Science

The annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference covers arguably the greatest variety of subjects of any science conference in the world. This year's gathering, held in St. Louis, Missouri, hosted symposia on everything from astrobiology to veterinary ethics. And although it's impossible for one reporter to cover more than a small fraction of the 200-plus scientific sessions held over five days, here are a few highlights of the most exciting research happening now.

This January, news that South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk fabricated research on cloned human stem cells brought more negative attention to an already controversial field. Hwang´s work had been believed to be a breakthrough. His technique for cloning embryonic stem cells genetically matched to patients might have been used by scientists worldwide to cure disease.

Two of the most Popular Science-themed TV shows, Cosmos and NOVA, air this fall, bringing big ideas-life, the universe and everything-back to the small screen.
Cosmos
September 27, the Science Channel
"Billions and billions of stars."
So goes the old Johnny Carson impression of Cosmos creator and narrator Carl Sagan. And since the show´s debut on PBS 25 years ago, a billion TV viewers have experienced Cosmos´s jaunt through the history of our universe.

Every branch of science has at some point been confronted by a daunting question that stumps progress for years, even decades. How did the continents form? What causes fever? Is there intelligent life beyond Earth? Solutions may accrue incrementally or arrive in a flash of inspiration. Sometimes it seems they are destined never to come at all. Here are four disciplines in need of a modern-day Einstein.

COSMOLOGY

Directed by Rob Cohen
Written by W.D. Richter
Cast
Josh Lucas-Lt. Ben Gannon
Jessica Biel-Kara Wade
Jamie Foxx-Henry Purcell
Sam Shepard-Capt. George Cummings
Richard Roxburgh-Keith Orbit
Joe Morton-Capt. Dick Marshfield
There are three reasons why filmmakers distort science and technology: 1) to make things look cooler, 2) to make a story "work," and 3) because they have no clue what they´re talking about, and they´ve chosen to ignore the advice (or pleas) of the film´s consultants.

First off, let me just say that i'll enjoy watching The Thing, a 600-pound creature made of orange rock, stop an oncoming 18-wheeler with his shoulder every bit as much as the next guy. But it's not the action scenes that get me excited about a movie like The Fantastic Four, which premieres on July 8. Whenever a new comic-book movie debuts, I get a kick out of seeing how the filmmakers finesse the science.

The papers Einstein wrote in 1905 covered a broad swath—special relativity, electrodynamics, Brownian motion, light quanta. Churned out in less than a year, these ideas had lasting impact: scientists today still devote their lives to evaluating Einstein´s work on gravity, space and time. Einstein isn´t the only scientist, however, to pull off such compacted productivity. Newton, Galileo and others had their own superproductive 12-month stretches—but as far as we can tell, no post-Einstein scientist has managed one. Why? Read on.
Galileo Galilei: 1609-1610

At 5:45 a.m. on September 11, Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari passed their bags through an X-ray machine at the Portland International Jetport in Maine. A surveillance video camera recorded their faces for posterity. Atta, a man believed to have links to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, walked calmly, wearing a blue dress shirt and dark pants. Alomari, in a white shirt and khakis, clutched a black bag, checking its contents. Three hours later, they and three other hijackers on American Airlines Flight 11 crashed a jetliner into the north tower of New York City's World Trade Center.

The idea of building a tower to
touch the sky goes back thousands of years. And within the past century, architects and engineers have designed seemingly impossible structures that stand a quarter-mile high -- a tribute to humanity's need to test the limits, as well as a way to alleviate congestion in crowded cities. But after terrorists crashed two hijacked passenger planes into New York City's tallest buildings on September 11, leveling both of the Twin Towers, iconic skyscrapers around the world suddenly gained a new label: target.

Before Russell Kerschmann came along, the world through a microscope looked much the way people perceived the world at large to be before Columbus set sail: flat. Microscopes let us see an object's surface and get some sense of its insides, but its true three-dimensional architecture remained a mystery. No one knew exactly how the two parts of Velcro attach, or precisely how the network of pores in a paper towel enable it to suck up water, or even how the three different layers that make up our skin interact.