Science and the media: 25 September - 1 October
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0747
In this week’s review, Steve Corneliussen discusses a New York Times editorial reflecting on the importance of the recent discovery of a possibly habitable exoplanet, a Times columnist’s sharp-tongued treatment of political candidates’ science views, a Times front-page report on Italian exploitation of wind power, a Washington Post discussion of the possible evolution of nuclear power plants, a Wall Street Journal op-ed ruminating on the possible evolution of historically black colleges and universities, and Thomas L. Friedman’s recent Times column calling on Americans to compete with China in the development of electric cars.
New York Times editors suggest why exoplanet Gliese 581g discovery matters
Amid the news reports about the discovery of exoplanet Gliese 581g , the New York Times has offered a 1 October editorial summarizing what happened and then suggesting why it’s important.The editors explain that astronomers have long studied the wobbling of stars for clues not only for finding exoplanets, but specifically for finding exoplanets that might seem potentially habitable—and that now, “after 11 years of searching with specialized instruments in Chile and Hawaii, a team of American astronomers has announced in the Astrophysical Journal that it has found the first likely candidate.” The editors also explain why Gliese 581g’s possible habitability doesn’t mean fully Earthlike.Then they close by suggesting why this discovery matters:
What makes this discovery so important is that it happened so early in the search for exoplanets and after examining only a tiny sample of small candidate stars as close to Earth as Gliese 581. In the paper reporting their discovery, the astronomers discuss the probable implications with carefully calibrated language that still doesn’t hide their excitement. “If the local stellar neighborhood,” they write, “is a representative sample of the galaxy as a whole, our Milky Way could be teeming with potentially habitable planets.” We are intrigued, too.
Maureen Dowd’s pro-science partisan sarcasm
Maureen Dowd’s Sunday, 26 September, New York Times column wielded her usual sharp sarcasm, this time on behalf of evolution, global warming, and genetic science and stem cells, and against Republicans, including US Senate candidates Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Sharron Angle of Nevada. (I report this not for the partisan politics in it, but because of its very high visibility as technocivic discourse.) Dowd recalls that in 2007, O’Donnell “frantically warned” the TV host Bill O’Reilly that “American scientific companies are crossbreeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.” To rebut that, Dowd invokes Irving Weissman, director of Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.Then she adds that Weissman works “toward breakthroughs on multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injuries, strokes, breast cancer and a host of other diseases"—and that he worries about what Dowd calls “the retrogressive attitude about science and medicine among the new crop of Tea Partiers.”
Nor does Dowd let President Obama off. He “was supposed to be a giant leap forward in modernity, the brainy, rational first black president leading us out of the scientific darkness of the W. years,” she writes. “But by letting nutters get a foothold, he may usher us into the past.” Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Jim DeMint, and some Tea Party types, she charges, “don’t merely yearn for the country they idealize from the 1950s,” but “want to go back to the 1750s.”
Not to take sides in the partisan parts of all of this, and not to dispute Dowd in principle about the importance of real science as an element of public policy, but some people might say that in enlightened civic science–mindedness, the 1750s may not actually be a matter of going back. After all, in 1743—the year when the statesman of science Thomas Jefferson was born—the preeminent 18th-century physicist and American founder Benjamin Franklin had organized the American Philosophical Society , which sought to promote useful knowledge and to pursue equally “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things [and] tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter.” In my view it’s not clear at all that very many modern politicians from any party display the civic science–mindedness of Jefferson and Franklin.
New York Times front page: wind-power success in Italian village
A photograph dominating the top of the 29 September New York Times front page shows the tiny central Italian village of Tocco da Casauria, set not only at the foot of a rugged mountain, but at the feet of four outsized, white wind turbines. The accompanying article —part of the Times‘s Beyond Fossil Fuels series examining “innovative attempts to reduce the world’s dependence on coal, oil and other carbon-intensive fuels"—reports that Tocco’s 2700 residents enjoy a substantial net profit by selling back more power than they take from the Italian grid.
It’s best to let this feature article’s opening speak for itself:The towering white wind turbines that rise ramrod straight from gnarled ancient olive groves here speak to something extraordinary happening across Italy.
Faced with sky-high electricity rates, small communities across a country known more for garbage than environmental citizenship are finding economic salvation in making renewable energy. More than 800 Italian communities now make more energy than they use because of the recent addition of renewable energy plants, according to a survey this year by the Italian environmental group Legambiente.
The Times reporter, Elisabeth Rosenthal, observes that “Tocco is in most ways stuck in yesteryear,” yet “from an energy perspective ... is very much tomorrow.” She reports not only on the wind turbines, but on Tocco’s solar panels.
She also uses the Tocco example as a basis for discussing the technopolitics and techno-economics of energy transformation in Italy, at one point touching on government incentives in a way that might be especially worth noting:
At the same time, the costs of renewable energy have been falling rapidly. And as in much of Europe, the lure of alternative power here was sweetened by feed-in tariffs—government guarantees to buy renewable electricity at an attractive set price from any company, city or household that produces it.
In the United States, where electricity is cheap and government policy has favored setting minimum standards for the percentage of energy produced from renewable sources rather than direct economic incentives like Europe’s feed-in tariffs, stimulating alternative energy has been only mildly successful. But in countries where energy from fossil fuels is naturally expensive—or rendered so because of a carbon tax—and there is money to be made, renewable energy quickly starts to flow, even in unlikely places like Tocco.
Washington Post discusses future nuclear power
Did Paul Guinnessy’s August Physics Today article “Small Nuclear Reactors Raise Big Hopes? ” inspire the Washington Post to commission its 14 September Health and Science section feature “The Nuke Next Door ”? In any case, the Post article generated four letters to the editor on three separate days in two different sections of the newspaper.
Both articles had reported on prospects for a nuclear-power resurgence involving reactors much smaller than those now in use. The first of the ensuingPost letters—and the only one to offer anti-nuke discouragement—got elevated from the Post‘s weekly Health and Science section to the 19 September op-ed-page letters column. The writer called thePost feature “disturbing” and complained that smallness doesn’t mean that new reactors “would be any less deadly to surrounding residents if a meltdown were to occur,” that history “teaches that we need to factor in human error when contemplating new technologies,” and that solar and wind are safer.
On 21 September, the next edition of the weekly Health and Science section carried two letters . In the first, an official of Hyperion Power Generation Inc wrote that “another option is the liquid-metal-cooled reactor technologies ... the innovation that is within reach and that other countries are pursuing.” In part the second letter—which, if it had appeared on the op-ed page, could have partly answered the one that did appear there—lauded thePost article “for acknowledging that the accident at Three Mile Island caused no deaths or even injuries and that typical coal-fired power plants typically expose the surroundings to more radiation than nuclear plants.” That letter went on to argue that “larger plants are more efficient.”
Meanwhile, I had been urging Rolland Johnson—president of Muons Inc and chief science officer of Accelerator Technologies Inc, both in Newport News, Virginia—to see this evolving discussion as an opportunity to talk to a large audience about accelerator-driven subcritical reactors, or ADSRs. On 28 September, his letter appeared in Health and Science to argue that although small modular reactors do reduce greenhouse gases, an entirely different approach—one without safety and proliferation concerns—"would exploit US national laboratory advances in the technology of particle accelerators.” Though the editors removed the term, the advances that Johnson cited are in superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) accelerating technology.
“Proton accelerators,” Johnson wrote, “can be used to extract energy from materials that are not capable of a chain reaction, such as the relatively abundant element thorium.” And unlike a conventional reactor of any size, an ADSR “can be immediately shut down simply by switching off the accelerator.” Moreover, a “ton of its thorium fuel could yield as much energy as would be produced by 200 tons of mined uranium using a conventional reactor, or by burning 3,500,000 tons of coal.” And an “ADSR can also generate power by destroying waste from conventional nuclear reactors.” With enthusiasm growing worldwide, he wrote, a US failure to take the lead in ADSRs would make it “likely that we will be left behind and in the future have to buy our reactors from other countries.”
Wall Street Journal op-ed advocates remaking historically black colleges and universities
A pair of letters in the September Physics Today continued discussion of what a June PT article had called the “dire” decline of physics programs in historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. Now a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board has offered a 28 September op-ed proposing , as the headline puts it, that “black colleges need a new mission,” and asserting, as the subheadline puts it, that although HBCUs were once “an essential response to racism, they are now academically inferior.”
The op-ed asserts that today, nearly 90% of black students “spurn” HBCUs and that “the available evidence shows that, in the main, these students are better off exercising their non-HBCU options.” To back that up, it says:In 2006, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the six-year graduation rate at HBCUs was 37%. That’s 20 percentage points below the national average and eight percentage points below the average of black students at other colleges. A recent Washington Monthly magazine survey of colleges with the worst graduation rates featured black schools in first and second place, and in eight of the top 24 spots.
The economists Roland Fryer of Harvard and Michael Greenstone of MIT have found that black colleges are inferior to traditional schools in preparing students for post-college life. “In the 1970s, HBCU matriculation was associated with higher wages and an increased probability of graduation, relative to attending a [traditional college],” they wrote in a 2007 paper. “By the 1990s, however, there is a substantial wage penalty. Overall, there is a 20% decline in the relative wages of HBCU graduates in just two decades.” The authors concluded that “by some measures, HBCU attendance appears to retard black progress.”
The op-ed also reports that President Obama has pledged to invest $850 million in the nation’s 105 black colleges over the next decade. It calls for the president “to use the federal government’s leverage to remake these schools to meet today’s challenges.” It suggests that “uneconomically small black colleges could be consolidated,” that “for-profit entities could be brought in to manage other schools,” and that still other institutions “could be repurposed as community colleges that focus on developmental courses to compensate for the poor elementary and secondary educations that so many black children still receive.”
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman calls for electric-car “moon shot”
In a 26 September New York Times column , Thomas L. Friedman renews his recurring challenge to the federal government to think big about future energy technology, and continues his longstanding practice of comparing America’s performance and prospects to those of other countries—in this case, China.
“China is doing moon shots,” he begins—"big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments.” He lists four: a network of ultramodern airports, a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities, a genetic engineering industry, and an electric-car industry."Not to worry” though, he quips. “America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan. This contrast is not good.”
Friedman advocates one American moon shot: electric cars. He cites the view of Shai Agassi, CEO of a global electric-car company, that this industry is “pivotal for three reasons":First, the auto industry was the foundation for America’s manufacturing middle class. Second, the country that replaces gasoline-powered vehicles with electric-powered vehicles—in an age of steadily rising oil prices and steadily falling battery prices—will have a huge cost advantage and independence from imported oil. Third, electric cars are full of power electronics and software. “Think of the applications industry that will be spun out from electric cars,” says Agassi. It will be the iPhone on steroids.
Friedman cautions that although President Obama “has directed stimulus money at electric cars,” he appears “unwilling to do the one thing that would create the sustained consumer pull required to grow an electric car industry here: raise taxes on gasoline.” If “only China puts the gasoline prices and [electric-car] infrastructure in place,” Friedman predicts, “the industry will gravitate there. It will be a moon shot for them, a hobby for us, and you’ll import your new electric car from China just like you’re now importing your oil from Saudi Arabia.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
More about the authors
Paul Guinnessy, pguinnes@aip.org
