm.

While that team tries to understand the structure of the Internet, a team at University of Washington is mapping the black holes as they appear.

To find out more visit:

YearofScience2009.org

UnderstandingScience.org

1, 2, 3, 4, how do you improve your math score? Well, start by getting good at estimating numbers of objects in groups. New research shows that good “number sense” translates to higher standardized math test scores.

Just as school is getting ready to start, here’s a story from across the pond that will make you want to pick up some light reading for your ,. A ten-year-old Manchester, England boy (and his mother) both received a B grade in science. The pair took the equivalent of the science SAT and passed with flying colors.

According to the London Telegraph, there were parts of the GSCE that Jamie Van Hunskerken helped his mother better understand during their test prep class. The test results for the standardized tests that most high school children take to graduate are released at the end of August every year.

Jamie decided he is going to take the math course next.

Sometimes the world seems too complex to be natural. But scientist continually prove that nature is both complicated and natural.

From a butterfly’s wings to the perfect spirals of a seashell, it’s all just patterns. Now new research is showing how cells migrate–also a pattern.

And, this holds great promise for stopping the spread of cancer.

A group of scientists is banking on the world to help solve some big diseases. Cures to finding proteins to stop cancer, Alzheimer’s or HIV may lie in global game players.

A new online videogame project, called FoldIt is looking for players to help biologists better understand protein structures.

The high score could win you a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Every musical note strikes a mathematical chord. And, now a group of scientists has found some complex shapes in the music even before geometric mathematicians can describe them.

In this week’s issue of Science magazine three music theorists describe the advanced geometry they discovered in Bach’s music.

2007 was a big year for science—and REALscience. From weird weather events to extraordinary discoveries in space, the year was full of all kinds of science. It was the beginning of the International Polar Year. Global warming dominated the news. Science was under political attack. But the biggest science news of 2007 was….well you’ll have to listen to find out.

Happy New Year. See you in 2008.

Soon taking a stroll through the landmarks of Europe will be as easy as opening a digital map. Wait a couple of years and all the major landmarks of the world—from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to the Statue of Liberty will be digitally reconstructed using other people’s vacation photos. The work is being done at the University of Washington and has already shown great promise.

picture_this_103007.mp3

Port congestion is becoming a problem and with nowhere to build cranes might hold the answer.

photo by Lance Wordsworth

A world record attempt at being the first biodiesel powered motor boat to circumnavigate the globe has been thwarted. The 50-day Earthrace journey came to an abrupt halt on the shores of Spain this week. It would have been the first boat to attempt such a feat fueled by 100 percent vegetable oil. The team will try again next year.

Two undergraduate math teams took home the top math modeling prize after beating out other top flight schools. They came up with the simplest way to divide a state into congressional districts based on population rather than politics. They solved the complex math problem using a method they had never heard of before.

Getting a math problem right doesn’t just help students. Sometimes good math helps in the real world, too. An Illinois man is out of the running…uh biking…for the Guiness Book of World Records thanks to a few too many math errors.

A cloaking device set the math community buzzing last May, how making invisibility not just possible, but practical.

“Who would have thought that people would be talking about invisibility in scientific terms?” said Gunther Uhlmann, the UW’s Walker Family endowed professor of mathematics.

Invisibility is a recurring theme in human legend, most recently from Harry Potter’s cloak and now to the NBC hit series Heroes. The real scientific hubbub began in May when a team of American and British physicists announced they had solved the equations for an invisibility cloak.

Fast forward five months and the team had constructed a prototype. The news sent shockwaves through popular and scientific circles. It was even named one of the year’s top scientific achievements, and a video of a nearly invisible penny popped up on the video Web site, YouTube.

Uhlmann followed the news especially closely because he and his colleagues had discovered an invisibility cloak in 2003. Among the din of discovery the UW team almost became, well, invisible.

Uhlmann unknowingly discovered the same equations three years earlier but in a decidedly different context. His team was working on math theory that underlies a way of detecting breast-cancer tumors by placing electrodes around the breast, measuring the voltage at different points, and then reconstructing the enclosed volume. Since tumors are more conductive than normal breast tissue, even small tumors would show up.

In their calculations, Uhlmann’s group found one case that didn’t work at all. For certain types of coatings they could not detect anything about the enclosed volume.

“This was the opposite of what we were looking for,” Uhlmann recalled. “We were trying to make invisible things visible, and not the opposite.” The group published its findings, including the mysterious case, in the journal Mathematics Research Letters.

And that was that.

The breast-cancer research continued. The work is a type of inverse problem that uses measurements from the surface of a body — say a human body, or the Earth — to deduce what’s inside. UW mathematicians have been active in this area for 20 years, Uhlmann said, developing basic theories and applications to discover underground oil reserves and pinpoint buried land mines. But in July, Uhlmann received an e-mail from a colleague alerting him that an article in the journal Science contained some familiar equations.

A group of physicists showed that for certain types of coatings, sensors could — guess what? — sense absolutely nothing about the enclosed volume. Looking at the surrounding waves it was as if nothing was there. The group from Duke University and other institutions discovered the results independently, Uhlmann said.

“We had not thought about the positive aspects of this result,” he now admits. But he acknowledges that science doesn’t always follow a straight path.

The Duke researchers’ prototype cloak is a small cylinder, about the size of a donut, that can make a small object invisible to microwaves. Its creation was made possible by new materials, called metamaterials, that control electromagnetic waves and bend them through angles previously thought impossible. The existing invisibility cloak uses tiny copper wires embedded in fiberglass panels to manipulate incoming waves. Waves wrap around an object and return to their regular path.

Many drawbacks still exist. The current “cloak” is actually more of a thick shield. A person trapped inside the cloak would be completely cut off from the outside world. And so far, the cloak is invisible only to microwave frequencies. But many researchers are now clamoring to improve the design.

Uhlmann and his colleagues are revisiting their original equations. In a recently submitted paper, they solve equations showing how to make a cloak invisible to all incoming frequencies, including visible light. They also calculate how to shield living, glowing or electrically active objects. And although they hint at other surprises on the horizon, they’re keeping readers in suspense.

“This is a very active field and many people are interested, so we’d rather not discuss our ideas in detail at the moment,” Uhlmann said. He revealed, however, that they will look at “almost invisibility.” What happens when conditions aren’t quite the mathematical ideal? And what would be the consequence of cutting tiny peepholes into the cloak?

Applications for invisibility are endless. The military would have obvious interests. Surgeons might like metal instruments that were invisible to magnetic fields, so they could take magnetic resonance images on the operating table. Someday we might even be able to cloak buildings to make them invisible to seismic waves, Uhlmann said. But these applications — and any teenagers wanting to hide from their parents, employees wanting to occasionally disappear, or would-be thieves — will have to wait a few more years.

Uhlmann recently submitted the paper “Full wave invisibility of active devices at all frequencies” to the journal Communications in Mathematical Physics. Coauthors are Allan Greenleaf at the University of Rochester, a longtime collaborator; Matti Lassas at the Helsinki University of Technology, a former post-doctoral researcher at UW; and Yaroslav Kurylev at Loughborough University in the UK.