I was thrilled to attend this fast-growing conference and get to see great peeps like Sheril K, Darlene Cavalier, Carl Zimmer, Tom Levenson, Isis, SciCurious, Jennifer Ouellette, and many, many more.

I didn’t always attend the panels (and only spoke on one, last minute) but I did have some reflections:

1. Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging – Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette: Hollywood getting into science = definitely cool. But will Hollywood’s ace marketers ever see a real need to court science bloggers to get the word out about films, given the relatively small size of our audiences and the vastness of their ad budgets? Not clear to me how much *we* matter, at least so far.

2. Trust and Critical Thinking – Stephanie Zvan, PZ Myers, Desiree Schell, Greg Laden, Kirsten Sanford. Yes, science on the web is a total mess. But trying to “certify” good/accurate science bloggers, vs. bad/biased ones, is an idea that poses more problems than solutions. And anyway, bloggers aren’t the gold standard of scientific accuracy–scientific societies, the NAS, the IPCC, etc, are. Science bloggers should raise the profile of these organizations, and prop up the sense of their credibility, rather than slapping quality labels on various science blogs.

3. Broader Impact Done Right – Karen James, Kevin Zelnio, Miriam Goldstein, Jeff Ives and Beth Beck. It is exciting to learn how some recipients of federal research grants have built websites that have been effective at public outreach and thus at fulfilling the “broader impacts” stipulation of the grant. However, I seriously doubt that most grant recipients are innovating in these ways. Throwing up a website is not, generally, a good way of publicizing research, unless you really know what you’re doing, and plan to carefully measure your traffic and influence. More generally, why on earth do we have vast scores of different grant recipients all called upon to publicize their individual research projects separately? Why isn’t there some joining of forces, and some decisionmaking about what science really needs highlighting before the public, and which scientific teams are best equipped to do so?

Those are my semi-random opinions from ScienceOnline 2010. I’m so glad that I attended, and hope to do so again next year!

John Boswell, the musician and producer of the wonderful Symphony of Science remixes, has created a new one, the fourth in the series: The Unbroken Thread. It features our man Carl Sagan, with David Attenborough and Jane Goodall. I like this one quite a bit.

I hope Boswell keeps making these. They’re very well done! The music is pleasant, the meaning is deep, and the words, of course, are beautiful and something everyone should hear.

If you hand your grandma an iPod and tell her to “shuffle,” chances are she’ll jump to her feet and start doing a shuffling two-step. So we don’t blame this 13-year-old kid from Britain, who took three whole days to realize that there was a Side B to the tape he popped in his dad’s old Walkman.

In an article for BBC’s magazine, 13-year-old Scott Campbell explains how he traded his iPod for a Sony Walkman for one week. He was clearly shocked by what his dad told him was “the iPod of its day” when it was introduced 30 years ago. He is also mildly appalled at the sheer bulk of the contraption. Scott writes:

From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets. It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.

Scott eventually gets over the Walkman’s bulk, but is annoyed by the “buttons that protrude on the top and on the side.” However, he does come around to the player’s one unique feature.

The Walkman actually has two headphone sockets, labeled A and B, meaning the little music that I have, I can share with friends. To plug two pairs of headphones in to an iPod, you have to buy a special adapter.

See? The eighties weren’t that bad.

Related Content:
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Image: Wikipedia

The Science of Kissing Gallery is now live thanks to our talented colleagues at Discover!

This week’s kiss comes from reader Chad Gardner and I can’t help but smile at such a happy couple! Submit your original photo or artwork to the gallery here and remember to include relevant links to blogs and events.

This is phenomenal footage, showing what an eagle sees as it flies courtesy a very small and light camera attached to the bird.

Wow. I have to find a copy of that whole show. That’s really amazing footage!

Tip o’ the flight feathers to Fark.

UPDATE:  SOLVED!

By Rob at 12:30 CDT

Ah, another Saturday; another riddle.  I have something nice for you to ponder today.

You remember the rules, right?  Don’t forget after you solve the riddle to hang around long enough to give me your choice of subject for my next blog post.

Are you ready?  Okay… without further ado:

telescopes

This is a single object, but it is not one of a kind.

There has been a great deal written about this object, in works of both fact and fiction.

It is visible to the naked eye.

This object had a violent beginning.

Mt St Helens  USGS

It was well-known to prehistoric man.

The more we know about this object, the more mysterious and interesting it becomes.

You know a lot about this object; you’ve been learning about it your whole life.

Do you know what it is?

I’m in the comment section, so pop over and tell me what you think.

I haven’t done a Caturday post in awhile, but I found an old photo with a story I wanted to share.

In 2009 I filmed a documentary for the show "Engineering the Universe" (this was with the same crew that helped me Kill A Planet). We wanted to make a scale model of the solar system that people could instantly grasp, so we went to the Denver Broncos’ Mile High Stadium to use the football field there. We put the Sun on one end and Pluto at the other… but I won’t spoil it. It’ll air eventually!

Anyway, as we walked onto the field through the corridor between bleachers, this cutie was guarding the way:

But what was she guarding? If you look down on the right near the end of the corridor, you’ll see a blue metal door ajar with a green bin in front of it. I saw some movement, so I peered in… and got a surprise.

I guess Guard Cat was actually Mama Guard Cat! She was very skittish, but the kittens were friendly and adorable. The whole crew wanted to take them home, but we decided they had a pretty good life right here. I’m sure they get fed, and had plenty of rodents and such to choose from. The stadium is huge and no doubt is the cat equivalent of a food court.

Happy Caturday!

The walls are alive… with sophisticated sensors that can sniff out potential terrorists, according to Popular Science:

Researchers at brain trust Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing andErgonomics (FKIE) in Wachtberg, Germany have developed a network of “chemical noses” that can not only smell chemicals hidden on a person, but also identify the carrier as he or she moves through a crowded space.

This means that someone entering an airport with individual chemical components, that can be used to make an explosive later, can be tracked right from the door itself.

Sensitive sensors located in walls would “sniff” out the chemicals, triggering a discreet security alarm. The sequence of triggered alarms would allow security personnel to determine which direction the chemical-carrying person was moving, and a software program would zoom in on one individual in the crowd. Cameras all over the airport would track the suspect as he moves and security could then apprehend the person well before he/she reaches the crowded security checkpoints.

Here’s how the Hazardous Material Localization and Person Tracking (HAMLeT for short) system works, according to researcher Wolfgang Koch:

The system involves a network of highly sensitive smell sensors that follow an explosives trail. There are oscillating crystals on the sensor and whenever the electronic noses capture chemical molecules, their oscillation frequency changes. The precise nature of the change is different for different substances.

In an experiment with the German Armed Forces, the system accurately zeroed in on five “terrorists” carrying hidden explosives. The scientists are now working on refining the prototype, so there are no false alarms.

However, there is no mention of the dilemma faced by particularly smelly people. What if your deodorant or aftershave contained some sort of chemical that could also be used to terrorize old ladies and kids on a plane? Our suggestion? Don’t stand too close to the walls.

Related Content:
Discoblog: German Activists Protest Body Scanners By Stripping Down
80beats: 5 Reasons Body Scanners May Not Solve Our Terrorism Problem
80beats: Are Digital Strip Searches Coming Soon To Every Airport Near You?
Discoblog: “What a Wonderful Smell You’ve Discovered!” Device Sniffs Out Dead Bodies
80beats: New Research Points Toward Artificial Nose Based on Human Smell Sensors
DISCOVER: Future Tech discusses the military’s interest in e-noses

Image: iStockphoto

Finally, some potentially hopeful news for military veterans coming home with the lingering psychological scars associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. In a paper for this week’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, a team reports finding that troops wounded in Iraq who were treated with morphine right away were less likely to develop PTSD as a result of the incident.

The study of 696 members of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, all wounded in Iraq from 2004 to 2006, found that 61 percent of those who eventually developed PTSD had been given morphine, usually within an hour after being wounded. But 76 percent of those who did not develop PTSD had been given morphine [Reuters]. Neither the size of the morphine dose nor the severity of injury appeared to make a difference in the morphine effect, the study says.

However, the researchers can’t yet say for sure why morphine might have this moderate protective effect against PTSD—the pain relief itself could help, but there could be indirect effects that contribute, like morphine blocking certain brain receptors that affect how the brain encodes traumatic memories. Therefore, it’s too early to use the study in the field. “I would be very reluctant to suggest any change in clinical practice,” said Troy Lisa Holbrook of the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, who headed the study…. “We need to understand a great deal more how this appears to work” [Washington Post].

At least the study gives medical researchers a place to start. More than 40,000 military personnel have been diagnosed with PTSD since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Defense Department officials say many more surely have the disorder but have not sought treatment. Overall, experts estimate that about 20% of troops and veterans suffer from PTSD, along with 8% of civilians [Los Angeles Times].

Related Content:
80beats: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mouse: Scientists Erase Mice’s Memories
80beats: Can Playing Tetris Ease the Symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress?
DISCOVER: Treating Agony with Ecstasy
Cosmic Variance: Guest Post: Tom Levenson on the Iraq War Suicides And the Material Basis of Consciousness

Image: U.S. Navy: Seabees building a hospital in Iraq

In the past I’ve often been listed as the nominal professor for various graduate students taking “reading courses,” which basically meant “I’m going to be doing my research, but there’s some university requirement that says I must be registered for a certain number of courses each term, so please sign my sheet.” But this term I have two students doing honest-to-goodness reading courses — trying to learn some specific material that isn’t being offered in any structured course offered at the moment.

And — it’s great! Anyone have their favorite suggestions/anti-suggestions for reading courses? The method I chose was the following: the student and I consult on a course of readings for the term. Every week, the student reads through the relevant material. Then once a week we meet, and I sit in my chair and take notes as the student gives an informal lecture, as if they were the professor and I was the student.

Obviously good for me, since I get to brush up on some things that I knew really well some time ago but haven’t thought about recently. And the students get to dig into something they really care about. But the somewhat-unanticipated bonus is that the students get fantastic practice in teaching and giving talks. Since it’s just one-on-one, we can stop at any moment for me to point something out or for them to ask a question. And I can expound upon my theories of chalkboard etiquette, such as the need to speak out loud every single symbol you write on the board. Over the course of a single hour, I can see the student’s presentation skills improve noticeably (from “good” to “even better”).

The world being what it is, it’s not possible for every course to be taught with just one student and one professor. But despite all the very real advances in technology and pedagogical theory, I still believe that the best teaching happens with two people sitting at opposite ends of a log (or equivalent), passing words and ideas back and forth. Everything else is just trying to recreate that magic.

Is it ever OK to lie for skepticism? I would say yes, under very specific circumstances… like when you’re teaching students to think critically:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

[...]

This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention – by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly check new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact.

This is a wonderful story, and I think makes an effective teaching method. And it forces students to pay attention… while making them eager to do so! Read the whole thing; you’ll get a smile from it.

Tip o’ the tweed jacket to Craig Temple.

Rhea peeks from the other side of Titan. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

In this tragic time, it’s good to take a time-out and reflect, and this Cassini image helps me do just that.

About the image from the Cassini website:

Rhea emerges after being occulted by the larger moon Titan.
Mutual event observations such as this one, in which one moon passes close to or in front of another, help scientists refine their understanding of the orbits of Saturn’s moons. Titan is about 1 million kilometers (621,000 miles) from Cassini in this image. Rhea is about 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Cassini.

The high altitude detached haze layer of Titan’s atmosphere is clearly visible in the image. See Titan’s Halo to learn more.
Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemispheres of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) and Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 27, 2009. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Titan and 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Rhea.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

I’m probably the last person to mention this, but there is an interesting article on Gizmodo about the physics of space battles. It goes over some of the basics of how to think about such events, discussing attacks, maneuvering, defense, and so on.

I’ve been thinking of writing something similar for a long time. The problem is, the more I think about it, the more stuff I think of! That means writing, essentially, an infinitely long essay, and I don’t have the time for that. Seriously, there is so much fascinating material here that it’s hard to know what to leave in and what to leave out.

Still, it would be fun. Just navigating in space is a whole science fiction topic with such depth and complexity that it would take weeks to write it up… but those would be fun weeks. And there are other topics I’ve thought about as well. Someday, someday.

Flying high, NASA style!

One of the space agency’s employees seems to have been inspired by the space shuttle’s soaring trajectory. A baggie containing a small amount of white powder residue, later found to be cocaine, was found at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Way to go, NASA-employee-doing-coke-on-premises. You have forever altered our image of clean-cut astronauts standing around in space suits, chatting with diligent rocket scientists. But NASA is not so amused.

According to CNN, Bob Cabana, the director of Kennedy Space Center, issued a terse statement that read in part:

“This is a rare and isolated incident, and I’m disappointed that it happened, but it should not detract from the outstanding work that is being done by a dedicated team on a daily basis.”

About 200 employees and contractors have access to the restricted hangar where the drug was found, and they’re now being being tested for the drug. For NASA, the incident is not just a blow to its image–the drug’s presence in a restricted area also raises questions about the work done by NASA’s elite workers. The hangar is being used to prepare for space shuttle Discovery’s launch, which is scheduled for this March.

The Internet, meanwhile, is tittering with amusement, with one reader commenting on a news article: “There’s just so much coke in Florida, this bit probably just settled there, like pollen or something. Although! I think it makes for a great new sitcom idea. Miami Vice, Interstellar Unit!”

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80beats: One-Third of U.S. Cocaine Tainted with Dangerous Livestock Drug

Image: Kennedy Space Center

A Texas doctor claims that you can now kill your acne while you chat on the phone with your friends. Houston dermatologist Greg Pearson says that his AcneApp, available at Apple’s app store for $1.99, is a great way to clear your mug of unseemly spots.

Fox TV, Houston reports:

The AcneApp emits alternating bursts of red and blue light from the iPhone’s screen. All users have to do is run the program then hold the phone up to their faces.

Dr. Pearson says the phone needs to be held to the face for about two minutes a day, and callers have to remember to switch sides for maximum benefit. He isn’t quite sure of the results, and he can’t promote the app’s medical benefits because it hasn’t been FDA-approved. Nevertheless, Pearson told Fox TV that the app has been designed with “some science” in mind.

The New York Times explains how the app is supposed to work:

The AcneApp emits an alternating blue (antibacterial) and red (anti-inflammatory) light technology, believed to kill bacteria associated with acne and promote healing, and even act on wrinkles by stimulating collagen growth.

Dr. Pearson also claims that light treatments have been shown to be more effective in treating acne than over-the-counter meds.

Discoblog claims that without any testing of the light’s wavelength, intensity, duration, coverage, and orientation, it’s a laughable attempt to sell a snake oil iPhone app. But give him points for creativity.

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Image: AcneApp

I sometimes ruminate over how to meld astronomy, computers, and preaching to the public. There are lots of ways to make astronomy interesting and accessible, and lots of people turning those possibilities into realities.

One of the most interesting and clever ways to do this has been done by Jim Bumgardner: he’s created a piece of software that takes the positions of stars in the sky, maps them, and then has it make an ethereal musical tone whenever a star crosses the meridian (the imaginary line in the sky that connects due north, through the zenith, to due south). He calls it the Wheel of Stars, and it’s really very soothing and wonderful.

As he puts it:

As the stars cross zero and 180 degrees, indicated by the center line, the clock plays an individual note, or chime for each star. The pitch of the chime is based on the star’s BV measurement (which roughly corresponds to color or temperature). The volume is based on the star’s magnitude, or apparent brightness, and the stereo panning is based on the position on the screen (use headphones to hear it better).

I see this as being very useful in planetaria between shows, as a screen saver, or as a projector in a kid’s room. Things like this make me smile. I like clever people; they make the world a far more interesting place.

On Wednesday, we covered the overreaction by a few important online sources to an International Journal of Biological Sciences article claiming to find “signs of toxicity” in three varieties of genetically modified (GM) corn produced by Monsanto. We posted some caveats that made us uneasy about the study, such as the funding sources, the unknown quality of the journal, and the fact that the toxicity claims rely on reinterpreting statistical data that Gilles-Eric Séralini and his coauthors themselves note is not as robust as it needs to be.

Karl Haro von Mogel, a University of Wisconsin Ph.D. student who works with Pamela Ronald (the GM expert we quoted in our last post), responded with some other problems he has on this study. He has a blog post of his own (in which he gets hopping mad at coverage that attributed organ damage, organ failure, or even cancer to the rats in the study). But here are the major issues he points out to DISCOVER:

1. Cherry-picking. “They were picking out about 20–30 significant measurements out of about 500 for one of the sets of data they analyzed,” Haro von Mogel tells DISCOVER. “At the 95% significance level, you would expect that 5% of the observations would show a significant difference due to chance alone, which is what happened.” In other words, one would expect to get some alarming results in approximately 25 out of the 500 of the measurements, which is indeed what they found. “Picking apart what seems to be normal background variability seems to me to be data dredging.”

2. “False Discovery Rate.” The battle over these corn varieties has been cooking for years; Séralini and others published a paper in 2007 on the same issues, and after statistical criticisms like the ones just mentioned the authors came around with this new edition. One of the main shots scientists took at the previous paper, Haro von Mogel says, was that the team didn’t employ a “false discovery rate”—a stringent statistical method that controls for false positives. This time they did, but for at least two of the three varieties—MON 810 and MON 863—the researchers themselves note p-values that are not significant. (A p-value is a measure of the likelihood that any particular finding was due to chance alone rather than a real effect. By convention, science calls anything that has a greater than 5 percent chance of being a random effect “insignificant.”)

3. “Insignificant” results. As you can see in the study’s chart, there a significant effect shown in “Lar uni cell” (large unnucleated cell count) for female rats fed the GM corn as 11 percent of their diet. But for female rats fed three times as much GM corn, it’s not there. “Are they highlighting random variation or finding genuine effects? These are the kinds of questions that scientists need to address before concluding that they have found ’signs of toxicity,’”Haro von Mogel asks. (Séralini et al. have argued that more attention needs to be paid to nonlinear toxic effects, where greater doses would cause less harm.)

4. Lack of corroboration or explanation. The government organization Food Standards for Australia and New Zealand (which disputed Séralini’s 2007 paper [Microsoft Word file]), also disputes the recent study, in part because there is no other science corroborating the statistical data—data that was challenged in the previous points. Their response concludes by saying, “The authors do not offer any plausible scientific explanations for their hypothesis, nor do they consider the lack of concordance of the statistics with other investigative processes used in the studies such as pathology, histopathology and histochemistry…Reliance solely on statistics to determine treatment related effects in such studies is not indicative of a robust toxicological analysis. There is no corroborating evidence that would lead independently to the conclusion that there were effects of toxicological significance. FSANZ remains confident that the changes reported in these studies are neither sex- nor dose-related and are primarily due to chance alone.”

We emailed Séralini to ask if he would respond to these particular criticisms, and have not yet heard a response. But the study is currently available to read for free, and you can see a YouTube clip of him discussing this paper, his methods, and his criticisms of Monsanto.

In light of these concerns regarding the study, it would be an enormous stretch to say the study proves that these corn varieties cause organ damage in mammals. But none of this puts Monsanto’s GM corn totally in the clear, either. As commenters on our earlier post pointed out, Monsanto was simply following the rather laissez-faire rules for government approval, doing the 90-day trials themselves. But Séralini’s team calls for long-term studies, upwards of two years, to get reliable data.

With the dearth of available data, which Monsanto was loath to give up to the researchers in the first place, strong conclusions are tough to come by. As Per Pinstrup-Andersen, a Cornell food expert not associated with Haro von Mogel’s team, sums up this study: “It is very convoluted but the authors imply that the results are not scientifically valid by recommending a study “to provide true scientifically valid data,’” he tells DISCOVER.

But, as Séralini notes in his YouTube clip, that scientifically valid study would cost a fortune. And considering that these biotech crops have already been approved, Monsanto has little incentive to continue testing them.

Related Content:
80beats: GM Corn Leads to Organ Failure!? Not So Fast
80beats: New Biotech Corn Gives Triple Vitamin Boost; Professors Unmoved
80beats: Germany Joins the European Mutiny of Genetically Modified Crops
DISCOVER: Genetically Altered Corn tells how a corn not intended for humans got into the food supply

Image: flickr / Peter Blanchard

This weekend at Caltech we had a small but very fun conference: the “Physics of the Universe Summit,” or POTUS for short. (The acronym is just an accident, I’m assured.) The subject matter was pretty conventional — particle physics, the LHC, dark matter — but the organization was a little more free-flowing and responsive than the usual parade of dusty talks.

One of the motivating ideas that was mentioned more than once was the famous list of important problems proposed by David Hilbert in 1900. These were Hilbert’s personal idea of what math problems were important but solvable over the next 100 years, and his ideas turned out to be relatively influential within twentieth-century mathematics. Our conference, 110 years later and in physics rather than math, was encouraged to think along similarly grandiose lines.

And indeed people had done exactly that, especially ten years ago when the century turned: see representative lists here and here. I asked the organizers if anyone was taking a swing at it this time, and was answered in the negative. I was scheduled to give one of the closing summaries, and this sounded more interesting than what I actually had planned, so naturally I had to step up.

Here are the slides from my presentation, where you can find some elaboration on my choices.

And here’s the actual list:

1. What breaks electroweak symmetry?
2. What is the ultraviolet extrapolation of the Standard Model?
3. Why is there a large hierarchy between the Planck scale, the weak scale, and the vaccum energy?
4. How do strongly-interacting degrees of freedom resolve into weakly-interacting ones?
5. Is there a pattern/explanation behind the family structure and parameters of the Standard Model?
6. What is the phenomenology of the dark sector?
7. What symmetries appear in useful descriptions of nature?
8. Are there surprises at low masses/energies?
9. How does the observable universe evolve?
10. How does gravity work on macroscopic scales?
11. What is the topology and geometry of spacetime and dynamical degrees of freedom on small scales?
12. How does quantum gravity work in the real world?
13. Why was the early universe hot, dense, and very smooth but not perfectly smooth?
14. What is beyond the observable universe?
15. Why is there a low-entropy boundary condition in the past but not the future?
16. Why aren’t we fluctuations in de Sitter space?
17. How do we compare probabilities for different classes of observers?
18. What rules govern the evolution of complex structures?
19. Is quantum mechanics correct?
20. What happens when wave functions collapse?
21. How do we go from the quantum Hamiltonian to a quasiclassical configuration space?
22. Is physics deterministic?
23. How many bits are required to describe the universe?
24. Will “elementary physics” ultimately be finished?

Clearly I cheated somewhat by squeezing multiple questions into single problems. But the real challenge was thinking sufficiently big to come up with problems that people a century from now would agree are interesting. And I stuck to “elementary physics” — particle physics, gravitation, cosmology — just because I’m not competent to pick out the important problems in any other fields. Twenty-four, of course, because Hilbert had 23, and we had to go one better. There was certainly no shortage of candidates; I was coming up with more good problems and throwing out old ones right up until the last minute. Any obvious ones I missed?

This is the first in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.

Guilt. Shame. These aren’t emotions commonly associated with fish. According to Jennifer Jacquet, however, they may actually be effective tools to prevent destructive overfishing. Jennifer knows a thing or two about guilt—she writes the Guilty Planet blog for scienceblogs.com. Her lecture today covered creative ways to convince corporations to buy and sell fish caught in a sustainable manner. A supermarket that sells orange roughy, for instance, might change its practices if made to feel shame for peddling this exploited fish. Greenpeace, which graded the major seafood markets for sustainability, has made headway by calling out less ocean-friendly chains like Trader Joe’s. Can we go further, though, and attach a real public stigma to the trade of unsustainably caught fish?

Jennifer talked about the importance of corporate transparency to bring about policy changes, using examples from other industries. She mentioned the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), which forces polluters to publicize their emission levels. On the day after the first TRI figures were released in 1989, the polluting firms saw their stocks fall a combined $4.1 million. These corporations—feeling guilty and seeking to deflect public scorn—soon announced plans to reduce emissions. Jennifer also referenced restaurant hygiene report cards, which grade the cleanliness of restaurants: you get an A if diners can eat your risotto off the floor, a C if the vermin outnumber your patrons. No restaurant wants the scarlet letter “C” tacked to its window—it would be hard to recover from the public shame of such a poor grade.

Our class discussion, as it has a tendency to do here at Scripps, delved into a number of tangents, all of them thought-provoking. One student, who moved to San Diego from China in June for graduate school, cautioned that with shame can come unfair humiliation. He spoke of China’s Cultural Revolution, when citizens who were suspected of supporting capitalism were forced to walk through the streets wearing hats bearing the sign “Capitalist Dog.” Now, he asserts, China feels regret for putting its people through such a public disgrace because it realizes its original convictions were misguided. I brought up the success of anti-smoking campaigns and the shame placed on cigarette companies for being deceitful about the health effects of smoking and its youth-targeted advertising. Prof. Jeremy Jackson countered by pointing out that a backlash against anti-smoking campaigns actually makes smoking appealing to some young people.

But back to fish—after all, this is a marine policy course. Can seafood retailers like Walmart and Red Lobster be guilted into changing their practices? I think we have a long way to go: it’s still a social norm to buy and eat trawl-caught shrimp, which includes 12 pounds of unintended, wasted bycatch for every pound of shrimp caught. The public looks down upon corporate misdeeds like embezzlement and pollution. It’s time to add trade in unsustainable fisheries to that list of offense.

Linda De Croock, a Belgian woman who had her throat crushed in a car accident a quarter-century ago, received one of the odder-sounding organ transplants we’ve ever heard: For two years, De Croock had a dead man’s windpipe growing inside her arm. Reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine, her doctors say they successfully implanted the donated trachea in her forearm and then moved it from there to where it belongs.

While the arm might seem a questionable place to put a windpipe, the point was to acclimate her body to the new organ and get her off anti-rejection drugs. Doctors at Belgium’s University Hospital Leuven implanted the donor windpipe in De Croock’s arm as a first step in getting her body to accept the organ and to restart its blood supply. About 10 months later, when enough tissue had grown around it to let her stop taking the drugs, the windpipe was transferred to its proper place [Canadian Press]. Since De Croock’s own tissue has grown around the windpipe, her body no longer considers it foreign and dangerous. A year has passed since the surgery to move the windpipe from her arm to her throat, and the doctors report she is doing well.

After the accident, De Croock originally had metal pieces installed to prop open her windpipe. But having metal do the job became worse and worse. “Life before my transplant was becoming less livable all the time, with continual pain and jabbing and pricking in my throat and windpipe,” the 54-year-old Belgian told The Associated Press in a telephone interview [Canadian Press].

This is the first time scientists have transplanted an organ as large as a trachea in this way—allowing it to acclimate inside the patient’s body before they set it in its proper location. Dr Pierre Delaere, the surgeon who led the team, said: ”This is a major step forward for trachea transplantation. Her voice is excellent, and her breathing is normal. I don’t think she could run a marathon, but she is doing well” [Sydney Morning Herald].

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80beats: Doctors Use a Patient’s Own Stem Cells to Build Her a New Windpipe
Discoblog: Organ Transplants Gone Horribly Awry
DISCOVER: How Do Transplant Patients End Up With Killer Organs?

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