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How To Be Greener

December 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Spotted on a recent visit to ESA's ESTEC base in Noordwijk

To what extent should climate scientists, who arguably have the best understanding of the calamitous effects of global warming on the planet and its inhabitants, be setting an example in reducing their personal carbon footprint? That was the question raised some time ago in a Notes & Theories Blog article by Jens Rolff, evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield. Scientists’ privileged position on the highest echelons of education in society, he argues, gives them a responsibility to set an example to the rest of society in reducing their personal burden on the environment.

Phil Marshall at the University of Oxford raised similar questions some months ago in an interesting opinion piece in Physics World. A study he carried out for the Astro2010 Decadal Survey in the US showed that:

in astronomy it is not the big facilities that are the most polluting, but the astronomers themselves, as they fly all over the world to observatories, conferences and meetings. We estimated that astronomers were averaging some 23,000 air miles per year during the course of their work, which at 1.8 kWh per mile added up (in our simple model) to about 85% of the professional energy consumption of astrophysics. For comparison, the average US citizen uses about 250 kWh per day on transport, heating, lighting, food, consumer goods and so on; US astronomers use an additional 130 kWh per day doing astronomy.

There you go: being a professional astronomer may increase your carbon footprint by half.

There are of course many provisos to this stark figure. The number of astronomers, or even scientists, in the world is tiny compared with the overall population – so the overall contribution to the world’s carbon emissions is very small. I think scientists are not particularly worse, possibly even significantly better, than those in other professions: many people travel a huge amount for their jobs, and you could argue that the question of personal responsibility should be expanded to all of those.

Leaving existential questions aside, if we assume that changing our personal behaviour as astronomers is a valuable thing to do, for whatever reason, how would we do it?

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SoLo11: Change Can Happen

September 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A couple of weeks ago I attended Science Online London, where I heard lots of great talks and discussions on communicating science, open access, open data and other pet subjects. My favourite talk of the conference was Michael Nielsen‘s keynote on the topic of Open Science. Michael was a keynote speaker at the 2009 edition of .Astronomy in Leiden, where he told us about some exciting demonstrations of science research being done entirely openly on the web, rather than in closed collaborations. He gave a nice TED talk on this subject too.

Projects like Polymath and Galaxy Zoo do make people very excited about open science. But in reality bringing such innovative methods into the mainstream of research requires quite a dramatic change in culture amongst researchers; anyone who’s ever tried to introduce just one new research tool to even a small team of scientists knows what a quixotic exercise that can be.

So to address this much-raised issue, Michael gave a great talk, not about traditional open science topics, but about how wide-spread change can be effected in a community, or in societies as a whole. Many smart people in the political sciences and economics have thought, spoken and written about this very topic, and it was great to get this broader perspective on a problem we tend to see as quite narrowly applicable to science.

I like that his talk was really aimed at moving the discussion forward. I’ve been attending these Science Online-type conferences for some time now, and while I always meet interesting people and have a good time, the ideas tend to get recycled from year to year with little real progress in the arguments. Michael’s talk gives no answers, but it addressed the criticisms his ideas tend to get in a very direct way.

The video of the talk is now available online, watch it below or on YouTube.

 

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Astronomy Exchange

September 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The Western world’s ongoing financial woes are providing food for thought for all of us on the pros, cons, opportunities and dangers of a market-based economy. In the face of financial austerity that’s biting into education and research grant budgets, universities and research institutes are under increasing pressure to look for alternative sources of income from education and research, through charging fees for education, focusing on “impact” science  with real-world applications, and generating funds from that research through spin-offs and intellectual property.

One of the first people I met at SciFoo was Elizabeth Iorns, a cancer researcher at the University of Miami, who had recently relocated to the land of science milk and tech honey, Palo Alto, to launch a start-up company that aims to help labs maximise the return from their experimental equipment, and help others gain access to equipment they don’t have available in their own labs. The website for Science Exchange launched a couple of weeks ago and got some nice coverage from Nature. On the site, scientists can advertise their projects, and others can bid on them to do the work, leading to the nickname “an eBay for science”.

There’s some aspects to the system that aren’t all that clear to me, but it’s certainly a great idea and I look forward to hearing how it goes.

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Astrobiology: Where’s the Bacon?

August 24, 2011 By 5 Comments

 

ResearchBlogging.orgThe presence of life in the Universe has titillated scientists for centuries. The explosion of exoplanet discoveries throughout our Galaxy and beyond in the last 15 years has allowed philosophical exploration to turn into real science. Research in astrobiology, “the study of the origins, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe” by astrophysicists, geophysicists, biologists and chemists, has flourished, spurred on particularly by targeted spending programmes such as NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. The fledgling field has been a regular grabber of spectacular headlines – but not always for the right reasons.

Last year, US researchers claimed in a Science paper to have discovered bacteria in California’s Mono Lake that were capable of replacing phosphorous in their DNA by arsenic, allowing them to thrive in arsenic-rich environments. NASA announced this potentially groundbreaking finding with much fanfare: the bacteria GFAJ-1 would be the first lifeform discovered to substitute one of its fundamental DNA building blocks with a different element. But Wolfe-Simon et al’s results were called into question by a number of respected scientists, and the resulting storm of commentary brought out the best and the worst of scientists and of the web. If you want to know more about it, Carl Zimmer has written some good reports on the whole affair for Slate.

Astrobiology at SciFoo

At SciFoo last week I was happy to meet Rosie Redfield, who runs a microbiology lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Rosie was the first scientist to write an extensive critique of the arsenic paper on her research blog. She’s currently repeating the experiments with the GFAJ-1 bacteria in her own lab and documenting her progress on the blog, which is, irrespective of the controversial back story, an interesting experiment in itself. I participated in a session she organised at SciFoo entitled “Astrobiology: Buzzword or Science?”, in which we had a lively discussion on the phenomenon that is astrobiology. I can’t remember all the participants (sorry!), but among them were SETI’s Jill Tarter,  Chris Lintott, Sean Carroll, as well as Rosie and myself.

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SciFoo

August 23, 2011 By 6 Comments

Swag!

I’ve just returned from the US, where I was lucky enough to attend SciFoo, a wacky science and technology camp hosted by O’Reilly, Google and Nature at the Googleplex in Mountain View. First, it was obviously great to hang out at Google HQ, a place that is the stuff of legends in techy circles. Yes, the site was great, the food was delicious (and everywhere!) and the toilet seats heated (heated!). The conference itself was everything everyone had warned and promised me it would be. It was exciting, overwhelming and inspirational. I met lots of people from all different walks of life, united by the simple fact that they’re very clever and have bright ideas. There were scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, writers, engineers, young people, old people, men, women.

I was continuously torn between attending sessions on topics I know and care about in which I could actively participate, and sessions on issues that I’m not an expert on, like the economic crisis, the future of the human race, climate change. In the end I did a bit of both and came away with a really great experience. I have a few posts up my sleeve based on some great conversations I had there.

As we’re gearing up towards another .Astronomy conference for next year, I’ve been giving some thought to how the organisers of SciFoo manage to make the conference so special. The format is entirely “Unconference” – that is, driven by the participants, who post up their sessions on a giant whiteboard. We’ve used this format for .Astronomy as well, albeit only for half-days, and it’s surprisingly difficult to end up with a good balance of sessions run by the right people. Perhaps having a bigger pool of participants (SciFoo has a few 100 compared with .Astro’s 50 or so) makes that easier. What I enjoyed particularly was the explicit statement by the organisers that we should expect all conversations to be off the record (“FrieNDA”), and entirely open to everyone. So there was no clique-iness, no barriers for actively participating, and that worked extremely well.

Traditional science conferences sometimes wear me down with their undercurrent of of gossip and sniping. I’m more than guilty of it myself, and there is a time for all that – competition does drive progress, etc. But sometimes you need to be able to just listen and say: “THAT is AWESOME”. That, I think, is an undervalued skill in research.

So here’s another big thanks to the excellent organisers for SciFoo 2011 – I was happy to be part of it. More soon!

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