Do you know an early career scientist who has demonstrated excellence in engaging the public on scientific topics? Go nominate her or him for the AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science:

A monetary prize of $5,000, a commemorative plaque, complimentary registration to the AAAS Annual Meeting, and reimbursement for reasonable hotel and travel expenses to attend the AAAS Annual Meeting to receive the prize are given to the recipient.For the purposes of this award, public engagement activities are defined as the individual’s active participation in efforts to engage with the public on science- and technology-related issues and promote meaningful dialogue between science and society.

The award will be given at the AAAS Annual Meeting.

Details about eligibility and the submission process here.

Every three years the Librarian of Congress reviews the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and James H. Billington’s review just expanded digital freedom with this year’s ruling of new exemptions to the copyright law.

Jailbreak that iPhone

First and foremost, Billington ruled that it’s not against the law to jailbreak a phone (the practice of working around the device’s security system and taking more direct control of it). The Electronic Frontier Foundation lobbied hard for this, particularly with the iPhone in mind. Because Apple keeps tight reins on the device—offering only AT&T phone service and acting as gatekeeper for what apps can be added—many people had taken to jailbreaking the phone.

About 4 million iPhone and iPod Touch units had been jailbroken as of last August, and were accessing apps from a sort of black-market storefront called Cydia, the marketplace’s founder told Wired. The store is a haven for many developers that Apple, the gatekeeper to its App Store, has ignored or turned away [Los Angeles Times].

The ruling may be a victory for free use, but that doesn’t mean you should go out and jailbreak that iPhone straight away. Apple, which has staunchly opposed the legalization of jailbreaking, says it leaves the phone open to attacks and the user without access to software upgrades. Oh, and by the way, Steve Jobs and company will still void your warranty if you do it.

Circumventing copyright protection isn’t a crime—sometimes

Billington also ruled that breaking the copyright protection on DVDs is not, by itself, illegal. It’s what you do with it that matters.

College professors and students, documentary filmmakers, and those making noncommercial videos, are now able to circumvent the copyright protection on DVDs in order to use short clips from those DVDs in new works “for the purpose of criticism or comment” [PC World].

Simultaneously, a federal appeals court ruled much to the same effect in a case involving MGE UPS Inc., which makes backup power devices. The company sued after hackers figured out how to bypass a dongle system MGE developed, but the court dismissed the case saying that the act of hacking the system is not itself a violation of the law.

In other words, just circumventing the technology isn’t enough to get into trouble with the DMCA. The circumvention must lead to some violation of copyright [Ars Technica].

Video games and e-books

The rules on e-books have been updated, too. Many of them have restrictions on the read-aloud option, which book publishers wanted so that your e-book couldn’t double as an audio book. The Library of Congress made it legal to work around that restriction, but only if no audio book exists for that title (no matter what it costs).

And hacking video games is now OK, too, so long as you’re doing it for “good faith testing” of possible security problems.

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Image: Apple

Particle physicists hunting for the Higgs boson reported their latest findings yesterday at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris. The big two–Europe’s Large Hadron Collider and Fermilab’s Tevatron Collider (in Illinois)–gave updates, and other conference buzz included talk of a new facility, the International Linear Collider, which may one day give physicists a cleaner look at the other colliders’ results.

Large Hadron Collider — More Detailed Models Help the Search

Currently operating at 7 Tera electron Volts (TeV), the Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Though electrical malfunctions hindered the collider in 2008, now LHC scientists report that they have made up for lost time: finding in months, what took the Tevatron, with its 2 TeV collisions, decades.

“The scientific community thought it would take one, maybe two years to get to this level, but it happened in three months,” said Guy Wormser, a top French physicist and chairman of the conference.[AFP]

As Symmetry (a Fermilab/SLAC publication) notes, these findings are more than a test of strength–or a simple retracing of the Tevatron’s footsteps. LHC physicists have to show that their facility can reproduce the results other machines have already seen, if one day they are to be sure that their data indicate something new.

As also reported by Symmetry, because the LHC is running at energies 3.5 times the Tevatron’s, these higher energies allow LHC physicists to refine their previous understandings, teasing out details impossible to see at lower energies. Such details may help physicists refine their search for the Higgs, the particle that presumably gives mass to all other particles.

CERN, the European umbrella organization that runs the LHC, says that these tests show the collider is ready for that search.

“Rediscovering our ‘old friends’ in the particle world shows that the LHC experiments are well prepared to enter new territory” said CERN’s Director-General Rolf Heuer. “It seems that the Standard Model is working as expected. Now it is down to nature to show us what is new.”[CERN]

Tevatron — Telling Physicists Where Not to Look

Meanwhile, Tevatron researchers have narrowed the expected mass of the missing particle. The diagram above shows the expected mass ranges, and those excluded by the new Tevatron data and previous Fermilab experiments. For reference, the proton has a mass of a little less than one GeV/c^2.

[P]hysicists’ standard model of the fundamental particle does not predict how much the Higgs itself will weigh. So scientists must go searching for it. Previous experiments show that it probably has a mass between 114 and 185 giga-electron volts (GeV), or 121 and 197 times the mass of the proton. Last year, experimenters working with D0 (aka DZero) and the Tevatron’s other particle detector, CDF [Collider Detector at Fermilab], took a chunk out of that possible range, reporting that the Higgs most likely does not weigh between 162 GeV and 166 GeV. Now, they’ve widened that “exclusion window” to between 158 GeV and 175 GeV.[Science Now]

Given such results, physicists have submitted a proposal to Fermilab asking that the Tevatron’s life be extended beyond 2011 to 2014, but the lab can’t guarantee that given its limited resources and other ongoing experiments and new projects.

Currently CERN officials have scheduled an LHC shutdown for 15 months also in 2011, which might give an operating Tevatron a chance to find the Higgs, Robert Roser of the Tevatron’s CDF detector told The Guardian.

“The LHC won’t be able to say anything about the Higgs particle until well into 2013. If we can run until 2014, we should be able to see the Higgs boson whatever mass it has,” said Roser. [The Guardian]

International Linear Collider — A Future, Cleaner Look?

Given results from the LHC and Fermilab, scientists continue to discuss new colliders, such as the International Linear Collider. Unlike the Tevatron and the LHC, which spin particles in a circle and then collide them, the International Linear Collider will force electrons and their antimatter-pair, positrons, to face off in a straight, approximately 20-mile long tube. Researchers say the collider would complement ongoing research at the LHC, by giving scientists a less powerful but cleaner look at the data, in part because the linear setup will ensure that particles that didn’t smash in the initial collision won’t continue circulating through the detector, Popular Science reports. They hope to start building the detector in 2012, but it will require international funding, the AP reports, amounting to $12.85 billion. Barry Barish, director of the proposed collider, told the AP:

“If we are going to build an ambitious machine, then it’s got to be a global machine.”[AP]

A video describing the ILC is available, here.

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Images: CERN, Fermilab

Graphing variables is a critical skill in science. If something depends on something else — like the speed of sounds depends on air density, or the surface gravity of an object depends on its size — then if you plot the two things on a graph, you should see a pattern. The result is a line, or a curve. If the two things don’t depend on each other, you get a random collection of dots: a scatter plot.

About a hundred years ago, two astronomers plotted the brightness of stars against their color (from blue to red) and what they found was amazing: a clear connection between the two! In fact, stars fell into several groups, and over the years we’ve learned about why that happens. Most stars are stable, like the Sun, and fall into the Main Sequence of the plot. Some are old, some young, some dying, some dead. And they all have their place in what we now call the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram, or H-R diagram for short. It’s one of the most useful tools astronomers have ever created.

And now my friend Stuart who runs Astronomy Blog has done it one better: he’s created an H-R diagram of media stars. It’s awesome:

That’s really funny, and I wish I had thought of it. The vertical axis is fame, as denoted by Google results, and the horizontal axis is peer-reviewed papers. I’m actually only first author on I think two papers, but I was listed as author on a lot due to my work on Hubble. So I do OK on this diagram. I note that Brian Cox is more luminous than me, but then, he’s an actual rock star. If there were a branch for white main sequence stars, he and I would be in a dead heat.

Next up, I hope: a space-time diagram showing warping due to massive astronomers.

Today’s sewage is tomorrow’s rocket fuel–at least, according to Stanford researchers. Raw sewage has long posed a problem for scientists who aim to get rid of it. That’s because the chemical byproduct of the bacteria that break down waste is nitrous oxide–a greenhouse gas also known as laughing gas.

The proposed solution? Using the nitrous oxide produced by waste as rocket fuel, of course, according to Popular Science:

“[The] rocket thruster, which was designed for use in spacecraft, can consume the excess nitrous oxide to produce heat. In a Stanford press release, [researcher] Cantwell says the nitrous oxide can heat an engine to almost 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and expel nitrogen and oxygen at 5,000 feet per second.”

Hot oxygen and nitrogen are far less harmful to the environment than nitrous oxide, and the methane that also is produced can help power other wastewater plants, the researchers say. This method, in which bacteria break down the waste in the absence of oxygen, is faster and cheaper than letting sewage decompose in an oxygenated environment, in which “wastewater treatment plants pump oxygen into a roiling mix of raw sewage, to encourage good bacteria to break down organic matter.”

So the next time you head to the bathroom, remember that your contribution could one day prove valuable to rocket scientists. Just another reason to flush with pride.

Image: flickr / ecsuecsu

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Colonel Quaritch and his exoskeleton from Avatar

Science fiction is sometimes a playground to explore what it would be like to have a different body. Most recently, in Avatar and Iron Man 2 we saw people joined to exoskeletons, which are being developed in real life for the military and for rehabilitation. The biomechanics of these exoskeletons are a close mimic of our own but with much more power or size. In Avatar, we also witnessed people experience the novelty of inhabiting a three-meter-tall blue body with movable ears and a neural interface that conveniently doubles as a tail.

But why wait for the shapeshifting future? Corsets and girdles are the best known types of “foundation garments” or “shapewear,” but for me at least, they are more Jane Eyre than Madonna, despite the latter’s use of them in her performances over the past twenty years.

For those who actually use shapewear on a day-to-day basis, the most common types must be the padded bra and shoulder pads. But the past week highlighted two new ways of changing the shape of our body. The first was in a Wall Street Journal article by Rachel Dodes on padded panties that promise to give Beyoncé-level gluteus maximi to the large behind-inclined; the second is from Sylvester Stallone’s comment that “action movies changed radically when it became possible to Velcro your muscles on.”

Three cheers to Stallone for bringing male shapewear to our attention. Besides those sometimes unsettling codpieces we see when we watch ballerinos perform the Nutcracker, it turns out that you can purchase just about as many kinds of shape enhancing undergarments for men–bottoms and tops–as for women. Unlike the “Booty Pops” talked about in the WSJ article, which are available at Walgreens and Bed Bath and Beyoncé Beyond, these are not quite as readily available, however (or so I’m told).

Changing our body and face shape is an old past time, of course but shapewear now seems an especially timely approach as a form of body shaping on the cheap, with no trainer or surgery required. In words that would make the hover-chaired human blimps of Wall-E eat another banana split, these two new types of shapewear have already been tied to freedom from the misery of physical movement. Stallone now realizes that he “didn’t have to go to the gym for all those years,” while Booty Pop’s website celebrates that “No expensive surgery or overpriced trainer required.” This is body-shaping custom-tailored for the calorically abundant and economically depressed times of Homo sedentarius.

The mass embrace of the Booty Pop, to choose my words carefully, hints at a new stance toward the human body as human scaffold. It’s a fitting preamble to the future envisaged by sci-fi, when robotic augmentation or more radical reshaping of our body shape through genetics may come to pass. My personal hope is that I’ll have a chance to be an octopus in some future life, so that I can answer emails with two tentacles while using others for stuffing my clam-hole with deep fried cheese, doing an experiment, and lifting barbells. Or maybe I’ll just get Octobooty Pop instead.

You may be talking and I may be listening, but our brains look strikingly similar.

That’s the conclusion of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. After conducting brain scans of a woman telling a story off the cuff and then of 11 people listening to a recording of her, researchers Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson say they found that the same parts of the brains showed activation at the same time, suggesting a deep connection between talker and listener.

Graduate student Lauren Silbert was the team’s storytelling guinea pig. She recounted tales of high school, like deciding whom to take to prom, while undergoing an fMRI scan.

As Silbert spoke about her prom experience, the same areas lit up in her brain as in the brains of her listeners. In most brain regions, the activation pattern in the listeners’ brains came a few seconds after that seen in Silbert’s brain. But a few brain areas, including one in the frontal lobe, actually lit up before Silbert’s, perhaps representing listeners’ anticipating what she was going to say next, the team says [ScienceNOW].

When the neuroscientists scanned the same listeners while they heard a story in Russian that they couldn’t understand, the coupling of brain regions didn’t show up.

The study certainly comes with caveats: Its sample size is small, and scientists don’t know exactly what causes the synchronization, nor the exact function of the brain regions in question to any more specificity than “language.” But Stephens and Hasson argue that their findings speak to conceptual common ground people must meet to make conversation possible:

“If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us,’” said Hasson. “You’re sharing the same lexical items, grammatical constructs and contextual framework. And this is happening not just abstractly, but literally in the brain” [Wired.com].

The findings leave neuroscientists with a host of directions in which they could go. Hasson says his team’s next step is to go beyond one talker and a bunch of listeners and actually study people engaged in dialogue.

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Image: iStockphoto