Monday, October 31, 2005
The Worst Jobs in Science
Their work is noninvasive—for the apes, that is . . .
"Have I been pissed on? Yes," says anthropologist Cheryl Knott of Harvard University. Knott is a pioneer of "noninvasive monitoring of steroids through urine sampling." Translation: Look out below! For the past 11 years, Knott and her colleagues have trekked into Gunung Palung National Park in Borneo, Indonesia, in search of the endangered primates. Once a subject is spotted, they deploy plastic sheets like a firemen's rescue trampoline and wait for the tree-swinging apes to go see a man about a mule. For more pee-catching precision, they attach bags to poles and follow beneath the animals. "It's kind of gross when you get hit, but this is the best way to figure out what's going on in their bodies," Knott says.
Knott analyzes fertility through estrogen and progesterone levels, and weight gain or loss through ketone measurements. DNA is extracted from the orangu-dookie, and stress levels can be measured by cortisol in the urine. The goal is to understand great-ape reproduction, and because of her unique urine-collection method, Knott isn't limited to visual observations, as previous researchers have been. She has documented, for example, that female orangutans' reproductive-hormone levels surge during periods when they are eating more. That timing is critical for the apes, which reproduce only around every eight years. It's also highlighted how vulnerable the animals are to extinction, and that's why, when she's not sampling urine, Knott is working to conserve the rain forest.
Rampant illegal logging—even in the park—has led to an 80 percent decrease in the orangs' habitat, making it all the easier for hunters to prey on the animals. By some estimates, 50 percent of orangutans have been wiped out in the past decade.
Her dance partner is a supersensitive Robot
Give him an "A" for effort. Earlier this year NASA robot scientist Vladimir Lumelsky unveiled a revolutionary "skin" that will allow robots to sense the presence of astronauts and to move out of the way so that nobody gets hurt. Lumelsky's skin is being developed to assist in NASA's future space-exploration plans—trips that will rely heavily on robots. The current skin uses 1,000 infrared sensors to detect moving objects and then relays the data to the robot's "brain," which instantly signals the robot to skedaddle. Lumelsky envisions future skins with tens of thousands of infrared sensors able to withstand the extreme heat, cold and radiation of space travel. It's serious science, and Lumelsky, being a serious man, gave nary a thought to the fact that his prototype robot bears a striking resemblance to a giant phallus.
For the 'bot's public debut he hired a leotard-clad ballerina to dance with it (see for yourself:www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/mpeg/115084main_ballerina.mpeg). "It takes two to tango," Lumelsky e-mailed us, somewhat exasperated. "The astronaut must be able to turn his back to the robot and expect it to act adequately, like a dance partner. Our system does this; no other such systems exist.
"We humans are completely unprepared to see a machine behave (literally) like an animal," he added. "As with everything else in our culture, it wears off quickly, but it takes your breath away when seeing it for the first time." We'll say!
Bugs, bears, and a melting earth—you call this a vacation?
Every year thousands of desk jockeys sign up with the nonprofit Earthwatch Institute and pay as much as $3,000 a week to pitch in on scientific expeditions. While some select romantic projects like studying the giant statues and the ancient inhabitants of Easter Island in the Pacific, others choose to slog through peat bogs near Churchill, Manitoba, ducking polar bears and fending off biblical swarms of blackflies, blood-letting mosquitoes and deerflies known locally as "bulldogs."
"One guy was recently bitten, and it left a golf-ball-size welt on his forehead," says Peter Kershaw, a biogeographer at the University of Alberta who leads four Earthwatch groups a year in Churchill. "Sometimes people's eyes get swollen shut. It usually happens to the Brits for some reason, I don't know why."
The vacationers aid Kershaw in his investigation of melting permafrost in the world's peatlands. As much as 30 percent of the Earth's carbon is locked up in these frozen bogs, and if they melt, all that carbon and methane will be released—potentially catastrophically—into an already warming world. Thanks to the volunteers' hard work, Kershaw has established a network of fixed study plots across a wide range of Arctic terrain. The plot network has given him, and future scientists, a much-needed baseline to see how quickly once-frozen peat decays to carbon. And it will allow them to monitor how the inhabitants of the Arctic's ecosystem, from polar bears to grasses, are being affected by climate change.
Volunteers dig soil pits, analyze dirt, measure the depth of frost melt, and play a game called Page Count: "You close your notebooks as fast as you can and see how many mosquitoes you kill," Kershaw explains. "I think the record is 56 mosquitoes in one whack. I like to say that our research bites."
It's a job that separates the boys from the men
OK, OK, their real job title is usually something like "cryobiologist" or "laboratory technician," but at sperm banks around the country, they are known as semen washers. "Every time I interview someone I make sure I ask them, 'Do you know you'll be working with semen?' " says Diana Schillinger, the Los Angeles lab manager at the country's largest sperm bank, California Cryobank. Let's start at the beginning. Laboriously prescreened "donors" emerge from a so-called collection room that is stocked with girlie mags and triple-X DVDs. They hand over their deposit, get their $75, and leave. The semen washers take the seminal goo and place a sample under the microscope for a sperm count. Next comes the washing. The techs spin the sample in a centrifuge to separate the "plasma" from the motile cells. Then they add a preservative, and it's off to the freezer, where it can stay for 20 years. Or not. Thanks to semen washers (and in vitro fertilization), more than 250,000 babies have been delivered in the U.S. since 1995.
"The hardest part is explaining it to friends," Schillinger says. "But we do have stories." Like what? "Like the donor who was in the room for the longest time. We had a big discussion about who was going to check on him. Turns out he thought he had to fill up the entire specimen cup."
When the earth heats up, they head in
Here's how basic fear-psychology saves lives. A volcano rumbles, spews ash, magma and incandescent rock, and the brain's amygdala says, "Good god! Flee!" Then there are volcanologists, who—loaded down with monitoring gear and charged with the mission of predicting eruptions before they kill thousands—ignore the amygdala and run toward volcanoes.
Let us count the ways you can get offed as a volcanologist: There's the magma, of course. There are also pyroclastic flows—incinerating clouds of gas, rock, ash, trees and other debris—sulfur dioxide gas, and volcano-melted glaciers called lahars that descend down a mountainside like an avalanche of quick-dry cement. And then there are the garden-variety hazards of mountain climbing, and all those hours in helicopters. In the past couple decades, dozens of volcanologists have been killed on the job, and scores more have been wounded in near misses.
"It's dangerous," says Jeff Wynn, chief scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Volcano Hazards Program, which monitors the country's active volcanoes. "Just last September, when Mount St. Helens was getting very active, we had a failure of our seismic gear. A scientist flew up in a helicopter to replace the batteries. He was only allowed to stay on the ground for five minutes, and the pilot was told to keep the rotors going. Two days later there was an eruption, and the site was obliterated."
They've mastered fusion. Next up: Filing
This job hasn't been any fun since the disastrous espionage trial against Wen Ho Lee in 1999. Now it's gotten worse. Lee was a naturalized citizen who had worked for 20 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory's highly prestigious and supersecret X Division, where some of the world's biggest eggheads handle the applied physics of our nuke stockpile. The FBI suspected him of selling secrets to the Chinese.
After some seriously abusive jailhouse tactics, for which an appalled federal judge apologized, Lee pled guilty to one, almost trifling, count of mishandling classified data and was immediately released (the judge sentenced him to the 278 days of solitary he had already served). Nevertheless, the X Division's sterling reputation had been badly tarnished.
Not long after, more classified data-storage tapes went missing and then showed up behind a copy machine, and the FBI returned for more interrogations . . . er, interviews.
Then, in 2004, came an eye-burning laser accident with an intern, and yet another case of missing data tapes. In a lab-wide lecture, the since-retired director called his scientists "buttheads" and "cowboys" (never good for morale) and ordered a costly months-long lab shutdown so that the scientists could learn to file paper like pro bureaucrats, not absent-minded professors.
But wait, those last missing tapes? An FBI investigation concluded that they probably never existed in the first place; it was all a clerical error. But the damage had been done. For the first time since Oppenheimer, the federal government put Los Alamos's management up for industry bid, offering an annual $79-million contract—nearly 10 times as much as the University of California is now paid to run the lab and fed-up scientists are retiring in droves.
As for the younger brain-iacs, surely they can find a job in academia, right? Not exactly, lamented one X Division scientist, who declined to be quoted for fear of retri-bution. Since most of their work is classified, there's often no record of having ever published anything.
Never has success smelled less sweet
"Take some of the most dramatic shoreline you can imagine: seabirds, gigantic mountains and volcanoes—truly dramatic. Now imagine that you are on this beach tightly surrounded by 100 overweight and extremely flatulent people," Ron Oremland says of Mono and Searles lakes in California, where his U.S. Geological Survey team has been working for years.
The team recently made scientific history at Searles with the discovery of an "extremophile" microbe thriving in some of the most putrid, nauseating, arsenic-saturated mud on Earth. To harvest that mud, once thought to be sterile, the researchers suffer through 125-degree days, blinding sun reflecting off the salt-caked lake, and so much noxious gas that it makes their eyes water.
The air is stewed with copious amounts of hydrogen sulfide (rotten-egg smell), methyl mercaptan (the noisome fumes added to natural gas) and highly volatile methylated amines (think: dead fish). Aside from earning Oremland the honor of documenting the arsenic-eating extremophile in the journal Science, his work is a step toward finding other microbes that could potentially clean arsenic contami-nation from the nation's freshwater supply. The Searles microbe can survive only in extreme environments, but Oremland suspects that there are other microbes out there that could survive in places that aren't so disgusting. Happy hunting!
On the front lines of science's devolution
"The evolution debate is consuming almost everything we do," says Brad Williamson, a 30-year science veteran at suburban Olathe East High School and a past president of the National Association of Biology Teachers. "It's politicized the classroom. Parents will say their child can't be in class during any discussion of evolution, and students will say things like 'My grandfather wasn't a monkey!'"
First, a history lesson. In 1999 a group of religious fundamentalists won election to the Kansas State Board of Education and tried to introduce creationism into the state's classrooms. They wanted to delete references to radiocarbon dating, continental drift and the fossil record from the education standards. In 2001 more-temperate forces prevailed in elections, but the anti-evolutionists garnered a 6-4 majority again last November. This year Intelligent Design (ID) theory is their anti-evolution tool of choice.
At the heart of ID is the idea that certain elements of the natural world—the human eye, say—are "irreducibly complex" and have not and cannot be explained by evolutionary theory. Therefore, IDers say, they must be the work of an intelligent designer (that is, God).
The problem for teachers is that ID can't be tested using the scientific method, the system of making, testing and retesting hypotheses that is the bedrock of science. That's because underpinning ID is religious belief. In science class, Williamson says, "students have to trust that I'm just dealing with science."
Alas, for Kansas's educational reputation, the damage may be done. "We've heard anecdotally that our students are getting much more scrutiny at places like medical schools. I get calls from teachers in other states who say things like 'You rubes!'" Williamson says. "But this is happening across the country. It's not just Kansas anymore."
The smell is just the start of the nastiness
Almost 1.5 billion tons of manure are produced annually by animals in this country—90 percent of it from cattle. That's the same weight as 14,432 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. You get the point: It's a load of crap. And it's loaded with nasty contaminants like campylobacter (the number-one cause of acute gastroenteritis in the U.S.), salmonella (the number-two cause) and E.coli 0157:H7, which can cause kidney failure in children and painful, bloody diarrhea in everybody else.
Farmers fertilize their fields with manure, but if the excrement is rife with E.coli, then so will be the vegetables. Luckily for us, researchers at the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety are knee-deep in figuring out how to eliminate these bacteria from our animals, their poop and our food. But to develop techniques to neutralize the nasty critters, they must go to the source.
"We have to wade through a lot of poop," concedes Michael Doyle, the center's director. "If you want to get the manure, you've got to grab it. Even when you wear gloves, the fecal smell tends to get embedded in your skin." Hog poop smells the worst, Doyle says, but it's chicken poop's chokingly high ammonia content that brings tears to researchers' eyes.
Doyle's group is testing everything from campylobacter-destroying bacteria—a kind of germ warfare—to killing salmonella with chemicals. The science isn't the dirtiest part of his job anymore, though: "Most of the BS I deal with is in making sure there's money to keep this place running."
Warning: Pesticides are bad for you
Pharmaceutical companies have long relied on hard-up college students to act as guinea pigs. (Dudes, I was in a double-blind Viagra trial! And I got paid!) But did you know that the pesticide biz is hiring too?
Last year an industry-funded University of California at San Diego study paid students $15 an hour to have the root killer and World War I nerve agent chloropicrin shot into their eyes and noses. Chloropicrin is also a component of tear gas—that trusty suppressor of Big 10 sports riots—and at high doses can lead to nerve damage and death. Duuude. Because of its irritating qualities, small doses of the chemical are often added to other pesticides to act as a "warning agent," and it's the safety of those doses that the study looked at.
Coincidentally (or not), within a week of the UCSD study's completion, its industry funders submitted the results to the EPA to support chloropicrin's re-registration as an independent pesticide—not as a warning agent. Meanwhile, Congress is debating a moratorium on human testing. John Galvin suffered a repetitive-stress injury while working as a teenage pancake flipper.
source:http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=13874891
