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Monday, May 13, 2013

A Fitting Farewell from Chris Hadfield

For those who haven't been following Chris Hadfield on Facebook and Twitter, in his five months as commander of the ISS, he has given the public a rare look into the goings on in space. Communicating with classrooms, testing out people's theories, and sending down daily images of the glory of Earth are just a few of the ways he made his journey special. He is due to arrive back on Earth tonight and to commemorate, he's left us with this wonderful send off.



Video from Chris Hadfield's YouTube Channel

Thursday, March 14, 2013

A Refreshing Take Part II

After I published my post on the billboard in Lima, Peru that draws water from the air and purifies it for public use, I was able to speak with Alejandro Aponte, the Creative Director at Mayo DraftFCB (Referred to as Mayo Advertising previously). Alejandro and his partner, Juan Donalisio were approached by UTEC to come up with an idea that would entice applications to the school. While they had prime advertising real-estate on the Panamericana Highway, a direct route to summer fun at the beach, they needed an innovative idea. Together the team landed on the water system, but when they presented it to UTEC, Mayo DraftFCB wasn't sure how feasible this would be. Lucky for them, UTEC jumped on the project and according to Alejandro, "What worried us most was that we could not find that kind of technology, but after a lot of research and bringing together the right people, we made it."

Alejandro is excited about the future of the project and what systems like this billboard could mean for the community. "The great thing about this system is that it only requires atmospheric humidity to be at least 50%, which in Peru we are lucky to have so in many geographical areas."

With the early success of the billboard, and the vast media attention it's garnered, perhaps we will see many more billboards like this one cropping up in the future.

Check out this promo video in English produced by Mayo DraftFCB


Thursday, March 7, 2013

A Refreshing Take on Advertising--This Billboard Gives Back

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An advertising campaign for the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima, Peru aims not only to make them a household name, but to show future students what their innovations are capable of. UTEC worked with Mayo Advertising to create the "Ingenuity in Action" campaign which features a billboard on the Panamericana Highway that draws water from the air, purifies it, and delivers it to a faucet at its base for public use.


Lima, situated on a coastal desert, receives only around 1.5 centimeters of rain a year. Nine months of the year however, the city is covered with a blanket of dense fog as the moisture makes its way from the ocean, inland to the rainforests. Access to clean water is an ongoing problem for the 9 million residents living in and around Lima. Many reasons are to blame for rampant water insecurity, from mismanagement by private water companies to the reduction of the glacial water supply. People who are currently not reached by the public pumped water system must have water trucked in, which is often contaminated and costs residents ten times what the wealthy districts pay for tap water. With some families only bringing in $40 a month in earnings, the $10 a month that it can cost for water makes it nearly impossible to get ahead. There is a need for innovative solutions for providing potable water, which is what makes the school's campaign so eye catching.

The goal of the campaign is to draw the attention of prospective students to UTEC. Director of UTEC promotions Jessica Ruas Quartara says, "This highway billboard reveals the university education proposal, which is develop the ingenuity and talent of our students through a teaching based practice. The objective is to awake the engineering vocation by making it more attractive to young people, and to turn them into high qualified professionals who can use science, technology and innovation for sustainable development of Peru." The billboard has gotten plenty of attention, not just from prospective students, but from the greater community as well.


The billboard operates in two stages. First, as moisture-heavy air blows by the panel, condensers cool and trap the water. Next, a series of filtrations purify the water and bring it to a 25 gallon reservoir. To ensure the safety of the water, it is filtered with antistatic agents, activated carbon, minerals and reverse osmosis. UV lamps are the final purification measure. Electronic sensors keep track of water levels so that the reservoir is never filled to excess and helps prevent shortages. A computer system allows control signals to be transmitted wirelessly, lessening the need for dangerous highway maintenance. Local residents have flocked to the novelty, and in the three months the billboard has been operational, 9,450 liters of water have been delivered to the people.

Photo Flickr: Dragonwoman

Pulling vaporized water from the sky is not a completely novel idea for the area. Over the last decade, two biologists, Dr. Kai Tiedemann and Anne Lummerich started the Green Desert Project in the outskirts of Lima to provide water for crop irrigation in young communities. Rather than using electricity to condense the water from the air, they designed "fog catchers;" netted panels that allow water droplets to accumulate out of the fog. The tiny droplets aggregate until larger drops form and drip into gutters for collection. You've probably seen this phenomenon occurring on a spiderweb on a dewy morning. Original designs could bring down 150 gallons of water out of the air on very foggy days. Newer designs can net more than 600 gallons in a day. Several families can be served by one of these irrigation systems, and the project aims to eliminate the need for outside water for farming. Overall these systems are relatively inexpensive, and other aid groups have had success building smaller fog catchers for individual families for just $800.

These nets are a game changer for the poor communities outside of the city, yet these irrigation systems don't purify the water for consumption. The water can be filtered and boiled, but it isn't the same as the free-flowing drinking water the billboard system provides. Herein lies the problem. How can the billboard system be adapted to be cost effective in poorer areas?  Can these two ideas be combined, or is there a way to tweak the billboard to be used with less electricity or solar power?  The prospects are exciting, though it's still unclear how practical this system really is.


Some relief will come to the residents of Lima over the next three years. Last month, the government pledged to sink $3.1 billion into improvements in the water and sanitation infrastructure within the city. 148 new projects aim to extend pumped water and updated sewer systems to the outlying areas. Though it's unclear whether UTEC will receive funding from these plans for more billboards, perhaps in the near future a government official will find himself on the Panamericana Highway and a blue and white billboard will catch his eye.   




Friday, March 1, 2013

Help Fight the Sequester Mess

A nation stands divided. Many worry that it will never be united again. The government no longer functions efficiently, and the President, though embattled, still addresses his people with pride and more importantly, hope.

This is not 2013. It's 1863; March 3, 1863 to be precise. On this day, in the course of 24 hours, the Act of Incorporation is presented, passed through the House and Senate, and signed by Abraham Lincoln, creating the US National Academy of Sciences.

The American Civil War was arguably not a scientific war. Although new essential technologies emerged, the need for physicists, chemists, and biologists was not apparent to the US or Confederate governments. Even with the attitude that scientific discovery was superfluous to the country's goals, some elected officials recognized it's importance to America's future and many famous scientific organizations were developed around this time. Strong voices called out. demanding that science have a place, and NAS, AAAS, and the Smithsonian Institute were formed.

Here we stand as a country, 150 years later, watching funding for science slashed by the sequester. The public's attitude has only become more favorable toward scientific advancement, not just in the US but worldwide. Research being conducted in industry, at academic institutions, and in our classrooms has permeated nearly every area of our lives. From medicine, to defense, down to the food we eat and the ways we communicate, scientific thought, research, and development is essential to our way of life.

Less than a month ago, the science community cheered as President Obama addressed the nation:

"If we want to make the best products, we also have to invest in the best ideas. Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy. Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s; developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs; devising new material to make batteries ten times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation. Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race."

In a Pew Research Center survey, 77% of those polled wish to increase or keep science funding at current levels. Even with the party divide, only 32% of Republicans polled asked for cuts to science funding. Yet, starting today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) alone will see a cut of $1.6 billion. The National Science Foundation (NSF),  the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and NASA together will lose $900 million. This means fewer grants will be awarded, many grants previously awarded will no longer be honored, and fewer jobs will be created in the coming years. Even if the sequester is resolved in the coming months, the damage it's caused will affect the science world for years.

Even scientists with excellent grant scores are in jeopardy. The grant pool is being called a lottery by some. Funding shortages are nothing new, and at both the NIH and the NSF, funding rates were at all time lows last year. Although cuts due to the sequester only represent around 5% of the budgets for these organizations, they've been running on shoe-string budgets for a decade.

The unintended consequence is that the United States will cut its innovators first. Something most people don't know about science funding is that it's not always fair. Just as a company will hand a pink slip to a new employee in favor of keeping someone with a proven track record, grant awards often go to the labs with the most promising history, and not necessarily the labs with the most exciting ideas. Because funds are so limited, grant reviewers require preliminary data showing that your idea will work, a small guarantee that they are putting their money in the right place. As a brand new Ph.D., this can be the biggest mountain to climb. How do you collect data to prove that your idea will work when you don't have the money to test it?

For many Americans, these problems aren't even on the radar, and because many of the consequences are long-term, most of the public won't have first hand experience with them until sometime in the future. There will come a day when your father's cancer treatment is revoked because the clinical trial was cancelled, or you contract a new strain of flu that could have been prevented if the lab creating new vaccines hadn't faced cutbacks. By this point however, the damage will be very deep.

Even in our broader communities, the roots of science will be stifled. Wisconsin alone stands to lose $40.8 million for K-12 education. The National Park Service will need to reduce hours to compensate for losses. Undergraduate financial aid will take a hit at the UW-Madison as well. All across the country, our future innovators won't even have the opportunity show us what they can do. Science infiltrates every bit of our lives, right down to the way we think, and the sequester threatens that way life.

Please help to fight the sequester by writing to your senators and representatives.

If you live here in Wisconsin

Tammy Baldwin
Ron Johnson

If you live elsewhere in the US, you can enter your zip code here and it will provide contact info for you:

http://act.secondtonone.org/6059/stop-sequestration/

For more information about how the sequester relates to science:

Looming Government Cuts "Unmitigated Disaster" for Life Sciences
Starvation Diet
Science agencies prepare for cuts
AAAS Estimation of R&D Cuts

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Wake Up Call


ScienceOnline Logo candy
It's been half a year since I found myself writing a blog post. My inspiration lies with ScienceOnline2013. Self-described, this conference in Raleigh, North Carolina is "Conversation, Community, & Connections at the Intersection of Science & the Web." I would describe it as meeting the family you never knew you had.

The travel gods shined on me as I made my way across the country through all the storms. Although I'd had many online conversations with other attendees, I really had never met almost any of them face to face. It can be pretty intimidating walking into a room full of (or sharing a hotel room with) a bunch of strangers. It can also be a bit strange knowing who someone else is before you even say hello, especially when no one knows you.

I found SciOctopus!
Yes, I was a newcomer. But as it turns out, so were about half of the people there. For me, this made things easier. You make fast friends when everyone is looking for someone to talk to. Actually, even seasoned veterans of ScienceOnline were just as welcoming. Part of this due to how the conference is structured. All titles are stripped when you walk through the door and all that remains is your first name and your Twitter handle. No, this doesn't make everyone anonymous, but it does make everyone seem more approachable. Why not talk to Fraser Cain, Carl Zimmer, or Maryn McKenna? During the sessions, everyone gets a voice. The morning Converge sessions were the only times when there was a simple speaker/audience format. The rest of the conference was divided into workshops and discussions.

I most enjoyed the sessions on combining art and science (there were many) as well as a session on imposter syndrome. I also liked the instant feedback from the crowd on Twitter. Never would I have thought that people on their phones and laptops during a talk would be an awesome thing and not incredibly rude. I very quickly became one of those people. Sorry to anyone following me on Twitter that wasn't expecting a #scio13 tweet storm.

Overall, my experience was fantastic!  I hope to go again next year, and maybe even moderate a session.  I saw everything from dancing lemurs, to star parties, to famous science writers rocking out to Gangnam Style. I've never been to a conference where I've had too many dinner invitations because everyone was so welcoming, or to a conference where the attendees are so excited to see each other, they chat through the night and you find them bleary-eyed and still in the lobby the next morning. I met some of my heroes, made some new friends, and I learned a ton about all the cool stuff being done for science communication.

North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

Some tips for newcomers:

No Fear. Everyone is there to have a good time!

Get a smartphone. Yes, I might be the only one left without one, but seriously, don't be like me.

Find a friend. I found out just before I left that two former colleagues of mine were also attending. It really helped having someone there who knew me. After the 156th time you say who you are and where you're from, it feels good to just be familiar with someone. The three of us didn't stick together often, but at the end of the day, it was great to check in.

Put yourself out there. My best night was tagging along with the oceans group for dinner. It was a random Twitter invitation that turned into a night of laughter.

Something I wish would improve for next year:

Discussion moderation. I know I'm not the only one who felt things in this department were a little helter-skelter. Karyn Traphagen even wrote a response piece about it here. Although I don't want the moderators to head the discussion, they do need to guide it. I was pretty frustrated when someone would ask a question and rather than moving on to someone who would answer it, the moderator would just hand the mic to the next speaker, regardless of it being a different direction of thought. What ended up happening is that questions would never be answered, or topics would never be developed. When the discussion is all over the place, not much gets accomplished by the session. In some sessions it was a bit like being a teacher in a kindergarten classroom.

Teacher: "What letter does the word 'Cat' begin with? Yes, Jimmy?"
Jimmy: "I have a brown dog."
Teacher: "Okay then."

I would love to see more direction from the moderators. They should shepherd the discussion, even if not by providing their own food for thought.


News Flask! Cookie
SciO13 was a wake up call for me. If science communication is what I want to do, I need to be online: blogging, reading, commenting. My previous job left me exhausted and joys and sorrows in life made things complicated. Now I feel like I have a handle on things (sort of) and I will be posting at least once a week. I'm sure that my blog will take a turn toward science education, since that's what I'm working on in real life, but there will still be plenty of research reporting, book reviews, and loads of links to people doing cool stuff.