Science Cheerleader

(Dr. John Wild pictured with Rosalyn Queen, former Chair, Board of Trustees, Columbus Foundation ) Last week, Dr. John Wild passed away. Dr. Wild is widely recognized at the inventor of the ultrasound and he was honored for this distinction in 1998 by the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation, an independent federal government agency (from time to time, the Foundation hires me to recommend worthy candidates for their awards programs).

Judith Shellenberger, executive director of the Foundation, sent a sweet note to Dr. Wild five years ago in which she wrote:

It was a great privilege to honor you with the Foundation’s first Frank Annunzio Award
in 1998 in Washington, D.C.  The Foundation has bestowed the Frank Annunzio Award on many fine Americans since that time, but you were the first.  I am proud that the Foundation’s Board acknowledged your great work through this award and chose you as its first recipient.

I had the pleasure of meeting this great man. What a wonderful sense of humor! I thought I’d share a little information about him as a reminder that great inventors are not just a product of the 19th century.

From the U.K. Telegraph: John Wild, who died on September 18 aged 95, was the father of ultrasound in medicine, having invented imaging techniques that became standard for tumour screening in general and the diagnosis of breast cancer in particular. Read more.

Here’s Sarah with a fascinating update to one of her previous posts.

You may recall one of my posts from a few months ago where I encouraged everyone to become involved in CureTogether.  (To summarize, CureTogether is a collaboration of people from around the world volunteering to solve real problems by reporting information about their chronic conditions. Patients self-report and rate symptoms and treatments for over 360 conditions. The top conditions at CureTogether are depression, anxiety, migraine, back pain, and vulvodynia.)  I am pleased to report that I just received an e-mail from Alex Carmichael, one of the co-founders of CureTogether, with some fabulous news about the success of their citizen science projects.

According to Alex, after an analysis of data reported by 324 patients at CureTogether, patients who report infertility are 1.9x more likely to report having asthma than patients who don’t report infertility.  Within the 34 people reporting infertility, 13 (38%) reported having asthma (the remaining 21 out of 34 specifically said they did NOT have asthma). Within the 290 people reporting “no infertility”, 58 (20%) reported having asthma (the remaining 232 specifically reported NOT having asthma).  This 38% vs. 20% relative risk is statistically significant, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.4 – 2.6.

This finding is really important because using only user-reported data, CureTogether has confirmed the infertility-asthma association that has only been explored previously in clinical studies such as the ones I have listed below:

1. Asthma was found to be associated with irregular menstruation.

2. Asthma is higher in women with endometriosis (which also has a high correlation to infertility) than in the general population.

3. The more siblings you have, the less likely you are to have asthma.

4. A big cohort study in the UK found no link between fertility and allergy-related diseases but also said that with asthma in particular there was a different relationship to fertility than with eczema and hay fever.

Obviously, this is a big step for citizen science – REAL disease correlations being confirmed just by people answering a few health questions.  I encourage you all to log on to the CureTogether website and take a few moments to report data of your own!  In the meantime, I have no doubts that they will continue to have more success to share with us in the coming months…

Heeeeere’s John! About a year ago, Google announced it’s “10 to the 100th Power” contest to celebrate its 10th anniversary.  The intent of the contest was to get ideas from around that would help the most number of people.  Google would invest a big pot of cash to help kick-start some of those ideas.  The contest was a pretty neat; even I submitted several ideas in the hope of becoming the savior of all humankind.

Semi-finalists were supposed to be announced by January 27th, 2009, but got delayed until March 17th, and then  was put on hold again.  Apparently the company that handles a bazillion search requests each day got swamped by 150,000 ideas, but I digress.  On September 24th the semi-finalists were announced, and the public is invited to vote on their favorites.  I’m a little miffed because none of my obviously world-changing ideas were among the chosen, but I’ll just have to get over that small disappointment.

All of the ideas are meritorious, however there are a couple that readers of “Science Cheerleader” might find especially interesting…

1. Enhance science and engineering education
2. Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists

I’m really not trying to game the vote (well, OK, I am), but I encourage you to let your Google vote be heard.  Voting ends on October 8th, 2009.

(Thanks to David Hartman for sending this tip!)  Recently, National Public Radio’s Science Friday featured The New York Hall of Science’s (in Queens)  unusual mini golf park. “Every hole illustrates a different scientific principle. Charles Camarda, a NASA engineer and former astronaut, agreed to play a round and explain some basic space science as he putted.”

Check out this video.

Recently, Sarah chatted with the talented band They Might Be Giants. They’ve got a new CD, “Here Comes Science!” with songs titled, “My brother the ape” and “Meet the elements” and more. Sarah’s interview will be posted shortly.

Today, Space.com reports on new findings detailed in the September 25 issue of Science.

From Space.com: “Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called “unambiguous evidence” of water across the surface of the moon….Finding water on the moon would be a boon to possible future lunar bases, acting as a potential source of drinking water and fuel.”

Read more.

We first announced this in the spring. Last call! Participate in the Year of Science 2009 Science Zine-a-thon Contest! A science zine (pronounced zeen) is a mini-magazine. Choose a science topic from one of the YoS themes and create your zine on a specially folded sheet of 8 ½ x 11 paper. This is a great activity for science enthusiasts of all ages! Send in your zines, and you could win a great prize. Submissions must be postmarked by November 15, 2009.

One week ago today, the National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council held a public briefing and symposium to release the report “Engineering in K-12 Education:  Understanding the Status and Improving the Prospects.”  The report assesses the value of developing and implementing engineering curricula for kindergarten through grade 12.  The report also describes what engineering concepts children are able to understand and at what age, and provides an analysis of more than a dozen engineering curriculum projects.

Access the report for free online or listen to the webcast of the event.

On a related note, recently, a friend and extraordinary man David Hartman forwarded to me an Aviation Week and Space Technology article. Hartman, a former cohost of Good Morning America, is the tall man pictured here with a VERY pregnant, fat me…it was yeeeeaaars ago, OK!?  Recognize MIT’s Marvin Minsky, Penn and Teller, ABC’s John Stosell, Robin Roberts and Antonio Mora? Hartman and Mora cohosted the Discover Technology Awards, a program I directed. But I digress… the article’s written by Norman Augustine, an engineer and former CEO of Lockheed Martin, who addresses his “concerns about the impacts current trends will have on his field.” *

If you’ve stayed through that intro, you deserve a mind-boggling excerpt from this article: “Students in grades 5-8 have a 98% chance of having a science teacher who does not have a degree in science.”

Read the piece titled Race to the Bottom and take note that it’s not all bad news. In fact,  I’ll be back with a look at how and why U.S. adults are outpacing other nations when it comes to science literacy…while our kids continue to lag far behind.  (9/29 addition: Here’s a related article on Why the World Needs More Engineers. Thanks, subscriber Bart, for sending this to us.)

*Augustine and Hartman go back to 1987 when Hartman produced a prime time documentary on National Defense and the U.S. Military.  I should mention that Hartman wants readers to know that it was Tony Borotto, a retired aviator, who sent him Augustine’s article.

Data.gov has it all.

Concerned about flu outbreaks? Check out FluView, a national flu activity map.

Learn about the quality of your local drinking water or view an EPA map pinpointing a variety of air, water and land pollution sources.

From John Collier: A few years ago, for her 3^rd grade “States of the USA” project, my daughter picked the Hawkeye State – Iowa. Many people view Iowa as just one vast corn field stuck between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, but my daughter likes Iowa because the state does have many interesting facets. Her presentation was in the form of a game show similar to “Jeopardy!” and she asked questions such as…

1. What starship captain of the USS Enterprise will be born in Riverside, Iowa in the year 2233?” (Answer:James T. Kirk)
2. “This famous Iowa native won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on developing new and higher-yielding varieties of wheat, which reduced the likelihood of famine in developing countries. Who was this Green Revolution pioneer?”

The answer to question #2 is “Norman Borlaug”, who died on September 12^th, 2009 at the age of 95.

While doing the research on Dr. Borlaug, my family became fascinated by the story of his life: How he lived in other countries and did research to increase crop yields, how he helped stop almost certain famine in parts of Asia (thereby saving possibly up to a billion lives) and how – to the best of our knowledge – he may be the only Nobel Peace Prize winner with a rap song written specifically in his honor.

Like most kids, there are some days when young Norman didn’t want to go to school. His grandfather Nels told him: “Norm-boy, it’s better to fill your head now if you want to fill your belly later.”

If there was ever an major intersection between science and public policy, figuring out how to feed our teaming (and increasing) billions surely is it. The words of Norman Borlaug’s grandfather were important 90 years ago, and even more important today.

Image credit:  AgBioWorld