Science dazzles us, science bewilders us, science touches everything and everyone — from life-saving medicines to technologies so blended into day-to-day existence that they seem nearly as natural as drawing breath. More than in any other nation, the American lifestyle and economy is driven by research and scientific innovation. Lose that edge, scientists warn — lose that obsession with discovery — and we may lose the very restless, questing quality that has made the United States, for all its warts, the most innovative and prosperous place on earth. A fundamental aim of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, is to show that science isn’t just weird stuff happening in a lab somewhere. It’s the neverceasing quest to explain our world and inhabit it more comfortably. Here, Globe reporters take a look at some of the ideas presented by AAAS members, whose annual meeting ends a five-day run today in Boston.
COLIN NICKERSON
Antarctica invaders
Climate changePredatory crabs are about to have a global warming feast off Antarctica.
For millions of years, prehistoric creatures such as giant sea spiders, pillbugs, and brittlestars have thrived off that continent's coast because most of the creatures there to eat them are slow-moving predators such as sea stars and giant, floppy ribbon worms.
Fast-moving crabs never made it, because they literally got drunk on the way: Cold water prevents them from flushing magnesium out of their system. If it gets too cold, they pass out and die.
But now, researchers from Rhode Island, Alabama, and Britain say the crabs are quickly sobering up. Coastal waters off the western Antarctic Peninsula have warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years - more than double the global average - and king crabs are massing for the first time in deeper, slightly warmer waters nearby.
If warming continues at the current pace, the scientists say, the crabs could invade coastal waters within the century and forever alter the continent's isolated, fragile ecosystem.
Sharks would likely not be far behind.
"When the wall created by cold water crumbles, these predators will find a veritable smorgasbord," said Cheryl Wilga, a biologist at the University of Rhode Island. "There's no place like this on earth."
BETH DALEY
The father and the fetus
Environmental healthRutgers professor Cynthia R. Daniels does not expect to see this warning on tavern walls any time soon: "Men Who Drink Should Not Reproduce."
But, she and other speakers said yesterday, research raises troubling questions about whether the sins - or potential toxic exposures - of fathers may bring harm to their future children.
Pregnant women are bombarded with warnings that what they drink, eat, and do could harm the fetus they carry. But fathers? The field of "paternal exposures" has been much less explored.
Gladys Friedler, of the Boston University School of Medicine said she found back in the 1960s - to her "total disbelief and bewilderment" - that when male rats were given morphine before they mated, their progeny tended to have more developmental problems than pups with clean and sober fathers. Opiates do not cause mutations, yet they appeared able to affect future progeny.
University of Idaho researcher Matthew D. Anway said he has found that when pregnant rats are injected with a potent fungicide called vinclozolin at a key time, it also affects their offspring for generations afterward. The mechanism appears to be epigenetic: That is, it doesn't change the genes themselves, but affects how genes are turned off and on in the body. His team is now exploring a possible connection between such early damage and prostate cancer.
Anway said his research findings concern dosages far higher than experienced in the real world.
Masculinity tends to conjure images of strength and invulnerability, Daniels said, but when it comes to the potential for fetal harm, "Men may be at least as vulnerable as women."
CAREY GOLDBERG
Mystery of gamma ray bursts
AstronomyCall them the birth wails of black holes. Or the dying howls of imploding colossal stars.
Short, extraordinarily powerful bursts of gamma rays are shockingly frequent occurrences in the universe - and thank your lucky stars that one hasn't ripped through our neck of the cosmos. Their radiation is intense enough to wipe out life for thousands of light years around.
At a session Friday, astronomers described the international effort to solve the mystery of gamma bursts, first detected in the 1960s by US military satellites.
Using such tools as NASA's Swift satellite, scientists have determined that gamma ray bursts mark the collapse of supernovae, or exploding super-giant stars, into black holes - enigmatic objects so dense that even light can't escape. Aloft for three years, Swift has discovered more than 300 gamma ray bursts, most occurring billions of light years away.
"The brightest of these fleeting events emit more energy in a few seconds than our sun will emit in its 10-billion-year lifetime," said Alan Wells, an astronomer at Britain's University of Leicester.
COLIN NICKERSON
Crops for health
NutritionNext time you bite into a carrot, consider this: The vegetable has, on average, about 50 percent more carotene - a heart- and eye-healthy nutrient - than carrots did 30 years ago.
That's because scientists were able to crossbreed different varieties of carrots to come up with a healthier hybrid. On Saturday, a panel of scientists said that more of this centuries-old agricultural tradition should be used to fight obesity and improve world nutrition.
Scientists know that fruits and vegetables are good for people - but they are finding a vast diversity in the amounts of nutrients among different varieties, such as black beans and pintos, and even among the same varieties grown in different places. These scientists are trying to screen each variety for the best health-promoting properties and crossbreed them to make more nutritious food.
"We're looking to mine the existing diversity," said Henry Thompson, director of the Cancer Prevention Lab at Colorado State University. He said such techniques are "safe, highly effective and if prepared right, tasty."
Scientists don't know yet how much carotene, for example, a carrot should have to give someone the optimal health benefit and more research is needed to understand the complex mechanisms that make a nutrient beneficial. In the meantime, they suggest people not only eat lots of fruits and vegetables, but different varieties of each one. That means more McIntosh apples as well as Granny Smith.
"Mom was right - variety and moderation," said Thompson.
BETH DALEY
Humaniqueness
What makes us special? Maybe it's a floodlight thing.
Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser yesterday presented a new hypothesis of what he calls "Humaniqueness," the qualities that set human thought apart from animal intelligence.
The essence of that difference, he said, seems to be that animals' minds operate much like laser beams, focused on solving very specific problems; while human minds work more broadly, something like floodlights, and can take knowledge acquired from one task or sphere and apply it elsewhere.
So, for example, honeybees have an impressive dance language for telling hive-mates where they have found food.
"The problem is," Hauser said, "that's all they communicate about" - they never dance about anything else.
Or take chimpanzees and the sticks they use for digging up termites. It is true, Hauser said, that the old idea that humankind was the only toolmaker has been demonstrated to be wrong. "Animals do in fact make and use tools," he said. But their tool use, is "whoppingly different" from humans'. No animal uses multiple materials to make a tool, he said, and animals never design a tool for one use and then apply it to something different.
Hauser proposed that human uniqueness stems from talents for recombining information and thinking abstractly. He would like to see these ideas explored in experiments on animals.
In mice, for example, manipulating a gene associated with human speech has been shown to change their vocalizations. Hauser said he'd like to "see what kind of transformations might be possible."
CAREY GOLDBERG
Animal testing
Lab rats, rejoice. Animal testing may be on its way out.
Every year, millions of rodents, cats, monkeys and other species are injected with chemicals to test the safety of everything from household cleaners to pesticides. Developing a single chemical can take two years of testing and the sacrifice of thousands of animals.
Now, however, new efforts and improved technologies could soon reduce - and possibly end - the animal testing that many people consider cruel. By injecting chemicals directly into isolated human cells in the laboratory and using advanced imaging and computer screening techniques, advocates say results can be more accurate, less time-consuming and less expensive than animal testing.
Last week, the National Institutes of Health and the US Environmental Protection Agency said they were developing such methods for chemicals because of "public unease" over animal testing, high testing costs and the growing number of new chemicals. Meanwhile, the European Union in 2009 will begin banning any cosmetic that has an ingredient that was tested on animals.
"The idea that in 10 years we could be out of animal testing in commercial products is not pie in the sky . . . the opportunity is here," said Alan Goldberg, who directs the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University. "Humane science is better science."
Still, animal testing will not end immediately. Government officials need to validate the new methods before they are widely accepted - a process that could take a decade or more.
BETH DALEY
Engineering challenges
The big technological challenges of the 21st century will heavily involve cleaning up the messes made by the 20th, such as global warming, depletion of fuel sources, and the spectacular waste of H2O in a world where much of the population lacks access to clean drinking water.
That was the implicit assessment of the US National Academy of Engineering, which at the AAAS meeting under way in Boston announced the "14 great challenges" facing humanity.
The list was compiled by a committee of 18 maverick thinkers, including geneticist J. Craig Venter, Google cofounder Larry Page, Princeton climate change theorist Robert Socolow, and futurist author Raymond Kurzweil.
Somewhat ironically, many of the challenges involved undoing what most engineers would likely list as the great achievements of the 20th century - the carbon-consuming modes transport and industries that forged our present-day prosperity; the poorly-secured nuclear arsenals that may provide terrorists with atom bombs; the urban infrastructures that have all but collapsed in the chaotic, teeming cities of the Third World.
"All of the greatest achievements of the 20th century did have a dark side to them," said William Perry, the Stanford University engineering professor and former US defense secretary who headed the group.
The underlying idea, said engineering academy president (and former MIT president) Charles Vest, was to compile a list of things "that were visionary and terribly important to human life, but also doable. Some are imperative to our survival on this planet . . .and will make us more secure against both human and natural threats."
Among other things, they proposed pushing back the effects of aging, using advances in genetics and medical "informatics" to target the deadliest diseases, and using nanotechnology to harness the huge energies of the sun.
"We only need to capture one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on earth to meet 100 percent of our energy needs," said Kurzweil, speaking to the AAAS. "This will become feasible using nanoengineered solar panels and nanoengineered fuel cells."
Nanotechology involves creating microscopic devices and materials that function on the molecular level. For example, robots the size of blood cells that can scour the human system in search of tiny, treatable tumors.
Kurzweil also vigorously promoted the concept of "reverse-engineering" the brain - designing computers that can think intuitively and creatively, like humans. Such computers, he argued, will inevitably out-think humans, and thus, in the optimistic view, turn their undistracted silicon-chip minds to solving the huge health, engineering, and environmental problems that have stumped flesh-and-blood scientists.
"Once non-biological intelligence matches the range and subtlety of human intelligence, it will necessarily soar past," he said.
Socolow said in a statement that the job of listing the great challenges was in some respects too formidable, especially in terms of ranking their order of importance. "Ultimately we didn't find it within our intellectual powers to rank these challenges. How do you rank the eradication of poverty versus keeping the world habitable versus avoiding nuclear war?"
COLIN NICKERSON
