Science and the media: 7 - 13 November
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.1084
Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week: a front-page Washington Post fundamental-physics story involving well-loved house pets, inaccurate science news in a media failure, optimism in a New York Times article about the prospects for quantum computing, claims reported in the New York Times that a figurative Hurricane Katrina is devastating NASA astrophysics, a Nature essay urging forthright scientific opposition to false climate-science reporting, and a New York Times article forecasting gloomy science budgets.
Washington Post front page: “How a Cat Drinks: Feline Finesse and Fluid Dynamics”
Oh, those whimsical MIT physicists. Always thinking up cute science stuff.
That’s apparently the Washington Post editors’ spirit in choosing to front-page a 12 November article spotlighting “an exquisite demonstration of physics,” cats’ method of drinking by balancing “the forces of gravity against the forces of inertia.”
Still, the news report itself seems serious. The phrase fluid dynamics appears in the headline. And even though the Post framed the word fundamental with scare quotes—as shown in the third excerpt below—the reporter emphasizes that like any fundamental understanding, this new knowledge could become involved in useful applications. So although I myself, as a fan of science, wouldn’t choose whimsy and cuteness as the main criteria for front-page science news, I’ll take it.
Here are three illustrative excerpts, each with its newspaper-style paragraph breaks deleted, followed by a comment:
“What we found is that the cat uses fluid dynamics and physics in a way to absolutely optimize tongue lapping and water collection,” said Jeffrey Aristoff, now at Princeton University but who was one of the four researchers who began the study out of curiosity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Nobody had ever studied it before, so nobody knew how the water went from the bowl into the cat’s mouth,” he said. Not surprisingly, they found that cats lap at precisely the rate that would get them the most water for the effort expended. The team’s results are described in an article released Thursday by the journal Science. As with most basic scientific research, the ultimate usefulness of this knowledge is uncertain. But it is not, the researchers say, hard to imagine some downstream applications, perhaps in robotics.
They found the same basic drinking mechanism in all the cats, though the larger ones (with larger tongues) slowed their lapping to best take advantage of the physics at play—that is, the balance between upward movement of the water set off by the cat’s tongue (the inertia) and the gravity pulling the water down. A lion, Aristoff said, laps about two times per second. “In the beginning of the project, we weren’t fully confident that fluid mechanics played a role in cats’ drinking,” said Jung, whose research focuses on soft bodies, such as fish, and the fluids surrounding them. “But as the project went on, we were surprised and amused by the beauty of the fluid mechanics involved in this system.
Although the work on cat drinking was done for professional pleasure—it wasn’t funded by a grant, and the only expense was high-quality video cameras—the researchers said there could be useful implications gleaned from their “fundamental” research. Engineers, for example, are moving into the field of “soft robots” and are working on the basic properties of nonmetallic parts that may play a role. Aristoff said there’s great interest in creating robots that can walk on water, and this research could help.
A comment: When lazy critics use this easy-to-spot article’s news for alleging wastefulness in science spending—distorting the Post editors’ friendly whimsy into hostile recrimination—it’ll be important to begin the defense by stipulating, as the reporter does, that no grants were involved.
American Geophysical Union: “Inaccurate news reports misrepresent” an AGU climate-science initiative
Here’s a media failure story that may be worth telling.
For each Friday’s Science and the Media , Physics Today compiles media reports that I’ve circulated to nearly three dozen officials and staff members at the American Institute of Physics . But this week we’re omitting one of those reports because of gross inaccuracy concerning the American Geophysical Union in the article that I was reporting about, an article headlined “Climate scientists plan campaign against global warming skeptics.”
On the morning when the false news broke, I didn’t stop to suspect what now seems obvious: That no scientific society suddenly adopts an aggressively contentious, high-visibility political posture—though if I had suspected, I’d obviously have had even more reason to be quick about reporting it. In my report, I summarized the article and said that it had originated at the Los Angeles Times, was carried in other Tribune newspapers and had already led to a posting by Andrew Revkin in his Dot Earth blog at the New York Times.
But the news was flat wrong about the AGU. The scientific society’s immediate response was a press release under the headline “Inaccurate news reports misrepresent a climate-science initiative of the American Geophysical Union.” Here—to sum up the incident—are that release’s first two paragraphs:
WASHINGTON-An article appearing in the Los Angeles Times, and then picked up by media outlets far and wide, misrepresents the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a climate science project the AGU is about to relaunch. The project, called Climate Q&A Service, aims simply to provide accurate scientific answers to questions from journalists about climate science.
“In contrast to what has been reported in the LA Times and elsewhere, there is no campaign by AGU against climate skeptics or congressional conservatives,” says Christine McEntee, executive director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union. “AGU will continue to provide accurate scientific information on Earth and space topics to inform the general public and to support sound public policy development.”
New York Times: “Quantum Computing Reaches for True Power”
Maybe everyone else already knew better, but when it comes to the prospects for quantum computing, I was stuck at the end of the second paragraph of this opening from a 9 November John Markoff article in the Science Times section of the New York Times:
In 1981 the physicist Richard Feynman speculated about the possibility of “tiny computers obeying quantum mechanical laws.” He suggested that such a quantum computer might be the best way to simulate real-world quantum systems, a challenge that today is largely beyond the calculating power of even the fastest supercomputers.
Since then there has been sporadic progress in building this kind of computer. The experiments to date, however, have largely yielded only systems that seek to demonstrate that the principle is sound. They offer a tantalizing peek at the possibility of future supercomputing power, but only the slimmest results.
Recent progress, however, has renewed enthusiasm for finding avenues to build significantly more powerful quantum computers. Laboratory efforts in the United States and in Europe are under way using a number of technologies.
How’s that for quantum techno-optimism? Is it media hype? Is Markoff merely meeting a deadline with a good story? Or would quantum-computing researchers actually endorse it?
Markoff begins his effort to justify that third paragraph by reporting that IBM is beginning a five-year quantum-computing research effort to build on recent advances at Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He says these advances “suggest the possibility of quantum computing based on standard microelectronics manufacturing technologies.” Both groups, he writes, “layer a superconducting material, either rhenium or niobium, on a semiconductor surface, which when cooled to near absolute zero exhibits quantum behavior.”
For educational context, Markoff reminds readers about quantum bits, or qubits, which, unlike conventional bits, can represent 1 and 0 states simultaneously—leading to “the possibility of performing a mathematical operation on both states simultaneously.” It would be possible in a two-qubit system, he writes, “to compute on four values at once, in a three-qubit system on eight at once, in a four-qubit system on 16, and so on. As the number of qubits increases, potential processing power increases exponentially.”
But there’s a catch:
The mere act of measuring or observing a qubit can strip it of its computing potential. So researchers have used quantum entanglement—in which particles are linked so that measuring a property of one instantly reveals information about the other, no matter how far apart the two particles are—to extract information. But creating and maintaining qubits in entangled states has been tremendously challenging.
Markoff reports that the Yale group believes “that while the number of qubits is increasing only slowly, the precision with which . . . researchers are able to control quantum interactions has increased a thousandfold,” and that the UCSB group believes “they will essentially double the computational power of their quantum computers next year.”
He also mentions competing approaches. One “involves building qubits from ions . . . trapped in electromagnetic fields,” with lasers used to entangle the ions, and with “more than 20 university and corporate research laboratories . . . pursuing this design.” Another involves “light-emitting diodes coupled with a custom-formed quantum dot, which function[s] as a light source for entangled photons.” Markoff also mentions “a system with more than 50 quantum bits” that “has been greeted skeptically by many researchers who believe that it has not proved true entanglement.”
Maybe when this media report gets posted on Science and the Media , knowledgeable researchers will comment about Markoff’s optimism.
NASA astrophysics budget “devastation”?
An 11 November Kenneth Chang article in the New York Times offers a more dramatic version of the story that’s hinted at in a 10 November NASA press release , which began by quoting NASA administrator Charles Bolden:
I appreciate the work done by the James Webb Space Telescope‘s (JWST) Independent Comprehensive Review Panel (ICRP), and want to thank Sen. Barbara Mikulski for initiating this review. The ICRP report makes clear that, while JWST technical performance has been consistent with the project plan, the cost performance and coordination have been lacking, and I agree with these findings.
Chang reminds readers that the JWST is supposed to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope, that it’s designed “to peer to the edges of the universe and beginning of time” and that, equipped with a 21-foot-wide mirror, it is to be sent “floating almost a million miles above the night side of the Earth . . . to gather faint infrared light that emanated from the farthest, earliest stars.”
Then Chang also:
- Notes that the JWST “already consumes 40 percent of NASA’s astrophysics budget.”
- Reports that the review panel found that the project is “running about one-third over its $5 billion budget and more than a year behind schedule.”
- Quotes Alan P. Boss —of the Carnegie Institution for Science, and also of the Science Committee of the NASA Advisory Council—declaring that this is “NASA’s Hurricane Katrina” and that the telescope “will leave nothing but devastation in the astrophysics division budget.”
- Adds that the review panel’s leader, John R. Casani, a former project manager for NASA’s successful Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini missions, “said that to meet at 2015 launching date the project would need increases of more than $200 million in both 2011 and 2012, and that the panel was not able to come up with suggestions for reducing the cost.”
Nature essay: “How to Beat the Media in the Climate Street Fight”
Now that some scientists are planning actively to confront climate skeptics in the political realm, an essay in the 4 November Nature takes on added relevance. The thumbnail summary for Simon L. Lewis’s “How to Beat the Media in the Climate Street Fight” says, “Researchers must take a more aggressive approach to counter shoddy journalism and set the scientific record straight.”
Lewis is a Royal Society research fellow and reader in global change science at the University of Leeds. On a climate-science question earlier this year in the UK, Lewis explains, he
was seriously misrepresented by a newspaper and thrown into a political storm. Rather than take it lying down, I set the record straight. It has been an odd journey, and I think there are lessons for how we scientists should deal with the media.
The essay recounts the details of this “odd journey.” Lewis tells of a Sunday Times article that was “completely rewritten . . . to include new quotes” that were “genuine, but heavily edited and misleadingly taken out of context,” and that also included “fabricated assertions” about Lewis’s views. “I was furious,” he writes.
Lewis describes the actions he took, and observes that for “a scientist to take such an active media role was unorthodox, but it felt good.” Moreover, he says, “it worked. It was widely recognized that the story was wrong and I had been badly treated. The New York Times featured me in a front-page article.”
The “Sunday Times offered to publish a single-line apology,” but Lewis says he “knew others had extracted greater concessions,” so he “kicked harder.” The offending article was eventually removed from the Web, replaced by a formal correction and apology that were also printed prominently in the newspaper, with the retraction reported around the world.
Lewis concludes:
What lessons are there for scientists in politically charged areas who find themselves in a similar position? Do your research. What is the reporter’s track record? Anticipate that every sentence you say or write may be dissected and interpreted in the least charitable manner possible. And if things go wrong, seek advice from public-relations experts, and where necessary, media lawyers. In my experience, science-media professionals are almost as lost as scientists themselves, when dealing with topics as emotive as climate change.
The media dictate what most people know about contemporary scientific debates. Given the need for informed policy, scientists need to learn to better read and engage with this media landscape. Closing the newspaper with a sigh is not enough.
New York Times: “Money for Scientific Research May Be Scarce With a Republican-Led House”
Consider the 4 November New York Times headline “Money for Scientific Research May Be Scarce With a Republican-Led House.” As summarized below, this brief Kenneth Chang article does say a little bit more. But sometimes a headline is all you really need.
Chang reports that in “the Republican platform, Pledge to America, the party vows to cut discretionary nonmilitary spending to 2008 levels,” which would mean that “research and development at nonmilitary agencies—including those that sponsor science and health research—would fall 12.3 percent, to $57.8 billion, from the Mr. Obama’s request of $65.9 billion for fiscal year 2011.”
Citing the views of Patrick Clemins, who directs budget programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chang says that what will actually happen is simply not yet clear. But NIH, NSF, and NOAA seem in particular danger. Chang also mentions uncertainties that continue for NASA and for stem-cell research from before the election.
One thing seems worth adding. Consider also the headline on a recent FYI bulletin at the American Institute of Physics website: “Looking Ahead: President Obama, Incoming Science Committee Chairman on S&T.”
That incoming chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee is Ranking Member Ralph Hall, a Republican from Texas. Here are two recent statements from Congressman Hall as quoted in FYI, one from before the election, the second from just after it:
The American people have spoken loud and clear: stop frivolous spending in Washington, and make the Federal government more efficient, more effective, and more transparent. I couldn’t agree more, and I think the Science and Technology Committee can play a key role in this effort. We need to streamline R&D programs and eliminate duplication, cut wasteful spending, and help ensure that science policy is a driver of innovation and jobs.
Nationally, I am heartened that Americans returned Republicans to the majority in hopes of providing a check on runaway spending in Washington and getting the economy back on track toward growth and job creation. I look forward to working with current members on the Science and Technology Committee, as well as hearing from our new members, to formulate and advance an agenda that keeps our nation moving forward. The Science and Technology Committee will be a place where every member’s ideas will be respected and considered, and all Republicans can play a role in crafting good science policy.
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.
