Science Proceeds By Funerals

Above all, science is a human institution. And as a machine for thinking, it's greater and more powerful than any of its single participants. You said that science proceeds by tiny steps. It also proceeds by funerals.

University departments are just waiting for the professor to get out of the way so the younger guys can get in.

That was author Ian McEwan on a very listenable hour of Science Friday on the importance of science writing in science books as well as science in fiction. The other guests were cosmologists Brian Greene and Lawrence Krauss.

I thought Ian McEwan gave a really good account of why he includes science in his books:

FLATOW: Ian, why do you put science in your books? What - why do we have to know about quantum mechanics? Are you purposely doing that to teach us something or just to...

MCEWAN: No, absolutely not. No.

FLATOW: No.

MCEWAN: It just came along with the character. It's a reflection of my own pleasure in it, but it seems just a human enterprise. I mean, this is - I mean, the standard measure of how alive you are is the measure of your curiosity, and I think of science as organized curiosity.

We once relied on priests to tell us the shape and nature and purpose of the cosmos and life itself. It's been a long, slow story of that undoing. We now have a far more interesting story, and it's also penetrated our lives. I mean, there's climate change, and we all have these intricate, beautiful machines in our hands, and it's impacting on our decisions about bioethics and many other things.

So if we think of the novel as an investigation of the human condition, technology and science is now so woven into that condition. You cannot escape it. So it's inevitable, I think, that...

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Paranoia Over Google Mapping Tools Persists In Indian Officialdom

sigh... I keep writing about this only partly as comedy.. but mostly in frustration...

From an article in the Hindu about the recently held "mapathon"contest organized by Google.

As Delhi Police investigates whether Google violated rules in holding a competition that asked users to add information about their local areas for its online map, the U.S. Internet giant on Saturday said it had responded to queries raised by Survey of India more than 10 days back and hasn’t heard from it yet. (emphasis mine)

Apparently, the Survey of India and the Defence establishment is worried that such initiatives will have grave security repercussions.  The problem is that Google has been asking users to add information about their local areas for its online map for several years now. I just don't comprehend how a mapping contest wherein lots of enthusiasts add places of interest on a map within a short span of time becomes a greater security threat than an individual using Google Maps on any other day of the year.

more from this article in the Economic Times... But on behalf of the Surveyor General of India Swarna Subba Rao, his deputy major general R C Padhi told the three ministries that Mapathon was "not in accordance with the national Mapping Policy 2005 and map restriction policies issued by the defence ministry from time to time", sources said.

Added a senior defence officer, "Such activities can have serious security repercussions in case mapping of restricted areas is undertaken by members of the general public."

The words "general public" come out of the mouths of our officials with such contempt and suspicion. These archaic mapping policies which restrict the "general public" from mapping certain areas have long been rendered meaningless by the many roving eyes that hover above the earth. I am sure the government understands this.. but relinquishing control over anything has always been hard for Indian officialdom.

The exceedingly vast majority of people using Google applications to map India don't want to harm India.

Those who do... might I remind the Indian Government that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai on November 26 2008 did not wait for a mapping contest to survey the city.

Biogeography And Teaching Evolution

Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education, Oakland, CA, USA has a wonderful essay in Evolution: Education and Outreach on how observations of the bio-geographic distribution of species helped Darwin and Wallace to work out independently their theories of evolution through natural selection.

He suggests that many of  today' students who are often reluctant to accept evolution because they see differences between species as unbridgeable gaps can overcome this obstacle by observing the actual patterns of differences between closely related species living amongst them.

From the article:

The greatest challenge many students face in understanding evolution is what Wallace faced in 1846: they haven’t seen the sort of diversity that calls for explanation in terms of evolution. The world most students encounter seems to contain organisms in discrete categories: squirrels and rabbits, robins and sparrows, grass and daisies, oaks and pines. They are unlikely to notice that two ladybird beetles actually represent different species or that there are several species of grass in their lawn, let alone to recognize that there are two local species of chipmunk which can only be distinguished by dissection or DNA analysis. What diversity they notice represents groups that are quite distinct, with differences so large that it is impossible to imagine how their members could share a common ancestry.

As a result, students today, much like Darwin in 1835, tend to see species as distinct entities. Presenting students with a similar experience of the often subtle differences between species can similarly shake this misconception. When they realize how low the barriers can be between different species, they can place lessons on speciation in a more accurate context. Rather than imagining that speciation means turning lions into tigers, or bears into cows, or fish into humans, they will see that speciation involves a subtle divergence in the evolutionary trajectories taken by populations. Because the Galápagos mockingbirds were still early in their divergence, Darwin was able to recognize the process. Students today can learn similar lessons by examining the subtle differences between species on neighboring islands. The Evolution and Nature of Science Institute has a lesson plan in which students compare lizards in the Canary Islands (http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/lessons/island.html), while Understanding Evolution offers a lesson plan looking at Anolis lizard biogeography in the Caribbean (http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/lessons/anolis/teacher_directions.html).

Very relevant advice but applicable only to those students who are willing to examine the evidence with an open mind. People indoctrinated with a fundamentalist ideology are unlikely to be impressed by two very similar species of beetles in their backyard. .

By the way this journal,  Evolution: Education and Outreach is now open access.

So dip into it.

Lessons In Carbon Storage From Geological Analogues - Open Access Geology

Mike Bickle and Niko Kampman in an open access article in the April issue of Geology summarize the findings of two papers (1 , 2)  published in the same issue on naturally occurring CO2 accumulations in sedimentary reservoirs and inferences drawn on their long term fate.

One potential strategy to manage growing atmospheric CO2 is to inject and store it in deep sedimentary aquifers with a retention time of at least ten thousand years.

The article identifies the key questions:

(1) how quickly will the buoyant CO2 dissolve in formation brines (good), (2) how quickly will the CO2 brines react with silicate minerals and precipitate solid carbonate phases (good), (3) will CO2 or CO2-charged brines corrode cap-rocks and escape upward (bad), and (4) will CO2 penetrate up fault zones (bad)?

It is dense but rewarding reading for those into mineralogy, phase equilibria and fluid-rock interaction. 

This is something that should be of enormous interest to Indian sedimentary basin specialists and climate change mitigation planners. In a recent post I mentioned about India's plans to build 400 odd more coal power plants in the next few decades. Many will be located near sources of coal in the continental rift basins of eastern India. Is carbon dioxide sequestration in natural reservoirs economically viable? Do these basins have favorable conditions deep underground for long term storage of CO2? It is research well worth funding given that our dependance on coal will last several more decades.
 

Huh? Thousands Of Rivers Wiped Off Map Of China

The first national water census pointed out that thousands of rivers (28 thousand was the figure given) shown on previous maps are now missing from China' s state water maps. See this article.

Explanations:

Official- Climate change is to blame for the drying of some waterways. Plus some earlier mistakes by cartographers

Environmentalists: Ill conceived development and over use of underground water resources.

That last one is an important point. Much of the base flow of rivers, especially those which are not sourced from glaciers comes from groundwater discharging as springs. That means the water you see flowing in the river channel months after the rains are over is actually groundwater seeping out along river banks. Even rivers connected to glaciers may have a significant component of their flow provided for by groundwater discharge. A survey in the Nepal Himalayas revealed that groundwater contributes more than melting glaciers to the annual discharge of the rivers. 

Rivers may gain water from groundwater over long stretches. Such streams are called effluent (fig on left: source: USGS) . Rivers that lose water to groundwater are called influent.  Here is an excellent USGS  primer on the impacts of groundwater exploitation on surface water.

All the important monsoonal rivers in Peninsular India as well,  Narmada, Mahanadi, Cauvery, Krishna and Godavari depend on groundwater discharge to remain perennial. If the local water table plummets well  below the river bed due to over extraction of groundwater then discharge into the river will cease.

River management must include management of groundwater resources as well. The USGS article I linked to points out: " From a sustainability perspective, the key point is that pumping decisions today will affect surface-water availability; however, these effects may not be fully realized for many years".

A lesson not taken seriously in China and in India as well.