161.53.145.110161.53.145.110/TORTUGA_Lib_67/American Scientist January-February 2017.pdf161.53.145.110

1992 September–October 3

ArtificialSymbiosisOpposition toGMOs spurs new bio-engineering techniques

AMERICAN

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Feature Articles

32 Blood, Guts, and Hope Treatment of gastrointestinal tissue

with ultrasound makes it more permeable to medications that can alleviate inflammatory bowel disease.

Carl M. Schoellhammer, Robert Langer, and C. Giovanni Traverso

36 The Prospects of Artificial Endosymbioses

The use of beneficial microbes holds promise for public health and food production, but it has trade-offs.Ryan Kerney, Zakiya Whatley, Sarah Rivera, and David Hewitt

46 Photoshopping the Universe Maninpulating images of outer

space makes them more accurate, not misrepresentative of reality.Travis A. Rector, Kimberly Arcand, and Megan Watzke

Departments

2 From the Editors

3 Letters to the Editors

6 Spotlight Insights into human origins

Nuclear power Q&A Infographic Briefings

12 Sightings Imaging tiny structures in color

Robert Frederick

13 Computing ScienceComputational thinking in sciencePeter Denning

18 Science CommunicationEnding science’s crisis of complacencyMatthew Nisbet

22 PerspectiveMisinformation in FlintSiddhartha Roy

27 Engineering Autonomous vehicles Henry Petroski

Scientists’ Nightstand51 Book Reviews Analysis of disasters Two views

of the game Tetris

From Sigma Xi58 Distinguished Lectureships,

2017–2018

61 Sigma Xi TodayChapter award winners How science should affect public policy Annual Meeting and Student

Research Conference recap Register for the Student Research Showcase

Artificial endosymbioses hold promise for transferring their benefits to novel hosts. In mosquitoes, for example, a bacteria of the genus Wolbachia, which can live in the ovaries or testes of a variety of insects, are under exploration for their potential to cause population declines or to limit virus transmission in diseases such as dengue, chikungunya, and Zika. In “The Prospects of Artificial Endosymbioses” (pages 36–43), authors Ryan Kerney, Zakiya Whatley, Sarah Rivera, and David Hewitt discuss the ways that endo-symbioses might be engineered and used, as well as the challenges they pose. The authors also point out that, for better or worse, sym-biotically modified organisms are often seen as more “natural” by the public and given less ethical scrutiny than genetically modified organisms that have similar uses and benefits. (Cover illustration by Michael Morgenstern.)

AMERICAN

The Cover

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2 American Scientist, Volume 105

AMERICAN

FROM THE EDITORS

VOLUME 105, NUMBER 1

Editor-in-Chief Jamie L. Vernon Senior Consulting Editor Corey S. PowellManaging Editor Fenella SaundersDigital Features Editor Katie L. BurkeContributing Editors Sandra J. Ackerman, Marla Broadfoot, Catherine Clabby, Brian Hayes, Anna Lena Phillips, Diana Robinson, David Schoonmaker, Michael SzpirEditorial Associate Mia Evans

Art Director Barbara J. Aulicino

SCIENTISTS’ NIGHTSTANDEditor Dianne Timblin

AMERICAN SCIENTIST ONLINEDigital Managing Editor Robert Frederick

Publisher John C. Nemeth

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PUBLISHED BY SIGMA XI, THE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH HONOR SOCIETYPresident Tee GuidottiTreasurer David BakerPresident-Elect Stuart L. CooperImmediate Past President Mark PeeplesInterim Executive Director John C. Nemeth

American Scientist gratefully acknowledges support for “Engineering” through the Leroy Record Fund.

Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society is a society of scientists and engineers,

achievement. A diverse organization of members and chapters, the Society fosters interaction among science, technology, and society; encourages appreciation and support of original work in science and technology; and promotes

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Printed in USA

The inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States represents a sea

change for the scientific enterprise. Trump has claimed, variously, that climate change is a hoax, vaccines trigger autism, and compact fluorescent light bulbs cause cancer. These views stand at odds with scientific evidence. Many have argued that his election confirms we have entered a post-truth era, in which facts are considered subjective and any infor-mation that conflicts with one’s personal opinion is justifiably questionable.

This sociopolitical moment has arrived even as sci-ence and technology—institutions that intrinsically

rely on objective observations of reality—have reached a pinnacle of influence and usefulness. Science has made it possible to defeat emerging health threats, overcome diminishing resource availability, ease environmental stress, and ac-celerate economic growth. Survey data show that the public overwhelmingly supports investments in these areas. Generally speaking, the aims of scientists and the public would appear to be compatible. And yet scientists are facing mar-ginalization and suppression from incoming leadership. So what’s going on?

In some ways it’s not difficult to understand why science has become en-tangled in the political fray: Science is a powerful tool that disrupts existing paradigms. And disruption can be unsettling. Groups that benefit from the sta-tus quo feel threatened when new technologies catalyze systemic change, even when these transformations mean better health and greater prosperity overall. Other groups sidelined during earlier transitional periods grow concerned that further change, even if it may be very different, will render their circumstances all the more dire.

Taking either of these perspectives as a starting point, calling scientific intent into question doesn’t seem a great leap. From there, especially in the absence of other information, the next logical step for some may be disbelief, distrust, and disdain. Those who reject climate science may view scientists as part of a global anticapitalist conspiracy. Those who question the safety of genetically modified crops may assert that scientists are colluding with corporations to monopolize agricultural markets.

At American Scientist, we recognize the enormous need to help remedy the current predicament. We are therefore renewing our commitment to sharing and contextualizing scientific and technological breakthroughs. We’ll strive not only to provide important science updates but also to explain how they fit into the bigger scheme of things.

We’re aware that these simple acts, performed by a small group of people, won’t be enough by themselves to restore broad-based faith in science, so we’ll need your help. As we enter a challenging age for science, we’ll be working to ensure that researchers and technologists have a seat at the table when impor-tant decisions are made. We’ll also provide ideas and opportunities for you to participate in the process.

In this issue, we are launching Science Communication, a column dedicated to the effective dissemination of research results to all audiences. In his inaugural article, “Ending the Crisis of Complacency for Science” (pages 18–21), Matthew Nisbet identifies gaps in current science communication channels that alien-ate scientists from the public by failing to accommodate in-depth coverage and analysis of scientific topics. Also, in “The Hand-in-Hand Spread of Mistrust and Misinformation in Flint” (pages 22–26), Siddhartha Roy calls on his experience dealing with the Flint water crisis to recommend ways scientists can regain eroded public trust. Together, Nisbet and Roy make a compelling case for scien-tists to engage with the public at the local level.

We invite you to tell us whether these ideas are helpful for restoring trust and truth in all our communities. —Jamie L. Vernon (@JLVernonPhD)

Science in the Post-Truth Era


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www.americanscientist.org 2017 January–February 3

Win-Win TextbooksTo the Editors:David Harris’s and Mark A. Schnee-gurt’s article “The Other Open-Access Debate” (November–December) on the price of textbooks reminds me of a decision I made some years ago. I launched a new pair of courses for Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Pro-gram in Interactive Media and Game Development. Based on one of my hobbies, collecting strategy games, the two courses in board-game design were unique nationally at the time. As I designed the courses, I wrote five textbooks (found as the series “Studies in Game Design”).

I self-published, which meant that each book’s release was nearly instan-taneous. I wrote two books over a sum-mer. They were on sale by that Labor Day. I priced the books to be affordable for students. The books, some with lavish full-color illustrations, cost the students $4–$6 each. So, most students bought the books without complaint. And there also have been library sales. My royalty rate was 70 percent, for the most part. Self-publication is a win-win outcome for faculty and students.

Alas, portable book devices appar-ently do not handle LaTeX or PDFs well as inputs. However, my third self-publisher firm, Third Millennium, takes PDFs as inputs, so that I could indeed self-publish physics texts this way.

George Phillies, Professor EmeritusWorcester Polytechnic InstituteWorcester, MA

Drs. Harris and Schneegurt respond:Dr. Phillies’s approach is an excellent example of how digital technologies enable producers of content to reach an audience that was not possible just a few years ago. The cost savings for students is an undeniable benefit to so-ciety. However, the push toward open-ly licensing content is about more than just low cost—it’s also about the rights afforded the user of the content. Users can adapt, redistribute, and augment our published materials without per-mission. This level of freedom sparks innovation and broadens accessibility.

We believe that authors should be compensated for their work, so under our model authors are paid for their intellectual work during production, but not through a lifetime of royal-

ties at student expense. Our content-development model is supported by extensive peer review and professional editing to ensure that the materials are accurate and meet the scope and se-quence requirements of established curricula. The finished products are available, free of charge, in a myriad of online formats, with great flexibility and accessibility, and as low-cost print-ed volumes that match the quality of traditional textbooks. The digital revo-lution has heightened the adventure of education, through self-publishing content and open educational resourc-es. We believe that both models can coexist effectively in the market.

Camelot of MathematicsTo the Editors:Thank you for Dan Silver’s highly entertaining article in the September–October issue, “Mathematical Induction and the Nature of British Miracles.” England in the 1800s must have been a Camelot of mathematics, featuring an extraordinary population of brilliant ec-centrics. In future excursions there, you might look for reasons to include Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace. I know

American Scientist (ISSN 0003-0996) is published bimonthly by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 (919-549-0097). Newsstand single copy $5.95. Back issues $7.95 per copy for 1st class mailing. U.S. subscriptions: one year $30, two years $54, three years $80. Canadian subscriptions: one year $38; other foreign subscriptions: one year $46. U.S. institutional rate: $75; Canadian $83; other foreign $91. Copyright © 2017 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic or electronic process, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise copied, with the exception of one-time noncommercial, personal use, without written permission of the publisher. Second-class postage paid at Durham, NC, and additional mailing office. Postmaster: Send change of address form 3579 to Sigma Xi, P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. Canadian publications mail agreement no. 40040263. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to P. O. Box 503, RPO West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, Ontario L4B 4R6.

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she worked on continued fractions and also maybe on the concept of induction. I don’t know how much of that work ended up being published.

Paul ZeigerBoulder, CO

Dr. Silver responds:Ada Lovelace was tutored in mathemat-ics by Augustus De Morgan, whose love of inductive learning I detailed in the ar-ticle. I had asked Christopher Hollings, departmental lecturer in mathematics and its history at the University of Ox-

ford, to look into their extant notes, hop-ing to find evidence that De Morgan had taught her about induction. Unfor-tunately, no evidence of that was found. Nevertheless, Ada Lovelace was a fasci-nating person. If I ever find a new angle on her life and work, then you can be sure that I will write about her.

Endangered Seeds

To the Editors:I enjoyed reading the book excerpt “Seeds on Ice” about the seed bank

that ensures that crop diversity may be maintained in the future, included in the September–October issue. What about saving seeds of endangered wild plants?

Lane SmithStony Brook, NY

Editors’ Note:The Svalbard Global Seed Vault stores seeds from plants that are wild relatives of crop plants, to ensure a wider pool of potentially useful genetic traits, and some of these wild relatives could be endangered. However, the seed vault focuses on storing seeds from worldwide genebanks of plants related to agriculture, and therefore doesn’t store seeds from plants that are not related to crops, whether or not they are endan-gered. One exception, however, is that the vault stores general plant seeds from Sval-bard, its hosting location; seeds from about 88 plant species of the region are stored, 20 of which are endangered. However, the Mil-lennium Seed Bank in the United Kingdom focuses on seeds of wild plants.

How to Write to American Scientist

Brief letters commenting on articles appearing in the magazine are wel-comed. The editors reserve the right to edit submissions. Please include an email address if possible. Address: Letters to the Editors, P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 or [email protected].

ONLINE @


New Website Design in the WorksKeep an eye on our website in the coming months for the launch of our updated online design.http://www.amsci.org

Scientists’ Nightstand Gift GuideOur 2016 gift guide covers children’s books, large-format picture books, and nonfiction prose books.http://bit.ly/2fPq6Wc

Escher the ScientistThe artist M. C. Escher valued the in-fluence of scientists and mathemati-cians in producing his famous works.http://bit.ly/2fjrBaZClimate Change Communication 101In this blog post, digital features editor Katie L. Burke summarizes the communication ideas that the climate change literature has explored so far.http://bit.ly/2fzem7c

A New Form of CombustionIn this podcast, related to the last is-sue’s Sightings column, digital manag-ing editor Robert Frederick explores a low-emission method of combustion that is full of puzzles and potential.http://bit.ly/2gwo8ec

Graphene Takes FlightThis podcast, related to the last issue’s Spotlight report, features an in-terview with aerospace engineer Billy Beggs about the first ever graphene-coated airplane, built by his team.http://bit.ly/2gbVsa5

Nuclear Power After FukushimaWatch a Q&A with research physicist M. V. Ramana of Princeton University

on the future of energy production via nuclear power.http://bit.ly/2f0qYYE

Having Faith in Science, EquivocallyIn this opinion blog post, digital managing editor Robert Frederick says: “Unequivocally deny scientific results? No, that’s saying there’s cer-tainty when there must be doubt.”http://bit.ly/2fzdCyS

InfographicPage 10 Michael Paukner

Computing SciencePages 15, 16 Barbara Aulicino

PerspectivePage 24 Barbara Aulicino

The Prospects of Artificial Endosymbiosis

Pages 37–39 Barbara Aulicino

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Spotlight

The public image of Neanderthals as low-browed, hulking brutes is due for a makeover. We humans sometimes like to think of ourselves as quite dis-tinct from our extinct cousins, but the evidence from more and more fossil sites suggests that Homo neanderthalensisand Homo sapiens shared many personal qualities. We now know, for instance, that Neanderthals took care of their el-derly and disabled relatives, buried their dead in ritualistic ways, and, in certain contexts, apparently imbued natural ob-jects with symbolic meaning. Moreover, these near-humans must have been able to adapt to many different habitats: In the period between about 450,000 and 40,000 years ago, they left their traces in locales as far-flung as Portugal, Chi-na, and the Indonesian island of Flores. Their adventurousness is matched today by the boundless curiosity and ingenu-ity of researchers developing new ways to find out more about them.

The talks and posters presented at the 2016 annual meeting of the European Society for the Study of Human Evolu-tion, hosted by Madrid’s Museo Arque-ológico Regional, spanned the past two million years of human evolution. Nean-derthals came in for an outsize share of the attention, though, perhaps because the Iberian peninsula abounds in Nean-derthal sites. Two of the most intensively studied of these sites lie in north-central Spain: Atapuerca (which includes the evocatively named Sima de los Huesos, or Chasm of Bones) and Pinilla del Valle.

The site of Sima de los Huesos is fa-mous for its large collection of hominin fossils: One stratigraphic layer alone was found to hold several thousand of them, including many skull fragments. Using a new dating technique, a re-search team led by paleontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga of the Universidad Com-plutense de Madrid, has established a minimum age of 430,000 years for these

samples. The date is of particular inter-est here because morphological analysis of the skull fragments, backed up by the evidence from nuclear DNA sequenc-ing, puts this population at the begin-ning of the Neanderthal lineage; thus, several different kinds of evidence con-verge at this site to establish when our congeneric cousins arrived on the scene.

Pinilla del Valle, an hour’s drive from the center of Madrid, also contains nu-merous well-preserved hominin fossils, thanks to its composition of karst and dolomite, rock types that easily form caves. Recently investigated is Desscu-bierta (“discovered” or “uncovered”) Cave, with a long and narrow galley whose sediments have been carbon-dated to between 38,000 and 42,000 years ago. At least one spot in the galley appears to have been used as a hearth and also a grave; here Arsuaga and his collaborators have found six tooth frag-ments and part of the jaw of a Neander-thal child. Nearby, a number of other small hearths contain an array of horn cores from aurochs (Bos primigenius) and bison (Bison priscus), together with ant-lers from red deer (Cervus elaphus). Most fascinating, a short distance away above a layer of flat stones, the skull of a steppe rhinoceros (Stephanorhinus hemitoechus)was found upside down, with a horn placed on top of it.

How to explain such a bizarre as-semblage? In a presentation at the con-ference, Arsuaga laid out his research team’s reasoning: “This association could have been produced by chance, but we consider this improbable, given the preponderance of horns; also, the presence of fire points to an anthropo-genic origin.” He continued, “Could it have been subsistence? There is no evi-dence of human consumption.” As an-other possibility, it might perhaps have been functional—but we know Nean-derthals didn´t use organic substances such as horn, antler, or bone as raw material for implements or ornaments. Moreover, there’s no evidence, such as partly worked bones or a concentration of bone fragments, to indicate that this was a site of industry. To the research-ers who discovered them, these care-fully arranged horns and skulls looked almost like modern-day hunting tro-phies. Indeed, at 40,000 to 45,000 years

Neanderthals ReenvisionedNew techniques for determining the age of fossils and sediments are providing insights into human origins.

This artist’s reconstruction of a Neanderthal child reflects an emerging sense of Homo neander-thalensis as closely similar to modern humans, though more robust in form. The reconstruction, by Elisabeth Daynes, is based on fossils found at the Devil’s Tower site near Gibraltar, Spain.

Sebastien Plailly/Science Source


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2017 January–February 7www.americanscientist.org

old, Descubierta Cave may contain “possibly the strongest evidence yet for symbolic behavior in Neanderthals,” Arsuaga concludes—although, he says, alternative explanations are welcome.

Archaeological finds weren’t the only kind of scientific development to be discussed at the conference. Several groups presented new techniques that could help archaeologists gather more data from material already found. In one presentation, Zenobia Jacobs, of the University of Wollongong, Austra-lia, and her colleagues offered a couple of improvements on the conventional method of dating fossils by thermolu-minescence, in which a sample is heated to release trapped electrons, which can be used to determine the amount of time since it was exposed to sunlight. The new method is the one that Ar-suaga and his colleagues used to date samples at Sima de los Huesos, and is called optically stimulated luminescence.This technique reveals the erosion and transport history of individual grains in a sample, and can tell whether a given site underwent disturbance at some point before being excavated (this would be indicated by a mixture of ages within one sample). The age range of the optically stimulated lu-minescence measurements made on quartz grains can even be extended further back in the past by means of a related technique, infrared stimulated lu-minescence, in which measurements are made on potassium feldspar grains.

Another new technique, in which DNA is extracted from sediment sam-ples, can yield a taxonomic catalogue of the plants and creatures that had existed at a given site—most useful when fossil-ized remains are too damaged or frag-mented to provide such information. A study presented by Viviane Slon, Svante Pääbo, and their colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary An-thropology and nine other international research institutions, examined DNA from sediment samples at six sites across Eurasia; mitochondrial DNA fragments from five of the sites confirmed the pres-ence of mammals large and small, from bears to the now-extinct woolly rhinoc-eros. Slon and her coauthors see great potential in this technique for tracing “the past presence of animals and poten-tially hominins at archaeological sites.” When it comes to recovering stories of the past, not only the sites beneath the ground but the ground itself has much to tell us. —Sandra J. Ackerman

Neanderthals buried their dead to the accompaniment of rites that apparently varied from one region to another. In the scene reimagined above (based on a site in Regourdou, France), the limbs of the deceased man were tucked in and bound as if to inter the body in the fetal posi-tion, whereas a burial site not far from Madrid was found to include many horn cores, antlers, and even a rhinoceros skull, apparently with symbolic significance. Below, a paleontologist examines a few of the thousands of bones and bone fragments excavated from the Sima de los Huesos site, in Atapuerca, Spain.

Tom M

cHugh/Science Source

Javier Trueba/MSF/Science Source


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How did the Fukushima Daiichi inci-dent compare with previous problems at other nuclear power reactors?On March 11, 2011, a tsunami struck the coast of Japan, and as a result, three op-erating reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant lost cooling. One of the problems with any nuclear power plant is that the fuel, even if you shut down the reactor, continues to keep generating heat that has to be contin-uously transported out of the reactor. Because that was no longer happen-ing, there was essentially a meltdown, and one result was hydrogen gas being produced inside the reactor. Eventually there was a hydrogen explosion that led to the radionuclides generated inside the nuclear reactor being expelled into the atmosphere. This release then contami-nated both the surrounding countryside and the Pacific Ocean.

Compared with Chernobyl, Fukushi-ma probably resulted in something like an eighth to a quarter of the amount of cesium-137, which is the most significant long-term radionuclide that contami-nates, being released. But most of it was carried over the Pacific Ocean, so there was not much damage to human health. There was much, much less radioactiv-ity released from Three Mile Island.

What is the current state of nuclear power usage in the world?The International Atomic Energy Agen-cy counts about 450 operating plants, of which 43 are in Japan. Of the latter, only 2 are operating, and it’s not clear how many of the ones that are not operating will ever come back. Most of them were shut down after Fukushima. Likewise, in the United States, although there are 100 plants, quite a few are scheduled to be shut down over the next few years.

How much power is generated by nu-clear plants, compared with all sources?Nuclear power generates about 11 per-cent of the world’s electricity as of last year, and this number has been declin-

ing steadily. The highest it has been was in 1996, when it was about 17.6 percent, so there’s been roughly about a 39 per-cent decline since then.

Is that because of economics, public per-ception, or some combination thereof?I think there are multiple factors go-ing on here. Economics certainly plays a very important part. Nuclear power plants are expensive to construct. They also take a long time to construct, so you cannot quickly build up a nuclear power capacity. Public perception has certainly played a part too, though it’s a much harder thing to quantify. Also, the world has been using far less electricity than had been anticipated in the past. Peo-ple thought the energy demand would keep growing, and that has not really happened around the world. There are many countries where energy consump-tion has been fairly stagnant, including the United States.

What safety updates are being built into new reactors, in light of the prob-lems that occurred at Fukushima?Most countries around the world made some kind of safety assessment of their reactor fleets and of what they were constructing. To the extent that these have been implemented, one as-sumes that these fleets are going to be safer, as are newer plants. At the same time, I think the question is, can we re-ally be sure that these reactors are not going to have an accident? And there I think the answer is that one just can-not be sure about this. There’s always going to be a possibility of an accident, regardless of what kind of reactor it is.

How are other energy technologies af-fecting the economic viability of nucle-ar power generation?In the United States, except in a few states that have regulated markets, it makes no economic sense whatsoever to invest in a new nuclear plant. A new nuclear plant today, such as the ones be-

ing constructed in Georgia and South Carolina, cost around $15 to $20 billion for about 2,000 megawatts of generat-ing capacity, and the cost of electricity from these plants is much higher than one can expect from most of the alterna-tives. Because of fracking, natural gas prices are very low, but renewables have also become extremely cheap in the past few years. Electricity from a new nuclear plant would cost roughly twice as much as electricity from a photovoltaic farm.

Renewable energy sources are able to have smaller footprints. There has also been some investment in smaller modu-lar nuclear reactors, but is scale a factor?Wind and solar tend to be much more modular in their nature of construc-tion. Nuclear reactors could also be more modular, and in fact, the oldest nuclear power plants were small ones. But there was a reason why nuclear power plants became big. They were always very expensive, and the only way to lower costs was to take advan-tage of economies of scale. It doesn’t take twice as much concrete or twice as many workers to operate a plant that is generating twice as much electricity. It’s hard to imagine how a small reactor is going to be economically better off.

How do we compare the risks of a nu-clear power plant disaster with, say, less visible but potentially disastrous climate change from fossil fuel use? Comparing risks is always a very tricky business. Nuclear power suffers from a particular combination of risks that make it very hard for people to come

First Person: M. V. RamanaSince the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in 2011, the nuclear power in-dustry has been in the spotlight worldwide. M. V. Ramana, a physicist with the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, and a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer, studies nuclear power in the wider context of energy production, and looks at public perception of the energy industry. Ramana discussed the future prospects of nuclear power with managing editor Fenella Saunders. (A video of the full interview is available on the American Scientist website.)


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to terms with. It’s an unfamiliar risk. It’s also a risk that is fairly catastrophic at some given point, as opposed to a small number of deaths occurring year after year, as is the case with fossil fuel plants. It’s a risk that probably runs across generations. It’s also a risk over which people have very little control. Comparisons between that and, let’s say, the risks of being in a car accident, cause people to react very differently.

When I drive, I know there’s a risk of an accident, but I also know that if I wear my seat belt, if I drive within the speed limit, if I obey laws, if I don’t try to drive at midnight on a Saturday night when I’m expecting many more drunk drivers, and so forth, my chances of an accident go down. I have no such control over what happens in a nuclear power plant, or for that matter, an air-plane, so I am going to treat those kinds of risks very differently. The numbers then do not mean a lot.

With respect to climate change, it and nuclear plants share similarities in the magnitude and lack of control for indi-vidual people, but the differences are that the climate is seen as something with multiple possible solutions, and people who are concerned about climate also strongly support things like renew-ables and energy efficiency. Those kinds of options do not exist with nuclear.

How widespread is support for using nu-clear energy to mitigate climate change?To the extent that people support nu-clear power more because of climate change concerns, it’s a very reluctant source of support. The people who are concerned about climate change also tend to be concerned about nuclear waste, the risk of accidents, and so forth, so they say, “If there is no other option, then perhaps we will go in for nuclear, but given that we see that there are rapid advances in renewables and other ways, then we would rather support that.” In the United States, if you look at the peo-ple who support nuclear power, it’s cor-related very strongly with people who also deny climate change or who think that it is not a big problem.

Is there anything to the argument that renewables will take too long to ramp up, and nuclear is the better option be-cause it’s more established?I think the argument does not work at all. It takes much less time to ramp up renewable power production, sim-ply because nuclear power plants take

a very long time to construct. In Cali-fornia recently there was a decision to shut down the Diablo Canyon plant over the next 10 years. The local utility will replace it with a combination of renewables and efficiency. That kind of a model seems to be much more likely. But build a new nuclear power plant to replace it? I don’t think any utility that has concern about its profitability is go-ing to make that decision.

Does the support of some prominent po-litical leaders for nuclear power change public perception of the technology?In public opinion polls, if you ask peo-ple whether they support new nuclear power construction, their answers very much depend on how you phrase the question or which kind of information you give them beforehand. If you tell people, for example, that “Nuclear pow-er is a well-known way of mitigating climate change. Do you support build-ing nuclear power plants?,” you’re more likely to get the answer yes, as opposed to when you ask them, “Nuclear pow-er plants cost a lot of money to build. Would you support that?” In that sense, if you have a lot of prominent people supporting nuclear power, that’s going to help with public perception, but at the same time, that alone is not going to change the picture fundamentally.

Is there any connection between mis-trust of science and experts and criticism of nuclear power?I think the vast majority of people who are concerned about nuclear power also quite often know a lot about science, and trust science, and it is the results of these science-based studies that lead them to be distrustful of predictions about how safe nuclear power plants are. I think in many cases the nuclear industry has not served itself well. In India, for example, the head of the In-dian Atomic Energy Commission, after Fukushima, announced that the prob-ability of a Fukushima-like accident in India is one in infinity—zero, in other words. This is the kind of very over-confident statement that actually leads people not to trust scientists of that sort.

Is such a myth of guaranteed safety being propagated in China as well?In China, certainly this battle is going on in a big way. China has the fastest grow-ing nuclear power industry anywhere in the world, and yet they are faced with the fairly important decision of where

they build their nuclear power plants. So far, all the nuclear power plants in China have been built on the coast. Prior to Fukushima, there were plans to con-struct nuclear power plants inland as well, near large rivers or lakes, because all nuclear reactors require sources of cooling water. This has been strongly resisted both by the public as well as by fairly high-level decision makers. The nuclear industry in China has been say-ing, “You don’t have to worry about it. The new designs that we are construct-ing are perfectly safe,” and on the other side, there are people saying, “We still cannot be sure, and we don’t want to risk contaminating our agricultural land and our rivers with this.”

Is the disposal of nuclear waste taken into account when reactors are built?Is waste management planned at the be-ginning of the cycle? I think the answer for that has to be no. Whether it’s in the United States or elsewhere, many coun-tries had assumed that within a couple of decades or when they built their first power plant, they would start having geological waste repositories operating. To date that has not happened. We all know about the Yucca Mountain pro-posal, which has gone up and down, but it’s not operational. There is in fact no operational underground waste storage facility for permanent disposal of com-mercial radioactive nuclear waste.

Most people thought the problem of setting up a nuclear waste repository would mean finding a suitable geologi-cal site. It turns out that that’s not the main problem. The main problem is trying to find a community that is will-ing to live near one of these waste re-positories, with all the risks that come with it. Now they are saying, “Let’s start with trying to find a community that is willing to do this, and then set up one of these things.”

So is nuclear basically an industry that’s on the way out?It’s a risky business to predict the fu-ture. But if you look at the trends, they do show an industry in decline. At the same time, the nuclear industry has high levels of political support in different countries, so it’s not going to go away any time soon either. I think what we’re going to see is something very slowly running into the sunset, unless there is some dramatic breakthrough in the next decade or two. There are lots of technical challenges still in front of us.

www.americanscientist.org


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Infographic

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ichael Paukner / substudio.com

The Moon by the Clock: The illuminated portion of the Moon visible to Earthbound observers changes shape as it orbits. Al-though tidal locking with Earth results in the same lunar sur-face always facing our planet, the Moon cycles through lunar phases that vary in visibility, from 100 percent (when the Moon is full) to 0 percent (when the Moon is new, or invisible from

Earth), nearly every 14 days. The “2017 o’clock” Moon calen-dar is graphic designer Michael Paukner visualization of the yearly calendar using inspiration from astronomy. The graphic depicts the year’s 52 weeks and 365 days on a clockwise an-nual trip around the Sun and shows the dates when the Moon is new, in its first quarter, in its second quarter, and full.



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New Gene Editing TechniqueThe gene editing technique CRISPR has rapidly advanced genomic engineer-ing, but one of its downsides is that it can be prone to cut DNA in the wrong place. A more complicated gene editing technique was recently proposed that avoids CRISPR’s proclivity for cutting and

thus has more control over off-target effects. The technique shows promise for treating the common genetic disorder thalas-semia, which

is characterized by low levels of hemo-globin in the bloodstream. The method could also work for other genetic disor-ders caused by a single mutant allele. Re-searchers used synthetic genetic material called peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) that were designed to bind to a particular sec-tion of mouse DNA where the faulty cod-ing for hemoglobin resides. Once a PNA binds there, it forms a bumpy triple helix, an anomaly that a cell’s repair machinery will cut away. The second stage of the technique is to deploy a DNA patch with the correct hemoglobin code that the re-pair machinery can insert. The technique only worked in a handful of cells, but that was enough to cure thalassemia in mouse models. The next step is to check how it might perform in humans.

Bahal, R., et al. In vivo correction of anaemia in -thalassemic mice by PNA-mediated gene editing with nanoparticle delivery. Na-ture Communications 7:13304 (October 26)

Great Apes and False BeliefA new study that involved eye tracking of great apes watching videos of an ac-tor in a gorilla suit indicated that these primates can predict another’s behavior even when they know it is misguided, which could indicate the ability to rec-ognize in others a false belief. Such an ability is a stage in the development of a theory of mind, a stage previously

thought to be unique to humans. The videos adapted a technique that has been used to study false belief in infants and that tests whether study subjects an-ticipate where someone will look for an object or individual. The videos showed high-stakes scenarios, such as the actor in a gorilla suit attacking a researcher, then hiding in one of two hay bales, then leav-ing after the researcher leaves the scene. When the researcher returns with a big stick to look for the wayward gorilla, eye tracking showed that the bonobos, chim-panzees, and orangutans who watched the video would spend time looking at the hay bale where it had been hiding, predicting where the researcher would mistakenly look for it. This study prompt-ed a debate among primatologists about false belief and what conclusions were appropriate to draw from the study. Nev-ertheless, all seem to agree that it dem-onstrates the promise of eye tracking methods in animal behavior research and the potential for mental continuity be-tween humans and their close relatives.

Krupenye, C., F. Kano, S. Hirata, J. Call, and M. Tomasello. Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs. Science 354:110–144 (October 7)

Deep-Sea Viruses Kill ArchaeaOn the deep sea floor, bacteria are more abundant than archaea, but the latter suf-fer viral infections twice as often. Nearly all mortality of these microbes in the deep sea is due to viral infections. Because of the deep sea’s vast scale—it constitutes more than 65 percent of the world’s surface and more than 90 percent of its biosphere—these archaea–virus relation-ships could have large effects on global biogeochemical cycles. For example, deep-sea deaths of bacteria and archaea release between 0.37 and 0.63 gigatons of carbon per year. Although little is known about deep-sea ecosystems, this study is an im-portant advance in understanding their uniqueness and significance.

Danovaro, R., et al. Virus-mediated archaeal hecatomb in the deep seafloor. Science Ad-vances 2:e1600492 (October 12)

Intermediate Jaw in Fish FossilA new fossil find of an ancient lineage of fish is rewriting what we know and will teach about jaw evolution in ver-tebrates. The fish fossil is from a group called placoderms that has long been

thought to be an anomalous lineage of armored, “jawless” bony fish that died out as bony fish with modern ver-tebrate jaws emerged and gave rise to subsequent lineages. One of the ways that modern vertebrates can trace their evolution is the consistency in the jaw bones in everything from goldfish to lizards to humans. But this recent fossil find of a 423-million-year-old placoderm species, Qilinyu rostrata, as well as a placoderm fossil reported in 2013, Ente-lognathus primordialis, show that there were placoderms that had jaw bones ancestral to modern vertebrates. These finds demonstrate an intermediate form between the jawless, toothlike plates of earlier placoderms and the three-boned jaw (composed of a maxilla, premaxilla, and dentary) of modern vertebrates.

Zhu, M., et al. A Silurian maxillate placo-derm illuminates jaw evolution. Science 354:334–336 (October 21)

Paralyzed Monkeys WalkMonkeys with spinal cord injuries were able to walk again when a wireless implant was placed in their brains, stimulating electrodes in their legs that recreate signals recorded from their brains. The animals regained the ability to coordinate their legs and bear weight

on them. Two people with spinal cord injuries are now undergoing an adapted version of this treatment.

Capogrosso, M., et al. A brain–spine interface alleviating gait deficits after spinal cord injury in primates. Nature 539:284–288 (November 10)

I n this roundup, digital features editor Katie L. Burke summarizes notable recent developments in

scientific research, selected from reports compiled in the free electronic newslet-ter Sigma Xi SmartBrief. Online: https://www.smartbrief.com/sigmaxi/index.jsp

Briefings

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Recalling the moment he and his colleagues com-posed their first two-color image of the structures inside an endosome (a compartment attached to the cell membrane that helps sort incoming substanc-

es), Stephen Adams says his initial response was, “Wow, this is a really pretty picture. I wonder what it means?”

Adams, a biochemist at the University of California, San Diego, had been working on the project for 13 years. “Thirteen sounds unlucky, so I like to round up,” Adams says. It started just after a Christmas holiday during which his longtime colleague Roger Tsien had spent some quiet time thinking about how an electron microscope could image biological samples in color. “He would just pick up concepts from completely different fields,” Adams says, “and then he’d think ‘Well, what chemistry do we need to achieve this?’”

Individually coloring an object’s parts makes it far eas-ier for us to understand how the whole object functions. But even though electron microscopes allow us to see at resolutions millions of times better than that of our eyes, they can’t distinguish where different proteins are located in a cell, which is necessary to correctly colorize them. So Tsien’s idea was to chemically tag specific proteins with metals, providing the electron microscope with a distinc-tive signal. Tsien, who died in August 2016 at age 64, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for his develop-ments with green fluorescent protein, which is used to tag different proteins with multiple colors in living crea-tures. This work to colorize electron microscope images built on that knowledge. But the team had to work out a complicated process to tag multiple proteins in biological samples that were headed to the vacuum environment of electron microscopy. As Adams explains, “That is what

took us so long.” The team reported their work in the No-vember 17, 2016, issue of Cell Chemical Biology.

“The trick is that we generate a polymer at the site of each protein,” Adams says. Then the biological sample is placed in a solution, and, one by one, different metals are washed over the sample and precipitate out when they at-tach to a polymer at the site of the specific protein they are meant to tag. Afterward, under the electron microscope, the deposited metals cause distinctive spectra, which are used to identify their locations: Peptides taken up by the endo-some were labeled with the metal praseodymium (falsely colored red, above). Cerium-labeled proteins (green) show the location of proteins that start on the outside of an endo-some and then get internalized as “it does this unusual, inward budding of the membrane,” Adams says.

“Of course, people haven’t been able to look at [the internal structure of the endosome] in such high resolu-tion before,” Adams says, “so it’s not like I could just say ‘Ah yes, it’s exactly as we expect.’” So like with any proof-of-concept technique, researchers will repeat their work, refine their processes, improve multicolor electron microscopy, and look for still other ways to verify what we can now see. —Robert Frederick

Sightings

Even though they are far smaller than the shortest wavelength of visible light, tiny biological objects can finally be imaged in multiple hues.

Now In Color


False colors reveal better than ever before the internal structure of two endosomes of a eukaryotic cell. Biochemists painstakingly developed a process to tag the vesicle’s proteins and contents with metals so they could be identified with an electron microscope and assigned colors. Until now, electron microscope data could only be translated into grayscale images.

Stephen R. Adams et al.

200 nanometers


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Aquiet but profound revolu-tion has been taking place throughout science. The computing revolution has

transformed science by enabling all sorts of new discoveries through infor-mation technology.

Throughout most of the history of sci-ence and technology, there have been two types of characters. One is the ex-perimenter, who gathers data to reveal when a hypothesis works and when it does not. The other is the theoretician, who designs mathematical models to explain what is already known and uses the models to make predictions about what is not known. The two types inter-act with one another because hypoth-eses may come from models, and what is known comes from previous models and data. The experimenter and the the-oretician were active in the sciences well before computers came on the scene.

When governments began to com-mission projects to build electronic computers in the 1940s, scientists be-gan discussing how they would use these machines. Nearly everybody had something to gain. Experiment-ers looked to computers for data analysis—sifting through large data sets for statistical patterns. Theoreti-cians looked to them for calculating the equations of mathematical mod-els. Many such models were formu-lated as differential equations, which considered changes in functions over

infinitesimal intervals. Consider for ex-ample the generic function f over time (abbreviated f(t)). Suppose that the dif-ferences in f(t) over time give another equation, abbreviated g(t). We write this relation as df(t)/dt=g(t). You could then calculate the approximate values of f(t) in a series of small changes in time steps, abbreviated Δt, with the differ-ence equation f(t+Δt)=f(t)+Δtg(t). This calculation could easily be extended to multiple space dimensions with differ-ence equations that combine values on neighboring nodes of a grid. In his col-lected works, John von Neumann, the polymath who helped design the first stored program computers, described

algorithms for solving systems of dif-ferential equations on discrete grids.

Using the computer to accelerate the traditional work of experimenters and theoreticians was a revolution of its own. But something more happened. Scientists who used computers found themselves routinely designing new ways to advance science. Simulation is a prime example. By simulating airflows around a wing with a type of equation (called Navier-Stokes) that is broken out over a grid surrounding a simulated aircraft, aeronautical engineers largely

eliminated the need for wind tunnels and test flights. Astronomers similarly simulated the collisions of galaxies, and chemists simulated the deterioration of space probe heat shields on entering an atmosphere. Simulation allowed scien-tists to reach where theory and experi-ment could not. It became a new way of doing science. Scientists became compu-tational designers as well as experiment-ers and theoreticians.

Another important example of how computers have changed how science is done has been the new paradigm of treating a physical process as an infor-mation process, which allows more to be learned about the physical process

by studying the information process. Biologists have made significant ad-vances with this technique, notably with sequencing and editing genes. Data analysts also have found that deep learning models enable them to make surprisingly accurate predictions of processes in many fields. For the quantities predicted, the real process behaves as an information process.

The two approaches are often com-bined, such as when the information process provides a simulation for the physical process it models.

Computational Thinking in Science

The computer revolution has profoundly affected how we think about science, experimentation, and research.

Peter J. Denning

Peter J. Denning is distinguished professor of com-puter science and director of the Cebrowski Institute for information innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is editor of ACM Ubiquity, and is a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery. The author’s views are not necessarily those of his employer or the U.S. Federal Government. Email: [email protected]

ComputingScience

Scientists who used computers found themselves routinely designing new

ways to advance science. They became computational designers as well as

experimenters and theoreticians.


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The Origins of a TermThe term computational science, and its associated term computational thinking,came into wide use during the 1980s. In 1982, theoretical physicist Kenneth Wil-son received a Nobel Prize in physics

for developing computational models that produced startling new discover-ies about phase changes in materials. He designed computational methods to evaluate the equations of renormaliza-tion groups, and used them to observe how a material changes phase, such as the direction of the magnetic force in a ferrimagnet (in which adjacent ions have opposite but unequal charges). He launched a campaign to win recog-nition and respect for computational

science. He argued that all scientific disciplines had very tough problems—“grand challenges”—that would yield to massive computation. He and other visionaries used the term computational science for the emerging branches of sci-

ence that used computation as their pri-mary method. They saw computation as a new paradigm of science, comple-menting the traditional paradigms of theory and experiment. Some of them used the term computational thinking for the thought processes in doing com-putational science—designing, testing, and using computational models. They launched a political movement to se-cure funding for computational science research, culminating in the High-Per-

formance Communication and Com-puting (HPCC) Act passed in 1991 by the U.S. Congress.

It is interesting that computational science and computational thinking in science emerged from within the sci-entific fields—they were not imported from computer science. Indeed, com-puter scientists were slow to join the movement. From the beginnings of computer science in the 1940s, there was a small but important branch of the field that specialized in numerical methods and mathematical software. These computer scientists have the greatest affinity for computational sci-ence and were the first to embrace it.

Computation has proved so produc-tive for advancement of science and engineering that virtually every field of science and engineering has developed a computational branch. In many fields, the computational branch has grown to constitute the majority of the field. For example, in 2001 David Baltimore, No-bel laureate in biology, said that biology is an information science. Most recent advances in biology have involved DNA modeling, sequencing, and editing. We can expect this trend to continue, with computation invading deeper into every field, including social sciences and the

Aeronautics engineers use simulations from computational fluid dynamics to model airflows around proposed aircraft. They have become so good at this that they can test new aircraft designs without wind tunnels or test flights. The first step is to build a three-dimensional mesh in the space surrounding the aircraft (above, in this case for the Space Shuttle). The spacing of the grid points is smaller near the fuselage, where the changes in air movement are greatest. Then the differ-ential equations of airflow are converted to difference equations on the mesh. A su-percomputer grinds out the profiles of the flow field and the forces on each part of the aircraft over time. The numerical results are converted to colored images (left)that reveal where the stresses on the aircraft are greatest. (Image at left courtesy of NASA; image above courtesy of Peter A. Gnoffo and Jeffery A. White/NASA.)

Computational thinking emerged from within the scientific fields—it was not

imported from computer science. Indeed, computer scientists were slow to

join the movement.


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humanities. Many people will learn to be computational designers and thinkers.

What is Computational Thinking?Computational thinking is generally defined as the mental skills that facili-tate the design of automated process-es. Although this term traces back to the beginnings of computer science in the 1950s, it became popular after 2006 when educators undertook the task of helping all children become produc-tive users of computation as part of STEM education. If we can learn what constitutes computational thinking as a mental skill, we may be able to draw more young people to science and ac-celerate our own abilities to advance science. The interest from educators is forcing us to be precise in determining just what computational thinking is.

Most published definitions to date can be paraphrased as follows: “Com-putational thinking is the thought pro-cesses involved in formulating problems so that their solutions are represented as computational steps and algorithms that can be effectively carried out by an information-processing agent.” This definition, however, is fraught with problematic ideas. Consider the word “formulating.” People regularly formu-late requests to have machines do things for them without having to understand how the computation works or how it is designed. The term “information agent” is also problematic—it quickly opens the door to the false belief that step-by-step procedures followed by human beings are necessarily algorithms. Many people follow “step-by-step” procedures that cannot be reduced to an algorithm and automated by a machine. These fuzzy definitions have made it difficult for ed-ucators to know what they are supposed to teach and how to assess whether stu-dents have learned it.

And what “thought processes” are involved? The published definitions say they include making digital repre-sentations, sequencing, choosing alter-natives, iterating loops, running par-allel tasks, abstracting, decomposing, testing, debugging, and reusing. But this is hardly a complete description. To be a useful contributor, a program-mer also needs to understand enough of a scientific field to be able to express problems and solution methods appro-priate for the field. For example, I once witnessed that a team of computational fluid dynamics scientists invited PhD computer scientists to work with them,

only to discover that the computer sci-entists did not understand enough fluid dynamics to be useful. They were not able to think in terms of computational fluid dynamics. The other team mem-bers wound up treating the computer scientists like programmers rather than peers, much to their chagrin. It seems that the thought processes of computa-tional thinking should include those of skilled practitioners of the field where the computation will be used.

All these difficulties suggest that the word “thinking” is not what we are really interested in—we want the

ability to design computations. Design includes the dimensions of listening to the community of users, testing proto-types to see how users react, and mak-ing technology offers that take care of user concerns. Therefore computational design is a more accurate term. It is clearly a skill set, not a body of mental knowledge about programming.

What is a Computational Model?An essential aspect of computational design (or thinking) is a machine that will carry out the automated steps. But most computational designers do not

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As an example of a problem aided by computational thinking, consider a telephone switching office. To determine its capacity, telephone engineers pick a target probability of overflow—for example, 0.001. They ask: What is the maximum number N of simultaneous phone calls so that the chances that a new caller cannot get a dial tone is less than 0.001? A random walk computational model yields an answer. The model has states n=0, 1, 2, …, N,representing the number of calls in progress up to a maximum of N; here N=10. Requests to initiate new calls are occurring at rate . Individual callers hang up at rate μ. Each new-call arrival increases the state by 1 and each hangup decreases it by 1. The movement through the possible states is represented by the state diagram above. Telephone engineers define p(n) as the fraction of time the system is in state n and can prove a difference equation p(n)=( /nμ)p(n–1). They calculate all the p(n) by guessing p(0) and then normalizing so that the sum of p(n) is 1. Then they find the largest N so that p(N) is below the target threshold. For example, if they find p(N)=0.001 when N=10, they predict that a new caller has a chance 0.001 of not getting a dial tone when the exchange capacity is 10 calls.

Computational design helps a doctor build an electronic controller for her office, which consists of a waiting room and a treatment room that holds four people. Patients enter the waiting room and sit down. As soon as the doctor is free, she calls the next patient into the treatment room. When done, the patient departs by a separate door. The doctor wants an indicator lamp to glow in the treatment room when patients are waiting, and another to glow in the waiting room when she is busy treating someone. The engineer designing the controller uses a computational model with states (n,t) where n=0,1,2,3,4 is the num-ber of patients in the waiting room and t=0,1 is the number of patients in the treatment room. The indicator lamp in the treatment room glows whenever n>0, and the lamp in the waiting room glows whenever t>0. The controller implements the state diagram above. State transitions occur at three events: patient arrival (a), patient departure (d), and patient call by the doctor (c). These events are signaled by sensors in the three doors.


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directly consider the hardware of the machine itself; instead they work with a computational model, which is an abstract machine—basically a layer of software on top of the hardware that translates a program into instructions for the hard-ware. Designers are not concerned with mapping the model to the real machine, because that’s a simulation job that soft-ware engineers take care of.

In computing science, the model most talked about is the Turing machine, which was invented in 1936 by com-puting pioneer Alan Turing. His model consists of an infinite tape and a finite state control unit that moves one square at a time back and forth on the tape, reading and changing symbols. Turing machines are the most general model for computation—anything that people

reasonably think can be computed, can be computed by a Turing machine.

But Turing machines are too primi-tive to easily represent everyday com-putation. With each new programming language, computer scientists defined an associated abstract machine that represented the entity programmed by the language. Software called a compilerthen translated the language operations on the abstract machine into machine code on the real hardware.

The models of the Turing machine and of programming languages are all general purpose—they deal with any-thing that can be computed. But we often work with much less powerful models that are still incredibly useful. One of the most common is the finite state machine, which consists of a logic

circuit, a set of flip-flop switch circuits to record the current state, and a clock whose ticks trigger state transitions. Finite state machines model many electronic controllers and operating system command interpreters.

The typical artificial neural network is an even simpler model. It is a loop-free network of gates modeled after neurons. The gates are arranged in lay-ers from those connected to inputs to those connected to outputs. A pattern of bits at the input passes through the net-work and produces an output. There is no state to be recorded or remembered. Each signal from one layer to the next has an associated weight. The network is trained by an algorithm that itera-tively adjusts the weights until the net-work becomes very good at generating

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select a largesubset of

most-fit members

Since the 1950s, various geneticists have experimented with computer simulations of biological evolution, studying how various traits are passed on and how a population evolves to adapt to its circumstances. In 1975 John Holland adapted the idea of these simulations to a general method for finding near-optimal solutions to complex problems in many domains. The idea, depicted in the flow diagram above, is to develop a population of candidate solutions to the problem, encoded as bit-strings. Each bit-string is evaluated by a fitness function, and the most-fit members of the population are selected for

reproduction by mutation and cross-over. A bit-string is modi-fied by mutation when one or several of its bits are randomly flipped. A pair of bit-strings is modified by cross-over by select-ing a random break point and exchanging the two tails of the strings. These changes generate a new population. The process is iterated many times until there are no further improvements in the most-fit individuals or until the computational budget is exhausted. This process is surprisingly good at finding near-optimal solutions to optimization problems whose direct solu-tions would otherwise be intractable.


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the desired output. Some people call this machine learning because the trained (weight-adjusted) circuit acquires a ca-pability to implement a function by be-ing shown many examples. It is also called deep learning because of the hid-den layers and weights in the circuit. Many modern advances in artificial in-telligence and data analytics have been achieved by these circuits. Simulations of these circuits now allow for millions of nodes and dozens of layers.

When you go outside computer sci-ence, you will find few people talk-ing about Turing machines and finite state machines. They talk instead of machine learning and simulation of computational models relevant to their fields. In each field, the computational designer either programs a model or designs a new model—or both.

An important issue with computa-tional models is complexity—how long does it take to get a result? How much storage is needed? Very often a computational model that will give you the exact answer is impossible, too expensive, or too slow. Computational designers get around this with heuris-tics—fast approximations that generate close-approximation solutions quickly.

Experimental validation is often the only way to gain trust in a heuristic. An arti-ficial neural network for face recognition is a heuristic. No one knows of an exact algorithm for recognizing faces. But we know how to build a fast neural network that can get it right most of the time.

Advances and LimitsComputing has changed dramatically since the time when computational modeling grew up. In the 1980s, the hosting system for grand-challenge models was a supercomputer. Today the hosting system is the entire Inter-net, now more commonly called the cloud—a massively distributed sys-tem of data and processing resources around the world. Commercial cloud

services allow you to mobilize the storage and processing power you need when you need it. In addition, we are no longer constrained to deal with finite computations—those that start, compute, deliver their output, and stop. Instead we now tap endless flows of data and processing power as needed and we count on the whole thing to keep operating indefinitely. With so much cheap, massive comput-ing power, more people can be com-putational designers and tackle grand challenge problems.

But there are important limits to what we can do with all this comput-ing power. One limit is that most of our computational methods have a sharp fo-cus—they are very good at the particular task for which they were designed, but not for seemingly similar tasks. We can often overcome that limit with a new design that closes a gap in the old de-sign. Facial recognition is an example. A decade ago, we did not have good methods of detecting and recognizing faces in images—we had to examine the images ourselves. Today, with deep learning algorithms, we have designed very reliable automated face recogniz-ers, overcoming the earlier gap.

Another limit is that there are many problems that cannot be solved at all with computation. Some of these are purely technical, such as determining by inspection when a computer pro-gram will halt or enter an infinite loop. Many others are very complex issues featuring technologies intertwined with social communities and no ob-vious answers—which are known as wicked problems. Many wicked prob-lems are caused by the combined ef-fects of billions of people using a tech-nology. For example, the production of more than a billion refrigerators re-leases enough fluorocarbons to disrupt the upper atmosphere’s protection against excessive sunlight. Millions of cars produce so much smog that some

cities are unhealthy. The only solutions to these problems will emerge from social cooperation among the groups that now offer competing and conflict-ing approaches. Although computing technology can help by visualizing the large-scale effects of our individual ac-tions, only social action will solve the problems we are causing.

Still, computational science is a pow-erful force within science. It empha-sizes the “computational way” of do-ing science and turns its practitioners into skilled computational designers (and thinkers) in their fields of science. Computational designers spend much of their time inventing, programming, and validating computational mod-els, which are abstract machines that solve problems or answer questions. Computational designers need to be computational thinkers as well as prac-titioners in their own fields. Compu-tational design will be an important source of work in the future.

BibliographyAho, A. 2011. Computation and computa-

tional thinking. Ubiquity Symposium. DOI: 10.1145/1895419.1922682

Baltimore, D. 2001. How biology became an information science. In The Invisible Future: The Seamless Integration of Technology into Ev-eryday Life, ed. P. Denning, pp. 43–46. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Computing at School, a subdivision of the British Computer Society. 2015. Computational think-ing: A guide for teachers. http://www.comput-ingatschool.org.uk/computationalthinking

Computer Science Teachers Association. 2011. Operational Definition of Computational Thinking for K-12 Education. http://www.csta.acm.org/Curriculum/sub/CurrFiles/CompThinkingFlyer.pdf

Easton, T. 2006. Beyond the algorithmization of the sciences. Communications of the ACM 49(5):31–33.

Harvard Graduate School of Education. Com-putational thinking with Scratch: Defining. http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/ct/de-fining.html

Holland, J. 1975. Adaption in Natural and Arti-ficial Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kelly, K. 2016. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that will Shape our Future. New York: Viking Books.

Papert, S. 1980. Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. New York: Basic Books.

Tedre, M., and P. J. Denning. 2016. The long quest for computational thinking. Proceed-ings of the 16th Koli Calling Conference on Com-puting Education Research, November 24–27, 2016, Koli, Finland, pp. 120–129.

Wilson, K. G. 1989. Grand challenges to com-putational science. Future Generation Com-puter Systems 5:171–189.

Wing, J. 2006. Computational thinking. Com-munications of the ACM 49:33–35.

There are many problems that cannot be solved at all with computation; their solutions will emerge only from social

cooperation among groups.


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http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/computationalthinking

http://www.csta.acm.org/Curriculum/sub/CurrFiles/CompThinkingFlyer.pdf

http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/ct/defining.html






As newly elected president Donald Trump takes office, the scientific community faces the likelihood not only

of unprecedented cuts in government funding for research, but also of bold new attacks on scientific expertise as a basis for policy making and decisions. Trump campaigned on a pledge to elim-inate as much as $100 million in “waste-ful climate change spending,” and there have been reports of plans to severely cut funding for NASA and other agen-cies. For the National Institutes of Health, Trump and the Republican-led Congress are likely to revisit funding for embryonic stem cell research and to take a closer look at restricting gene editing.

Major regulations designed to protect the environment and public health will also come under fire. Environmental Protection Agency rules limiting emis-sions from coal plants, which President-elect Trump has called “job destroying,” may be rescinded; current bans on oil and gas drilling may be lifted; and the United States’ participation in the his-toric United Nations climate change agreement may be canceled. Behind the scenes at scientific and regulatory agencies, political appointees are likely to block or delay other environmental and public health regulations, to edit or censor scientific agency reports, and to restrict the ability of federal scientists to communicate with the public and the media. By way of his speeches and Twitter remarks, President-elect Trump will likely spread dangerous scientific

falsehoods and conspiracy theories, similar to his past claims that climate change is a “hoax,” or that childhood vaccination is linked to autism.

Some among scientists might dismiss the brutal 2016 election and Trump’s victory as an aberration and historical outlier. The next four years or more will be tough times, they might say, but as has been the case in the past, some ar-eas of science will thrive, others will struggle, but ultimately better times will come again. They may argue that no major course correction, new way of advocating for scientific funding, or emphasis on communicating the im-portance of expertise is needed.

But such arguments are grossly mis-guided. The 2016 election should be a wake-up call for the scientific commu-nity and its leaders. We are not living

in normal times. Over the next few years, if there is to be any possible sil-ver lining, it will be that leaders of the scientific community break out of a culture of complacency, ending a long-standing reticence to confront the pro-found, dire problems we now face.

An examination of the deeper trends that have enabled Trump’s election to the presidency reveals troubling signs

that America’s civic capacity to engage in informed decision-making has been overrun by widening income and edu-cational disparities, anxiety over the speed of cultural and technological change, and critical weaknesses in our mainstream news media system.

Each of these problems is too complex for the scientific community to try to manage and mitigate on its own, but for the most part scientists and their organi-zations have watched on the sidelines as other sectors of civil society have tackled these issues. Yet, in fact, there is much that scientists and their organizations can contribute, and they can do so in a manner that remains nonpartisan.

Over the past decade, many scien-tists have enthusiastically sought out communication training opportunities, honing their skills at presentations,

media interviews, and social media. Social scientists have joined the effort, systematically studying the “science of science communication,” evaluating the many factors that shape individual and societal decisions, and considering the implications for effective commu-nication. During the Trump years, en-thusiasm for these activities and new directions will justifiably deepen.

Ending the Crisis of Complacency in Science

To survive the Trump administration, scientists need to invest in a strategic vision that mobilizes social change.

Matthew Nisbet

Scientists should help to refocus the conversation back to enhanced funding

for higher education, and related strategies for lowering costs.

Matthew Nisbet is a professor of communication, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern Uni-versity, and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Envi-ronmental Communication. Twitter: @MCNisbet

ScienceCommunication


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But each of these tools and insights remain just tactics, limited in their ef-fect, if they are not applied and coor-dinated on behalf of a larger vision of social change. What is needed is broader strategic thinking about the handful of policy goals and investments that sci-entists can join with others in pursuing that would have an enduring impact on problems such as income inequality and political polarization, and on the threat they pose to the scientific enterprise.

Tackling Inequality Consider first the challenge of economic inequality, particularly how the problem has manifested itself in recent politics. The past year has brought wider atten-tion to the deep anxiety among less-ed-ucated, predominantly white Americans about their economic security in a world that seems to have left them behind. These anxieties have fueled support for right-wing populist leaders such as Trump, as well as extreme distrust of what they see as institutional elites, in-cluding scientists and other experts.

The struggles and anxieties of work-ing class whites are not unique to the United States and are reflective of global dynamics and trends. In the May 2016 “Brexit” vote in the United King-dom, those without a university degree voted in a large majority to leave the European Union, whereas the better-educated individuals in cosmopolitan London voted to remain. Despite an overwhelming consensus among ex-perts that leaving the European Union would severely damage the UK econ-omy, a leader of the Leave campaign rallied public support by declaring that the “people of this country have had enough of experts.” Trump and his sur-rogates expressed similar sentiments during the 2016 election as they railed against political insiders in Washington.

Yet, paradoxically, the very success of scientists and engineers has contrib-uted to these conditions. Scientific in-novations have generated vast wealth for those professionals at the top of the knowledge economy, just as those same innovations have eliminated mil-lions of jobs among those at the bot-tom, transforming entire industries and regions. Those most affected are not only whites without college educa-tions, but also many people of color.

Scientists and their organizations, therefore, have both a strategic and an ethical imperative to help society cope with the negative effects of globalization,

forces that some of their advances and innovations have helped set in motion.

So where to begin? Making public higher education more affordable and accessible was a major campaign issue, one that Trump expressed support for, although he did not offer specifics. Re-publicans in Congress and across state legislatures have also advocated for low-ering the cost of higher education, pro-posing several different plans. Scientists and their organizations should join with leaders of both parties along with others in refocusing the conversation back to enhanced funding for higher education and related strategies for lowering costs. They can do so by identifying and con-veying the various policy choices, ben-efits, and trade-offs. This focus should go beyond just the STEM fields, to em-phasize the need for affordable higher education across majors and careers.

Research suggests that support among non-college-educated whites for anti-establishment rhetoric is rooted in more than just economic anxiety, but also reflects racial resentment and anti-immigration attitudes. It is not just the economy that is changing around us, but also society and culture, challeng-ing conceptions of identity. There is no obvious solution to racial resentment and cultural bigotry, but for future gen-erations, greater access to higher edu-cation will help promote more diverse interactions and experiences that may start to erode such feelings.

In addition, the speed of scientific advances and technological innova-tion may be directly contributing to cultural anxiety and unease in other ways, reflecting concerns that do not conform to traditional left or right po-litical ideologies.

A protester at a rally opposing the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States holds a sign that responds to the antiscience rhetoric brought out during the campaign.

Christopher Penler/Alamy Stock Photo


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According to one survey analysis, about a third of Americans can be characterized as scientific optimists. They have respect for the intentions of scientists, and they believe that sci-ence and technology drive societal progress. Not surprisingly, optimists tend to be highly educated and finan-cially well off, and they are dispropor-

tionately white. Most can realistically expect that their careers, fields, and industries will benefit from scientific advances and that, as consumers, they will be able to afford most innovations.

In contrast, about a quarter of Ameri-cans can be classified as scientific pes-simists. They hold concerns about the speed of change in modern life and

have a sense that science poses conflicts with traditional values and belief sys-tems. Compared with optimists, mem-bers of this group score much lower in terms of educational attainment and income, are more likely to be female, and are more likely to be minorities.

With advances in gene editing, robot-ics, and artificial intelligence, and the likely return of debates over stem cell research, scientists and their organiza-tions will need to effectively address the legitimate concerns that such pessimists and others may hold about the social implications of these advances. Like past high-profile debates over stem cell research and cloning, these issues are likely to play an increasingly prominent role in our polarized national politics.

Taking News LocalAs they rise to broader attention, how-ever, debates in the national news media over gene editing, stem cell research, cli-mate change, energy, and other topics too often distort these issues; simplistic left-right distinctions are made, which are overhyped by some and dismissed as repugnant by others. At national and regional newspapers, budget cuts and layoffs limit the opportunity for in-depth coverage and analysis. In recent years, innovative for-profit media orga-nizations such as Vox.com and STAT out of the Boston Globe have been launched to help fill the gap at the national level, expanding ways of covering complex science-related policy debates, although such sites have yet to demonstrate their long-term financial sustainability.

Many more journalistic outlets, how-ever, are needed in order to restore America’s civic capacity to engage in respectful debate about complex prob-lems and trends and what they mean for society. The place to start may be in the cities and regions where, because of the decline of local newspapers, the information needs of local residents and voters are not being met. In these communities, people lack a trusted local source of news that can explain, contex-tualize, and vet conflicting claims and interpretations. When news consumers become skeptical of “elite” outlets such as the New York Times, without other known sources to trust, it becomes that much easier for them to turn to their ideologically preferred outlet, whether a cable news network such as Fox News, a talk radio show, an online site such as Breitbart News, or a fake news story circulated on their social media feeds.

From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service conducted the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which studied the natural progression of the disease in African-American males in rural Alabama under the guise of giving the participants free health care. The subjects were not told that they had syphilis, and when effective treatment with penicillin became available in the 1940s, it was with-held from the participants. Blood samples were taken (above) as part of the study. The study was widely reviled when it was exposed, leading to stringent patient consent protocols. Nevertheless, such occurrences have led to lingering distrust of science, particularly among minority populations.

National Archives

Abandoned storefronts in the small town of Pamplin, Virginia, are indicative of local economies that have faltered in the era of globalization. This town was the site of a clay pipe factory, now closed. Many towns in America once relied on a specific industry for their livelihood, and when that industry disappeared, remaining residents felt left behind by advances in science and tech-nology that have enabled others to prosper. The author argues that scientists need to find better ways of addressing such social disparities to restore trust in expert institutions, including science.

Dennis Mook/RGB Ventures/Superstock/Alamy Stock Photo


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http://www.vox.com






To begin to meet the information needs of communities across the coun-try, scientists need to join with others in calling for greater financial investment in local nonprofit media. One place to start is public radio stations that are expand-ing their reach by way of digital news platforms. Examples of other promising

nonprofit ventures include the Texas Tri-bune, an online newspaper that runs the largest statehouse bureau in the country. Another endeavor, launched in 2010, is Midwest Energy News, which features a staff of six journalists reporting on the transition from fossil fuels to clean en-ergy across Midwestern states. Their stories are freely syndicated and repub-lished by newspapers and other outlets.

Many research universities also have the capacity to launch their own digi-tal nonprofit news organizations, seed-ing partnerships between journalism schools and computer science depart-ments, and drawing on the perspectives of expert faculty as contributors. For ex-ample, since 2013 the Institute on the En-vironment at the University of Minne-sota has published Ensia, a multimedia magazine featuring originally reported stories and commentaries focused on

environmental problems and solutions, articles that can be freely republished by other media organizations. In a second example, Yale Climate Connections pro-duces daily 90-second radio shorts about climate change that air on 260 public, university, community, and alternative radio stations nationwide.

But sparking substantive growth in the nonprofit news sector will take money. Lots of it. In the wake of mas-sive layoffs at regional and local news-papers, a 2011 Federal Communica-tions Commission report estimated that somewhere between $265 million and $1.6 billion is needed annually to fill the gaps in just local public affairs reporting alone, without consideration of the cost of meeting national needs.

Yet funding agencies and philanthrop-ic organizations make risky investments when they devote, for example, billions of dollars to research on climate change or biotechnology, or millions of dollars to training scientist communicators and funding communication research, but they do not also invest in making sure that major cities and regions across the country have full-time, experienced re-porters who can draw attention to these

issues, explain their complexity, and hold those in power accountable, includ-ing scientific institutions.

Mobilizing scientists and their orga-nizations to coordinate their actions on behalf of combating economic inequal-ity, promoting affordable higher edu-cation, addressing emerging concerns about scientific advances, and invest-ing in local nonprofit media are just a few examples of goals that might define broader, longer-term thinking. The path forward is ultimately up to scientists and their leaders. But to stay focused on tactical approaches, rather than on social change, puts much at risk.

BibliographyDrutman, L. 2015. The Business of America

Is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Po-liticized and Politics Became More Corporate. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Inglehart, R., and P. Norris. 2016. Trump, Brexit, and the rise of Populism: Economic have-nots and cultural backlash. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Working Paper. https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/uploads/files/events/Inglehart-and-Norris-Populism.pdf

Nisbet, M. C., and D. Fahy. 2015. The need for knowledge-based journalism in politicized science debates. The ANNALS of the Ameri-can Academy of Political and Social Science658:223–234.

Nisbet, M., and E. M. Markowitz. 2014. Un-derstanding public opinion in debates over biomedical research: Looking beyond po-litical partisanship to focus on beliefs about science and society. PLoS ONE 9(2):e88473.

Thurber, J. A., and A. Yoshinaka (eds). 2015. American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of Political Polarization. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Waldman. S., and the Working Group on In-formation Needs of Communications. 2011. Information needs of communities: The changing media landscape in a broadband age. Washing-ton, D.C.: Federal Communications Com-mission. www.fcc.gov/infoneedsreport

Protesters (left) and supporters (right) of genetically modified foods often have websites or other news sources that selectively support their own views. Without good-quality, local sources of news to re-place the disappearing newspapers that residents once trusted, many

now turn to ideologically biased sites, or to social media streams tai-lored to their preferences, for their information. Restoring local news, however, will likely take large amounts of philanthropic funding as well as support from nontraditional sources, such as universities.

Todd Bannor/Alamy Stock Photo

To meet the information needs of communities, scientists need to join with

others in calling for greater financial investment in local nonprofit media.


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In the wake of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, countless Ameri-cans are asking: Can I trust my tap water? High lead levels in wa-

ter are being found in homes, schools, and daycares across the country; recent investigations by USA Today, CNN,and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) revealed that more than 5,300 public water systems had lead violations last year. The NRDC warned in a June 2016 report that “mil-lions of Americans could be drinking contaminated water—and not even know it.” This statement agrees with a 2015 article in the Journal of American Water Works Association that declared up to 96 million Americans could be at risk from lead-laden water. This num-ber is not surprising considering the 6 million to 10 million lead pipes and the legion of leaded plumbing materi-als in our water infrastructure, all of which can leach lead despite optimal treatment. In his 2006 book, The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster, historian Wer-ner Troesken called the misguided de-cision to install lead pipes across the United States between the mid-1800s and 1980s “a long-running environ-mental and public health catastrophe.”

The Flint water crisis began when a Michigan state-appointed emergency manager decided to change Flint’s

public water source to the Flint River in April 2014, and then the Michigan Department of Environmental Qual-ity (MDEQ) did not mandate feder-ally required corrosion-control treat-ment. This oversight led to increased corrosion of lead pipes and fittings. Consequently, the blood lead levels in Flint’s children doubled after the water switch. As the chlorine that sanitizes water interacted with corroded pipes and so was removed, the city also wit-nessed one of the worst legionnaires’ disease outbreaks in modern U.S. history, causing 12 deaths. This envi-ronmental injustice that endangered families for 18 months was prolonged because the city and MDEQ cheated on water tests, was hostile to outside researchers sounding the alarm, and betrayed the public’s trust by repeat-edly insisting the brown, smelly, lead-laden water was safe to consume.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as per its Office of In-spector General investigation, had suf-ficient knowledge of imminent and substantial endangerment to Flint resi-dents from lead-contaminated water as early as June 2015. Instead of taking decisive action, the agency silenced its own whistleblower, regulations man-ager Miguel Del Toral, and did not is-sue an emergency order until seven months later in January 2016.

The exploitation of loopholes in fed-eral regulations and the use of faulty water-sampling methods that mini-mize the lead collected is not unique to Flint. A recent investigation by The Guardian found that at least 33 ma-jor cities east of the Mississippi River

were cheating on such testing by, for example, flushing pipes the night be-fore sample collection to temporarily hide lead-in-water issues. Residents of Philadelphia sued the city not long ago because of such practices. New York City vowed to retest water in its public schools after my advisor, Marc Edwards, called out their and others’ sampling practices in The New York Times. Regrettably, they have agreed to only partially fix these problems. EPA expert Mike Schock warns that such testing allows for “wanton experimen-tation on the public.”

In light of such exposés, it is no wonder that many citizens are worried about tap water. Agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have continued to put innocent lives at risk as they have periodically dismissed the seri-ousness of lead exposure from drink-ing water, while the water industry has taken cover under a weak Lead and Copper Rule so that they may avoid their obligation to protect public health. The Lead and Copper Rule al-lows 10 percent of homes on a public water supply to dispense any amount of lead if the rest are below 15 parts per billion. Ten percent! If a water util-ity is out of compliance, they are re-quired to “optimize” water treatment, begin citywide lead pipe replacement that often costs millions of dollars, and inform residents that their tap water is unsafe to drink. Unfortunately, ef-forts have often been directed toward achieving compliance rather than min-imizing public health risk, so many Flints are likely out there.

Siddhartha Roy is a PhD candidate in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, where he works with Marc Edwards to research failure mechanisms in potable water infrastructure. He is the student leader and communications director of the Virginia Tech research team that helped uncover the Flint water crisis. Twitter: @H2Oetal

The Hand-in-Hand Spread of Mistrust and Misinformation in Flint

The water crisis not only left infrastructure and government agencies in need of cleaning up; the information landscape was also messy.

Siddhartha Roy

Perspective


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Beginning in August 2015, our Flint Water Study research team, led by Edwards, along with Flint residents, led the early efforts to document the city’s lead contamination—and sub-sequent related water-quality issues. Since then, we have spent more than a year monitoring the response. The city switched back to treated Lake Hu-ron water (from Detroit) in October 2015, and the state and the EPA are now working to improve the overall water quality. When Flint’s children were finally protected after Governor Rick Snyder’s emergency declaration in early 2016, we announced the end of our investigation.

Soon thereafter, Flint residents spray-painted “The Block,” a promi-nent concrete slab that residents use as a community bulletin board, on a cold morning in January to send a mes-sage to the government: “You want our trust??? We want VA Tech!!!”Because of this demand, later that month Edwards was invited to serve on Governor Snyder’s Flint Water Inter-

agency Coordinating Committee, and our team was hired to continue water testing in collaboration with residents, supported by state and EPA funds. This declaration of trust by Flint residents was priceless and is illustrated by Flint Bishop Bernadel Jefferson’s comments to National Public Radio (NPR): “We trust them [the Flint Water Study]. We don’t trust nobody else.”

Since President Barack Obama de-clared Flint a federal emergency in January 2016, more than $600 million in healthcare, nutrition, and infrastructure aid became available. Civil servants and consulting firms have been indicted, and lead pipes are being replaced across the city. Progress has been slow for Flint citi-zens: After 30 months, unfiltered water in Flint is still not safe to drink.

As the Flint water crisis unfolded in 2015 and early 2016, the decline in public trust was palpable: People dis-trusted the city’s water, the distributed lead filters, and any messaging from government agencies. As resident Ken-neth Glover told the New York Times,

“I don’t even give [the water] to my dog…. I don’t care how many filters they give us. I don’t care what they say. How can I trust them again?” This atmosphere enabled misinformation campaigns that spread harmful false-hoods about the water’s quality—for example, that the distributed lead fil-ters do not work or that lead aerosol-izes in the shower and can harm one’s lungs—to briefly gain momentum. Consequently, a few residents who had previously been betrayed, turned against scientifically valid advice no matter who offered it.

The Public’s Search for AnswersThe imperfect nature of scientific knowledge was encountered in the water crisis and sometimes even ex-ploited. At other times, there were le-gitimate concerns. For example, the lead filters that the State of Michigan and the U.S. Federal Emergency Man-agement Agency (FEMA) distributed around the city are rated to remove up to 150 parts per billion of lead, where-

After the water crisis, Flint resident Darlene Long (second from left) and her family go to a hotel outside the city once a month to bathe for lon-ger time periods with peace of mind. Many residents in Flint continue to distrust the water’s safety, even after government and independent scientists have tested the water and confirmed that it is safe for bathing.

Brittany Greeson


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as several Flint homes had lead levels that were some-times 10 or even 100 times higher than that in their tap water. Citizens and relief groups were apprehensive for many months, and a May 2016 poll by Target Insyght/MIRS News found that 70 percent of residents did not trust government assurances that the filtered water was safe. The EPA stepped up to this challenge by testing fil-ters at more than 200 taps—some of which were dispens-ing lead levels as high as 4,080 parts per billion—and found that the filters effec-tively brought lead below 1 part per billion every time, which matched the findings of our previous research.

Although the scientific uncertainty here was re-solved, has this information increased public trust in the filters? In the absence of ac-curate survey data, public trust is hard to quantify. Lo-cal media outlets, however, emphatically communicated the safety of lead filters with mixed re-sults. Some residents have repeatedly told us and the media that they don’t trust filtered water.

Scientists also stepped in to develop safety information when residents re-ported incidences of skin rashes even af-ter Flint switched back to Detroit water. There is a dearth of studies specifically tying environmental, genetic, psychoso-matic, and placebo factors to such skin problems. As per the CDC, the preva-lence in school-aged children of atopic dermatitis, the most common type of rash, is at most 20 percent. A CDC-led dermatologic investigation concluded in August 2016 that rash incidences were indeed high, clinically severe, and chronic when Flint was served water from the Flint River but were lower af-ter the switch back to Detroit water, and that these later rash cases were less se-vere and acute and in some cases were probably unrelated to the water. This

uncertainty about the rashes’ cause led to a scenario in which we only could be compassionate and share residents’ frustrations but could not provide a sci-entifically robust answer.

Some Flint residents didn’t know who to trust and under-standably wanted to test their water for themselves rather than rely on the word of sci-entists or government agen-cies. As they and concerned citizens in other towns turned to online sources and social media for support and infor-mation, some of the content they found was harmful. For example, several YouTube and Facebook videos misuse a common water measure-ment—total dissolved sol-ids (TDS)—and claim that it shows that water filtered us-ing certified lead filters is still not safe or that even bottled water distributed in Flint has high lead levels. TDS meters cannot measure lead in water, which requires sophisticated analytical equipment, and they are not a standard for water safety in general or lead in particular. Instead, they quantify water conductivity or net concentration of dis-solved solids, such as essential minerals, salts, and metals.

These videos spread quickly on so-cial media among citizens. One video viewed more than 17,000 times sinceJanuary 2016 strangely asserts that the higher the number displayed on this

The lifetime risk of contracting cancer due to chronic exposure to some regulated disinfection byproducts such as trihalomethanes is much lower than the recent risk of Flint residents contracting legionnaires’ disease, a serious waterborne illness, when they were being served by the Flint River (April 2014–October 2015). The lifetime risk calculated for total trihalomethanes here is based on several inherently conservative assumptions, and likely over-estimates individual risk. (Data from the Flint Water Study, In-stitute for Highway Safety, CDC, and engineer Joe Goodwill of Saint Francis University. For more information, see http://joeontap.com/#153454559929.)

Xuyen Mai of the University of Massachusetts Amherst samples water in homes in Flint, Michigan, with Virginia Tech’s Flint Water Study to make sure disinfection byproducts were below federally regulated thresholds. (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

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“water tester,” the worse the water is. Considering that the World Health Or-ganization classifies water with TDS under 300 parts per million as “excel-lent,” the video, which states that wa-ter with TDS of 103 parts per million is “horrible,” is both alarmist and pro-foundly misleading. Although these hoaxes were addressed online and in the news, the videos often circulate again among worried citizens.

A more damning example relates to Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo’s nonprofit Water Defense: Their op-portunistic, irresponsible intervention in Flint, in which commercialization of a new product was cloaked as hu-manitarian science, preyed on an al-ready traumatized population’s fears and impaired efforts to rebuild public trust in the safety of the city’s water for bathing and showering. After President Obama’s emergency declaration, Ruf-falo’s group arrived in Flint in Febru-ary 2016, armed with a green sponge. Because the sponge indiscriminately absorbs disinfection chemicals reacting with organic matter in the water, air, and its own material, measurements from it are not reliable. Such measure-ments about disinfection byproducts (DPBs) are not comparable to any estab-lished health standards for measuring them. DBPs (such as chloroform) are an unavoidable consequence of chlorine disinfection; they form when chlorine, which is routinely added to water to kill microbes, reacts with naturally oc-curring organic matter. They are found in tap waters across the United States. DBPs are suspected carcinogens and are heavily regulated as an acceptable chronic exposure risk in public water because, although they are undesirable, the alternative of not chlorinating water would increase the acute risks of sick-ness and death from waterborne dis-eases (such as cholera and legionnaires’ disease). Indeed, the World Health Or-ganization emphasizes in their manual, Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality,that “disinfection should not be com-promised in attempting to control dis-infection byproducts.” High levels of DBPs were a legitimate problem when Flint’s water source was the Flint River, but their levels have dropped well be-low federal standards after the switch back to Detroit water.

Measuring DBPs is much more complicated than tossing a sponge in the bathtub. It requires expensive lab equipment and precise sampling proto-

cols to prevent contamination. Because of the unexplained skin ailments that some Flint residents were suffering, many were worried that the water was not safe for bathing. An explanation and the ability to find their own an-swers were rightfully attractive to peo-ple. This drive can be good: It is what led residents to collaborate with our team and sample their own tap water in August 2015—the results of which, as one resident told me, were “empow-ering.” But trust voids are often a per-fect breeding ground for groups such

as Water Defense to capitalize on ram-pant fears. In a YouTube video, Water Defense’s Scott Smith began making outrageous claims that Flint’s water was worse than 62 disaster sites he had visited, including oil spills. We were dumbfounded when Ruffalo claimed on CNN that DBPs in Flint’s water could originate from corroded lead and galvanized iron pipes, which defies the laws of chemistry. There are still gaps in the current knowledge of DBPs, includ-ing which specific contaminants are formed and which should be regulated based on greatest health risk. There are no legitimate grounds, however, for this group to take up disinfection by-products specifically in Flint.

Water Defense’s false explanations for the skin rashes gave many mis-trustful and traumatized Flint families an explanation that, no matter how flawed, was satisfying. But avoiding bathing because of Water Defense’s misleading claims has had serious con-sequences for Flint residents. Indeed, a spike in gastrointestinal diseases, which is often symptomatic of poor sanitation, was witnessed in May 2016 and could be attributed in part to Wa-ter Defense’s false warnings about the

dangers of bathing or showering. Ironically, this increase in easily pre-

ventable disease underscores the value of chlorine disinfection for public water systems. Nonetheless, the fear of the water is still real for residents. Students at Northridge Academy in Flint, for example, told us during an outreach visit in November 2016 that they still avoid taking showers because they are scared. The local media’s initial lack of scrutiny of scientific-sounding claims from nonscientists gave the potentially dangerous misinformation some cred-

ibility. Because our team related to the public’s exasperation with the govern-ment after the water crisis, and because our attempts to privately reason with Water Defense proved futile, we felt we had the moral obligation to call them out publicly on our website.

The Price of Impugning PseudoscienceOne of the bizarre experiences of wad-ing into the mists of misinformation is that bad actors and conspiracy theo-rists usually respond to suggestions that their messages are misguided with accusations about the ethics or credibil-ity of those who question them, even if they lack the evidence for such claims. The media, especially The Huffington Post and Slate, eventually fact-checked both sides, conducted independent in-vestigations into Water Defense’s op-portunism, and published opinions from credible outside scientists. In contrast, prior coverage had portrayed Water Defense’s claims as scientifical-ly legitimate. People’s distrust in the government was so high that a few in turn mistrusted us because some of our measurements showing the improve-ment in Flint’s water were funded by the EPA, even though we had also self-

Flint citizens understandably wanted to test the water for themselves rather than

rely on the word of scientists. As they and concerned citizens in other towns

turned to online sources and social media for support and information, some of the

content they found was harmful.


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funded the earlier water testing in Flint that originally exposed the agencies involved in the crisis.

Our team then enlisted the help of Dave Reckhow, a pioneer in disinfec-tion byproduct research, and his ex-ceptional team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They orches-trated independent testing in May 2016 in Flint and found disinfection byprod-uct levels to be “pretty average” with

“nothing out of the ordinary.” Their findings were corroborated by testing from the EPA, the CDC, and research-ers at Wayne State University. All these efforts ultimately discredited Water Defense. No major media outlet has covered their sponge claims since then.

Even so, such damages are difficult to repair and can exacerbate down-ward spirals in mistrust. Many Flint residents have altered their bathing habits (for example, some have found alternate bathing locations such as ho-tels and portable showers, and others have reduced bathing times or are only using bottled water, shower-head fil-ters, and so on) because they cannot bring themselves to trust the water. One family described to us the sheer joy of taking 30-minute showers while out of town, drawing a sharp contrast to their cumbersome bathing at home using bottled water. Personal expe-riences with, and fears of, the water trump all scientific studies. The road to rebuilding trust is long and hard.

Staying VigilantThe government at all levels failed the people of Flint. A resident told us she believes her family had been “left to die.” Others have expressed perpetual guilt over having given their children contaminated water. Many continue to work with the laudable conviction that they will not rest until justice and reparations have been served. Laura Sul-livan, a professor of mechanical engi-neering and Flint resident and activist, summarized the current problem to the

New York Times: “It’s difficult to convince people once they’re aware that it has been unsafe that it is now safe…. The messenger that says the water is safe can’t come from the state government. They’ve already ruined their potential to be someone who can be trusted.”

How can scientists contribute to building informed publics and em-powering them to differentiate be-tween facts and fiction? Our scientific

work and advocacy in Flint, alongside residents, showed how science can be used for the public good and conceiv-ably garner their trust. Based on my experiences in Flint, I can testify that community-engaged science requires, first and foremost, a commitment to respecting the public, their experi-ences, and knowledge. An unassum-ing openness in addressing scientific queries, sharing data, and mentoring citizen groups (both online and in community meetings) will ensure a sustained partnership in which both parties can mutually benefit and build trust in one another. During a sam-

pling trip to Flint in November 2016, a family was wary of letting us into their home for water testing because they mistook us for the EPA, but once we explained who we were they could not have been more kind and welcoming.

Although scientists are justifiably wary of being seen as advocates, I con-tend that they should stop considering their work as inherently neutral, but in-stead see their broader societal contexts and make central to their scientific en-deavors principles of ethics, transpar-ency, and service to humanity. Training scientists in disciplines such as com-munity engagement, science commu-nication, and ethical conduct alongside sound science will help them quickly and successfully navigate these tricky situations. In the aftermath of an envi-ronmental disaster, it’s not just the en-vironmental problem that needs to be cleaned up. The information landscape can also become messy, and keeping it clean takes vigilance.

If there are more Flints out there, as many suspect, we will need to con-tinue building and sustaining trust between scientists and local commu-nities. The Flint model of collabora-tive and community-engaged research can be modified and incorporated into contemporary academic training. These skills and strategies can empow-er scientists to demonstrate their com-petence and restore trustworthiness, thereby earning the trust necessary to thwart future misinformation cam-paigns, such as those seen in Flint.

If there are more Flints out there, as many suspect, we will need to continue building and sustaining trust between

scientists and local communities.


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In 2015, the future of self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles looked bright and virtually within reach. I described their status in The Road

Ahead (July–August 2016), an excerpt from my 2016 book The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infra-structure, as of the time the book had gone to press in the fall of 2015. Earlier that year a computer-controlled Audi Q5 successfully made a 3,400-mile trip from San Francisco to New York City without human intervention for 99 percent of the time. And Tesla’s all-electric self-steering and self-braking Model S sedan was coming onto the market. The road ahead for the auton-omous vehicle looked smooth, indeed.

All that changed in early summer 2016, when a front-page story in the New York Times reported that the own-er of a Model S equipped with Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot feature had been killed in an accident. A driver had been using the beta technology while alleged-ly watching a movie as his car was driv-ing itself down a Florida highway, and neither the driver nor the car detected that a tractor-trailer truck traveling the other way was making a left turn across the lanes ahead. The computerized Tesla evidently could not distinguish the white side panels of the trailer from the brightly lit sky in the background, and the preoccupied driver was not pre-

pared to take over control of the car, as he was supposed to have been ready to do at all times. This first known fatal-ity involving an autonomous vehicle naturally led to considerable reflection and recrimination about the status of the technology, its future as a business endeavor, and its regulation. The Na-tional Transportation Safety Board, known for its involvement in determin-ing the cause of airplane crashes, elected to investigate the accident, joining forces with the Florida Highway Patrol and the National Highway Traffic Safety Ad-ministration; the group of agencies is expected to announce a draft of revised

guidelines for autonomous vehicles in the following months.

Hard-Won Cultural AcceptanceIn spite of the Model S tragedy, the autonomous vehicle is already a real-ity, but it is not yet something fully de-bugged or commonly encountered (or recognized) on our streets and high-ways. That is likely to change within a matter of years or decades, depend-ing not so much on the technological development of computer-controlled automobiles and trucks as on external factors, such as urban infrastructure, jurisdictional regulation, and public ac-

Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Profes-sor of Civil Engineering and a professor of his-tory at Duke University. His most recent book isThe Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure. Address: Box 90287, Durham, NC 27708.

Setbacks and Prospects for Autonomous Vehicles

Self-driving cars seemed ready to keep going ahead, but some recent incidents have slowed their development.

Henry Petroski

Engineering

This inside view of an automated Audi Q5 during a cross-country trip shows the driver’s hands off the wheel and a dashboard screen depicting the car’s sensor readings of its position in traffic.

Delphi Automotive


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ceptance. In this regard, this potentially innovative means of transportation can be expected to experience obstacles not unlike those that accompanied the in-troduction of the motor vehicle itself, upon which were imposed rules and regulations that did not hobble the horse. For example, in some cities early automobiles had to follow at a walk-ing pace someone carrying a red flag or lantern to herald the vehicle’s approach.

Before there were horseless car-riages on the road, there were, of course, horse-drawn carriages, wag-ons, and sleighs. That the reins could be dropped and control turned over to their motive power has been me-morialized in, among other pieces of writing, the familiar holiday tune that begins, in its original metric form,

Over the river, and through the wood,To Grandfather’s house we go;The horse knows the way to carry the sleighThrough the white and drifted snow.

Like technological artifacts, pieces of literature can evolve over time in re-sponse to a variety of external influenc-es, including changing social, cultural, and commercial interests and mores. This poem, by the American novelist, poet, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), was originally published in 1844 under the title, “The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day.” Today, many people know this verse as a Christmas tune, in which the horse knows the way to Grandmother’s house. The change of specific holiday from Thanksgiv-

ing to Christmas gives the tune more verisimilitude. And although snow in late November is certainly plausible in northern states, especially in the early 19th century when New England was still in the so-called Little Ice Age, the white and drifted stuff has come to be more commonly associated in a wider geographical region with late Decem-ber. Thus both culture and technology can adapt to changing times.

Early automobiles did not know the way to Grandfather’s or Grand-mother’s or anyone’s house. Indeed, in the nascent years of motorized travel, autos were less likely than horses to make it through the snow or the ensu-ing mud when the snow melted on dirt roads. There exist numerous images of horses pulling cars out of the mud in the early 20th century, when there were increasing calls for better paved roads on which wheeled vehicles rid-ing on primitive rubber tires could gain traction. It was obvious frustrations and downright faults with early hard-rubber tires, cranked starting mecha-nisms, hand-operated windshield wip-ers, and the like, that drove the devel-opment of pneumatic tires, the electric starter, and automatic wipers. Self-driv-ing cars were the stuff of science fiction, if they were thought of at all.

The gyroscopic motion of a spinning bicycle wheel did enable early cyclists to ride hands-free, and automatic pilots for airplanes have also relied on the prin-ciple of the gyroscope. During World War II, increasingly radio, rather than gyroscopic or mechanical constraint control, was the technology of choice to

guide torpedoes and rockets. Around the middle of the 20th century, General Motors and RCA teamed up to develop autonomous highway systems employ-ing radio communications to control speed and steering. Prototypes of such systems, in which magnets located in the vehicle followed a steel cable embedded in the road, were tested in the 1950s.

Today, roads do not need buried ca-bles, physical tracks, or curbs to keep autonomous vehicles in their lane and away from nearby vehicles. Rather, op-tical cameras can track road and lane markings and watch traffic in adjacent lanes. Radar mounted on a car pre-vents it from colliding with a vehicle in front of it. The signals from the radar and a multitude of sensors carried by a self-driving automobile are processed by an onboard computer, thus making alterations to the physical layout of a street or freeway unnecessary, as long as lanes are properly marked and the markings are maintained so that they are visible to the camera.

These and other technologies have become familiar to automobile drivers. Perhaps the earliest form it took was cruise control, whereby the speed of a vehicle could be set by the push of a button, even as the vehicle went up and down hills. The latest adaptive cruise control systems not only hold a preset speed on the open road but also can slow down a car to keep it a respectful distance from the car ahead and even bring it to a full stop when traffic ahead calls for it. Signals from lane-sensing cameras can cause beeping warnings when a car wanders out of its lane without signaling first and, in the most sophisticated systems, can steer the car back into its lane automatically. Even self-parking cars are now widely ad-vertised, which automate the process of parallel parking once the driver com-pletes the initial alignment of the car.

A Grand ChallengeAll of the basic technology for a self-driving car has been in place for some time, much of it the product of the U.S. Department of Defense and automak-ers investing in the development of ar-tificial intelligence systems. As early as the 1980s, a Mercedes van (because cars with their limited cargo space could not accommodate the size of the computer equipment needed at the time) drove itself for hundreds of miles on the high-way. In 2004, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

A British recreation shows how in some cities early “horseless carriages” were required to follow a person waving a red flag in order to warn of the vehicle’s approach.

The Guardian


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issued a Grand Challenge, with a $1 million prize, to teams working on au-tonomous vehicles. The 150-mile course through the Mojave Desert stymied the robot entries that year, none of which even reached the course’s 8-mile mark.

Nevertheless, the challenge was reis-sued the next year with an increased top prize of $2 million. Five vehicles com-pleted the course; the winner was a team from Stanford University, followed by two entries from Carnegie Mellon Uni-versity that came in second and third; an insurance company placed fourth; and a truck manufacturing firm came in fifth.

The Grand Challenge changed in 2007, and the new course, known as the Urban Challenge, was only 60 miles long, but entrants had to obey all traf-fic signs and signals and drive through traffic. In order of finish, six academic entrants completed the course: Carn-egie Mellon; Stanford; Virginia Tech; Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy; a combined team from Pennsyl-vania State University and Lehigh Uni-versity; and Cornell University. (For more on the results of and incidents during this competition, see “Leave the Driving to It,” Computing Science, November–December 2011.) The results of the grand challenges demonstrated that the Defense Department goal of having a third of military vehicles drive themselves by 2015 was realistic.

On Real StreetsIn the meantime, other autonomous ve-hicles began to take on the self-imposed and perhaps greater challenge of negoti-ating real-world urban streets on a day-to-day basis. Google has been the most widely known self-driven competitor in this category, with its Street View cars providing data—including imagery tied to satellite coordinates—of most every traffic signal and situation in the world on which its autonomous-vehicle algo-rithms can practice.

Automobile companies are already gearing up for the final push towards completely hands-off driving. Shortly after the Audi cross-country achieve-ment, Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief ex-ecutive officer, promised a fully au-tonomous vehicle by about 2020. In 2017, General Motors is expected to introduce technology in its Cadillac line that will allow no-hands driving. Other manufacturers have their own plans and schedules to offer no-hands and no-feet features incrementally on their near-term models. According to a

2015 study by the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., au-tonomous cars can be expected to re-duce automobile fatalities by about 90 percent by the middle of this century.

Having all vehicles on the road fitted with equipment that con-nects them via the Internet of Things through wireless technology is al-ready an expressed goal of the U.S. Department of Transportation, which announced in 2014 a plan to require such technology in the not-too-distant future. New cars are expected to have such equipment factory-installed; ret-rofitting older ones with the appro-priate transmitter is expected to cost approximately $350 per vehicle. As part of a research and development program at the University of Michi-gan Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor, volunteers are already testing transmitter-equipped vehicles in actual traffic conditions. Future cars and trucks similarly equipped can be in constant electronic contact with one another and with their infrastructural environment and so keep their ap-propriate distance, properly yield and stop at intersections, and respond to emergency conditions, such as chil-dren chasing a ball into the street.

The U.S. Department of Transporta-tion will award up to $40 million, subject to the vagaries of the federal budgeting

process, to a single city to assist it in de-fining the nature of a “Smart City“ by becoming the first in the nation to fully integrate innovative technologies—self-driving cars, connected vehicles, and smart sensors—into its transportation network. In March 2016, the seven fi-nalist cities (of 78 entrants) were an-nounced—Austin, Texas; Columbus, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Kansas City, Missouri; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; and San Francisco, California. The winner was Columbus, which had raised an additional $100 mil-lion from private partners, including up to $10 million from Smart Cities Chal-lenge cosponsor Vulcan Inc., which was formed in 1986 by Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen and his sister Jody.

What successful smart cities of the fu-ture will look like depends upon many factors, including regional traditional practices, but one thing that will be nec-essary, at least in the short term, is to recognize the fact that traffic will consist of a mix of technology-equipped and unequipped vehicles. Short of banning vehicles from other places, whether autonomous or conventionally driven, such outsider vehicles will need to be ac-commodated by leaving much of the ur-ban infrastructure in place. Thus streets and intersections will look normal to the conventional driver—with standard traffic signs and signals, lane markings,

An advertisement from 1957 depicts cars of the future driving themselves. At the time, autono-mous cars were envisioned to use magnets to follow a buried steel cable, and radio signals to detect surrounding traffic. Modern cameras and software have replaced the need for such systems.

“America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies” by H. Miller


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and the like virtually unchanged—but with autonomous and other rethought methods of transportation integrated into the old fabric. Only when there has been a near-universal conversion to the smart model might the old infrastruc-ture be completely replaced by the new.

But depending on the nature of the development of self-driving technol-ogy, the new may not look that different from the old anyway. For example, au-tonomous vehicles now depend on lane markings being sharply defined in or-der to recognize them for what they are. Unless there are to be wires or cables embedded in all streets and highways, thus regressing rather than advancing to a truly wireless mode, the street and road markings will have to be main-tained, and at a higher level than they typically are today. This could be a pos-itive byproduct of the new technology: Our pavements would look freshly painted and their markings easy to see even for the conventional driver’s eyes in poor weather and lighting, thereby providing reassurance to the person rel-

egated to the passenger seat and gener-ally providing a safer and more relaxed driving experience even in the worst of visibility conditions.

Contingency PlansNaturally, the promise of a utopian driving future has its doubters and de-tractors. Skeptics worry about whether software developers are properly an-ticipating every possible contingency. What will happen when a computer-controlled automobile stops behind a truck double-parked to make a deliv-ery? Will the self-driving vehicle “think” that it is waiting for the light to change, or will it recognize after a period of time (how long?) that the truck is stopped for another reason, because traffic is still moving in the adjacent lane? The fact that Volkswagen and other car makers could develop software that could de-tect whether a vehicle was on a tread-mill in a laboratory being tested for emissions or on the open road could reassure even the harshest skeptics that software can be deviously smart.

Still, questions remain. Will driverless cars be programmed to be patient or ag-gressive in traffic? Many conventional automobiles now have a switch that the driver can flip to operate the transmis-sion in a sport or economy mode, but will the displaced human driver be able to throw a switch to choose the mode in which an autonomous car will pro-ceed? Will such decisions be made by automobile or software engineers, or by their managers, or by corporate boards? Will all autonomous vehicles have to be programmed to detect which mode is governing surrounding vehicles, in or-der to properly anticipate what they will do in various situations? And how will a driverless vehicle deal with a yellow traffic light when it is in the “dilemma zone,” too close to stop safely but not go-ing fast enough to clear the intersection before the light turns red? (See Engineer-ing, May–June 2016).

And how will the conversion to be-ing a smart city affect a municipality’s practice of dealing with potholes each spring? Will the fascination of city traf-fic engineers with the new technology divert their attention from the ordi-nary? Will streets be sharply marked with white and yellow lines that au-tonomous vehicles can “see” clearly, but left to deteriorate over time to the

In June 2016 the driver of a Tesla Model X claimed that the car suddenly accelerated on its own while parking. Tesla’s review of the car’s logs later showed that it had not been in either Autopilot or cruise control mode before or during the time of the crash; the investigators concluded that the cause of the accident was driver error. But such incidents demonstrate the lack of trust of autono-mous vehicles, even among early adopters of the technology.

Tesla Forum user puzant with assistance from mathwhiz


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point where the crumbling pavement will be impossible to paint a straight line upon? Will this situation occur be-cause funds for routine pothole filling, repair, and repaving have been divert-ed to support the new technology?

It will be very tempting for city councils and other municipal govern-ing bodies to concentrate on the new to the neglect of the old. Self-driving cars can encourage business development in downtown areas, because they could all but eliminate parking problems, as workers could be dropped off by their cars, whose problems it would then be to find parking spaces. Being without a driver or car-pooling passengers, the car will be free to park in the most remote areas, where spaces are more plenti-ful and perhaps even free. When the workday’s end is approaching, riders could summon their driverless vehicles through a smartphone app to pick them up at a prearranged time and place any-where in the city. What a human conve-nience and time saver! However, with convenience often comes overuse, and cities allowing such practices could find their traffic volumes growing beyond the capacity even of computers to man-age it. Gas usage could also skyrocket, if automated cars had to drive hours away to find parking.

Legal BindingsWhat about fundamental legal ques-tions such as, Who is the driver of a driverless car? As good as software can

be, it can also be flawed. Perhaps a bug will creep in when an update is issued, putting a car into an undesirable loop of circling a block surrounded by one-way streets. And if an empty autono-mous vehicle is involved in a fender bender or worse, who will be respon-sible? Should it be the absent driver, the driver sitting hands-free in the driver’s seat or the passenger seat, or the soft-

ware developer? Does a driverless vehi-cle need a driver’s license? Does it need a special license plate? In 2012 Nevada issued to Google a plate bearing the symbol for infinity, making it the first self-driving car to be registered as such. Will other states follow suit?

There is no telling where the federal government, not to mention individual states and cities, will come down on questions of autonomous vehicles and the special regulations that may bind

them, which could possibly constrain their adoption to the extent that their full potential cannot be realized. One of the reasons that the motorized Segway personal transporter did not become the successful enterprise it was hoped to be was that there was no uniformity among municipalities about whether the self-balancing device was a scooter capable of being ridden on sidewalks or a motor vehicle confined to the street. The experience of the Segway, coupled with the much greater promise of the self-driving car and the clout and sav-vy of its manufacturers and backers, makes it unlikely that autonomous ve-hicles will suffer the same fate.

But their success, at least in the short term, will depend to a large extent on how well they interact with the infra-structure now in place and behave in re-al-time traffic. The fatal May 2016 crash of the self-driving Tesla S sedan was fol-lowed a few weeks later by a nonfatal rollover accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike involving a Tesla Model X sport utility vehicle, which was said by the driver to have been on Autopilot, but this claim has not been confirmed by Tesla. About a week later, a second accident occurred in Montana, involv-ing a Model X that went off the road and crashed through a guardrail. Such inci-dents have made considerations about autonomous vehicles more immediate than theoretical, but Tesla has said that it has no plans to disable the Autopilot feature, which it never claimed made its cars drive autonomously. The driver has always been expected to be ready to take over in an instant. At least for now.

Selected BibliographyBoudette, N. E., B. Vlasic, and A. Kurtz. 2016.

U.S. safety agency investigates another Tesla crash involving Autopilot. New York Times July 6, page B1.

Petroski, H. 2016. The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure. New York: Bloomsbury.

Petroski, H. 2016. Why cities aren’t ready for the driverless car. Wall Street Journal April 22.

Ramsey, M., M. Spector, and J. Bach. 2016. Tes-la has no plans to disable Autopilot feature in its cars. Wall Street Journal July 12.

Spector, M., and I. J. Dugan. 2016. Tesla draws scrutiny after Autopilot feature linked to a death. Wall Street Journal June 30.

U.S. Department of Transportation. 2016. U.S Transportation Secretary Foxx announces seven finalist cities for Smart City Chal-lenge. March 12. http://bit.ly/1TY2EnY

Vlasic, B., and N. E. Boudette. 2016. A Tesla driver using Autopilot dies in a crash. New York Times July 1, pp. A1, B5. A Lexus is retrofitted with technology that allows it to be part of Google’s fleet of driverless cars.

Wikimedia Commons

Will the fascination of city traffic

engineers with the new technology of smart cities divert

their attention from ordinary maintenance?


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I t is 2 a.m. You wake up with sear-ing pain in your abdomen and you have the intense and urgent need to use the bathroom. But

you go back to bed thinking it was probably something you ate.

However, you are woken up again at 6 a.m. by the same mind-numbing pain and again race straight to the bath-room. You now know something is wrong. And it is completely unexpected, because you are generally healthy. You exercise and eat right, you get enough sleep. What could it possibly be? You de-cide you have to make an appointment with your doctor in the morning.

In the doctor’s office, you explain the situation but insist that you are healthy and take good care of yourself. The doctor begins some tests: poking, prodding, listening, and looking. You are uncomfortable and nervous.

The doctor informs you that you need a colonoscopy, which will require prepa-ration, light anesthesia, and someone to drop you off and pick you up. The procedure is scheduled for Friday. All week, you experience the same nightly ordeal, and now it also has begun hap-pening during the day while you are at work. You have to sheepishly run out of an 11 a.m. meeting to use the bathroom. Only now, you are also noticing that there is a little blood in the toilet.

The day before the colonoscopy, you have to prepare by drinking liters of a salty, horrible-tasting solution. The doctor explained that this would help empty your bowels so that the phy-sicians will be able to examine your intestine. You are doing your best to choke down the solution, but it is the worst tasting drink you have ever had. And you still have two liters to go.

In the morning your best friend drops you off at the hospital. Before you know it, you are lying on a cold, hard table, in only a gown, and feeling sleepy from the anesthesia.

When you wake up you are lying in a room. A few moments later, the doc-tor enters and begins reviewing your

colonoscopy with you. They found significant inflammation of your co-lon, and that is what is causing your abdominal issues.

You have just been diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease, as are nearly 60,000 individuals in the United States each year. This chronic disease affects almost 2 million individuals in the United States alone. The disease is characterized by inflammation of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. And the in-flammation leads to injury of the or-gan, impairing its function. As a result, symptoms can include significant ab-dominal pain, diarrhea with the pres-

ence of blood, and the need for frequent bowel movements. Even worse is the social stigma associated with such a de-bilitating disease, which makes living a normal lifestyle almost impossible.

Living with a Chronic DiseaseInflammatory bowel disease encom-passes two subtypes, based on where the inflammation is located in the GI tract. The most prevalent subtype is ul-cerative colitis, in which the inflammation is present in the distal colon and rectum and affects the outermost layer of the tissue (an inflammation of this region with similar symptoms, called acute coli-tis, can be brought on by a bacterial or fungal infection, but this illness usually

clears up after one round of treatment). Crohn’s disease, the second type, is char-acterized by inflammation affecting the entire thickness of the GI tissue and can occur in any part of the GI tract from the mouth to the anus. Ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease are not mutually exclu-sive; many patients have both types.

Patients with this disease experi-ence life-altering symptoms that have a tremendous negative effect on their quality of life. Worse, onset and diag-nosis typically occur in one’s 20s, which means that patients must live with these symptoms their entire adult life. Our colons are responsible for absorb-

Carl M. Schoellhammer is a Quinquennial Fellow in Robert Langer’s laboratory at the Koch Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his PhD. He was the winner of the 2015 Lemelson-MIT National Collegiate Inventor Prize and the 2016 National Collegiate Inventors Com-petition, and was named a 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare. Robert Langer is the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and holds more than 1,100 issued and pending patents worldwide. C. Giovanni Traverso is an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a gastroenterolo-gist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Email for Schoellhammer: [email protected]

Blood, Guts, and HopeTreatment of gastrointestinal tissue with ultrasound makes it more permeable to medications that can alleviate inflammatory bowel disease.

Carl M. Schoellhammer, Robert Langer, and C. Giovanni Traverso

Nearly 60,000 individuals each year are diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease, a chronic illness that affects almost 2 million individuals in the

United States alone.


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ing a significant amount of water. When this water is not absorbed, it leads to diarrhea, incontinence, and frequent bowel movements, potentially up to 20 times a day. It is difficult to imagine be-ing able to live one’s life the same way after diagnosis, given that patients have to constantly manage their symptoms and plan activities around their disease.

As is the case for most inflammatory conditions, the first line of treatment

options involves trying to get large doses of anti-inflammatory medica-tions directly to the affected site. For ulcerative colitis, in which the inflam-mation is present in the distal colon and rectum, treatment regimens often in-clude the use of medicated enemas and suppositories, which are administered at home by the patients themselves. If these treatments are strictly adhered to, they can be effective. But there is a

catch: The enema or suppository has to be retained in the colon overnight.

Our GI tract is covered in a thick mucus layer that helps to protect the tissue. When drugs are administered to the GI tract, the mucus layer can be somewhat of a barrier to the drugs. The drugs must slowly make their way through the mucus layer before they get to the tissue. That’s why enemas and suppositories must be retained for many hours, to give the drugs enough time to get through the mucus and start entering the inflamed tissue so that they can have a beneficial effect and reduce the inflammation.

Because of the need for extended re-tention, patients are typically instruct-ed to administer the enema before bed, because lying down can make retain-ing the enema easier. After emptying their bowels and lying down, patients then take a small applicator that looks like a large eyedropper and inserts the tip in the rectum so that they can in-fuse the fluid. They must then stay ly-ing down for as long as possible.

The entire regimen is a precari-ous and uncomfortable experience that must be endured every night for weeks or even months at a time. And when patients are suffering from active disease and are experiencing urgency and frequent bowel move-ments, they need the medication the most, but that’s when retention is al-most impossible.

As a result of ineffective treatment, 70 percent of patients are diagnosed as having uncontrolled disease. This sustained, recurring injury and in-flammation eventually destroys the colon, and 20 percent of patients end up needing to have parts of their co-lon surgically removed.

The increasing severity of the disease over time is enabled by poor control of the disease when it is first diagnosed, which is predominantly a result of dif-ficulties with retention of the enema, resulting in little therapeutic delivery to the site of inflammation. What these patients need is a method of delivering the anti-inflammatory drugs directly to the site of inflammation without the need for retaining the enema. Such an option could potentially enable greater control of their disease, and would al-low self-administration of their treat-ment on the go instead of being lim-ited to at-home application when lying down, and thus would lead to a signifi-cant improvement in quality of life.

A colored x-ray of the abdomen of a 30-year-old man with an extreme case of ulcerative colitis shows inflammation and ulceration of the colon that causes diarrhea, blood in the stool, and severe abdominal pain. The disease can be treated with anti-inflammatory drugs, but these are often difficult for patients to hold in the colon for enough time to have an effect. As the disease progresses, surgical removal of the colon is sometimes required.

Science Photo Library


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Speedy DeliveryThe problem of how to achieve ultra-rapid delivery is an interesting and challenging question that we have been tackling in our laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our research has focused on the use of physical enhancers to potentially enable ultrarapid delivery of drugs locally to the GI tract. Physical enhancers are technologies that help drug delivery using mechanisms not limited to pas-sive diffusion. A traditional enema, for example, is delivered by the natural diffusion of the drug through the thick mucus layer lining the GI tract. Physi-

cal enhancers could actually “propel” the medication into the tissue.

Our work has focused specifically on the use of ultrasound to achieve this ultrarapid delivery. Ultrasound is a pressure wave, similar to sound waves, but with a frequency above our limit of detection, which is approxi-mately 20 kilohertz.

Most individuals are familiar with the use of ultrasound in the clinic for imaging. Ultrasonic imaging uses very high frequencies, typically above 1 megahertz, to visualize structures within the body. For drug delivery ap-plications, our group and others have

shown that low-frequency ultrasound, with a frequency below 100 kilohertz, is most useful, because of a phenome-non known as acoustic cavitation. When ultrasound waves travel through flu-id, the varying pressure gradient can spontaneously grow small bubbles in the fluid. These bubbles oscillate and grow in size because of the oscillating pressure field produced by the ultra-sound. Some bubbles actually grow so large that they can no longer sup-port themselves, and they implode in a phenomenon known as transient cavitation. In this case, the surrounding fluid rushes into the previously empty space of the bubble, creating a microjet.

These microjets are tiny, powerful streams of fluid that travel at very high velocities. When these jets hit tissue, they can painlessly and temporarily make it more permeable and propel therapeutics directly into the tissue. As a result, we have investigated the use of ultrasound for ultrarapid drug delivery in the rectum.

Ultrasound EnablersWe created a prototype device capable of administering an enema while si-multaneously emitting low-frequency ultrasound through the enema, to in-duce transient cavitation within the inner walls of the rectum.

We have tested this device in mul-tiple animal models, including both rodents and pigs. Rigorous safety and tolerability studies were performed to ensure that tissues would abide the treatment well. We tested single ad-ministration, and also daily adminis-tration for up to five weeks. We then analyzed tissue health by observing tiny tissue samples imaged using a mi-croscope. Our observations found no evidence of damage to the tissue lo-cally. Moreover, we looked at potential injury to all internal organs and found no evidence of any adverse effects.

We also analyzed the potential for bacteria in the gut to inadvertently cross the tissue layer while it is made more permeable by the ultrasound, and to get into the bloodstream, but we found no evidence of this happening. Indeed, the microjets that are formed as a result of the ultrasound treatment are much smaller than even the tiniest bacteria. In addition, even more aggressive proce-dures—such as tissue biopsy collection over the course of a routine colonoscopy, which can result in significant tissue injury—are well tolerated and rarely re-

A wave of ultrasound traveling through a fluid causes oscillations in pressure that can cause bubbles to form and grow. When these bubbles become too large to sustain themselves, they can suddenly implode, creating a microjet of fluid, as seen at the center of this collapsing bubble. These tiny streams of liquid may be microscopic, but they move at very high veloci-ties. When the microjets hit tissue, they can temporarily make the tissue more permeable to medications. In the gastrointestinal tract, the microjets can help medications get around protective layers of mucus to treat inflamed tissue. (Photograph courtesy of Lawrence Crum.)

A light micrograph taken of a thin, stained tissue section of the mucosal lining of a human colon affected by ulcerative colitis shows one of the ulcers (center top) that give the disease its name. These breaks in the lining of the organ fail to heal and become inflamed.

CNRI/Science Source


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sult in complications. In mice, we further profiled cytokines, molecules that can act as danger signals to immune cells, in tissue, and we observed no change in type or amount of cytokines present after ultrasound treatment.

We tested the therapeutic benefit of the treatment in a mouse model of GI inflammation, by conducting an ex-periment in which we compared treat-ment with standard enemas using the anti-inflammatory drug mesalamine, with treatment using the mesalamine enema in combination with ultra-sound. Ultrasound was found to sig-nificantly enhance the benefit of treat-ment, and even completely removed signs of the disease in those animals receiving ultrasound.

Mesalamine enemas alone were found to have no therapeutic benefit compared with animals receiving no treatment, an observation that has pre-viously been reported in mice; this re-sult is because gastric exit times are very rapid in these animals, reducing the time of absorption. The tremen-dous benefit observed with the simul-

taneous use of ultrasound further un-derscores the rapidity of delivery of the mesalamine into the tissue, where it can begin reducing inflammation.

More recently we have begun ex-ploring the delivery of more complex therapeutics, such as DNA and RNA. These molecules hold great promise but have posed significant challenges to creating therapies. In part the limi-tations include the delicate nature of these molecules and their susceptibil-ity to degradation, as well as the need to get this material not just into tissue, but into specific cells within the tissue. We have observed promising results on the delivery of naked, unencapsulated RNA locally into the GI tracts of animal models, something that has not been reported to our knowledge. The ability to potentially deliver a broad-range of therapies without the need for tedious formulation development might enable a new treatment paradigm for GI-based diseases. Enabling more efficacious treatments that can successfully be used by patients would open a new door into an often overlooked set of diseases.

BibliographyDanese, S., and C. Fiocchi. 2011. Ulcerative

colitis. New England Journal of Medicine 365:1713–1725.

Kappelman, M. D., et al. 2007. The prevalence and geographic distribution of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis in the United States. Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatol-ogy 5:1424–1429.

Nelson, D. B. 2003. Infectious disease com-plications of GI endoscopy: Part II, exog-enous infections. Gastrointestinal Endoscopy 57:695–711.

Neurath, M. F. 2014. Cytokines in inflamma-tory bowel disease. Nature Reviews Immu-nology 14:329–342.

Polat,, B. E., D. Hart, R. Langer, and D. Blank-schtein. 2011. Ultrasound-mediated trans-dermal drug delivery: Mechanisms, scope, and emerging trends. Journal of Controlled Release 152:330–348.

Karagozian, R., and R. Burakoff. 2007. The role of mesalamine in the treatment of ulcer-ative colitis. Therapeutics and Clinical Risk Management 3:893–903.

Schoellhammer, C. M., et al. 2015. Ultrasound-mediated gastrointestinal drug delivery. Science Translational Medicine 7:310ra168. DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aaa5937.

Sandborn, W. J., et al. 2009. Colectomy rate comparison after treatment of ulcerative colitis with placebo or infliximab. Gastroen-terology 137:1250–1260.

Mesalamine is an anti-inflammatory drug used to treat inflammatory bowel disease, because it acts locally in the large intestine. It seems to in-hibit the production of inflammatory substanc-es from certain immune cells. Its formula is C7H7NO3, with carbon shown in teal, hydrogen in green, nitrogen in blue, and oxygen in red.

Macroscopic (top row) and microscopic (bottom row) views show ultrasound for the treatment of ulcerative colitis. Treatment is started by inserting the enema syringe into the inflamed colon (left), and an enema is instilled simultaneously with low-frequency ultrasound that causes cavitation bubbles (middle left), which implode and drive microjets of drug (blue) into the inflamed tissue. After treatment, the device is removed and the drug begins to reduce inflammation (middle right). After a course of treatment, inflammation is resolved (right). (Image from C. Schoellhammer et al., Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery 13:1045, reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis.)

Ultrasound was found to significantly enhance the benefit of the treatment, and

even completely removed signs of the disease in animals receiving it.

SCIMAT/Science Photo Library

For relevant Web links, consult this issue of American Scientist Online:

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.124/past.aspx


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In the engineering of biological systems, it can be said unequivo-cally that art imitates nature. Nearly all efforts to control hu-

man health, the environment, and agriculture involve the appropriation of evolutionary processes. These pro-cesses typically originate through in-cremental changes in the genome that are sustained and promoted through natural selection in descendant lineag-es. Recombinant DNA technology and more recently genome editing help us imitate these genome-level changes in engineered systems. However, the dra-matic evolutionary innovations that are attributed to singular beneficial endosymbioses, in which a mutual-ist microbial cell inhabits a host’s cell, are also worthy of imitation. For ex-ample, researchers are studying how to engineer endosymbiotic bacteria to control mosquito-borne viral diseases, tweak nitrogen-fixing microbes to help crop plants, and treat macular degen-eration, just to name a few projects that are under way.

Endosymbioses have arisen inde-pendently many times in nature. They are essential for many plants, which use them to take up vital nutrients or

defend against herbivores; in insects, their presence or absence may deter-mine gender or population structure, and they are often needed for special-ized diets; they allow many lineages to manufacture their own food through photosynthesis or chemosynthesis; and within our domain of life (eukaryotes), they are the origin of the organelles that manufacture energy storage mol-ecules through photosynthesis (chloro-plasts) and convert this energy for use in our cells (mitochondria). Indeed, chloroplasts and mitochondria are examples of just how successful and game-changing endosymbionts can be.

The power of endosymbioses to lead to innovations has not escaped the at-tention of modern bioengineers. The establishment of a novel symbiont in an otherwise naive host has the potential to radically alter the host cell physiology in many ways, without directly affect-ing the host genome. These approaches have a range of applications, which in-clude public health, agriculture, medi-cine, and basic research. As biologists better understand these relationships, the potential grows for people to move endosymbionts from one organism to another to transfer or establish novel benefits in a new association.

While genetically modified organ-isms (GMOs) are often highly con-troversial, the prospects of co-opting symbiotic relationships are apparently more ethically palatable. Pedro Gundel and colleagues coined the term sym-biotically modified organisms (SMOs) in 2013 to describe artificial fungal endo-symbionts (endophytes) in grasses, even though by that time the approach had already expanded to other appli-cations. To date, SMOs have not en-countered the same ethical scrutiny

as genetic modifications, even though naturally occurring endosymbioses are known to have had large and sweep-ing effects on ecology and evolution in the past. Although we are not arguing against these new applications here, we believe that it is useful to put the ethical contrasts between SMOs and GMOs into perspective.

Surprisingly, the study of artificial endosymbioses has a long history. However, an appreciation for the im-plications of early research from the 1930s has emerged only recently.

A Pioneering Artificial Endosymbiosis Biologists still know little about how new endosymbioses become estab-lished, a point that intrigued the great invertebrate zoologists Ralph and Mil-dred Buschbaum when they set up a pioneering artificial symbiosis in 1934.The Buschbaums knew that many protozoans, jellyfish, corals, and flat-worms were able to survive without feeding because of their algal symbi-onts, which make food through photo-synthesis. In some instances, such as in giant clams, these algae live inside specialized tissues, but not within the cells, of the host. However, the major-ity of these unique invertebrates har-bor intracellular algae (often belonging to the genera Symbiodinium or Chlo-rella, or to “blue-green” cyanobacteria). These photosynthetic cells reside in-side cells of their host and provide simple sugars, lipids, or amino acids

Ryan Kerney and Zakiya Whatley are both assistant professors of biology at Gettysburg College. Kerney works on the cellular mechanisms of acquiring and maintaining an algal endosymbiont in the spotted salamander; Whatley works on biofilm forma-tion and mechanisms of DNA replication. Sarah Rivera is an undergraduate biology student in the Gettysburg College class of 2018 and is a research assistant in Dr. Kerney’s laboratory. David Hewitt is a consultant who works with local and state governments and nonprofit organizations on land management and related public health issues; he is a research associate at the Academy of Natural Sci-ences. Email for Kerney: [email protected].

The Prospects of Artificial EndosymbiosesThe use of beneficial microbes holds promise for public health and food production, but has trade-offs that are not yet fully understood.

Ryan Kerney, Zakiya Whatley, Sarah Rivera, and David Hewitt

Many marine invertebrates, such as this hy-dra, have coevolved with endosymbiotic al-gae that produce food for the host. As biolo-gists better understand these relationships, the potential grows for moving endosymbi-onts between organisms to transfer or estab-lish their benefits in a new association. ©

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that are generated through photosyn-thesis. The algae in turn benefit from the host’s carbon dioxide and nitroge-nous wastes, and from the intracellular refugia, making these interactions mutualistic endosymbioses. The Busch-baums were also aware that similar algal associations were not known for vertebrates. So they decided to form an artificial symbiosis in the lab with cultured vertebrate tissue explants and the unicellular green alga Chlorella.

The Buschbaums’ co-cultures of Chlorella with chicken and amphibian cells revealed an apparent benefit to both partners. Although the exchange of metabolites was not measured, the Buschbaums did describe in their

1937 paper in Physiological Zoology a “marked” effect on the growth and “health” of both partners, and that re-sult was later quantified by growth measurements. The co-cultured algae were greener and more abundant than controls, and the mixed vertebrate tissue cultures remained healthy for twice as long. The Buschbaums also noted something entirely unexpected: Embryonic chicken fibroblasts, which are cells derived from connective tis-sue, “occasionally took up” the algal cells in culture. This adoption created not only an “artificial symbiosis” but an artificial endosymbiosis in cells that otherwise have no business acquiring foreign microbes. These fibroblasts had reduced fat stores and “appeared to be much healthier” than controls. This uniquely engineered endosymbiosis appeared to replicate both the recipro-cal benefits as well as the intimate cel-lular associations found in marine in-vertebrates and microbial protists (for example, Paramecium). However, their experimentally derived endosymbiosis was a first for vertebrate cells.

The Buschbaums had stumbled upon a discovery that was not fully ap-preciated until many decades later. Lit-tle is known even today about the rules of engagement that establish coopera-tive, rather than parasitic, intracellular interactions. Even the Chlorella algae they used to form their artificial sym-biosis can occasionally become para-sitic in rare cases of sheep, dog, gazelle, or even human infections reported in the medical literature. There is only de-

scriptive research on these rare para-sitic Chlorella infections, and the mecha-nisms that cause this alga to become harmful are currently unknown.

But as the Buschbaums’ and others’ work on Chlorella demonstrates, the line between mutualist and parasite can be vague. The development of any endosymbiosis includes the trade-offs of burden and benefit, as well as the unique evolutionary trajectory of an endosymbiotic microbe. These merit close scrutiny as artificial endosymbio-ses are increasingly employed in many novel applications—and some are already in use, often under outdated regulations for preventing unintended environmental or health consequences.

Control of Mosquito-Borne DiseasesSome of the most encouraging re-search on artificial endosymbioses in-volves mosquitoes. The use of a bacte-rial endosymbiont called Wolbachia in novel mosquito hosts is rapidly being developed to control several infectious diseases, including dengue, Zika, chi-kungunya and, to a lesser extent, ma-laria. There is already a tremendous amount of basic research on Wolbachia,primarily because they have unique abilities to spread through a host popu-lation by manipulating genders. This common symbiont of many species of insects and nematodes can be a re-markably well-tolerated “reproductive parasite” or even a mutualist, depend-ing on the particular Wolbachia strain and its host. Wolbachia lives inside the cells of its hosts’ organs, often in the ovaries or testes, and it can be trans-mitted to all offspring of an infected fe-male. The bacteria also often abort the development of offspring from infected

Pioneering invertebrate zoologists Mildred and Ralph Buschbaum (left and right, respectively)were the first to create an artificial endosymbiosis in the lab by demonstrating that such rela-tionships can be induced in vertebrate cell cultures. (Photographs courtesy of Vicki Pearse.)

In the Buschbaums’ experiments, the unicel-lular green algae in the genus Chlorella (col-ored green here) were occasionally taken up by cultures of embryonic chicken connective tis-sue cells, as shown in this image from the bi-ologists’ 1937 paper in Physiological Zoology.


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males mating with uninfected females through a process called cytoplasmic incompatibility. Both of these effects promote the rapid spread of Wolbachiainfection throughout a population.

Although Wolbachia infections have been found in other mosquito spe-cies, there is no native infection in the dengue-transmitting species, Aedes aegypti, or most malaria-transmitting Anopheles species. By microinjecting Wolbachia cells into mosquito embryos, Australian researcher Scott O’Neill and his team have produced artificial endosymbioses with multiple strains that are sustained as these maternally-transferred intracellular symbionts are passed down from one Aedes aegypti generation to the next. Similar success-

ful SMOs have also been established with the related Aedes albopictus and the malaria host Anopheles stephensi (al-though with limited inhibition of the malaria parasite).

Australia has seen two successful releases of Wolbachia SMO mosqui-toes to control the devastating viral disease dengue. These efforts began with multiple small-scale trials in 2011 and expanded to a city-wide trial in Townsville, Australia, in October 2014. This trial was followed by expansion to other Queensland sites. Wolbachia-infected mosquito projects are cur-rently under way in Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, and Vietnam, where this pathogen and related viruses present a more pressing problem. These artificial

endosymbioses exploit the unique bi-ology of Wolbachia and its relationship with the host insect.

Depending on the bacterial strain employed, the Wolbachia–A. aegyptiartificial endosymbiosis results in a shortened life span for the female mos-quitoes (and to a lesser extent for the male ones) or a decreased ability to harbor or transmit viruses such as den-gue. Subsequent studies have shown that Wolbachia infections limit the trans-mission of the Zika and chikungun-ya viruses as well. The virus control mechanisms are not well known but appear to occur inside the host cells. Endosymbiotic Wolbachia organisms rarely share this space with viruses in a mosquito or in other insect hosts. This

cut

50%chance

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> 50%chance

alteredgene

wildtype

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Wolbachia-infected

repairinheritance of conventional altered

gene: Single copy inherited from transformed parent. Fifty percent

chance of transmission.

only female infected, or both male and female infected with Wolbachia:

Wolbachia-infected offspring.

only male infected with Wolbachia:No offspring.

Female aborts the eggs.

Wolbachia inheritancegene drive inheritancenormal inheritance

inheritance of a gene drive:

Altered gene also contains mecha-nism to convert

the unaltered copy inherited from

other parent. More than 50 percent

chance of transmission.

0% chance

Under normal, Mendelian inheritance, an altered gene allele will only be passed on to 50 percent of offspring. But recent developments in gene-editing technology have generated “gene drive” inheritance. In these lines the altered gene has the ability to copy itself into the match-ing, unaltered chromosome. This change makes the altered gene spread rapidly through a population. Endosymbiotic bacteria of the genus Wolbachia also control their own rate of inheritance. Wolbachia bacteria are maternally inherited. Wolbachia-infected males that mate with unifected females result in offspring that never fully develop. But Wolbachia-infected females that mate with uninfected males result in all offspring inheriting the endosymbiont.


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is apparently due to resource competi-tion for ions or lipids, as well as some intrinsic inhibition of viral replication through a currently unknown mecha-nism. Although there is some evidence for an up-regulation of the insect’s im-mune response when Wolbachia organ-isms are present, experimental models in the fruit fly Drosophila suggest that the bacteria take a more passive role in reducing viral load.

In Australian neighborhoods where Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes were released in 2011, the bacteria’s frequency in resampled mosquitoes was as high as 90 percent. Still, it is too early to know what effect wide-spread Wolbachia infection will have on the long-term rate of dengue trans-mission. Researchers are monitoring these initial releases closely in hopes that the Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes are not at a selective disadvantage to local uninfected populations and that their virus-suppressing effects contin-ue over multiple generations in these novel wild hosts. Results to date have been encouraging, since no dengue outbreaks have occurred in these areas since the releases.

However, in advance of releasing Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes, O’Neill and his colleagues completed exten-sive testing to measure the ecological impacts of the mosquitoes with Wol-bachia on regional food webs, as well as the their potential to transmit the bacteria to other arthropod or human hosts. Both were determined to be neg-ligible. They also addressed commu-nity concerns through focus groups, thorough interviews with identified stakeholders, and telephone surveys of random community members. This

community outreach and transparent ecological testing was essential for the adoption of the SMO dengue-control system. By all accounts these efforts were a thorough assessment of poten-tial off-target impacts and an example of vital community engagement.

The acceptance and use of Wolbachiain mosquito vector control has several direct parallels with GMO approaches toward the same ends. However, the ethical considerations for each ap-proach have been weighed differently in public opinion and regulatory over-sight. Currently, both avenues are un-der exploration either to limit a mos-quito’s ability to transfer a pathogen or to sterilize male mosquitoes and release them into a wild population.

Such control efforts are not without precedent. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the release of x-ray–sterilized males effectively controlled the screw-worm, a devastating parasitic maggot in humans and livestock. Subsequent sterile male eradication programs have been used against multiple insect pests, including mosquitoes.

Genetic modifications of A. aegyptihave led to the development and re-lease of male mosquitoes that are ef-fectively sterilized GMOs. This process requires a dominant lethal gene cluster in male mosquitoes. These male mos-quitoes then pass on their lethal gene cluster to all of their offspring, so that none end up living. Because these lab-reared mosquitoes competitively breed with females once they are released into the wild, the high numbers of un-viable offspring result in a profound crash in the population.

Oxitec is a company with success-ful mosquito-control campaigns in the

Cayman Islands, Brazil, and Panama that use sterilized GMO males. With a small trial proposed in Florida, they have recently focused on public edu-cation and outreach. However, their reception hasn’t been universally posi-tive. On November 8, 2016, residents of Key Haven in Monroe County cast referendum votes against the use of sterilized GMO A. aegypti to control dengue and Zika in their area. Even after the U.S. Food and Drug Adminis-tration (with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA]) found no significant environ-mental effects of using genetically mod-ified mosquitoes, there was a split vote. The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District of Monroe County recently ap-proved the release of genetically modi-fied mosquitoes despite local opposi-tion in Key Haven, the initial proposed release site. The board has decided to continue with the release at currently undetermined sites in the Florida Keys.

A second approach to controlling Ae-des mosquitoes uses artificial Wolbachiainfections that mimic the sterile-male approach. In 2015 the company Mos-quitoMate from Kentucky test-released Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes in Los Angeles. When they mate with an uninfected female, their offspring fail to develop, so they are effectively ster-ile. Florida appears to be more open to this SMO approach than it is to the release of Oxitec’s GMO mosquitoes. The EPA granted an extension of their Experimental Use Permit for Wolbachia-infected A. aegypti in September 2016 in Monroe County, and the mayor of Miami-Dade said that mosquito control had already contacted the University of Kentucky to conduct a trial of ster-ile SMOs as part of the state’s Zika re-sponse, according to the Miami Herald.

Use of Wolbachia offers an alternative to another promising but even more controversial genetic control technique. Mosquitoes can be genetically modi-fied to become worse hosts for a hu-man pathogen. However, spreading these modifications through wild pop-ulations is difficult. Establishing them in a population requires a gene drivethat will create transmission rates high-er than those of Mendelian inheritance. The most prominent recent advances in gene drive technology exploit a sequence-specific DNA targeting mechanism in bacteria called CRISPR-Cas9 (CRISPR stands for clustered

virus

Zika

Chikungunya

Dengue

~70 percent

61 percent

100 percent

0 percent

20 percent

63 percent

Wolbachia absent Wolbachia present

likelihood of virustransmission

Endosymbiotic Wolbachia bacteria can be used to control viral diseases, because their pres-ence reduces the likelihood that an infected mosquito will transmit a virus. (Data from: Aliota, M. T., et al. 2016. Scientific Reports 6:28792; Aliota, M. T., et al. 2016. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0004677; and Bian, G., et al. 2010. PLOS Pathogendoi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1000833.)


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symbioticallymodified organisms

herbivory resistance

endophyte

geneticallymodified organisms

Cry gene

plant genome

plant genome

plant genome

nitrogenase genes

cspB gene

nitrogen fixation

drought tolerance

arbuscular mycorrhizae

nitrogen-fixing bacteria


regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). This technology has revolu-tionized precision genome editing. In the CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive approach, the introduced DNA on one chromo-some (say, from the father) contains the ingredients to manipulate DNA on the matching chromosome from the mother. Both the foreign transgenes that mediate CRISPR-Cas9 editing and those that affect the transmission of diseases are transferred from one par-ent’s chromosome to the other. This re-sults in 100-percent transmission of the transgene, which eventually spreads through an entire population.

A recent National Academies of Sci-ences conference focused on ethical concerns regarding the use of gene drives to spread transgenes in wild populations. Although the mecha-nisms are different (and more specif-ic), the ability of a gene drive to self-propagate is similar to the ability of viral infections to spread. The National Academies of Sciences urged extreme caution in the development of these techniques for fear of off-target ef-fects. For instance, it is unclear wheth-er these self-propagating transgenes would have the ability to jump into new nonmosquito genomes, including potentially our own.

The Wolbachia approach to control-ling A. aegypti transmission of viruseshas similarities to, as well as dramatic differences from, the gene-drive ap-proach. Maternal inheritance in Wolba-chia organisms and their ability to es-sentially induce sterility when infected males mate with uninfected females means that they are similarly capable of spreading through a population extremely rapidly. Despite advances, gene-drive technology will likely be held up by ethical concerns for the foreseeable future, whereas Wolbachia-based mosquito control is already in use. In A. aegypti, Wolbachia infection is a comparable substitute for gene driv-ers to control transmission of these vi-ruses. However, to date, similar Anoph-eles mosquito SMOs have exhibited limited success in reducing the trans-mission of malaria through Wolbachia infection. Unlike the Wolbachia SMO, the CRISPR-based gene drive approach to malaria control using antibody trans-genes has great potential, although projects using this approach are cur-rently also held up by ethical concerns.

Although the current excitement about the Wolbachia intervention is war-

ranted, there remains room for caution. Wolbachia-containing mosquitoes are re-productively less fit than the wild-type mosquito and could be vulnerable to competition and prone to eventual loss in the wild population, in which case multiple releases might be required. In addition, the persistence of Wolbachia’s antiviral effects has not been evalu-ated through any longitudinal study. This persistence may be limited by the continued evolution of the Wolbachiabacteria, the virus pathogen, or the mosquito host. Because of Wolbachia’s maternal inheritance and ability to spread through a population, it is likely

the most successfully infectious bacteri-um known. However, Wolbachia species have coevolved with their native hosts. Whether the bacteria maintain the same types of relationships with novel mos-quito hosts remains to be seen.

Symbiotically Modified CropsControversy surrounding GMOs and their effects on human lives is most prominent in agriculture, where there is already widespread use of genetically modified crops, including soy, corn, and cotton. Transgenes from distantly relat-ed organisms confer resistance to herbi-cides or diseases, generate insecticides,

Naturally occurring endosymbionts are integral to the functioning of some plants and could be harnessed to improve crop performance. Fungi that live in aboveground tissue called endo-phytes can secrete chemicals that improve herbivore deterrence. Bacteria and fungi in plant root cells can fix atmospheric nitrogen and aid in water retention, respectively. There are genes that can also provide these benefits, sometimes with much greater control over potential off-target effects. And in some cases, potential symbiotically modified organisms (SMOs) also require genetic modification for an endosymbiosis to work in a new host. Nevertheless, some SMOs are already on the market with little resistance, whereas GMOs face greater ethical scrutiny.


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protect from drought, or—potentially—help provide micronutrients to improve human well-being. These approaches continue to be under intense public scrutiny, with many detractors con-cerned with off-target effects on ecosys-tems or on human health, as well as commercial concerns regarding intel-lectual property rights and agricultural industry consolidation. Given the ongo-ing arguments surrounding GMOs, a potential role in agronomic technology for SMOs could be a less resisted path to feeding the world safely and sustain-ably. ButSMOs may help address public fears without affecting actual risk.

Naturally occurring bacterial and fungal endosymbioses are integral to the functioning of agricultural eco-systems and already provide opportu-nities for engineered systems or poten-tial for transformative advances. One of the leading areas of research focuses on nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live in-side the roots of legumes (and alder trees) and “fix” atmospheric nitrogen into biologically available forms of this essential nutrient, such as ammonia. A second group of endosymbionts, arbus-

cular mycorrhizae, are fungi that enter the plant root’s cell walls, where they can shift nutrients from soil to the plant, and in turn gain carbohydrates made by those plants. Finally, endophytes, which are fungi that live in leaves or other aboveground plant tissues, are also widespread and critical to plant ecology, with effects on water manage-ment and resistance to herbivory. All three categories of these symbionts are critical to ecosystem functioning across an astonishing breadth of bio-logical communities, climatic regimes, and levels of human impact in rural, suburban, and urban habitats. All are currently used extensively in modern agricultural systems. These symbionts’ uses can supplement or even replace the role of genetic modifications that have potential for expanded capabili-ties, including genetic modifications to the symbiont or genetic and symbiotic modifications to one host.

Nitrogen-fixing bacteria can help to allay one of the most environmentally impactful practices of modern agricul-ture: the use of nitrogenous fertilizers, which can lead to runoff that causes

algal blooms and oxygen depletion in aquatic ecosystems. Because nitrogen is already abundant in the atmosphere, but not in a form that most plants can use, nitrogen-fixing symbionts reduce the required amount of applied fer-tilizer by making the plentiful atmo-spheric nitrogen usable to their hosts. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria are already a major component of modern agronom-ic systems. Unlike Wolbachia, nitrogen-fixing bacteria are not inherited but instead are acquired from the environ-ment through the roots, thereby confer-ring nitrogen-fixing capability to alders and legumes, and are thus a major rea-son that leguminous cover plants are used extensively on crop fields.

Establishing nitrogen-fixing bacteria in novel hosts could significantly re-duce nitrogenous fertilizer application and subsequent increased burden of nitrogen on adjacent and hydrological-ly linked ecosystems. However, novel host–symbiont pairing would likely re-quire extensive genetic manipulations, because the establishment of intracel-lular, bacterial nitrogen-fixers requires complex signaling between both sym-

Symbiotic relationships change over time, and biolo-gists will need to understand and manage that change if people want to put such relationships to deliberate

use. One of the biggest challenges is that parasitic relation-ships develop into mutualist ones and vice versa, so that relationships that at first seem useful can end up countering the human intent. Longitudinal studies of symbiotic and parasitic interactions reveal some of these transitions. For instance, the classic work in the late 1970s of Kwang Jeon from the University of Tennessee demonstrated a transi-tion from parasite to obligate mutualist in bacteria infecting single-celled amoebas over multiple generations. Although the selective pressure for the transition from parasite to mu-tualist is not clear, the amoeba hosts not only began to tol-erate their bacterial parasites, but also eventually required their presence for survival.

The opposite path, from mutualist to parasite, has been correlated with changing circumstances in a different sys-tem. The symbiotic alga Symbiodinium microadriaticum,whose presence is required for the survival of some jelly-fish, has been shown to transition from mutualist to para-site depending on the mode of symbiont acquisition. A Symbiodinium alga that is passed down from one genera-tion to the next ends up being beneficial, but when algal strains are transmitted between host jellyfish of the same species, they can potentially be parasitic. Similarly, biologist John Klironomos at the University of Guelph showed that different mycorrhizal plant–fungus combinations could

yield increases or decreases of aboveground plant biomass, depending on which pair of partners was in play. The rela-tive benefits of the endosymbiotic partner change through manipulations of their co-culture conditions, through host–symbiont specificity, or over subsequent generations. There-fore, maintaining artificial endosymbioses over time may be problematic, because both strict resource codependence on metabolic byproducts and inheritance of the endosymbiont from parent to offspring are likely required for persistent beneficial associations.

So how can a mutual exchange relationship be main-tained? The consideration of new innovations should focus on the features of consistently beneficial endosymbionts (such as mitochondria and chloroplasts). Intracellular mi-crobes that consistently benefit their hosts tend to be “pris-oners” of the host cell microenvironment. This relationship may be maintained through ensuring transmission from one generation to the next, a tight metabolic integration, or potentially the transfer of DNA from the endosymbiont to the host with associated genome reductions in the former.Replicating these features may become a useful tool in en-suring stable interactions in engineered systems.

However, replicating these features in any system would not be trivial and would likely require extensive genetic ma-nipulations. These could be done by knocking out essential genes from the microbial symbiont (such as an endophyte or a nitrogen-fixing bacterium) and inserting those genes into the host genome (along with components that would target them to the microbe). There are several fascinating examples of convergent gene transfer in sap-feeding insects. Similar engineered transfers could tether the microbe’s metabolic needs to the host genome’s survival and success.

The Gray Area Between Parasitic and Mutualistic Relationships


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biont and host. The factors involved, which include bacterial signaling pro-teins such as nodulation (Nod) factorsthat specifically activate host signaling pathways (called SYM pathways), are under intensive research and may pro-vide inroads into nonlegume uptake of symbiotic bacterial nitrogen-fixers through genetic modifications to either the bacteria, the plant, or both. These plants would then be regulated under the same governmental oversight as other genetically engineered plants, thereby reducing the “non-GMO” ben-efit of those SMOs.

Several applied fungal endosymbio-ses are already commercially available in agriculture. Numerous strains and communities of mycorrhizae (some kinds live inside plant cell walls; others live outside them) are available com-mercially for use in residential and ag-ricultural use, with different products marketed for specific applications (for example, lawns, pastures, or ecological restoration). Like nitrogen-fixing bacte-ria, mycorrhizae are also acquired from the environment. Their artificial sym-bioses are established by inoculation—that is, the microbial organism is ap-plied directly to the surrounding soil or the plant. However, the efficacy of controlling mycorrhizae varies be-tween strain and application. Not all mycorrhizal interactions are equivalent (for example, some can reduce plant biomass). The inoculum source and its

associated local adaptation both play roles in how well mycorrhizae affect the desired plant growth.

Mycorrhizae and nitrogen-fixing bacteria both trigger the host cell’s conserved symbiotic signaling (SYM)pathway, which results in periodic calcium concentration increases in the nucleus and eventually symbiont ac-quisition. This common host response suggests that the artificial acquisition of nitrogen-fixing bacteria may only require minor modifications in plants that harbor intracellular mycorrhizae. However, nitrogen-fixing bacteria also require specialized transport systems

and a low-oxygen microhabitat that would likely be difficult to replicate and may come at a significant cost to the host plant.

These hurdles have led many re-searchers to focus on a strict GMO ap-proach to acquired nitrogen fixation. Although that approach has its own unique set of challenges, it is argu-ably more precise and practical than the many modifications required for SMO acquisition. Although SMOs may pose risks and benefits similar to those of GMOs, artificial nitrogen fixation through SMOs likely will take longer

to develop and will have less accuracy than a solely GMO-based approach.

Artificially introduced grass en-dophytes are already commercially available that can lead to more effi-cient water use in pasture grasses and to reduced herbivory on such grasses through the symbionts’ release of al-kaloids, thus moderating the need for applied insecticides. Given that anti-herbivory compounds may affect live-stock, strains that are not toxic to sheep and cows have been developed for ag-ricultural use. Endophytes are easy to apply—the inoculum just needs to be added to the plant stem. Unlike my-

corrhizae or nitrogen-fixing bacteria,which are acquired from the environ-ment each generation, the grass endo-phytes are passed down maternally once established. However, a down-side to their use is that they can be-come parasitic and cause “choke” dis-ease in the host plant.

GMOs may present a false dichoto-my with SMOs. Many endosymbionts require genetic modification in their genome or in that of their target host prior to their use. For example, endo-phyte strains can be genetically engi-neered or selected for reduced toxic-ity to livestock. Similarly, the potential acquisition of nitrogen-fixing bacteria would require extensive genetic modi-fications to a novel host to successfully enable their profound and needed en-vironmental benefits.

Some of the valid concerns about GMOs may well carry over to SMOs. Concerns about off-target toxicity of pesticides produced by a transgenic plant may also be applied to endo-phytes that produced anti-herbivory toxins in grass. Concerns about the “es-cape” of highly competitive genetically engineered plants that could then be-come weedy, such as those raised in re-sponse to development of glyphosate-resistant bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera,a commonly used turfgrass), could be applied to a grass imbued with a particularly adaptive endophyte. Con-cerns about the use of mycorrhizae and nitrogen-fixing bacteria with novel crop or pasture plants could include their potential to reduce biodiversity with minimally diverse agroecosystems, as

The only known naturally occuring endosymbiosis in vertebrates is a mutualism between the green alga Oophila amblystomatis and embryos of the salamander Ambystoma maculatum.(Image courtesy of Roger Hangarter of Indiana University.)

Genetically modified organisms may present a false dichotomy with symbiotically modified organisms.


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these plants still would likely be plant-ed in fields that contain few or only one species or strain.

Given the ubiquity of these symbiot-ic relationships in nature (relationships

not brought about by direct human in-tervention), the general lack of genetic engineering involved, and the ease of their application, the use of SMOs can be seen as “natural” in comparison with GMOs. However, “natural” does not imply “without risk,” because many of the concerns that are raised for GMOs may apply to SMOs as well.

Vertebrate Artificial EndosymbiosesMost efforts have focused on plants and invertebrates, because that’s where many known examples of endosymbiosis occur. However, fol-lowing the work of the Buschbaums, artificial endosymbioses have recently been extended to vertebrates as well. Although endosymbioses appear in many branches of eukaryotic life (meaning all organisms that keep their DNA in a nucleus), there is only one known example of a mutualist natu-rally entering vertebrate cells to form a symbiotic interaction. Cells of the green alga Oophila amblystomatis enter tissues and cells of the spotted sala-mander Ambystoma maculatum during the amphibian’s development. The acquisition of this alga has several

similarities with the uptake of “algal” Symbiodinium by coral hosts, although Oophila algae produce only a limited photosynthetic benefit. Perhaps be-cause there are so few close natural analogs, artificial endosymbioses may not be as readily accepted in verte-brates as they are in agriculture.

Nevertheless, there have been sev-eral attempts at establishing an arti-ficial endosymbiosis in vertebrates using novel partners, much as the Buschbaums did in their experiment. Such approaches in the laboratory are mostly focused on introducing various types of algae into cell cultures.

Few attempts were made immedi-ately following the Buchsbaums’ ex-periments to replicate their “invigo-rating” artificial symbiosis. In the late 1970s Dennis Taylor from the Univer-sity of Miami had similar success with co-cultures between photosynthetic marine flagellates and fish explants or chicken-cell cultures. The topic has only recently been revisited by synthet-ic biologists working on experimental systems. These attempts have included genetically modified cyanobacteria (Synechococcus sp.). Similar unmodified

Many artificial endosymbioses require the transfer of a mutualistic microbe from one species to an-other. Yet biologists still do not fully understand

how and when these transfers can be made without causing unintended dysfunctions. Nevertheless, even the transfer of organelles with endosymbiotic origins, such as mito-chondria, has been surprisingly promising. Although they evolved from endosymbionts that became integrated into cells of some eukaryotes, mitochondria and chloroplasts are considered organelles rather than endosymbionts because of their extensive genomic and physiological integration with the host cell. Both of these endosymbiont-derived or-ganelles retain their own highly reduced circular bacterial genomes. Their DNA encodes for several proteins involved in organelle replication, metabolic processes, and the pro-duction of organelle-specific ribosomes. However, most of the organelle’s original DNA has been transferred to the host’s genome in the cell nucleus.

The persisting organelle genome has a tight integration with its host cell, making organelles unlikely candidates for simple swapping experiments. But that is just what medi-cal researchers and even clinicians are doing. This sort of exchange, combined with in vitro fertilization, could prevent mothers with mitochondrial genetic disorders from passing them on to their children.

Inborn genetic errors in mitochondria can be detected in a mother before she has children and potentially corrected through a nuclear transplantation technique that is similar

to cloning but occurs before fertilization. A donor provides their mitochondria through eggs that have had their nu-cleus removed. The mother then provides a “pro-nucleus” from her own unfertilized egg, which is microinjected into the donor’s egg prior to in vitro fertilization. The resulting embryo, and eventual individual, has a genetic composi-tion from three parents: the nuclear DNA from the sperm and egg nucleus donor and the mitochondrial DNA of their egg donor. The first baby born through this experimental therapy was recently announced. Still, potential effects of unmatched mitochondrial and maternal genomes remain uncertain and raise concerns about imprecise integration between the mitochondria and nucleus.

Surprisingly, the initial acquisition of the bacteria that gave rise to mitochondria, as well as that of the cyanobac-teria that gave rise to chloroplasts, each occurred only once in the history of eukaryotic life (with the arguable second origin of the photosynthetic organelles known as plastids in the amoeba Paulinella chromatophora). Despite many sub-sequent associations of eukaryotic, plastid-bearing endo-symbionts, and occasional bacterial endosymbionts, true organelle acquisition has been exceedingly rare. Modifying organelles or establishing new organelles in novel hosts may similarly be exceedingly difficult because of the extent of genomic integration required for these associations. Ini-tial organelle acquisitions did not occur in modern eukary-otes; rather, it took place between 1.0 and 1.8 billion years ago (depending on the analysis) with the extraordinarily different organisms that were our distant ancestors. How-ever, to date, transplants of these organelles between close relatives appear to be tolerated with surprising efficiency.

Initial Successes of Organelle Transfer

Engineered endosymbioses in vertebrates are under intense research. One recent labora-tory success is the modification of the genes that produce invasin and lysteriolysin so that the cyanobacterium Synechococcus (red) can enter and bypass digestion mechanisms in a vertebrate cell, in this case a mammalian en-dothelial cell. (Image from Agapakis, C. M., et al. 2011. Towards a synthetic chloroplast. PLoS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018877.)



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Synechococcus organisms are capable of establishing an artificial endosymbiosis with paramecium hosts after their nat-urally occurring algal symbionts have been removed. In vertebrates, however, the genes from human pathogens that produce invasin and listeriolysin were introduced to Synechococcus to enable its cellular entry and to bypass intra-cellular digestion mechanisms. These transformed bacteria were shown to enter and live in human cells in culture, resulting in the first human cell–algae endosymbiosis.

Although this work is still explor-atory, artificial endosymbioses have exciting potential for medical treat-ments. For example, putting algae cells into human eyes could stave off age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of impaired vision in the United States. Following the work on Synechococcus, researchers discovered entry of the algae Nannochloris eukaryo-tum into human cells after screening 11 algal strains for their ability to enter cultured eye (retina) tissue. This entry reduces expression of vascular endo-thelial growth factor, which can treat many forms of macular degeneration, and also increases cell viability. Unlike Synechococcus (a bacterium), N. eukaryo-tum is a eukaryote, as its name implies. It was isolated from a saltwater tank in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1980s and has been maintained in cul-ture for more than 30 years. Phycolo-gists (algal scientists) were initially in-terested in its uniquely small size (2–5 micrometers) and simple structure. The “voluntary” ability of N. eukaryotum to enter human cells also reveals a latent potential of microbes to interact with vertebrate cells, including human cells, in unexpected ways. This association did not require genetic manipulations of the symbiont or host and suggests that more vertebrate endosymbioses may exist without our knowledge.

What other value is there in an artifi-cial endosymbiosis of vertebrates, aside from the potential to treat macular de-generation? One futuristic possibility is in the field of “synthetic” meat produc-tion from cultured muscle precursor cells. Current attempts at cultured meat production require animal feedstocks. However, artificial photosynthetic sym-bionts could potentially lead to meat cultures that can generate their own food from sunlight, creating a guilt-free product that doesn’t require butchering of the feedstock and that would have a

much lighter environmental footprint. Other “futuristic” possibilities include the delivery of metabolites that aug-ment host-cell physiology through ge-netic manipulations of an endosymbi-ont itself. The creation of a microbial delivery service into diseased or aber-rant cells could lead to targeted cellular therapeutics without germline manipu-lations or the use of modified viruses.

Additional possibilities outside of photosynthesis and drug delivery abound. For example, artificial endo-symbiosis could allow grazing animals to eat plants that they currently cannot digest. The insect gut microbiome in-cludes microbes that aid in wood diges-tion, sap feeding, and blood feeding, tasks often attributed to intracellular bacterial symbionts. Expanding the di-gestive abilities of livestock could also help sustainably repurpose fallow lands and reduce the competition for land be-tween grazing livestock and crops.

The Trade-Offs of Symbioses Artificial endosymbioses have the po-tential to dramatically alter host cell physiology, organismal biology, and ecosystem functioning without directly manipulating the genome. This poten-tial has already been realized or is rap-idly advancing in numerous systems. This rapid adoption is occurring in part because public acceptance and regula-tory oversight of these approaches are distinct from acceptance and oversight of genetic modifications through ge-nome editing or use of recombinant DNA technology. This difference in re-ception is apparent in the far greater in-tensity of debates surrounding GMOs, compared with those surrounding SMOs. Modifying symbioses may ap-pear to be more “natural” than use of those other technologies, which can imply to many a reduced level of risk or an increased level of quality. How-ever, the line between “natural” and “artificial,” as with so many distinc-tions, becomes less clear as we under-stand more about the methods and outcomes of individual technologies.

SMOs can, arguably, result in more dramatic physiological changes to a host cell through a less controlled modification than occurs with genetic engineering. The transfer of an endo-symbiont is a less precise manipula-tion than altering a genetic code, be-cause an entire organism—not just a single gene or limited set of genes—is introduced. Most changes on a nucleo-

tide level are, from an individual cell’s perspective, less consequential than accommodating a foreign microbe. There is no reason to expect a priorithat a foreign endosymbiont will obey the same rules of interaction as a na-tive association. The latter has invari-ably resulted from a co-evolutionary process that can often result in dra-matic genomic integration. However in engineering, as in evolution, pro-found changes can occasionally be a “good” thing, regardless of precision. Again caution is warranted, and we need to evaluate individual technolo-gies. SMOs should not be seen as nec-essarily more or less risky than GMOs in any sweeping categorization.

Of key importance is the expecta-tion that artificial symbionts will have consistent effects on their hosts. Basic research on symbiotic associations has paid tremendous attention to the estab-lishment and maintenance of mutual-istic associations. Reciprocal exchanges can often result in “cheaters” infiltrat-ing transient mutualistic associations. Meanwhile, permament endosymbi-otic associations have recently been described as establishing a “symbiont prison” for an intracellular microbe that becomes dependent on its host. The latter may be preferable in SMOs for maintaining a consistent, and con-trolled, intracellular relationship.

The one guarantee of artificial endo-symbioses is that they will continue to evolve with or without our inter-vention. Maintaining an endosymbi-otic mutualism requires more than the accidental cellular fusion discovered by the Buschbaums, because the re-ciprocal costs and benefits need to be both established and maintained. As Charles Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection:“Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of an-other species.” Instead SMOs will al-ways require, to varying extents, some degree of compromise.




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When people interact with cosmic images, nearly all of their first questions are about authenticity: Are

the images real? Is this what I would see standing next to this? In a world made surreal with the magic of science-fiction special effects and digital image manipulation, there is a need to know

that what we are seeing is real, and that these fantastic cosmic starscapes are places that truly existed. These im-ages are of real objects in outer space. They aren’t creations of a graphic art-ist’s imagination. But how a telescope “sees” is radically different from how our eyes see. Telescopes give us su-perhuman vision. In most cases they

literally make the invisible visible. All astronomical images are translations of what the telescope can see into some-thing that our human eyes can see. But how is it done? This is a question that has challenged astronomers and astro-photographers for decades. Many peo-ple have developed and refined tech-niques to take the data generated by

Photoshopping the UniverseAstronomers produce beautiful images by manipulating raw telescope data, but such processing makes images more accurate, not misrepresentative of reality.

Travis A. Rector, Kimberly Arcand, and Megan Watzke

Photoshopping the Universe


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professional-grade telescopes and turn them into color images. Along the way we’ve worked to develop a visual lan-guage to better convey an understand-ing of what these pictures show.

Once telescopes collect astronomi-cal data, they need to undergo a se-ries of additional processing steps to turn them into color images. This is where programs such as Adobe Photo-shop come in. Unfortunately, the word “photoshop” has become a verb to de-scribe manipulating an image, and of-ten in a negative or devious way. Nev-ertheless, Photoshop and other image editing software are used to make as-tronomical images without any nefari-ous intentions or outcomes.

From Data to ImageAfter calibrating data from a telescope (or telescopes, as often data from more than one are used to make an image),

the next step is converting the data into grayscale images. (Usually the tele-scope’s camera can’t see color—that part comes later.) In these images, every pixel has a numerical value between zero and 255. Zero is pure black, whereas 255 is pure white, and everything in between is a shade of gray, with lower numbers being darker. This numeric value has to be a whole number, but when the data come off of the telescope, each pixel has a numeric value that indicates how much light hit that pixel, and that value does not have to be a whole number. So we must use a mathematical function to con-vert the actual value of the pixels into the range of zero to 255. This is often referred to as the scaling, or stretch, function.

The numeric values of the pixels can be used, for example, to precisely measure the brightness of a star or the temperature of gas. Also, the dy-namic range for a telescope is usually

much greater than for your eyes. Dy-namic range is defined as the ratio of the brightest object in an image to the faintest. It turns out that 256 shades of gray are usually sufficient for our eyes in differentiating brightness levels. But telescopes can do much better. There-fore, if we want to look at the data as an image, we need to translate what the telescope sees into something that works for our eyes. Each chunk of data

Travis A. Rector is a professor of physics and astrono-my at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Kimberly Arcand directs visualization efforts for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, at the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Megan Watzke is the public affairs officer for the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Excerpted with permission from Coloring the Universe by Travis Rector, Kimberly Arcand, and Megan Watzke, published by the Uni-versity of Alaska Press. © Travis A. Rector, Kimberly Arcand, and Megan Watzke. All rights reserved.

NASA, ESA, SSC, CXC, and STScI

This image of the center, or core, of our galaxy was produced from nine data sets: Four from the Spitzer Space Telescope show far-infrared in red, two from the Hubble Space Telescope show near-infrared in yel-low, and three from the Chandra X-ray Observatory show x-rays in blue and violet.


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(the data set from each filter, energy range, or waveband) is converted into its own grayscale image with a scaling function. Often, astronomers choose a different scaling function for each data set to highlight the detail in the darker and brighter areas of each image. Once you have a grayscale image for each data set, the next step is to combine them to create the color image.

Enter PhotoshopMany people think of Photoshop as an image manipulation program de-signed to change what a picture looks like—think of magazine covers show-ing celebrities who don’t seem to age. But it does much more than that. In particular, it’s useful for combining multiple grayscale images to create a single color image. Each grayscale im-age is loaded as a separate layer. The layers are shifted, rotated, and rescaled so that the images are aligned. The brightness and contrast of each layer

is separately fine-tuned to better bring out the detail in the bright and dark areas. Next, each layer is then given a color, and then the layers are stacked together to produce the preliminary color image. Photoshop lets astrono-mers combine as many layers as they wish, which allows for complex imag-es to be made. This is especially useful when we create images with data from multiple telescopes.

Cleaning the ImagePhotoshop is also used to “clean” the image, to remove defects from the im-age that are not real. The defects are false vestiges that appear in the image because of how the telescope or cam-era functions. It is similar to removing the red-eye effect from photographs taken with a flash. When we remove artifacts from an astronomical image, we do so carefully, so as not to alter the actual structure. This process can be difficult and tedious. Often this step

takes more time than the rest of the image-making process.

What are some of the defects that are removed? Sometimes cosmic rays, as-teroids, and satellite trails are not fully removed during the data processing. They appear as specks or streaks in the image. A common problem found in visible-light images is called a charge bleed. Because each pixel is collecting electricity created by the light that hits it, we can think of every individual pixel as an electricity bucket. If a bright object, such as a star, is observed for too long, the electricity it generates will “spill out” of the pixels near the center of the bright star and spread into ad-jacent pixels. We can use Photoshop to remove these bleed defects. If we don’t, it would look like laser beams are shooting out of the bright stars, which is definitely not happening. An-other instrumental effect, called diffrac-tion spikes, is noticeable in bright stars. These diffraction spikes are not caused

NOAO/AURA/AUI/NSF; Local Group Survey Team and T. A. Rector, University of Alaska Anchorage

An image of a nearby irregular galaxy, called Barnard’s galaxy (NGC 6822), com-bined data from five broadband filters and two narrowband filters, and shows wavelengths for ultraviolet (purple), infrared (red), blue (light blue), red (or-ange), and other visible wavelengths (green). Emissions from hydrogen ions are also red, and oxygen ions are blue.


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by the camera, but by the telescope it-self. As light enters into the telescope, it is slightly spread out (or more pre-cisely, diffracted) by the structure that holds up the secondary mirror at the top of the telescope. The light spreads out along the structure, causing bright stars to appear to have lines sticking out of them. Unlike charge bleeds, the diffraction spikes are usually not removed from the final image. Since the telescope itself produces the spikes (and not the digital camera), these arti-facts have been present in astronomical images for as long as such images have been made. They can therefore help function as a visual cue that tells your brain that you’re looking at an astro-nomical image. In fact, they serve this purpose so well that artists sometimes put diffraction spikes in their drawings or paintings of bright stars.

Another defect that astronomers occasionally have to remove is a no-ticeable ring around very bright stars. If a star’s light is intense enough, it can reflect off of optics inside the tele-scope and camera and produce a halo around the star; these are known as internal reflections. Astronomers find these reflections particularly challeng-ing to remove because they are often large and can overlap structures in the image that we don’t want to change. They can also have complex shapes that vary depending on where the star is in the image.

Many astronomical images are cre-ated when several smaller images are combined. And this can create another need for editing. These multipanel images are made when the telescope looks at one portion of the sky (called a pointing) and then moves to look at another, adjacent portion. Or there can be more than one detector inside the instrument. For example, the Kitt Peak National Observatory Mosaic cam-era in Arizona has eight detectors, so each pointing produces eight images. Variations in the sensitivity of each de-tector are removed when the data are calibrated, but not perfectly. This can leave seams along the locations where the images overlap, or gaps if the im-ages don’t align properly along the edges. The brightness of each image can be fine-tuned in Photoshop so the seams or gaps are virtually undetect-able. Small gaps can be filled in with additional data from other observa-tions and then blended in with the rest of the image.

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The planetary nebula NGC 6302 was imaged with data from six broadband filters, each assigned a different color. The camera—Hubble’s Wide Field 3—uses ultraviolet and visible light, but the filters isolate emissions from oxygen, helium, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur.

Pulsar B1509-58 was imaged using x-rays from Chandra (gold) and infrared (red and blue) from the Wide-field In-frared Survey Explorer (WISE). Color choices for nonvisible wavelengths can be simply a matter of astrono-mers’ aesthetic preferences.

www.americanscientist.org


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What Not to DoWhat’s just as important a question in processing images is what do we not do with Photoshop. Our goal with each image is to show how a telescope (or telescopes) sees a celestial object. In many cases, we also want to illustrate a new scientific result. We assign col-ors to each filter in a way that aims to be pleasing to the viewer and intuitive to understand, adding to the informa-tion the image conveys. For example, it can be distracting to make images of purple or green stars because stars are normally red, orange, yellow, white, or blue (as seen through visible-light broadband filters). Likewise, unusual colors for recognizable objects, such as spiral galaxies, can be distracting. For less familiar images, such as an x-ray image of the area around a black hole, there is more flexibility in the col-ors used. Undoubtedly, unusual colors such as bright greens can help attract attention to an image. But garish colors can also distract from the overall point. Strong colors can also affect the lon-gevity of the image; that is, you might enjoy an image but is it something that you would want to print and hang on your wall? Will it look as good 10 years from now as it does today?

Another item on the “don’t” list in-cludes modifying the actual structure in the image. We don’t add or remove stars. We don’t enlarge or slim down

galaxies by manipulating their pro-portions or aspect ratio. As tempting as it may be, filter effects that modify the structure are generally not used. Sometimes an image might be slight-ly sharpened to counter the blurring effects of stacking multiple images together. But that’s pretty much the only such manipulation that is used. Adjustments to color, brightness, or contrast are done to the entire image; for example, we don’t brighten one part of the image so it stands out more. If one star looks brighter than another, that’s because it really is brighter. We might rotate or crop an image to high-light key details. We don’t, however, deliberately crop to remove or hide a particular object so as to change the scientific narrative.

An essential part of the scientific process is to be explicit when de-scribing how an experiment is done or how a conclusion is reached. That way other scientists can recreate your experiment and analysis to see if they achieve similar results. Because these images are often used to illustrate sci-ence, we adhere to the same principle when describing them. Most astro-nomical images from professional ob-servatories include details about the observations used to make an image. This information details the telescopes, cameras, and filters used, number and lengths of the exposures, dates of ob-

servations, size and rotation of the image, the location of the object, and the people involved in completing the observations, processing the data, and making the image.

Using a specially developed image metadata standard, called Astronomi-cal Visualization Metadata (AVM), this information can also be embedded into the image. AVM is an easy way to learn about the details of an image. It also allows you to do cool things, such as show where the object is located in the sky using software such as Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope or Google Sky. For many observatories, including all of NASA’s telescopes, you can also down-load the raw data from their archives.

The principles we follow produce an image that is scientifically valid and show real objects in space as seen by our telescopes. But there is a sub-jective, creative element as well to producing images. Although many scientists are reluctant to think of themselves as artists, there is nonethe-less some artistry involved in making an appealing astronomical image.



T. A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage) and H. Schweiker (WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF)

This image of Cygnus X-1, a binary star system where a black hole is in orbit around a massive star, shows an umbrella-shaped jet of gas ejected from the black hole. Artifacts from the tele-scope’s optics, such as halos around stars, had to be removed in processing.



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S c i e n t i s t s’

Deconstructing DisasterTHE CURE FOR CATASTROPHE: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disaster. Robert Muir-Wood. 368 pp. Basic Books. 2016. $29.99.

LOVE CANAL: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present. Richard S. Newman. 328 pp. Oxford University Press. 2016. $29.95.

Casual observers of catastro-phe continue to distinguish between human-caused and

natural disasters, but in either case consider them to be unforeseeable, out-of-nowhere events. Two recent books—Love Canal, by Richard New-man, and The Cure for Catastrophe, by Robert Muir-Wood—might change some minds.

Although oil spills and train de-railments that release hazardous sub-stances are clearly the unintended results of societal choices, other well-publicized catastrophes generally understood to be “natural” disasters should be seen in the same light. The flooding of New Orleans during Hur-ricane Katrina, for example, or the 18,500 deaths from the compounded disasters in Tohoku, Japan, in Febru-ary 2011, or the deaths of 5,000 school children in China following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake—these events were not so-called acts of God. (The term is still used in contract law to designate an unanticipated calam-ity.) In the 20th and 21st centuries, poor political and economic choic-es have compounded the effect of natural events and put people unnec-essarily at risk.

These two books tell very different stories about disaster, but in the end they mutually reinforce our recogni-

tion of the critical nature of regula-tion, the role of citizen science, and the important part played by cultures and institutions in mitigating risk. Although we’re accustomed to defin-ing the critical juncture of a disaster as the moment the event affects local residents, in reality some of the most important decisions happened long before, when decision makers set safe-ty standards and building codes and implemented recovery frameworks. At the local level, residents can and should participate as active partners in formulating disaster mitigation plans, instead of being passive recipients of them. Everyday citizens can collect, analyze, and interpret data critical for their own health and survival. For ex-ample, participants in a global Web 2.0 project called Safecast share measure-ments of environmental radiation and other pollutants. Finally, local resi-dents can create safety cultures that re-duce disaster risk, while governments set up institutions to smooth recovery processes and ensure equity.

Newman’s well-written, deeply re-searched book tells the full story of the chemical disaster at Love Canal, a suburban neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York. Newman, a histo-rian specializing in environmental and early American history, begins the story centuries before Love Canal became synonymous with ecological catastrophe. He describes the initial Western exploration of the area during the 17th century, then focuses intently on the dreams of late-19th-century vi-sionary William Love, for whom the canal was named. Love envisioned generating electricity for a planned model community (to be called, nat-urally enough, Model City) by har-nessing the power of water drawn from nearby Niagara Falls through engineered waterways.

When that exercise in futuricity fell apart, it left behind a clay-lined

Nightstand

The Scientists’ Nightstand, American Scientist’s books section, offers reviews, review essays, brief excerpts, and more. For additional books coverage, please see our Science Cultureblog channel, which explores how science intersects with other areas of knowledge, entertain-ment, and society:americanscientist.org/blog/scienceculture.

A L S O I N T H I S I S S U E

THE TETRIS EFFECT: The Game That Hypnotized the World.By Dan Ackerman. TETRIS: The Games People Play. By Box Brown.page 54

O N L I N E

Our 2016 gift guide, including STEM book recommendations for readers of all ages: americanscientist.org/bookshelf/page/science-gift-guide-2016

Jim Mackanochie, who pioneered flight simulator technology, was an early fan of the game Tetris.

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canal that was ideal for the area’s next phase of use: answering the electrochemical industry’s need for a dumping ground. In 1942 Elon Hooker, civil engineer and captain of industry, began entombing some 22,000 tons of chemical waste in the premade canals. It was a legal move at the time, as no laws covered toxic waste disposal (or worker safety, for that matter) in the first half of the 20th century. Chemicals placed in the ditch included benzene, dioxins, and 10 other known carcinogens. Sealing the dump in 1953, Hooker Chemi-cal Company officers believed that as long as the site was left alone, the clay would prevent any waste from escaping.

Yet the local school board was al-ready eying the land in 1952, and the next year it purchased the site for $1 from Hooker Chemical. When the school board had first approached Hooker about the property, the com-pany dutifully warned them about the site’s hazardous contents. New-man notes that Hooker officials also pressed for assurances from the board that, should plans for a subdivision move forward, “mention of the chem-ical dump . . . would be included in all subsequent transactions between the city and developers, and then be-tween developers and homeowners.” This, Hooker officials hoped, would

absolve them of liability. The board agreed to the stipulation, but failed to follow through. After using some of the land for two schools in the early 1950s, the school board sold unused land to housing developers in the late 1950s, despite renewed warnings from Hooker Chemical executives and attorneys.

Things went downhill from there. Paint peeled off homes. Chil-dren played pop rocks, throwing phosphorous-laced stones at the ground after discovering the rocks would explode on impact. People complained of foul odors and dying vegetation. One family, the Schroed-ers, found that its sunken fiberglass swimming pool had risen from its usual position by two feet, pushed up by chemicals flooding into the ground-water. A number of residents noticed health changes in their families, in-cluding seemingly high numbers of miscarriages, respiratory problems, and cancer. As the community lost the rhythms of normal life, the women who lived there, led by people such as Lois Gibbs, mobilized into a grassroots movement in the 1970s. Pushing hard

against the weak regulation that had allowed the disaster to happen in the first place and not content with small-scale measures (such as limited evacu-ations), residents reached out to find regional and national allies.

Political action around the Love Ca-nal event, which is readily classified with “human-made disasters,” gained steam just when public attention was beginning to galvanize around issues of environmental justice. Newman shows how national political figures used Love Canal as a policy window through which they could develop the Comprehensive Environmental Re-sponse, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (or CERCLA, known more colloquially as Superfund), which pushed responsibility back onto pri-vate developers. Even firms such as Hooker, which had followed the rules when it disposed of the chemicals, were liable to help clean up the site later. Eventually all of the residents from Love Canal, even those not liv-ing directly over the disposal sites, were moved out, and the area was off-limits for decades as it was remedi-ated. Despite the tremendous public concern about this environmental di-saster, epidemiologists and scientists have drawn mixed conclusions from peer-reviewed health studies of for-mer residents. Some scientists, such as cancer researcher Beverly Paigen, argued in the late 1970s that residents

Photographs of the cleanup efforts in Love Canal underscored the severity of the problem, and images of the thousands of barrels of toxic waste removed from the site proved especially sym-bolic. As author Richard S. Newman notes, “Suddenly, activists did not have to explain chemi-cals’ hazards; pictures of the toxic landscape circulated widely. This disaster iconography would remain a powerful part of the Love Canal story for years to come.” From Love Canal.

Located behind a warning-bedecked fence by the time this 1978 photo was taken, the 99th Street School had opened in 1955. It represent-ed a second construction attempt, positioned 30 yards north of the original site. The rebuild occurred after the original school’s foundation sank into a chemical pit. From Love Canal.

Penelope Ploughman, August 1978/SUNY, Buffalo


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clearly suffered adverse health effects. But studies carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the early 1980s using blood samples found almost no chromosomal aberra-tions between residents and nonresi-dents. As with the Chernobyl disaster, outsiders cannot absolutely agree on the scope of the damage to those ex-posed to toxic chemicals.

The Love Canal story illuminates several broader issues, including the concept of putting areas considered of lesser “quality” into service for dispos-able land uses or as sacrifice zones for industry. When embarking on contro-versial new projects, developers and bureaucrats alike regularly look for land that has already been degraded or poorly used. The story also under-scores the need for citizen advocacy and pushback on land-use plans. As a diverse group of scholars—from polit-ical scientist Greg McAvoy to anthro-pologist Hugh Gusterson, and includ-ing myself—have argued, opposition that used to be pejoratively labeled “not in my back yard” (or NIMBY) typically catalyzes better public policy.

Muir-Wood’s narrative is choppier than Newman’s, and it breaks from the linear sequence common to his-torical and academic writing. Instead, the author adopts a science journalism approach, skipping from disaster to disaster, time period to time period, to get his point across. Throughout the book, he builds on the argument that disasters are political: “Disasters con-sume wealth, depreciate land values, and threaten governments. . . . From Simón Bolívar to Fidel Castro, leaders have understood the need to outwit catastrophes in order to maintain their authority.” Among other things, the political sphere affects the nature of the built environment as well as the accepted level of risk tolerance. “Di-sasters are determined,” Muir-Wood observes, “by what we build, where we choose to live, how we prepare, and how we communicate warnings.”He then links a variety of catastrophes over time and regions, with examples ranging from a Renaissance-era earth-quake in Portugal to modern-day ca-tastrophes such as the 2010 Chilean earthquake and the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

He illustrates how some low-cost mechanisms—such as disaster-response education—have shown suc-cess in communities such as Kamaishi,

Japan, during the March 11, 2011, tsu-nami. There, a professor had devel-oped educational programs to convey lessons learned from some successful evacuations immediately preceding the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Although a number of regions, in-cluding Chile, San Francisco, and Wel-lington, New Zealand, have invested in

upgrading their building infrastructure, Muir-Wood argues that we all too often construct buildings to withstand only the latest disaster. This approach can be especially hazardous in areas prone to multiple kinds of catastrophe—for example, earthquakes and wildfire, as in certain parts of California, or earth-quakes and typhoons in Japan.

Especially among developing na-tions, where regulation is weak and construction often unsupervised, we see the same problems: “bad de-sign, bad execution, bad reinforcing, bad concrete.” Muir-Wood finds that wealth and urbanization—that is, off-shoots of economic development—

reduce casualties. Nations, however, do not need money to save lives: Cuba’s proactive civil defense program has re-duced hurricane casualties to close to zero. Rather than relying on high levels of government spending, Cuba uses public education, good communication systems, and community mobilization to prepare the nation for storms.

The book points out that although the insurance and re-insurance mar-kets are often held up as examples of how to mitigate damage, private insur-ance is actually playing a diminishing role in the United States. Instead, the federal government is paying more and more of the compensation pro-vided to victims of disaster. As I have observed in my own research, there are other ways to reduce damage: Social capital and social ties are critical, with neighbors often serving as emergency first responders, and local nongovern-mental organizations saving lives and accelerating recovery. Although rein-forcing existing cohesion and building

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Love Canal resident and community activist Lois Gibbs met frequently with state and federal government officials, such as New York Governor Hugh Carey, as captured in this news photo-graph. The grassroots movement that emerged out of the fears and frustrations of local residents became a vital component among a combination of bottom-up and top-down political efforts that eventually led to the area’s evacuation, cleanup, and remediation. From Love Canal.

Regulatory and market choices well before the event

create the necessary conditions for disaster.


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new social networks takes a great deal of time, these tactics are generally far cheaper than physical infrastructure projects. In the end, to reduce casual-ties and improve response, a bottom-up, grassroots disaster culture will need to work side by side with top-down, forward-thinking institutions willing to enact substantial change. No government pronouncement or plan will be effective without buy-in from local residents; at the same time, neighborhoods and communi-ties rely on the resources held by the central government.

Both books recognize an important lesson that economic historian John Singleton offers in his recent book Eco-nomic and Natural Disasters Since 1900:Disasters—even those typically cat-egorized as unpredictable—happen during times of crisis. Although we typically notice only a crisis’s trigger moment and its tragic aftermath, in reality regulatory and market choices well before the event create the neces-sary conditions for the problem. And so the cycle continues. Whether by fill-ing in marshland, developing coastal properties, or disposing of waste in convenient but unsustainable ways, we continue to place ourselves in harm’s way.

Yet as time moves on, more tools are available to predict and mitigate risk. Muir-Wood recounts how in the wake of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which pushed nine insurance companies into bankruptcy, insurers developed catastrophe models based on “100,000 years of synthetic catastrophic histo-ries”; they used these models to cal-culate insurance prices and establish how much to hold in reserve in the event of a year of serious losses. As Muir-Wood points out, “The technol-ogy that protects the markets can also protect people.” “Political leaders,” he adds, “will increasingly be expected to account for latent disaster deaths and losses before they happen.” This kind of modeling is, in a sense, just another way to learn from the past. Sharing and contextualizing disaster narra-tives are others. Hopefully Love Canaland The Cure for Catastrophe will help readers think more carefully about the downstream consequences of our of-ten shortsighted choices.

Daniel P. Aldrich is professor and director of the Secu-rity and Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University. Twitter: @danielpaldrich.

Soviet BlocksTHE TETRIS EFFECT: The Game that Hypnotized the World. Dan Ackerman. 272 pp. Public Affairs, 2016. $25.99.

TETRIS: THE GAMES PEOPLE PLAY. Box Brown. 256 pp. First Second, 2016. $19.99.

What is it about Tetris? How did this inspired little game, which started out as a piece

of freeware designed to run on the Rus-sian 60 Microcomputer (Electronika 60 in English), transform

into an international bestseller generat-ing billions of dollars? Thereby hangs a tale—and 30 years on, two books have appeared to tell it. The Tetris Effect, by technology journalist Dan Ackerman, and Tetris, by Ignatz Award–winning cartoonist Box Brown, hit bookstore shelves within months of each other. Yet each ushers readers along a distinct and enlightening path.

The story behind the pioneering game Tetris is complex, spanning the worlds of technology, psychology, en-tertainment, politics, and business. Still, the core narrative is in some ways familiar. A videogame phenomenon

The original version of Tetris was designed for an Electronika 60 computer that had no graphics capabilities; gameplay elements were constructed using text characters. A small band of friends worked with creator Alexey Pajitnov to enhance the game’s look. Author Box Brown explains, “Together they developed a graphical version of Alexey’s game that ran on MS-DOS. . . . The game fit on a 5.25-inch floppy disk.” This version was free and, given the popularity of the oper-ating system it used, it was shared widely around Moscow. From Tetris: The Games People Play.

Box Brown, Tetris: T

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lay. First Second, 2016.


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emerges maybe once or twice a decade: It appears to come out of nowhere; then all at once everyone seems to be playing it. Pac-Man, Myst, Farmville, The Sims, Angry Birds, and Candy Crush are among a short list of games that be-came household words, acquired hun-dreds of millions of players, and gener-ated billions in revenue. When Tetrisexploded onto the gaming scene in the late 1980s, it did all these things too. At the same time, its impossible simplicity made it stand apart.

The game of Tetris has no luscious artwork, no characters, no story, no social features, no set of painstakingly hand-crafted puzzle levels. The game-play is nothing more than this: Seven blocks, arranged in a handful of pre-determined shapes, descend one by one onto a 10-block by 20-block grid as a player tries to rotate the shapes neatly into place, making room for more. Gradually the shapes fall faster, then faster yet until the grid fills and the game ends. That’s it.

The game was invented in 1984, but there was no technological reason it couldn’t have been created years ear-lier. The Atari 2600, for example, re-leased in 1978, was a powerful enough system to run a game like Tetris—and

had Tetris existed, it could easily have been the most addictive and popu-lar game for the 2600. But that didn’t happen of course, because no one had thought of a game anything like Tetris.

The one who did think of it was Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian comput-er scientist who was supposed to be working on artificial intelligence proj-ects. Instead, he kept thinking about how to make a computer version of the beloved pentominoes game he grew up playing. Pentominoes are puzzle pieces, each composed of five

squares presented in one of 12 differ-ent configurations. But the notion of recreating these classic wooden puzzle pieces within a computer game was a little overwhelming. Then it occurred to Pajitnov that he could simplify the pieces into tetrominoes, which would have only four squares each, for a total of seven unique pieces. He set to work creating the game, but early versions (fashioned under the less appealing title “Genetic Engineering”), which

simply allowed a player to arrange the tetrominoes freely in a rectangle, were dull and static. But a moment of inspiration changed the playing experience entirely: Pajitnov added time pressure. Tetrominoes would fall one after another from the top of the screen; whenever tetrominoes were rotated and nudged into place to fill a 10-block row of the grid, that row of blocks would disappear, freeing space for more blocks and enabling the game to continue a little longer. This mixture—a spatial puzzler intensified

by time pressure—turned out to be addictive. Pajitnov could hardly stop playing. When he showed the game to his colleagues, they were skeptical at first. Yet one by one, they too found themselves caught in the compulsion loop that Tetris generates in almost ev-eryone who plays it.

What exactly makes Tetris so com-pelling is a matter of much debate. For example, in his book Brown addresses the question through a discussion of

New from the bestselling author of The Physics of Wall Street

Is the key to the next eraof physics “nothing”?

New from the bestselling author of The Physics of Wall Street

Is the key to the next eraof physics “nothing”?

“Weatherall’s account of the ‘science of the vacuum’ covers some of the most fascinating aspects of physics with a unique

combination

—Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“Weatherall’s account of the ‘science of the vacuum’ covers some of the most fascinating aspects of physics with a unique

combination

—Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“Weatherall’s clear language and skillful organization

—Publishers Weekly

“Weatherall’s clear language and skillful organization

—Publishers Weekly

“Weatherall deftly explains all you wanted to know about

—Priyamvada Natarajan, theoretical astrophysicist andauthor of Mapping the Heavens

“Weatherall deftly explains all you wanted to know about

—Priyamvada Natarajan, theoretical astrophysicist andauthor of Mapping the Heavens

Something about Tetris makes it fit like a key into the

lock that is the human mind.


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Bluma Zeigarnik and Kurt Lewin’s re-search on how certain kinds of tension stimulate the prefrontal cortex. Acker-man first discusses the pharmatronic(or, mind-altering states induced by interaction with technology) qualities of various technology experiences, such as “the dopamine hit upon re-ceiving a new ‘like’” on social media, before homing in on Tetris’s rhythm and timing: “The pharmatronic ef-fect of Tetris is better explained by the hypnotic rhythms of the game and its simple, geometric patterns, with the

constant stream of immediate closed-loop feedback hooking unconscious triggers into the waking mind.”

Whatever the cause, something about this particular game makes it fit like a key into the lock that is the human mind. It is not simply a matter of puzzle pieces, time pressure, and gradual progress alone; many games have these, yet none have had the ad-dictive staying power of Tetris. It has remained popular for decades, hold-ing the Guinness World Record for the most ported videogame, meaning that

it has been officially translated onto more than 65 computer game plat-forms, including mobile phones. And although there have been hundreds of attempts to add new features, rules, and twists in an effort to improve the game, not one of them has lasted. In every case, the new rules and features make for a version that is less elegant and less captivating than the original.

But the game’s uniqueness is only part of the tale. Because the game’s creator was a government employee of the Soviet Union who crafted the game on the job, using his employer’s computers, Tetris itself belonged to the Motherland. When word of the game trickled out to the West, career bureau-crats found themselves pitted against envoys from an array of technology companies vying for the game’s inter-national commercial rights. Fitting to-gether the many individuals involved in the worldwide spread of Tetris is a bit of a Tetris game itself, involving sci-entists, inventors, entrepreneurs, cod-ers, government agents, and market-ers from Russia, Hungary, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

In The Tetris Effect, Ackerman tells the story as straightforwardly as pos-sible, introducing the key individu-als and unravelling the complex tale of the game’s invention and spread. Initially shared for free, a copy of Tet-ris found its way to Hungary, where it was discovered by software distribu-tor Robert Stein, who sought out the first distribution license for the game. Unfortunately for Stein, vagueness in his licensing contract and confusion in communicating with the Soviet gov-ernment, the owner the game, left the door open for others (including Atari and Nintendo) to receive competing licenses, or at least to think they had. What follows is a dramatic story in-volving multiple competing software companies, each grappling for control of a piece of software so simple that it can be coded with just 1 kilobyte of javascript, but that seizes and holds the human mind in a way that had nev-er been seen before. Who would win the battle for Tetris was a matter of not only persuasive personalities, but who could best deal with the reality that in-ventions such as the Nintendo Enter-tainment System and the Game Boy were redefining what the term comput-ing device even meant. Each new inven-tion blew previous contracts to shreds. Ackerman deftly weaves together these

Alexey Pajitnov, a computer scientist and the creator of Tetris, found himself fascinated by the intersections between psychology, art, and games. In Box Brown’s telling of Tetris’s origins, Pa-jitnov enjoys discussing the role of games with a close colleague. “Games aren’t just an escape,” Pajitnov exhorts his friend, “not just there to keep us busy during idle hours. Puzzles and games reveal a lot about psychology and human behavior! They imitate the mind! They inform life!” From Tetris: The Games People Play.

Box Brown, Tetris: T

he Gam

es People P

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stories of invention, legal wrangling, and savvy salesmanship. Along the way he shares asides about the many psychological studies that have brought Tetris into the lab and what they have taught us about the human mind. Researchers have, for example, used the game to study en-ergy consumption in the brain and to explore possible therapies for treat-ing post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Brown’s book Tetris tells the same story in a radically different way, conveying the game’s history in the style of a graphic novel. This approach may seem counterintui-tive, especially for a story in which much of the action takes place in meeting rooms and in front of com-puter screens. Yet I found Tetris to be one of the most inspiring works of videogame history I have ever read. Most stories of game development center on genius and success. As a game developer myself, however, I can tell you that the actual work isn’t like that. Game development is lonely and difficult, and Brown’s book cap-tures this perfectly. But it also shows that success comes from persisting in your passion to create something won-derful, even when (especially when) it seems crazy to the rest of the world.

The book’s format, as well as Brown’s uncluttered style, prevents this version of the story from going into the detail of Ackerman’s book, so some complex as-

pects are glossed over. But in presenting a tale of multiple cultures, dynamic per-sonalities, and interlocking puzzle piec-es, the graphic novel format has many advantages. It is far easier to grasp the evolution of the game by seeing illustra-tions of prototypes, and seeing the faces of the many individuals involved in the story makes it much easier to keep track of who is who. Moreover, Brown has a knack for illuminating the motivations of his real-life characters. Arguably the true hero of Brown’s story is Gunpei Yo-koi, creator of the Game Boy. Without his unceasing spirit of invention, the world of both videogames and mobile devices would be much less advanced today.

As an artist, Brown also brings a new dimension to the story: the game of Tetris as a work of art. He makes a persuasive argument throughout the book for viewing games as art and their creators as artists. As such, Pajit-nov’s puzzle game has reached a rar-efied status. A revolutionary work, “Tetris was essential to the develop-ment of the art form. These puzzle pieces,” he observes of the tetrami-noes, “have become canon.”

The books differ on certain points (for example, Brown submits that Pajitnov had no real desire to make money from his game, whereas Ackerman suggests otherwise), but they complement each other nicely. Just as two stereoscopic images help us see a three-dimensional picture, together these two books provide

a depth of insight impossible to gain from just one point of view. I read Brown’s book first and found that it served as an excellent lead-in to Acker-man’s more detailed work.

Pajitnov’s Tetris has been with us for a generation, yet these books show how it continues to mystify and sur-prise us. And given how easily the game continues to transfer to new technologies, it will likely be with us for generations to come.

Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design, is a video game designer and professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University.

Many companies Robert Stein approached about Tetrisrejected it, finding it too different from existing games.

Statement of ownership, management and circula-tion (required by 39 U.S.C. 3685). 1. Publication title: American Scientist. 2. Publication number: 2324-0. 3. Filing date: October 1, 2016. 4. Issue frequency: Bi-monthly. 5. No. of issues published annually: 6. An-nual subscription price: $30. 7. Complete mailing ad-dress of known office of publication: P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3975. 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3975. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and manag-ing editor: John Nemeth, publisher, P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3975; Jamie Ver-non, editor, P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3975; Fenella Saunders, managing editor, P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3975. 10. Owner: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3975. 11. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 per-cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None. 12. The purpose, func-tion, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for Federal income tax purposes: Has not changed during preceding 12 months. 13. Publication Title: American Scientist. 14. Issue Date for Circulation Data: Sept–Oct 2015–July–August 2016. 15. Extent and nature of circulation: science. A. Total no. copies: Average no. copies each issue

during preceding 12 months, 60,536; no. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 52,172. B. Paid circulation: B1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 30,335; no. copies of single issue published near-est to filing date, 21,347. B2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions: average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 0; actual no. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 0. B3. Paid dis-tribution outside the mails including sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other paid distribution outside USPS: average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 8,016; no. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 8,952. B4. Paid distribution by other classes of mail through the USPS: average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 0; no. cop-ies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 0. C. Total paid distribution: average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 38,351; no. cop-ies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 30,299. D. Free or nominal rate distribution: D1. Free or nominal rate outside-county copies as stated on PS Form 3541: average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 465; no. copies of single is-sue published nearest to filing date, 458. D2. Free or nominal rate in-county copies as stated on PS Form 3541: average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 0; actual no. copies of single issue pub-

lished nearest to filing date, 0. D3. Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other classes mailed through the USPS: average no. copies each issue during pre-ceding 12 months, 0; actual no. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 0. D4. Free or nomi-nal rate outside the mail: average no. copies each is-sue during preceding 12 months, 260; no. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 260. E. Total free or nominal rate distribution: average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 725; no. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 718. F. Total distribution: average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 39,076; no. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 31,017. G. Copies not distributed: average no. cop-ies each issue during preceding 12 months, 21,460; no. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 21,155. H. Total: average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 60,536; no. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 52,172. I. Percent paid: average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 98 percent; no. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 98 percent. 16. Total circulation includes electronic copies: no. cop-ies of single issue published nearest to filing date: a. paid electronic copies, 5,248. B. Total paid print cop-ies + paid electronic copies, 35,547. C. Total print dis-tribution + paid electronic copies, 36,265. D. Percent paid: 98%. 50% of all distributed copies (electronic & print) are paid above a nominal price.

Box Brown, Tetris. First Second, 2016.


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Richard Canary, Professor of Math-ematics, University of Michigan Non-Euclidean Sports and the Geometry

the Geometrization of Three-Dimensional

James Costa, Executive Director, High-lands Biological Station, and Professor of Biology, Western Carolina University

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Lee Dugatkin, Professor of Biology, University of Louisville

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Lola Fatoyinbo, Earth Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Dimensional Data from New Satellite Constellations (G,S)

Susan Coppersmith, Professor of Physics, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Sigma XiDistinguished Lecturers 2017–2018

Lisa Cook, Associate Professor, Depart-ment of Economics, Michigan University

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P (Public), G (General), S (Specialized) Details available at https://www.sigmaxi.org/programs/lectureships

For the 79th consecutive year, Sigma Xi presents its panel of Distinguished Lecturers as an opportunity for chapters to host visits from out-standing individuals who are at the leading edge of science. These visitors communicate their insights and excitement on a broad range of topics.

The Distinguished Lecturers are available from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018. Each speaker has con-sented to a modest honorarium together with full payment of travel costs and subsistence.

Local chapters may apply for subsidies to support expenses related to hosting a Distinguished Lecturer. Applications must be submitted online by March 1, 2017 for funds to be available the next fiscal year.

Additional support for the program comes from the American Meteorological Society and the National Cancer Institute. Lecturer biographies, contact information, and additional details can be found online under the Lectureship Program link at www.sigmaxi.org or by email to [email protected].

Judith Herzfeld, ChairCommittee on Lectureships

Application Deadline: March 1, 2017https://www.sigmaxi.org/programs/lectureships

Paul Anastas, Teresa and H. John Heinz III Chair of Chemistry and the Environment School of Forestry and En-vironmental Studies Yale University

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Andrew Cleland, John A. MacLean Sr. Professor for Molecular Engineering Innovation and Enterprise, University of Chicago

Company (P)


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Alexander Orlov, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, State University of New York, Stony Brook

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Concerned? (G)

Bryant C. Nelson, Staff Research Chemist, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Beth Middleton, Research Ecologist, Wetland and Aquatic Research Center, U.S. Geological Survey

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Isaac Krauss, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, Brandeis University

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Tomás Jiménez, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Stanford Uni-versity

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Nicholas Hud, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology

Sandra L. Hanson, Professor of Sociology, Catholic University

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Education (S)

Edward J. Hackett, Professor of An-thropology, Arizona State University

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-duct of Science (G,S)

Karen K. Oates, Professor of Biochem-istry and the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

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Peter MacLeish, Chair and Professor, Department of Neurobiology, Director of Neuroscience Institute, Morehouse School of Medicine

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Patricia McAnany, Kenan Eminent Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Jim O’Connor, Research Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey



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Erica Zell, Senior Research Scientist, Battelle Memorial Institute

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for Environmental Governance and Climate

Omowunmi Sadik, Professor of Chem-istry, and Director, Center for Advanced Sensors & Environmental Systems, State University of New York at Binghamton

George Weiblen, Professor in Plant Biology, University of Minnesota

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Todd Surovell, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Wyoming

Herman Sintim, Professor of Chemis-try, Purdue University

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Sally Seidel, Professor of Physics, University of New Mexico

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-mentation in Particle Physics Discovery (G,S)

Richard Schwartz, Chancellor’s Pro-fessor of Mathematics, Brown University

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Lucy and Lily (P)

Paula Rayman, Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Lowell; Gender Consultant, United States Insti-tute of Peace

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M. V. Ramana, Associate Research Scholar, Program in Science and Global Security, Princeton University

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June Pilcher, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Clemson University


The Committee on Distinguished Lectureships has also selected René Lopez, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of North Caro-lina at Chapel Hill, and Katherine Spielmann,Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, and Associate Director of School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, for the 2017–2018 panel of Distinguished Lecturers. Talk titles and additional details can be found online at www.sigmaxi.org/programs/lectureships or by emailing [email protected].

American Scientist’s


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January-February 2017 Volume 26Number 1

Sigma Xi TodayA N E W S L E T T E R O F S I G M A X I , T H E S C I E N T I F I C R E S E A R C H H O N O R S O C I E T Y

From the President

Interpreting science to address social needs is one of Sigma Xi’s most challenging functions, and our role in informing public policy, in particular, is growing. We aim to improve and go beyond the stereotypes of the science guru or the “horse whisperer” who speaks in special, interspecies language.

Decision makers, such as representatives in Con-gress and Parliament, expect to receive in context the technical knowledge that makes for better decisions. The context about which decision makers are con-cerned is not scientific: It is political and economic.

Contemporary studies of science policy begin with Roger A. Pielke Jr.’s book The Honest Broker (Cambridge University Press, 2007). The “honest bro-ker” is expected to provide accurate, neutral, and contextualized knowledge in a way that the decision maker can understand without having a technical education or background. The Science and Technology Policy Fellowships from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) are based on this concept. The honest broker must always guard against abus-ing trust by insinuating personal opinion and conviction under the guise of strict objectivity, thereby becoming a “stealth advocate.”

Even so, there is nothing wrong with science advocacy, as long as motives and opinions are not concealed and the debate is grounded in evidence. (Pielke does not make this clear in the book.) Advocacy informs the public sphere in policy development, expert legal testimony, program design, budget priorities, and risk management. Indeed, advocacy for a position or interpretation is how science itself moves forward.

Pielke mentions two other models, but they are theoretical and have es-sentially no viable role. The “pure scientist” model does not work in policy, because scientific knowledge for policy requires contextualization. The “science arbiter” model, which limits the role of the scientist to advising on questions already asked and resolving disputes, assumes that the relevant questions are already formed and articulated.

Scientists don’t hold expertise in the form of only facts. Just as important are conceptual frameworks, limitations of method used, interpolation in missing evidence, correcting for known biases, and the ineffable sense of skepticism when a finding or conclusion is implausible. These intangibles, which belong to what Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge,” are reflect-ed in the depth and experience the science expert brings to giving advice.

Science informing public policy involves a complicated and often fraught relationship between the scientist and the decision maker based on trust, communication, reciprocal comprehension, and skepticism. That is what makes the ability to effectively articulate and advise on science for policy a special skill distinct from research skills and technical scientific commu-nication. Being an effective science advisor requires skills that have to be learned. Leadership in Sigma Xi is an excellent way to develop these skills.

Tee L. Guidotti

How Science Should Affect Public Policy

President Tee L. Guidotti

Announcing the Chapter Award WinnersChapter of Excellence Awards have been bestowed on the following Sig-ma Xi chapters for exceptional chap-ter activity, innovative programming, and true community leadership dur-ing 2015–2016. Nominees for chapter awards were chosen by the regional and constituency directors based on chapter annual reports and winners were selected by the Committee on Qualifications and Membership. 1. University of Michigan2. Rice University3. A tie between Southern Illinois

University-Carbondale and Gen-eral Motors R & D Center

Chapter Program of Excellence Awardshave been bestowed on the following chapters for organizing and/or host-ing an outstanding program during 2015–2016. 1. Mayo Foundation for programs

that promote STEM education and recognize STEM teachers

2. University of Maryland for the tour of the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

3. University of Florida for a group visit to a special presentation at the Kika Silva Pla Planetarium at Santa Fe College

The following chapters are recog-nized for initiating the most new members in 2015–2016: Brown Uni-versity, Washington University, Princeton, Ohio State University, Fordham University, Georgetown University, Worcester Polytechnic In-stitute, University of Michigan, Uni-versity of California-Berkeley, Texas A & M University, Cornell Universi-ty, Lehigh University, North Carolina State University, Harvard University, and Vanderbilt University.


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62 Sigma Xi Today

The 2016 Sigma Xi Annual Meeting and Student Research Conference, held November 10–13 in Atlanta, Georgia, was an energizing gathering for Sigma Xi chapter leaders, teachers, science supporters, and students.

The Annual Meeting featured leadership workshops for chapter del-egates. Delegates voted on changes to the Society’s constitution, most notably to add the word “honor” to the Society’s name: Sigma Xi, The

Scientific Research Honor Society. They also voted to create the opportunity for kindergarten through 12th grade

students who have presented a local science fair project and received a letter of recommendation from a science, technology, engineering, or math teacher to become Sigma Xi explorers. Sigma Xi explorers may form Sigma Xi explorer clubs, to be mentored and led by members of a Sigma Xi chapter in compliance with local school jurisdic-

tion policies. Sigma Xi explorers will be affiliated with a local Sigma Xi chapter that is in good stand-

ing where possible in person or virtually. Delegates also voted to allow the Assembly of Delegates to be con-

vened every other year if warranted at the Board of Directors’ discretion, instead of every year per the previous policy.

The agenda included professional development sessions on critical is-sues in research. Participants heard keynote lectures from Sigma Xi’s 2016 award winners, including the first Gold Key Award recipient, Norman Augustine, the former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corpora-tion. A new component was the STEM Mixer, a networking session.

Approximately 115 students presented research posters in the Student Research Conference. Top presenters in each research area within the high school, undergraduate, and graduate divisions were awarded a medal, a $130 prize in honor of Sigma Xi’s 130th year, and nominations to join Sig-ma Xi with their first year of membership dues provided by the Society. All presenting students received nominations to join Sigma Xi, and induc-tion ceremonies were held for 18 students. The District of Columbia Chap-ter continued its tradition of sponsoring the Student Choice Awards. The first place $200 award went to Amara Thind of University of California, Irvine. John Nemeth selected Shambhavi Badi, a high school student from Plano East Senior High School in Plano, Texas, for his Executive Director’s Special Award for her excellent science and science communication skills.

Photos by Robb Cohen Photography & Video and Cristina Gouin-Paul.

ANNUAL MEETING AND STUDENT RESEARCH CONFERENCE

Professional and Student Researchers Gather in Atlanta

From top left: Jan Achenbach of Northwestern Univer-sity, on right, selected Matt Ford, a Northwestern PhD student, to share $10,000 that comes with Achenbach’s Sigma Xi William Procter Prize for Scientific Achieve-ment. Each received $5,000. Ford’s money comes in the form of a Grant-in-Aid of Research.

Meli’sa Crawford, a graduate student from Arizona State University, presented a research poster during the Student Research Conference about her study on changes in male rats’ intestinal microbiota induced by high fat diets.

Delegate for the SUNY at Purchase Chapter Susan Letcher, Membership-at-Large Director Vijay Kowtha, and Chair of the Committee on Qualifications and Membership Emma Perry at the Annual Meeting.

Adam Kunesh, an undergraduate student at the Universi-ty of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses his research poster with Walston Chubb Award for Innovation win-ner Akhlesh Lakhtakia of Pennsylvania State University. Both have done research involving nanotechnology.

From left: Asegun Henry of Georgia Institute of Technology, Mohammad Khan at Emory University School of Medicine, Brion Bob with the U.S. Department of En-ergy, Suzanne Ffolkes with Research!America, Lisa C. Richardson of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Randall Guensler of Georgia Institute of Technology led a panel discussion about how policy decisions made at the federal level affect scientists. Other sessions focused on science communication, mentor-ship, STEM career options, entrepreneurship, and diversity in research.


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Registration Now Open for the 2017 Student Research Showcase

PROGRAMS

Researchers often find it difficult to talk about their projects with friends and relatives who are not in the same re-search field. Those who are able to ef-fectively communicate their work to a broader audience are at an advantage in terms of communicating the value of what they do to the public, to superiors at school or on the job, and to organi-zations that could provide funding to support a project. Sigma Xi’s Student Research Showcase is a unique oppor-tunity for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students to develop their communication skills through multime-dia. Held annually, this online science communication competition allows stu-dents to showcase their research on a website they build. The competition is open to all research disciplines.

Presentation websites contain three main components: an abstract, a tech-nical slideshow, and a video to intro-duce the project and its relevance to the research community and society. The video component challenges par-ticipants to present their research to a general audience. During the re-view period, more than sixty Sigma Xi members volunteer as judges to evalu-ate students’ submissions and engage

in digital conversations with present-ers through their websites.

Participants find discussion with the judges and the public helpful in better understanding their research. “I’m re-ally excited about trying to bridge the gap between the scientific community and a broader audience,” said Luka Negoita, the 2015 graduate division winner, when asked about his moti-vation to participate in the showcase. Participants compete for awards of up to $500 in high school, undergraduate, and graduate divisions. The winner of the People’s Choice Award is selected based on a public vote and receives a $250 award.

Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturers are sharing their re-search through broadcasts on YouTube Live. Watch the live events online, and log in with your Google, Gmail, or YouTube account to ask questions during the broadcasts. Mark your cal-endar for this upcoming session.

What’s on the Front Lines of Discovery for Particle Physics?

January 10, 3:30–4:15 PM ESTDistinguished Lecturer Sally C. Seidelis a faculty member of the University of New Mexico’s Collider Physics Group, whose primary goal is an improved un-

Sigma Xi members are encouraged to volunteer as judges.

For more information on the StudentResearch Showcase, visit https://www. sigmaxi.org/meetings-events/student-research-showcase.

derstanding of heavy quark bound states. These studies increase understanding of the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. The group’s work re-

quires that they collect and analyze data at the Large Hadron Collider and other experimental facilities.

For the link to watch this live broadcast, visit http://community.sigmaxi.org/events/calendar. Recent broadcasts have covered nuclear pow-er, sleep’s role in well-being, wetlands, and how math can be applied to predicting crime. For recordings of these broadcasts, visit https://www.youtube.com/user/AmSciMagazine/videos.

Watch Live Science Talks on YouTube

Sigma Xi Today is edited by Heather Thorstensen and designed by Spring Davis.

Key deadlines for the 2017

Student Research Showcase:

and registration deadline: February 22, 2017

March 22, 2017

April 3–10, 2017

Sally C. Seidel


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Sigma Xi is happy to report that some chapters that had lost their good standing status are starting to return to the Society. Since January of 2016, approximately 10 chapters have begun the process to return to good standing and some have already completed it. Four representatives of such chapters attended the Sigma Xi Annual Meeting in Atlanta in November. They shared why they are interested in reacti-vating their chapters.

Lauber Martins of the Andrews-Whirlpool Chapter in Michigan said that a major reason he and others were interested in revitalizing their chapter was to be able to take advantage of the networking opportunities that Sigma Xi can provide to students.

“We have the focus of preparing these students for grad school,” said Martins. “And if you involve them in research and involve them in a network, their work will be better and it will be a plus on their application for grad school. It’s very important that they have good, quality research and are involved with people who do the same thing.”

Sarosh Patel of the University of Bridgeport Chapter in Connecticut also named networking as a critical reason to bring Sigma Xi back to campus.

“We wanted to give our students an opportunity to network,” he said, “and also to get them into the process of grant writing and getting seed grants so that they can establish their work and apply for higher levels of fund-ing.” He also mentioned that member-ship is an honor.

Katharine Cammack, representing the University of the South Chapter in Tennessee, noted that networking through Sigma Xi is particularly valu-able because it brings researchers from various backgrounds together.

“You get a lot of different types of researchers doing a lot of different types of things. And it’s one of the only times when you’re in a particular discipline that you get to branch out,” she said.

According to Daniel Gleason of Georgia Southern University, the goal of the chapter there is not to compete

Undergraduate and gradu-ate students are invited to apply to Sigma Xi’s Gants-in-Aid of Research (GIAR) program by March 15. The application will be available by January 15 on Sigma Xi’s website at https://www.sigmaxi.org/programs/grants-in-aid/apply.

The program provides up to $1,000 each to stu-dents in most areas of sci-

ence and engineering. Designated funds from the National Academy of Sciences allow for more funding in certain research areas. Astronomy research projects can receive up to $5,000, and vision-related projects may receive up to $2,500.

The grants may be used to pay for travel expenses to or from a research site or to purchase non-standard laboratory equipment that is needed for a specific re-search project.

as the sole research society on campus, but rather to lend more funding and support to research initiatives.

“We wanted to reactivate our Sigma Xi chapter because we wanted to aug-ment and advance existing programs within our institution that are involved with undergraduate research,” he said.

U.S. citizenship and Sigma Xi membership are not required to apply. Approximately 75 percent of the funds, however, are restricted for use by Sigma Xi’s dues-paying members or by students whose project advisor is an active member.

In last year’s spring grant cycle, 124 students in 10 countries received grants totaling $108,038.

Support the Grants-in-Aid of Research Centennial Campaign

The Grants-in-Aid of Research program will reach its centennial year in 2022, thanks to donors and funds from the National Academy of Sciences. A five-year countdown kicked off at the recent Sigma Xi Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. If you would like to sup-port student research by donating to the pro-gram, go to https://ecommerce.sigmaxi.org/ecom/#Donate.

Call for Grant Applications

CHAPTERS AND GRANTS

64 Sigma Xi Today

Sigma Xi Welcomes Returning Chapters

Sarosh Patel of the University of Bridgeport Chapter , on left, became a Sigma Xi member during the Annual Meeting. He is helping to return the chapter to good standing status.


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Affiliates receive:

A subscription to Sigma Xi’s magazine, American Scientist

Sigma Xi’s newsletter

Access to an online community platform

An opportunity to subscribe to Sigma Xi SmartBrief for the latest research news

Join the Sigma XiAffiliate Circle

www.sigmaxi.org/affiliate

Sigma Xi invites everyone who is interested in science or engineering to join its Affiliate Circle.


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PRESENTING X-STEM SPONSOR:

Sneak Peek Friday: April 6, 2018

X-STEM: April 28, 2017 & April 5, 2018

OTHER EXCITING FESTIVAL EVENTS:

PROUD MEDIA PARTNER:


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http://www.usasciencefestival.org





Documents

161.53.145.110161.53.145.110/TORTUGA_Lib_67/American Scientist January-February 2017.pdf161.53.145.110