Photo Courtesy of Millburn Township Public Schools

Millburn High School senior Alexander Lin, a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search for 2015, stands with Millburn's science research teacher Paul Gilmore.

Millburn High School senior Alexander Lin was named as one of 40 national finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search 2015, a program of the Society for Science and the Public. Lin is one of four students from New Jersey to attain finalist status this year.

Finalists receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C. from March 5 to 11, where they will undergo final judging, display their work to the public, meet with notable scientists, and compete for just over $1 million in awards, including the three top awards of $150,000 each.

These finalists were chosen from the select pool of 300 high school seniors named semifinalists in the Intel Science Talent Search 2015 on Jan. 7, and more than 1,800 entrants based on the originality and creativity of their scientific research, as well as their achievement and leadership both inside and outside the classroom.

As one of this year's 300 semifinalists Lin and Millburn High School were awarded $1,000 each.

This year's finalist projects are distributed among 17 categories, including animal sciences, behavioral and social sciences, biochemistry, bioengineering, bioinformatics and genomics, chemistry, computer science, earth and planetary science, engineering, environmental science, materials science, mathematics, medicine and health, microbiology, physics, plant science, and space science.

Lin's project is titled, "Approximating the Maximum k-Colorable Subgraph Problem on Dotted Interval Graphs." He was named a semifinalist in the 2014 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology this past December.

Lin's research has been done under the auspices of Millburn High School's science research course, a 3-year program that begins in the sophomore year and offers students an opportunity to perform scientific research and participate in the community of science research.

After identifying a research topic, and obtaining a mentor at an outside university or research lab, students must write a 20-page scientific paper The course is taught by science research teachers Paul Gilmore and Gina Cocchiaro. Lin and Gilmore will be recognized at the Monday, Feb. 9 Board of Education meeting.

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Student is finalist in nat'l science contest

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Newswise February 5, 2015 As medical marijuana becomes increasingly accepted, there is growing interest in its use for children and adolescents with developmental and behavioral problems such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a review in the February Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, the official journal of the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.

That's despite a lack of studies showing any clinical benefit of cannabis for young patients with these disorderswhereas evidence strongly suggests harmful effects of regular marijuana use in the developing brain. Scott Hadland, MD, MPH, John R. Knight, MD, and Sion Kim Harris, PhD of Boston Children's Hospital write, "Given the current scarcity of data, cannabis cannot be safely recommended for the treatment of developmental or behavioral disorders at this time."

"Children with severe ASD cannot communicate verbally and may relate to the world through loud, repetitive shrieking and hand-flapping that is very disruptive to their families and all those around them," comments Dr Knight, the study's senior author. "So my heart goes out to families who are searching for something, anything to help their child," he continues. "But in using medicinal marijuana they may be trading away their child's future for short-term symptom control."

Known Harmful Effects of Marijuana in Children and Teens... The review was prompted by rapid changes in US marijuana policy, with marijuana being permitted for medical use in many jurisdictions and legalized in others. "Amidst this political change, patients and families are increasingly asking whether cannabis and its derivatives may have therapeutic utility for a number of conditions, including developmental and behavioral disorders in children and adolescents," according to Dr Knight and colleagues.

They review the important pharmacological properties of cannabis and related compounds, along with data on marijuana use in the population. Adolescents with developmental and behavioral disordersespecially ADHDmay be predisposed to early and heavier substance use. Meanwhile, a growing body of evidence links cannabis to "long-term and potentially irreversible physical, neurocognitive, psychiatric, and psychosocial adverse outcomes."

Over time, regular cannabis use by adolescents has been linked to persistent declines in intelligence quotient and increased risk of addiction, major depression, anxiety disorders, and psychotic thinking. The adolescent brain may be uniquely susceptible to the harmful effects of marijuana, reflecting the role of the cannabinoid receptors in normal neurodevelopment. Brain abnormalities in adults who are heavy marijuana users may have their origin in neurodevelopmental changes starting in adolescence.

...With Little Data on Benefits in Developmental or Behavioral Disorders While cannabis has been proposed to have a broad range of clinical benefits in adults, "At this time, good evidence is almost entirely lacking for its application in pediatric developmental and behavioral conditions," Dr Knight and coauthors write.

"The scant research that we have on adolescent use is alarming enough," says Leonard Rappaport MD, MS, Chief of the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital and past president of the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. "But we are really moving into entirely new territory when we consider giving cannabis to children as that has not even been done in neurotypical children, let alone those with developmental or behavioral problems."

Excerpt from:
Medical Marijuana for Children with Developmental and Behavioral Disorders?

Feb. 5, 2015

As scientific controversies objecting to vaccinations, denying climate change swirl through old and new media, Bruce Lewenstein, chair of the Department of Science and Technology Studies and professor of communication, will moderate a panel, Public Engagement for Scientists: Realities, Risks and Rewards, to kick off the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2015 annual meeting to be held Feb. 12-16 in San Jose, California.

Lewensteins Feb. 12 panel discussion will be streamed liveat 4 p.m. EST.

Communicating science from the research laboratory through television, radio, print media, social media and other forms of outreach has become a major topic at AAAS meetings in the last several years. The sessions about science communication have been incredibly popular. The rooms are so crowded with researchers, that they regularly overflow into the hallways, said Lewenstein, who expects a sold-out crowd of 600 people with perhaps hundreds more watching the online stream.

Session panelists includeElizabeth Babcock, chief public engagement officer, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco; Heidi Ballard, associate professor of education, University of California, Davis; Anthony Dudo, assistant professor, University of Texas at Austin; and Nalini Nadkarni, professor, University of Utah.

Other Cornell faculty who will be at the AAAS meeting:

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Cornell sending strong contingent to annual science meeting

In December a well-argued letter to The Irish Times by David Walsh took the field of womens studies to task for promoting the ideological notion that gender is a social construct in the face of scientific evidence that biology plays a prominent role

Every social scientist I ever met was liberal-left. This uniformity always struck me as very odd. I accidentally came across a new, rigorous academic analysis of this question in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. The authors are worried by recent problems in social psychology research, including fraud and problems with replicating results. The article, by Jos Duarte and others (none of whom are conservative), is called Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science and is easily accessed through Google.

In the US population as a whole, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is 33 per cent to 66 per cent, but 58-66 per cent of professors of social science are liberals and only 5-8 per cent are conservatives. In social psychology, 90 per cent of professors are liberals and 8 per cent are conservatives. On the other hand, the liberal to conservative ratio is about 50-50 in engineering, computer science, health sciences, business and technical fields.

Psychology has robustly demonstrated the value of diversity of viewpoints for improving creativity, discovery and problem-solving. The authors conclude that lack of political diversity undermines much social-psychological science by embedding liberal values into the research questions and methods, by steering researchers away from politically unpalatable research topics and results, and encouraging conclusions to be drawn that mischaracterise liberals and conservatives. Of course, homogeneously conservative social sciences would face the same problem as homogeneously left-liberal social sciences.

Increasing political diversity would improve the quality of social-psychological research by reducing biases such as confirmation bias (favouring evidence that confirms ones preconceptions) and by allowing dissenting minorities to challenge the majority thinking.

Although lack of political diversity does not threaten the validity of social science research in many areas, it does pose problems in areas relating to the political concerns of the left, for example race, gender, environmentalism, power and inequality, and also in areas where conservatives are studied themselves, such as in moral and political psychology.

To illustrate a typical problem that can arise, the authors cite a social psychology study that found people high in social-dominance orientation are more likely to make unethical decisions, and people high in right-wing authoritarianism are more likely to support their leaders unethical decisions. However, typical examples of decisions defined as unethical in the study included not taking a female colleagues side in a sexual harassment case and a worker placing the wellbeing of his company over unspecified environmental harm attributed to company operations. In both examples insufficient information was presented about the case to make a considered judgment. In other words, the liberal values of feminism and environmentalism were embedded in the ethical assumptions. Embedding ideological values in measures is dangerous to science.

Another example cited concerns about the scope and direction of prejudice. Social scientists have long considered prejudice and intolerance to be the province of the political right. But some researchers noted most studies of prejudice looked at low-status and left-leaning targets. New research designs were devised to include both left-leaning and right-leaning targets, and the results showed that prejudice is potent both on the left and the right: conservatives are prejudiced against stereotypically left-leaning targets (for example, African-Americans) and liberals are prejudiced against stereotypically right-leaning targets (for example, religious Christians).

In December a well-argued letter to The Irish Times by David Walsh took the field of womens studies to task for promoting the ideological notion that gender is a social construct in the face of scientific evidence that biology plays a prominent role.

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Why are so many social scientists left-liberal?

By Rachel Raczka

Boston.com Staff | 02.03.15 | 3:28 PM

As many of us enter day two of working from home this week, a fun new study out of the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology reveals that isolation may drive many social animals including humans into utter despair and an early death.

Co-conducted by scientists at Switzerlands University of Lausanne and Japans University of Tokyo, the study examined the behavior patterns of carpenter ants when placed in colonies of varying sizes: 10 ants, two ants, alone but with a few larvae to hang out with, or all alone. The scientists tracked the ants actions and found that the solitary ants were much more active that their social counterparts, continuously walking without any rest, as one of the studys co-authors described.

The extra exercise, combined with the ants socially-inclined digestive system, may have proved fatal. Carpenter ants collect and store food in something called a crop to bring back to the nest and share with the rest of the colony. With no nest to bring food back to, single ants retained the undigested excess (gross) and were unable to get enough energy to keep up with their increased activity.

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Ultimately, the lonely little ants found themselves with an energy imbalance. On average they died within six days, a drastic difference from the social ants average lifespan of 66 days. Notably, when all ants, single or in groups, werent fed anything at all, there was no difference in their (short, hungry) lifespans.

So what does this mean for us humans? No, we dont have to fear that our (non-existent) second stomach will starve us to death if we dont have friends, family, and cohabitants with which to interact, but the scientists behind the study say its a good reminder of how social patterns directly affect our health.

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Science Says Your Social Life May Be More Important Than You Think