Previous Cafés

Alcohol consumption by adults is so interwoven with our lives that we don't stop to think about how often it is associated with specific situations. "Going for a drink" is a bonding ritual that allows meetings between people across large cultural divides. Many people like a drink as stress-release or ‘social lubricant’ or simply to mark a special occasion. You may have just attended a birthday or wedding where someone was giving a toast.

Although acceptable in most societies, alcohol is also a drug. The effects of alcohol, like those of many legal or illegal drugs and environmental toxins, are not exactly the same for every individual. Moderate consumption may be perfectly fine for an adult, but it is a totally different situation for an unborn baby, i.e. the fetus. While mom’s hangover will pass, the consequences for the exposed child can be life-long.

There are several reasons that babies are so sensitive to alcohol. Alcohol crosses the placenta and enters the fetal bloodstream through the umbilical cord and it stays there longer than in mom’s blood. Babies simply have not developed the ability to break down and get rid of the alcohol. Another reason is that the baby’s metabolism is in overdrive. Their development from a cell mass to a new human being involves a series of cascades of biochemical reactions, cascades of gene expression, cellular movements, tissue formation, and organ construction. Each of these events is dependent on the previous event. It is like a very complicated dance and any point the choreography can be interrupted.

You may have heard of a condition called “fetal alcohol syndrome.” These children experienced high levels of alcohol during their mom’s pregnancy and are born with physical malformations and cognitive and functional problems. But lower levels of alcohol can have an impact too. Just because you can’t see an obvious defect, doesn’t mean than alcohol did not have an impact. This is because a large and very important organ in your body is developing for a long time and is very vulnerable. Its building plan is very complex and we don’t entirely understand how it works yet. It is your brain.

So what exactly happens to the brain and why should we care? A lot of people are doing research to find answers to these and related questions. What we know today is that there are differences in people’s brains and they are dependent on the individual situation and the level of alcohol exposure. Some differences are structural, for example missing areas or smaller overall size of the brain. Some are neurological, such as difficulties with movements or coordination. Some are functional, like problems with focusing on tasks or memorizing stuff.

In this Café, we will discuss what specific areas in the brain can be affected by alcohol and what those areas are important for. We will talk about how scientists are trying to uncover brain functions. We are looking forward to hear about your ideas how to tackle the questions and what you think the challenges are from your point of view.

About the Presenters

Martina Rosenberg

I was born in Berlin, Germany. As a child I was rather shy, and because my mom was working, I spent a lot of time with my grandma. I would sit at the table in our kitchen drawing and she would tell wonderful stories while preparing food. The stories could be about family, history, or—one of my favorites—the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, who my grandma actually met. I liked it because it was about determination and careful planning to achieve a goal, but also about the overcoming obstacles.

I also enjoyed finding out how things work around the house. I took apart about every mechanical thing I could get my hands on—and sometimes even succeeded in putting it back together again! I compiled a list of “inventions” (like battery powered glasses with little reading lights integrated in the frame) and a list of science “questions” (e.g., does coffee extracted by a coffee maker have the same amount of the same chemicals in it as coffee brewed by hand?). If I could not find answers, I would ask the librarian or a teacher or check out books.

In high school my favorite subjects were biology, chemistry, and art. Again we heard stories about great discoveries and great people. Even though I liked chemistry, I did not like the teacher at all. I think it either was mutual or he used some strange reverse psychology there. I heard remarks like: “a chemist in a skirt, that can’t be good.” This made my inner rebel react by being as good as I could be to prove that teacher wrong on facts and on women in science in general!

I struggled in making a decision about what I wanted to do in life. There were lots of topics I was interested in, but I was also quickly bored and looking for something new. I had a knack for science, but felt that art was more creative and satisfying. I decided to enroll in college to get to the bottom of this, and took as many different classes as I could. What I learned was that science as presented in school is rather dry, but it still is fascinating. For me the question of how things work now was in another area: biochemistry and molecular biology. So instead of looking at mechanical mechanisms I looked at mechanisms within cells.

I met my husband when I was a graduate student and we moved to New Mexico. This was a big change. It is at times frustrating to wrestle with a new language and a new environment, but also opens new possibilities. We both love it here and are enjoying the outdoors, doing hiking, biking, and skiing.

There were other changes. In the end, I am not sure if I ever resolved the issue of deciding what to do and maybe that is OK, because I can adjust the direction my research is going if my interests change. I have been working in gene regulation and cancer research, and now look at learning and memory from a neuroscience perspective. I like the interdisciplinary nature of this area. I know now that science, whether it’s biological, physical, or social, is fundamentally a creative process. I am still trying to find out how things work. The ‘thing’ for the moment is the brain and the human puzzle. I can be creative in finding solutions to a problem, designing experiments, and finding ways to present the results. I like to work with my hands. I love to teach and tell others about what I am doing. It is the ever-changing nature of the exploration that is keeping me engaged.

Rafael Varaschin

I am currently a PhD candidate in the Neurosciences Department at the University of New Mexico. Originally from Brazil, I started my scientific career during my undergraduate years by participating in a program known as “scientific initiation.” In this program, I joined in laboratory activities and helped senior students to conduct their experiments. The experience gained during this period naturally led me into the master’s program, which I concluded a couple of years later.

With my mentor retiring—and still having a world of opportunities to explore—I decided to take a step further and apply for a PhD abroad. Either destiny or chance brought me to New Mexico in the fall of 2007. Since then, I’ve been investigating novel therapeutics to treat cognitive deficit caused by prenatal alcohol exposure. The objective is to develop new medicines that can help children affected by the disease known as fetal alcohol syndrome.

When people say scientists need to be really smart, I have to disagree. They certainly are dedicated and a bit obsessive. I joke about this, saying that, because scientists spend most of their years in school in order to figure things out, either they must be stupid or they really like to be in school (or maybe a bit of both). On the other hand, in general, scientists tend to be more rational than the average person. We like to think critically about things, simultaneously looking for arguments that support or reject almost any hypothesis we stumble upon. For example: is it going to rain? The weather man says there is a 30% chance… but what are his sources? What kind of information did he have before coming to such conclusion? Is it really accurate? Can we make it better? And there you go; if you think like this you are already thinking as a scientist.

Outside the lab (and, yes, there is life outside the lab!) I enjoy traveling and exploring new places. This can be just an unknown street in my neighborhood or an entirely different country across the ocean. I also like to cook and indulge myself in new flavors.

Once I finish my education, I intend to return to my homeland and teach what I learned here. One of the best things in Academia is that you are always surrounded by young people that are eager to learn and contribute their share to society. I hope that in the distant—very distant!—future, I’ll become one of these old dudes that walk around the campus, still very active, giving lectures and attending seminars (after all, these are always excellent excuses for more traveling).

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Living in New Mexico, we have all been affected by wildfire in recent years, whether by the smoke emitted from fire hundreds of miles away, the immediate threat of wildfires to our communities or valued natural resources, or the evacuation of friends and family from threatened areas. Historically, frequent, low-intensity fires have been beneficial to wildland environments, clearing away excessive growth and regulating the competition for finite space and water. But due to the perceived risk of such fires, a century of fire suppression has left our forests choked with fuel that dries to tinder in years of drought. Now when fire occurs, it is catastrophic, as evidenced by the monumental wildfires that in the past decade have destroyed resources and property throughout the Western states.

Planning effective mitigation strategies (for example, thinning overgrown areas and setting controlled burns) to rebalance the environment and reduce the number of disastrous wildfires requires a clear understanding of how fire behaves in response to rugged terrain, variable winds, and mixed vegetation.

But understanding and predicting wildfire behavior is a very difficult scientific problem, since the length scales of the physics range from those of flame sheets or the thickness of leaves and pine needles to topography-influenced atmospheric dynamics. Thus a complex mix of chemical and physical processes drives wildfires.

Current wildfire models range in complexity from simple algebraic models that may be implemented in graphs or on hand-held calculators to complex formulations that are implemented on large computers. The models of different complexities are appropriate for different applications based on environmental conditions of the modeled fires, the completeness of the available fuels and weather data, the computational resources available, and the time urgency of the results.

Some of the more complex models are not currently suitable for real time applications because the computer runs take such a long time. But their more complete nature allows them to be used to understand some of the more complex aspects of wildfire behavior.

Coupled atmosphere/wildfire behavior models can be developed based on conservation of mass, momentum, species, and energy. Models of this sort use complex math to couple the physics-based wildfire model with the motions of the local atmosphere. For example, the software package FIRETEC is an attempt to capture the physical processes that control a wildfire on a local scale, while simulating fire behavior on large, landscape scales (hundreds of meters to kilometers.)

This Café explores the application of this kind of computer modeling as a new tool to help fire fighters predict the spread of wildfires and thus help them bring these devastating fires under control.

About the Presenter

I grew up in Albuquerque, where my father was a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratory. My mother returned to the school when I was 10 for her masters in special education, and subsequently had a long career in Albuquerque Public Schools. My brother and I grew up in a household where education was held as a high esteem, but other activities like soccer, track, swimming, hiking, rock climbing were also encouraged. I was raised with the attitude that even if you have disadvantages you should always push yourself to be the best you can be in whatever activities you choose to pursue.

In high school, I had a moderately rigorous course load that was slanted toward my strengths in math and science. But I made sure I had my fair share of challenges in other subjects. I always felt torn between taking classes like wood working, metals, and drafting—which I thoroughly enjoyed—and taking the classes that my parents encouraged me to take as college prep.

I took those tests designed to help students figure out which career paths they are best suited for. Interestingly, those tests usually suggested that I should be a forest ranger, forester, or something like that. This was in strong contrast with my father’s belief that I was best suited to be an engineer, based on my strengths in math... and other intangible fathers-intuition-type arguments. I took these with at grain of salt, since he was and engineer and therefore might have a little bias there. I was under the impression that my dad actually enjoyed his job as an engineer and I seldom heard him complain about work... until he took on various management activities and had to get involved lots of non-technical wrangling with funding agents, internal politics, and performance appraisals for his employees.

In the end, I chose to go into engineering. Engineering had been placed in front of me as a challenge, and I had a hard time backing away from a challenge. Maybe this was not the best reason to choose a career, but I also did consider the fact that engineering seemed to have a wider variety of career paths after school.

Ironically, my PhD dissertation at Los Alamos National Laboratory ended up being the development of a wildfire behavior model, which meant that I was working closely with foresters, spending time in the woods, and using the math, science, and computer skills that I had developed in school as an engineer.

At research and development institutions like Los Alamos and Sandia, the boundary between science and engineering is not black and white and in many cases the best teams have folks with both backgrounds. I am leader of a team that focuses on modeling a variety of complex processes in the atmosphere. The team is made up largely of atmospheric scientists, mechanical engineers, and computer scientists, and we work closely with foresters and ecologists, which creates a very strong mix of technical capabilities.

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Somewhere in the distant universe today, a star ended its life in a spectacular explosion. While you turned in your homework, or joined a pick-up game with your friends, the same elements that make up the paper from your homework, the ball in the game and even your own body were splattered into the cosmos from the innards of a supernova.

Supernovae are among the most energetic explosions in the universe since the Big Bang. They mark the catastrophic end of stars much more massive than our sun, leaving behind compact remnants such as neutron stars and black holes. The elements that make up our planet, even our own bodies, were created in the explosive fireball of a supernova. Any answer to the question of our own existence lies, in part, at the heart of an exploding star. Supernovae have even wiggled their way into helping answer the question of our cosmic fate. The rise and fall of a supernova's brightness has provided astronomers with a seemingly robust tool for measuring cosmic expansion.

The term supernova (more accurately nova) dates back to the 1500s, when astronomers were mostly very observant sky gazers. With today's epic motion picture thrillers, the sky is no longer the most exciting thing to watch on a Friday night. The term nova (in an astronomy context) arises from a time when even the sky was not considered a "motion picture". Nova is the Latin word meaning "new," and was coined to label stars that appeared in the sky suddenly, where no object had been seen before. "Supernova" is a spin off of this term, meaning a super bright star that appeared out of nowhere.

Regardless of its historical origin, the primary concept to take away from supernovae is that they mark the explosive death of a star that is at least 8 times more massive than our Sun. The very fact that we are discussing stellar death suggests a life cycle for stars; a changing evolution that takes them from the cradle to the grave. Most people are aware that stars twinkle and shine brightly. After all, who hasn't sung "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" or embarked upon a wish with "Star Light, Star Bright". By merely taking this general understanding one step further and asking, "Where does the star's shine come from?", we stumble upon an understanding of the entirety of a star's life.

Indeed, given the large distance to all stars, it is the shine from the star that is able to tell us anything at all. Much of the knowledge gleaned from supernovae relies on our understanding of how the light emitted from the surface came to be. Just as one can separate light into color bands with a prism, light from a supernova can be separated into wavelength bands, and the amount of energy in each band can be measured. This is called a spectrum and it provides a fingerprint of the supernova. Just as fingerprints can tell you about the person behind a crime, the spectrum of a supernova can tell us about the star behind the explosion. If we can successfully decipher this supernova fingerprint, we can learn a great deal about the physics behind the explosion and the role that supernovae play in our universe, our galaxy, and our world.

About the Presenter

I am currently a technical staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory working on theoretical simulations of exploding stars. I first decided that I wanted to be an astronomer while on a field trip with my Girl Scout troop in 9th grade. We visited an observatory where a group of professional astronomers explained what we know and, just as important, what we still don't know about the objects in our universe. They also made it clear that by studying planets, stars, and galaxies, we can learn a great deal about important physics here on earth. That convinced me that this was what I wanted to do for a job. Imagine being paid to solve cool puzzles!

I started on my way to becoming an astronomer as an undergraduate at Western Washington University (north of Seattle, WA). It turns out that a place with 90% of the year spent under cloud cover is not the best for getting your star-gazing groove on...so, next stop for me was graduate school at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Clouds in Tucson are as scarce as sun in Seattle. I had moved from a land of eternal spring to one of eternal summer, which I felt was a pretty good trade. The funny part is that for my thesis work I ended up settling down to the theoretical study of supernovae (exploding stars) using computer codes, which doesn't require clear skies at all.

I spent 8 years as a graduate student at the University of Arizona, and managed to leave with several valuable items. The first was a fabulous tan, followed by a husband, two wonderful children, and of course a PhD in Astronomy. My decision to focus on theory came after a few tries at being an observer at real telescopes. Bad weather, altitude headaches, and equipment with duct tape patches just didn't do it for me, so I turned to a more theoretical physics path. That is how I ended up in New Mexico. After spending eight years simulating big explosions on a computer, the thought of giant computers makes your eyes twinkle and you eventually end up at a National Lab.

The projects that I work on at Los Alamos National Laboratory involve studying the deaths of very massive stars (more than 10 times the mass of our Sun.) I use computer codes to simulate how the star explodes at the end of its life. Then I compare the shape and composition of the blown up star on my computer to blown up stars that we* can see with telescopes. When they look the same, I know that the physics I used in my simulations is correct.

*Of course, by "we" I mean other astronomers who like bad weather, altitude headaches, and duct taped equipment.

The thing I love most about astronomy is how easy it is to share with others. As I mentioned, I am a proud mother of two; my son is eight and my daughter is six and, even at these young ages, they know that their mommy studies stars because every night I can take them out and show them what I work on. It is exciting to have a job that can be shared with my whole family. Indeed, I look forward to sharing some of what I do as part of the Café Scientifique lecture series.

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What makes some communities or organizations able to quickly bounce back from a disaster, while others take a long time to recover? This question has become very important for emergency planners in federal, state, and local government, particularly since the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed New Orleans five years ago. These events have made people aware that we can’t always prevent disasters, but might be able to improve the ability of communities and regions to respond to and bounce back from major disruptions.

Social scientists have found that most communities are, in fact, quite resilient to most disasters. People tend to work together, overcome divisions, identify problems, and develop improvised solutions. This often leads to a greater sense of community and a sense of personal accomplishment. Long-term recovery can be harder, but rebuilding can create jobs and stimulate economies. Communities may even end up better than they were before. But there are some disturbing exceptions to this trend, including Hurricane Katrina. The hurricane killed many people, the federal and local emergency response was not effective, people who could not evacuate were housed in the Superdome and Convention Center in terrible conditions, crime was prevalent, and local government did not appear to have control over the situation. A significant portion of the population was eventually evacuated to other cities. Even five years later, many people have not returned, and large parts of the city have not been rebuilt. Clearly, New Orleans lacked sufficient resilience to overcome a disaster of the magnitude of Katrina.

There are four factors that social scientists are beginning to agree are important for community resilience:

1. A strong, diverse economy: Stable jobs, good incomes, diversity of industries, personal savings
2. Robust social networks: Community members know each other, help each other, and have connections outside the community
3. Competent organizations: Government, health care, community service, and religious organizations are competent and trustworthy, and have resources to handle community needs
4. High-quality infrastructure: Road, power, and water systems (etc.) are in good condition and are designed to provide service, even if some connections are destroyed.

To explore how these factors make communities resilient, I will tell two stories of disasters. The first is the Buffalo Creek flood, which wiped out a coal mining community in West Virginia in 1972. This is a classic example of community that was not resilient in the aftermath of a disaster. The second example is the Vietnamese immigrant community in the Versailles neighborhood of New Orleans. In spite of being relatively poor and culturally isolated, this community was one of the first to fully rebound following Hurricane Katrina.

Following the presentation and discussion, we will have a group activity, where you will have a chance to evaluate the resilience of your own community.

About the Presenter

I fell into doing research on the social impacts of disasters by a somewhat roundabout route. I was always interested in science, and in high school I decided I wanted to be a physicist. In college I quickly discovered that physics wasn’t for me, that I was more interested in understanding the bigger picture of the history and social impact of science and technology. So I ended up going to a graduate program in sociology that focused on science and technology issues.

I wrote my dissertation on how engineers design bridges in California to withstand earthquakes, looking at how they translate data from laboratory tests into real-world building methods and design requirements. This got me really interested in the sociology of infrastructure: technological systems that make a lot of our modern world possible, like the electric power grid, the telephone network, and roads and bridges. Also, part of my graduate training involved going into science labs and studying scientists, much as an anthropologist would study some faraway tribe. It was doing this that I met my wife, who does mechanical engineering research, and it was because she got a job at Los Alamos that I ended up looking for a job there ten years ago.

At Los Alamos, I started working in the area of risk and uncertainty analysis. I work with scientists and engineers to look at various technological systems and help determine whether they are at risk of failure or an accident, particularly in situations where there is not a lot of test data to go on. Somewhere along the way, I discovered that there is a group of people at Los Alamos who develop models and simulations of infrastructure systems, looking at how they could be impacted by a natural disaster or terrorist attack. It clicked that this would be an area where my current work in risk analysis might link up with my previous work looking at earthquake engineering and bridges and with some work I had been doing on the impact of Hurricane Katrina.

It turns out that there are a lot of people in government who are interested understanding the impact of disasters on communities, but there are not a lot of sociologists who have the background to work with the modeling and simulation experts. So that turned out to be a niche where my unique set of skills could be useful. That’s what brings me to the presentation I’m giving for Café Scientifique.

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Early discoveries in microbiology by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Edward Jenning allowed man to understand the role of microbes in causing infectious disease and methods by which we can contain them. Louis Pasteur identified many key microorganisms and discovered methods such as Pasteurization to safeguard foods from pathogenic bacteria. Robert Koch identified the causative agent of tuberculosis and developed a skin test for its diagnosis. This test remains the gold standard for TB diagnostics even today, almost two centuries later! Edward Jenner discovered the science of vaccination. The main reason that many pathogenic bacteria are kept under control and diseases such as small pox and polio are almost eradicated is our ability to efficiently vaccinate people against them. These pioneering discoveries in microbiology were essential to our understanding of the role of microorganisms in pathology.

But microorganisms have made it their business to evolve in order to survive under the harshest of conditions, and so they have evolved to develop drug resistance. Antibiotic-resistant strains of the most predominant disease-causing agents have been identified world over, and infectious disease is once again the leading cause for global mortality. At this juncture, accurate methods for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of infectious disease, especially drug-resistant strains, are essential if mankind is to avoid once again succumbing to the same diseases we thought we had conquered.

Because the world is now so interconnected, the problem of re-emerging diseases is not limited to developing countries, but is a growing problem right here at home.

No disease exemplifies this situation more than tuberculosis. Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis, has existed on Earth since time immemorial. Evidence of tuberculosis has been identified in the spines of Egyptian mummies from ~2400-3000 B.C.

There is an urgent need for rapid diagnosis for diseases such as tuberculosis. The sensor team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a waveguide-based sensor for the rapid detection of signatures associated with pathogens in the infected host. We are currently evaluating the feasibility of this technology for the detection of tuberculosis and other diseases. In this Cafe, we will discuss general microbiology and epidemiology of infectious diseases and novel strategies to combat them.

About the Presenter

I am a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on novel diagnostics strategies for infectious disease. Every small incident in your life leaves its mark on you and influences your decisions. Growing up in a developing country ravaged by disease has clearly left a mark on my thought process, as is evident from my chosen vocation.

I was born in Chennai, a busy city in Southern India, to a moderately affluent family with good access to medical care. Despite that, I suffered from mumps as a child, and knew children that suffered from other infectious diseases that could have easily been prevented by vaccination. Perhaps a lasting memory is that of our gardener coughing persistently as he worked. I did not know then that he was suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, a disease that would claim his life a decade later.

As a child I was—and I still am--interested in dancing and drama. But when I did well in 10th grade, my family and friends pushed me to pursue a degree in science. I enrolled as an undergraduate in microbiology at the University of Delhi, and found myself enjoying the curriculum. My education was primarily theoretical, with no research experience whatsoever. I enjoyed what I learned, but was not passionate about the science.

After my undergraduate degree, still wavering between science and the performing arts, and decided to pursue a master’s degree in microbiology, while performing at drama clubs and learning Indian dance. My masters program changed my outlook on science. I was fortunate enough to do my dissertation work at the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi, India. Working in a research institution on real world problems was challenging, inspiring, and exciting. I enjoyed laboratory work and practically lived in the lab during that time, resulting in a well-received masters thesis project.

By then, I had no doubt that I wanted to pursue graduate studies in Biomedical Sciences. I came to the University of New Mexico in 1998 to pursue my Ph. D. Studying in the United States was a completely new experience. I enjoyed the open and questioning culture, the casual approach to teaching, and the helpful nature of my professors.

I then joined QTL Biosystems Ltd in Santa Fe. I developed hand-held sensors for detection of biowarfare agents. It was an amazing experience, translating the lessons learned in school to actual applied products. But I realized that I enjoyed basic science more. So, I decided to join the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a post-doctoral fellow. There I have been developing assays for tuberculosis detection, traveling to endemic populations, and working with people in the field. I can honestly say I thoroughly enjoy my work and the challenges it presents. And I still dance and perform every year.

Perhaps one of the greatest things about being a scientist is that you get to learn new things every day. I enjoy mentoring students and post-doctoral fellows and watching a new era of inspired scientists rise. My ultimate goal is to develop better diagnostics for infectious disease, especially ones that have developed resistance. Well... if you aim for the stars, you may at least reach the Moon!

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Somewhere in Africa around eight million years ago, the rains fail to come. The forests begin to shrink. A population of apes finds itself without rainforest and the fruits that apes are accustomed to eating. What are they to do? If they are to survive, they have to change with the changing environment. They have to live in a drier climate. They have to find a new way to travel other than through the trees, now that there is no longer a rainforest canopy. They have to find something other than fleshy, ripe, nutritious fruits to eat, but their new diet has to be equally nutritious because they still have big brains to fuel and slow-growing babies that will rely on their mothers for a long time. There are new predators to face on the ground, and these apes may need to live and travel in larger groups for protection. A new group structure means a new social dynamic. A new social dynamic could fuel the drive for an even bigger brain. Thus is the dawn of humankind.

As humans, our closest living relatives are the great apes – orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. This means that we share an ancestry with the apes. Thanks to many genetic studies, we now know that humans and chimpanzees are more closely related to one another than they are to anyone else. In fact, humans and chimps share about 98.5% of the same genes. And yet, as genetically similar as we are to apes, in terms of anatomy and behavior, humans are extremely peculiar.

Anthropologists are interested in why humans are the way they are. Paleoanthropologists attempt to understand when, how, and why our peculiarities arose. How did humans become socially complex, cultured, cooperative, chatty, big-brained apes that eat meat, cook, walk on two legs, and often get married? What drove these changes in human evolution, and what came first? What fueled bigger brains and bodies, meat or cooked vegetables? What initiated cooperation between males and females and ultimately marriage systems? Could marriages exist without language – how else to keep track of your partner when out of sight? When did our children take eighteen years to grow up instead of twelve, and why take that long anyway? When did art evolve? When and why did humans become less violent than chimpanzees? At what point do we want to call these fossil species human?

In this session of Café Scientifique, we will explore through the fossil record the transitions that led humans to differ from other apes, addressing both what happened in human evolution and also how we figure out what happened.

About the Presenter

As a child growing up in North Carolina, when I was not in school, I was playing in the woods behind my house. I loved walking through the fallen leaves, catching frogs and lightening bugs (always catch and release!), watching squirrels, and listening to whippoorwills by day and owls by night. Often I was alone with nature, but I can remember one occasion when I took my teenage sister. She tried to build a rock dam in the creek, and I was furious. She thought she was building a swimming pool; I thought she was destroying an ecosystem. Thirty years later, I am still trying to better understand how nature works, and my sister still thinks I am crazy.

As a high-school student, I loved a lot of subjects, but my favorites were biology and chemistry. Two amazing experiences came my way when I was sixteen. First, through a science fair, I won a trip to the National Youth Science Camp, a month-long camp in West Virginia for two students from every state. For the first time, I was surrounded by fellow nerds, and we were free to be as nerdy as we liked. Then, my home state, at the time South Carolina, started a residential Science and Math school. I was a member of the charter class, and during that first year, students and faculty alike strived over eighteen-hour days for an academic utopia. It was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. In fact, science has since provided me with a lot of incredible experiences.

After high school, I studied at Duke University. As a child, I had always wanted to formally study animals, and Duke gave me that chance with lemurs at its primate center, and then with howler monkeys in Costa Rica. Finally, I was a bona fide animal behaviorist! Only, watching monkeys eating leaves all day was just a bit boring! I then coupled my love for animal ecology with evolution, and I found paleontology the means to study both subjects. After college, I left my beloved South, with the woods, beaches, birds, and stars, for Boston. I was a graduate student at Harvard University. As much as I hated the big city, Harvard was, and is, all it is cracked up to be. I was challenged by some of the greatest minds in the world, and Harvard provided me with opportunities to see the world.

My life-long dream had been to visit Africa, and the summer after my first year at Harvard, I finally saw lions, wild dogs, giraffes, and elephants in the wild. I have now gone fossil-hunting in Africa, Europe, and Asia. I have also trekked through African rainforests following chimpanzees, and I have lived with some of the last hunter-gatherers on earth, all with the hope of learning more about the past from the present and vice versa. Thanks to science, I dreamed big, learned to believe in myself, and saw my dreams come true.

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“Connection timed out.” “Server not found.” “The connection has been reset.” Has your web browser ever told you these things? Was it telling you the whole truth? Have you ever become interested in an Internet meme or something political someone said but you mysteriously couldn't find the video on YouTube? This Café will be about Internet censorship and threats to privacy that are occurring all over the world, and the parallels that I see here in the United States.

If you use a search engine to search for something from a typical high school in New Mexico, there's a good chance that your query and the results you get back are being filtered or recorded at least half a dozen times. When the search engine is deciding which results to send you in response to your query, it has to check for compliance with laws such as the Digital Millienium Copyright Act. On your end, your school may be using proxy filtering software such as Websense to enforce the Children's Internet Protection Act. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that route Internet packets between your school and the search engine (e.g., Comcast, Qwest, or AT&T) filter certain kinds of communication and record things like network flows and clickstreams, which basically means who you communicated with and what you communicated with them about. Some of them pass this information on to the U.S. Government in compliance with the Protect America Act. The search engine probably also records your query. Your high school may record Internet traffic and store it for weeks at a time for compliance with various laws, particularly if government employees (such as teachers) also use the Internet there.

And all that's happening just if you use a search engine from a school. What would you like to do when you're done with school? Foreign correspondent for a major newspaper? Human rights activist? Soldier? Defense lawyer? Whitehat hacker? If you plan on doing anything that requires access to information that someone, somewhere considers important, then you can bet that current trends on the Internet will have a profound effect on how you do your job in the future. In some parts of the world today, people put their lives at stake to use the Internet as a tool for getting their message out to the world. The activity during the recent “green revolution” protests in Iran regarding the election results in March is an example. Among the many interesting questions that computer scientists face, how to keep the Internet open and free is one that my own research focuses on.

The purpose of my talk will be two-fold. First, I want to get you thinking about how Internet censorship and threats to privacy affect you and your community, and what kinds of restrictions you can expect to bump into now and in the future (especially if you go looking for them ;-). Second, I hope to get you interested in some of the deep computational and scientific questions that Internet censorship and privacy issues raise, since some sharp scientific minds are needed if we're going to be able to address the technology and policy issues of the 21st century.

About the Presenter

In addition to being interested in computers when I was younger, I also remember being interested in making trouble, using dirty words, and finding out things I'm not supposed to know. Internet censorship is a research area that combines all of these early interests of mine. I probe the Internet looking for the words that different countries don't allow their citizens to use online, and then publish those lists. This way policy makers, and the voters whose interests they represent, can decide for themselves if the many various forms of Internet filtering around the world are at odds with human rights or other things relevant to U.S. foreign policy. This requires a whole range of computer science to do everything from crunching data for finding out what words in foreign languages are related to each other to teaching a computer to recognize the names of people and places in a news story. I also use my education in computer science to look for secrets about the technical details of how various censors monitor and interrupt communications on the Internet. And then taxpayers pay for me to travel around the world to present my findings by showing respected scientists all the dirty words and other secrets that I've found. Not a bad gig, and definitely not the picture I had of what scientists do when I was younger.

One of the great things about science is that you can follow your interests and see where they take you. When I was in high school, and even well into college, I had no idea what exactly computer scientists did. I knew I wanted to have a career working with computers, but I didn't realize that computer science is a field that is full of deep philosophical and scientific questions about nature, the mind, mathematics, physics, society, and every aspect of our lives. As Edsger Dijkstra once said, "Computer science is no more about computers that astronomy is about telescopes."

In terms of background, I grew up in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and then spent four years in Arizona getting a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. I then went back to California to get my Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Davis, where my dissertation work was on capturing and analyzing Internet worms. I became interested in Internet censorship when our reading group discussed a paper that had just come out. It was the first such paper I had seen, and seemed somewhat "out of the blue" to someone who had been focusing on traditional computer science. One great thing about computer science is that the possibilities of what kinds of questions we can apply the science of computation to are endless. That's what brought me to New Mexico, which has a rich history from the pioneering days of computation; it is where many fundamental questions about computation are being answered today. I'm now an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

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Everything you experience depends on the functions of your brain. This includes obvious things like vision, movement, and conscious decision making. People are generally aware of when these mental activities occur, and are comfortable thinking that their brain controls these activities. However, less obvious functions, like motivation, will-power, humor, love, pleasure, and sadness, these also all depend on the functions of the brain. It’s sometimes harder for people to accept that the parts of behavior that just seem to be part of who you are depend on an organ of the body.

We know that brain function is tied to everything we think and feel because, unfortunately, people get their brains injured all the time. Following significant head injuries there are frequently changes in the way people think and behave. Further, in those cases when we can figure out what part of the brain was injured, and we see how someone’s behavior changes, we can start to attribute a brain function to that injured part of the brain. So, for example, because people who had injuries to the occipital lobe at the back of the brain had disrupted vision or blindness, we learned that the occipital lobe has a role in visual perception. There are similar examples for injuries that predictably lead to problems in speech, or problems in complex reasoning, and from these patterns of injuries and lost function we discovered areas of the brain necessary for speech and complex reasoning. But what about more complicated functions – things like wanting to socialize with other people or keeping your mood up – are these products of brain function?

There are people who experience changes in mood or socializing after brain injuries, but the patterns aren’t as reliable as with injuries that affect speech or vision. This has been a clue that complicated behaviors—like how your mood reacts to stress; getting happy, depressed, or frightened around other people; or how good you are at focusing when the rewards for your work are far in the future—are associated with patterns of brain activity spread over larger areas of the brain. At one time, we weren’t sure we’d ever be able to make sense of these large and complicated patterns of brain activity. But over the last 25 years we’ve developed tools that have helped us start to understand what goes wrong in people’s brains, leading to mental illness.

If we’re looking for the relationship between brain function and behavior, we need to have really precise descriptions of how people feel and behave. Our best descriptions of behaviors are often descriptions of mental illness, in the form of rating scales. The creation of precise and valid rating scales has given us the information we need to relate changes in brain function to changes in behavior.

This presentation will start with an overall description of the brain, focusing primarily on the cortex, because that’s where most brain activity is found. We’ll focus a little more on the parts of the brain that tend to get ignored because their functions are broader and harder to describe in short outlines. We’ll then review some particular mental illnesses, and show how they are different from the moods and feelings we all share. Finally, we’ll see how brain activity in most people is different from brain activity in people who are experiencing mental illnesses.

Download a PDF of this presentation [1.8 Mb].

About the Presenter

I don’t really come from a background filled with scientists or engineers or doctors. My relatives were mostly businessmen and artists, but just about everyone in my family was an outdoors person. They all liked natural history and the idea that if you were a careful enough observer of the natural world, you could decipher how the world works. I myself wasn’t really an outdoors person, however, and preferred playing football in the park or reading. I complained as much as I could get away with when I had to go camping or fishing or hiking. Still, somehow it filtered in that observation and deduction could tell you how things work, and the idea must have stuck.

I started school at the University of New Mexico in studio art. I loved wielding big chunks of steel together in my sculpture classes, but I realized I didn’t love it enough to do it for the rest of my life. My problem with art was that there was never any certainty, and if I was going to spend all my time and energy on a problem, I wanted to at least have the chance of finding a right or wrong answer. Based on my exposure to natural history, I moved into biology. The basic experiments that you start with in biology classes are—let’s face it—not all that exciting, but I realized that I enjoyed scholarship, the process of knowing a subject deeply and trying to use what is already known to come to new conclusions. As I got more and more involved in biology, I got interested in how the anatomy of a little wild mouse, the grasshopper mouse, allowed it to be a ferocious carnivore, when externally it didn’t look all that different from every other kind of little wild mouse.

Doing my research into anatomic specializations of this mouse, I quickly went through all the anatomy and physiology classes that were offered in the Biology Department at UNM. I started taking courses with the medical students, and had my second big realization. I realized that you could specialize in a really esoteric facet of science, or you could try and integrate what interested you with the work of lots of other experts and look at bigger questions. Medical schools do this all the time, with groups of people asking questions that might for example focus on cellular metabolism in the brain, but also on the impact of illegal drugs on modulating that metabolism. From this introduction to medicine it was a quick slide into medical school, and then into psychiatry and neuroanatomy.

In the end, I ended up in a very specialized field of research, where we examine the responses of parts of the brain to visual perception of facial expressions. But we try to relate this to a much bigger question, about how people with some mental illnesses don’t seem to relate well to other people and about how you might find ways to help the mentally ill get along better in society. It’s the most creative thing I’ve ever done – far more creative than anything I did as an art student – and it’s about as much fun as you can have and get paid for it.

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It is a late Fall afternoon and two hikers are enjoying a brisk walk in the mountains. They are miles from the nearest the town and miles from the nearest person. They go around a curve in the trail when suddenly they stumble across human remains. Who is this person? How did they get here? How did they die?

These are a few of the questions that forensic investigators are faced with, and the body has numerous clues that help answer these questions. By using forensic tools and mathematical equations, we can determine the sex, age and race of an individual. We can also identify trauma and natural diseases by examining the condition of the bones. With a group of Forensic Anthropologists and Scene Investigators from the Office of the Medical Investigator, we will learn about skeletal remains and examine several cases.

About the Presenter

Wendy Potter

I was inspired to become an archaeologist by a bunch of anthropology books my mom had laying around from college and (of course) the glorified portrayal of archaeology in the Indiana Jones movies (yes, I even bought a hat like his). I was always interested in old things, which was fueled by articles in National Geographic, books on Egyptian mummies, and a family trip to the southwest when I was in middle school (Mesa Verde was the place that convinced me I'd be a southwestern archaeologist).

I went off to college with the goal of becoming an archaeologist, and after my first two semesters of classes, I took a summer field school in archaeology. There I realized that despite the discovery of whole black-on-white pots that were hundreds of years old, my interest was piqued when someone uncovered a fragment of a human upper jaw bone. At that point, I realized I was in the wrong subfield of anthropology. I returned to classes that fall with a focus on human osteology and stumbled upon a class in forensic anthropology. After that I was hooked and continued to study forensic anthropology in both academic and practical settings. (And I never did give up fully on the archaeology...I spent two field seasons excavating a cemetery in Egypt!)

I do what I do because I have the chance to take all that I've learned and apply it to problems that really matter to people. In a medico-legal setting, the impact of assessing the profile of a set of remains, as well as interpreting any trauma or pathology present, lies in the eventual identification of an individual and providing closure to families regarding what happened to their loved one. To me, this is more important to the general public than performing the same task for skeletons at an archaeological site that they've never heard of (though this would be of interest to me and the academic community).

In forensic anthropology, I have the chance to make a real difference in the lives of people, at particularly difficult time for them. This endeavor has proved to be very rewarding for me, even though most often my role in death investigation (contributing a piece of the puzzle) is not apparent to those outside of the medical investigator's office.

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We have gotten used to holograms, since they are used in books and movies, and they can be found in your very own pocket if you carry a charge card. But the magic of the hologram continues to convey wonder and even mystery.

This Café Scientifique presentation is about how light, lasers, and the hologram come together to give us a better understanding of the way we experience the world, especially visually. We will go through a series of explanations that are intended to develop an understanding of the nature of light, the way light interacts with objects, vision with one eye and in stereo, and the differences between photography and holography. There will be a series of hands-on experiences that directly involve the use of different lights, lasers, optics, diffraction gratings, and more. By examining the nature of light and the process of visual perception with many of our innate perceptual illusions, we may end up questioning if we see objects at all.

With a more integrated sense of what takes place as we see and experience the world, we will get a better understanding of holography itself. In closing we will see some digital holograms and discuss some of the ways holograms can be used for both optical elements as optics or digital hardcopy, integrating computation and computer graphics.

If you think that some of the numerous holo-gadgets on YouTube or that the CNN broadcast during the recent presidential election are the real thing, then think again, because they are a far cry from holograms. So join us for an evening that may open your eyes to holography. Holograms are not just 3-D images onstickers and toothpaste packaging; they have a wide range of applications these days, such as:

• Holographic computer memory storage system
• Holographic microfiche for high density information storage
• Holograms as "circuit elements" for optical computers
• Erasable holograms for routine real-time non-destructive testing and inspection
• Biomedical holograms are made inside live organs through optical fibers
• Holographic optical elements (HOE) used as: lenses, mirrors, gratings, e.g.:
  • HOE bi-focal contact lenses
  • CD players use holograms
  • UPC Grocery store scanners use spinning holograms
  • High resolution spectrometers use holographic gratings
• Holographic interferometry in non-destructive testing that reveals structural faults
• Anti-counterfeiting holograms on credit cards (some are erasable)
• Banknotes – the Austrian 5000 Shilling is printed with a golden hologram of Mozart
• Head-up display (HUD) holographic windshields installed in military aircraft

In this Cafe, you will have the hands-on opportunity to explore the characteristics of basic holograms and diffraction gratings and observe the interaction of lasers and holograms. For more information on holography and the associated science of photonics, electro-optics, lasers, and careers, please see http://spie.org/x22931.xml.

Another source of information on holographic optical storage and digital holography is the National Science Foundation Project on Advanced Technological Education in Information Technology at IEEE Computer Society CS Library: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/ITCC.2003.1197491.

About the Presenters

We have more than thirty years experience teaching, researching, and developing special projects in holography. Fred is the originator and co-author of The Holography Handbook, a Kodak award winning publication. We have shown our art work in museums and galleries worldwide.

We met in New York City while Fred was Director of Education at the Museum of Holography (MOH). There he directed the Artist-In-Residency Program, edited the museum publication “holosphere,” and traveled throughout the east coast and Europe. He was the MOH liaison for the first article about holography in National Geographic Magazine. Rebecca was a contributor to holosphere, and was among the initial group of artists to receive an Artist-In-Residence grant at the Museum of Holography, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

We spent several years in Germany developing a pulse ruby laser system that allows the recording of holograms of live subjects. We went on to produce one of the first reduced pulse portrait holograms published as an embossed printed hologram on the inaugural issue of GEO Wissen Magazine. We conducted an unofficial artist-in-residence program using the pulse ruby laser system. While we were in Hamburg, German, we traveled and consulted in England, France, Italy and Denmark.

After returning to the U.S., we became members of the Advanced Imaging group in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). We later moved to Los Angeles and co-founded Zone Holografix, a consulting and educational facility. Fred taught Holography at Pasadena City College and Contemporary Imaging Systems and Optical Systems in the graduate program at Brooks Institute of Photography. Rebecca was a staff writer for Holography News, an industry publication. While at Brooks, we were team members for the first holographic portrait of a President, Ronald Reagan, now in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. We both received the Shearwater Foundation Holography Award for our “exemplary careers.”

Fred was the chairperson for the first Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) Art & Culture Meeting at the Practical Holography Sessions. Rebecca was an Editorial Board member for the SPIE Technical Working Group publication “HOLOGRAPHY,” and participated as an SPIE holography grant administrator and juror for emerging artists in the field.

Both of us have worked as educators and consultants for holographic technical applications. Prior to moving to Santa Fe, NM, we both taught in the public school system of Columbia, MO, while Fred was an educator in the Photonics Laser Technology Program at the Columbia Area Career Center. Since relocating to Santa Fe, our most recent projects entail 3-D imaging systems involving a holographic auto stereographic screen allowing depth perception (three dimensional vision) to be used with the remote operation of a robot. Our other involvements include photovoltaic solar projects and holography workshops.

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We all have heard about the big, top secret—and very expensive!—spy satellites that some claim can read a license plate in Red Square. But it turns out that a lot of very useful information about what our potential adversaries are up to can be obtained from a source that is freely available to the public: Google Earth, a product created by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This Café Scientifique presentation is about how we can use “geospatial” tools like Google Earth for sleuthing for important information-gathering applications, such as national security, treaty verification, law enforcement, homeland security, environmental monitoring, emergency response, disaster relief or even sightseeing anywhere on Earth.

“Virtual globes” like Google Earth make it possible to zoom in on any suspected facilities and activities, particularly once there is independent information from ground level that something unusual is going on that might be of interest. Such information might appear on the Internet in blogs or wikis. It might come in through social networking sites like Twitter. It might take the form of input from knowledgeable local citizens, such as ground photos and maps taken by locals, hobbyists, and tourists of the surrounding locales. These can be useful in identifying facilities and their infrastructures, and understanding their purpose. This information then makes it possible to develop a much more detailed ground-view picture of the facilities through the use of software like Google’s Street ViewTM and Micorosoft’s Bing Maps 3D, Bird’s Eye, and PhotsynthTM in conjunction with the basic Google Earth capability.

The virtual globes also provide highly accurate mapping of the topography of an area, and allow detailed 3-D perspective views of all sites of interest. 3-D modeling software (i.e., Google’s SketchUp6), when used in conjunction with these virtual globes, can significantly enhance individual building details and even visualize interiors. This allows one to virtually “fly around” a facility, observing it in great three-dimensional detail. One can then make assessments to better inform decision-making. The new geospatial tools provide vastly more information than previously-used 2-dimensional maps and line drawings.

The down-side of this increasing global transparency is that those who want to keep clandestine facilities and associated activities from being detected, identified, or monitored are becoming more adept in their use of camouflage, concealment, and deception. Moreover, these tools can also be a “double-edged sword.” They have already been used for nefarious purposes, including terrorist planning and attack. Finally, we must always keep in mind the expression “all that glitters is not gold” when using these tools, as there is the ever-present threat from erroneous data and/or deliberate spoofing.

Nonetheless, these new geospatial visualization aids are ideal for a variety of reconnaissance assessment purposes including: detection, identification, site characterization, navigation, monitoring, and verification. Amazingly, these new geospatial tools also now make it possible for anyone to conduct his or her own remote satellite-based reconnaissance (aka: “armchair sleuthing”) for any application from the comfort of home, or from a WI-FI enabled coffee shop, or even while on the beach at some tropical island resort.

In this Café, participants will have the hands-on opportunity to test their imagery analysis skills using the new geospatial tools, with some fun quizzes created by the Australian Government’s Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organization (DIGO, http://www.defence.gov.au/digo/) and here in Los Alamos. Café participants can try their hand at “sleuthing” with Google Earth by examining a mysterious facility under construction near Shiraz, Iran. Is it a facility for developing nuclear weapons...or not?

For more information on geospatial intelligence and the associated science and careers, please see https://www1.nga.mil/kids/Pages/default.aspx.

About the Presenter

I grew up on Long Island, New York, in a typical middle class neighborhood (not far from a friend and neighbor named Billy Joel). My formative years were spent flying with my father, a Captain for American Airlines. My Dad would take me flying in an antique aircraft that he had rebuilt, and he would always assign me two jobs: 1) look out for other planes and 2) be the navigator. I spent a lot of time looking at the ground from the air, comparing the view with maps, and thinking in 3 dimensions. I also gained a unique appreciation of clouds from that lofty perspective and how they form, as well as the effects weather processes can have on aircraft operations. I built my own weather instruments (anemometer and wind vane) and monitored and recorded the daily changes with them. I spent one high school summer working in the tower at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) as a student meteorologist. When flying, I became fascinated by the landforms that I could see from the air, including the glacial deposits that created Long Island where I lived. I developed a life-long curiosity about the Earth, its history, and the physical processes that have transformed it, both natural and technological. I decided I wanted the ability to monitor those changes through remote sensing means, particularly from space.

So I went to college at the University of California-Berkeley and studied Physical Geology and Geomorphology, with a minor in Remote Sensing. One of my professors, Dr. Robert Colwell, opened my eyes to a whole new world of the art and science of deriving valuable information from overhead imagery. Although I was accepted to graduate school in geology at UC, I decided to take a different tack in life. I applied to the Office of Imagery Analysis, where I began my career. This was at the height of the “Cold War,” and the role of satellite reconnaissance was then very highly classified. It was a perfect fit for me. After learning all about the nuclear fuel cycle, I began to work on the task of tracking foreign nuclear fuel cycle activities. For six years, I was looking for everything from evidence of mining and concentrating uranium to nuclear weapons development, testing, and production.

But I missed California, and when the opportunity to do similar work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory became available, I jumped at it. For the next 18 years, I tracked nuclear activities in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. I received a gold medal from the Director of the CIA for helping the U.S. Government and the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) with its safeguards inspections and verification. I served as a nuclear Chief Inspector for the IAEA during inspections in Iraq from 1996-1998 and again in 2002. I moved to Los Alamos ten years ago, and have been active in promoting the use of commercial satellite imagery for briefings on foreign clandestine nuclear facilities to the International Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and various Foreign Ministries around the globe on behalf of the National Nuclear Security Administration and the U.S. State Department.

Science is about solving puzzles and mysteries and answering the questions: what, where, when, how, and why? With the new geospatial tools like Google Earth, it is now possible for anyone to arrive at some of those answers as they apply to international security in ways that were previously only possible within the cloaked depths of the U.S. intelligence community.

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In 2006, there were 250 million registered passenger vehicles in the United States. They traveled 3 trillion miles and burned almost 200 billion gallons of gasoline. That’s a lot of zeros on some very large numbers and we can’t really fathom what it means. But, it surely means our appetite for transportation fuel is large. Our oil companies and law makers talk about how many millions of barrels of fuel PER DAY we need to produce… and how many millions more we need to import. We currently import about two-thirds of the crude oil necessary to satisfy our daily consumption, and most of that comes from geopolitically unstable regions -- parts of the world where it’s not so easy to assess who our friends really are.

Burning fossil fuels – oil, gas, and coal - creates carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, meaning it absorbs and emits radiation within the thermal infrared range. Greenhouse gases are essential to maintaining the current temperature of the Earth; without them this planet would be so cold as to be uninhabitable. But, by changing the concentration of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, do we impact a natural balance and cause climate change and global warming?

About half of the man-made CO2 emissions to the atmosphere in the United States come from burning oil products like gasoline. Another third comes from burning coal and the remainder comes from natural gas. So, we can basically say that half the CO2 we emit comes from driving cars and half from turning on our lights. And boy do we like to do both of those. The United States tops the list of CO2 emissions per person and accounts for one fifth of the entire world’s CO2 emissions. Per person, we emit more than twice as much CO2 as our European friends and almost five times as much as the Chinese. With their huge population, China accounts for a fifth of the entire world’s CO2 emissions and their fraction is growing. They want all of the comforts and luxuries that we have become accustomed to.

So, here’s the picture. In the US, we are producing a lot of CO2. It comes from burning fossil fuels to light our houses, power our economy, move us around – often in vehicles with a lot of empty seats, and most of our transportation fuel is imported. To top it off, we have huge resources of fossil energy here in the United States in the form of coal and oil-shales and we know how to turn them into transportation fuel. The only downside is that the process to do so is currently expensive and produces even more CO2. So, until our economy makes a huge change and we start driving electric cars charged by wind, solar, and nuclear energy, we have the fossil energy resources to keep doing just what we are doing. But, many believe we need to figure out what to do with the CO2. In fact, new laws regulate the emissions of CO2 from new fuel sources and proposed laws may regulate the emission of CO2 from power plants or place a limit on the CO2 footprint associated with industrial processes. Thus, figuring out what to do with CO2 instead of pumping it into the atmosphere has become a hot topic.

This is where the fun science comes in.

Several options for managing CO2 involve capturing it and storing it. By reacting it with other minerals, we could store it as bricks. By pumping it to a certain depth in the ocean where the temperature and pressure are just right, we might be able to store it in a wild form called clathrates, which are crystalline solids that look like ice, and which occur when water molecules form a cage-like structure around “guest” CO2 molecules. Although plenty of questions exist about how to actually store the CO2, the most prominent idea is to store it in deep geologic formations. The idea is to capture CO2 at the smoke stack of coal burning power plant, purify it, compress it and then pump it deep into the subsurface – at no small cost. This doesn’t help with the transportation fuel (yet), but gets at an accessible concentrated stream from a pretty important process that accounts for nearly half of our CO2 emissions.

Many of you have already been exposed to the idea of geologic disposal of nuclear waste. How do you feel about subsurface storage of carbon dioxide? Keep in mind, the oil we pump out of the deep subsurface has been there for millions of years, trapped below impermeable rocks. In fact, we could (and do) pump CO2 into depleted oil reservoirs; the only problem is that the oil reservoirs we have depleted are now perforated with wells, so the CO2 might leak back up. Therefore, many scientists are looking at other formations that are less well characterized (but less perforated). Pumping CO2 into deep saline aquifers is an option, but then the brackish brine that the CO2 displaced would be pumped out and need managing. Do you think super salty water would be a waste product or a possible resource?

Here are a few more questions about engineering to meet our lifestyle demands vs. re-engineering our life styles. Do you think we should manage the CO2 we produce by storage, or manage how much CO2 we produce? How much of a lifestyle change are you willing to consider to reduce your CO2 footprint? Would you rather pay a little more at the pump and on your electric bill so scientists and engineers can figure out how to dispose of CO2 waste from the fossil fuels we burn or would you consider never driving in a car if it didn’t have at least one other person in it? Could driving alone in cars eventually have the same social stigma as smoking cigarettes? Speaking of powering our cars, what if imported oil became less available? Do you think we should consider harder-to-get-to fuels such as oil shale in Colorado? It would mean building more roads and increasing the negative impact on the landscape – but we’d be more energy independent and developing the resource would create jobs. How important is energy independence for the US? If you were a policy maker, how would you determine the relative importance of energy development, economic growth, landscape degradation, and CO2 emissions to the atmosphere from any fossil fuel burning process?

Answering these questions isn’t easy for anyone, but a scientific basis for analysis and assessment helps us quantify and compare the various options. We’ll talk about some of these methods at the Café.

Learn more: Capturing Carbon: Research focus to remove greenhouse gases for cleaner air

About the Presenter

It has been my experience that life is a series of opportunities, some of which you create and some of which just come along. The trick is to make good choices once the opportunities present themselves. My first opportunity, and one for which there were no available choices, was being born in Los Alamos. Granted, by the time I was 18 years old and finished with high school, there was nothing more important than getting Los Alamos in the rear-view mirror and getting out into the real world. But once there, it became very clear what a great opportunity it had been to growing up with the opportunity to ski every weekend in the winter, backpack all summer, and live in a really great community that supported its schools and kids. However, when I was 18, I didn’t have the foggiest idea what to do. I figured I was supposed to be a scientist of sorts, but I had no clue what the other options were – Los Alamos is kind of heavy on scientists and light on investment bankers and artists. I did OK in high school, took a few AP classes, and got reasonable SAT scores, but I was not in the top 10% of the class.

So, when it came time to apply for college, I was influenced by one thing. I had enjoyed my high school chemistry classes. Stressing out that my entire life was going to be determined by the fact that I liked chemistry in high school, I applied to University of California because we were eligible for in state tuition in chemical engineering. Around Christmas of my senor year, I was accepted to U.C. Berkeley and was resigned to figure out what chemical engineering was some time later. We didn’t have the Internet back then, and frankly, I didn’t know how to figure out what a chemical engineer was, other than someone who works for Dow or an oil company. Then came my next opportunity. I received a small card in the mail that said “Come to the University of Arizona, Study Hydrology, Get in-state tuition.” I asked my dad – a LANL Nuclear Chemist - what Hydrology was. He told me it was mix of geology, physics, math, and chemistry focused on water-related research, with all sorts of interesting real-world problems to solve. Finally, something tangible. I could help find water resources or clean up contaminated groundwater systems. And, I could dabble in several disciplines but not have to specialize in any. This made a lot more sense than chemical engineering (though I still hadn’t done any research on what it was).

So, over Spring Break, two buddies and I piled into dad’s car and off we went to Arizona to check out the school. University of Arizona is a party school, and we were in heaven. It also had the only undergraduate curriculum in hydrology in the nation and had a department loaded with world class hydrologists. These guys literally wrote the books on the subject. When I went to visit the professors in the department, I realized that they had pioneered much of the science. They figured out how to use radioactive isotopes to age-date ground water; they figured out how to best drill wells and evaluate how much water they could produce; they figured out how to develop computer models to optimize the spacing and pumping rates of wells to supply water for a city. This seemed like cool stuff and I was hooked.

Then came my next opportunity. During my second year of college I had broken up with a girlfriend and was sort of depressed. I also needed money, so I took a job as a custodian in the student union. One day, I was pushing the broom when an upper classman in the hydrology department came up to me and said that a hydrology consulting firm in town needed some student help and there might be some field work involved. To make a long story short, two weeks later it was almost Christmas break at the university, I had taken my finals early, and I was in Wyoming working with a crack team of hydrologists and geophysicists studying if and how a pond of nasty power plant effluent was leaking to the groundwater. It was 30 degrees below zero, we were drilling through 2 feet of ice, my feet were freezing, and I was in heaven again. As irony would have it, we are now—25 years later—studying that exact same power plant as we investigate how to manage the CO2 emissions from coal burning power plants. Throughout the rest of my college years, Harold, the president of the company, took me under his wing and advised me on my academic career. Not only would he not let buy a motorcycle when I wanted one—he tattled on me to my mother—he also insisted that I go to graduate school to finish my education. He made a huge difference in my life.

With the practical experience I had gained working for Harold and the undergraduate background from U of A, I was actually quite marketable to big name graduate schools. So, I went up to Stanford to visit and the first thing I saw was a lake on campus with students windsurfing and sunbathing on the beach. True to form, I signed up immediately. California then went into a drought and I didn’t see water in that lake again for the next 7 years. But, I did learn a few more things on the path to a Ph.D.

When I finally completed that process, I took the next logical step. I dropped everything and my wife and I bought open ended plane tickets that would take us to East Africa, Nepal, and Thailand. We decided to figure out how to get home once we got to Thailand. Nine months later, after an amazing set of experiences ranging from climbing Kilimanjaro in Africa to trekking to over 20,000 feet above sea level in the Himalayas, and usually on only a few dollars a day, we finally made it to Bangkok and needed to find a way home – we were running out of money. Fortunately, the cheapest flight home was out of Bali, Indonesia, so we spent 2 more months traversing the Indonesian Archipelago seeing Komodo Dragons, experiencing a fascinating culture, and scuba diving on World War II ship wrecks.

Spending a year traveling around the world was an opportunity we created. I resisted the temptation to use that new Stanford certificate and start making money, realizing this was the one chance in my life to seize a critical window of time. We spent less than $15,000 each, which is by definition well below the poverty level. Yet, we changed our lives. A new car could certainly wait. My father was right when he said “you can do anything you want if you set your mind to figuring it out”. I celebrated my 30th birthday on top of a volcano in Bali where we hard-boiled eggs in the steam vent. Then we decided it was time to get on with our lives.

Instead of being challenged by trying to find a cheap bus ticket from Uganda to Tanzania (yes, they did have chickens in the back and goats tied to the roof!), we are challenged 20 years later with raising a 5 year old and 7 year old, and it is just as rewarding. You’ll learn something about what I do in my job at Los Alamos National Laboratory when we get together and you’ll see that I find a substantial reward in applying everything I have learned in school and in life to the complex challenges our society and your generation faces.

Since the days of Henry Ford and his first assembly line, the automobile has had a tremendous impact on our lives. Transportation drives our economy and our way of life. We may or may not be traveling in the flying cars forecasted by some people for the 21st Century. But the automobile and our transportation system in general will see significant changes over the next two decades.

Changes to our transportation system will not come easy. The internal combustion engine and our transportation infrastructure, including car manufacturing, gasoline production and delivery, and our roads and interstate system, have had over a hundred years to develop. The planet has been blessed with staggering amounts of stored solar energy in the dinosaur carcasses and prehistoric biomass that have transformed over eons into petroleum, natural gas, and coal, which we call fossil energy. Even at its peak prices last summer, gasoline was still cheaper than the bottled water or soda that you may have bought at the gas station when you filled up your car.

The benefits of the automobile and fossil-energy-based transportation have not come without a complex set of problems. It is clear that continuing business as usual will have significant impacts on our economy, the environment, and our national security. In the last four decades, we have had three “energy crises” in the form of oil shortages and high prices. Yet the US still consumes about 22 million barrels oil each day, of which about 60% is now imported, largely to power our more than 250 million vehicles. We are digging up and using the Earth’s stored solar energy at an astounding rate. Decreasing our reliance on foreign oil is critical to our national and economic security.

Burning all this fossil fuel for transportation has significant environmental impacts as well. Air pollution and smog from the nitrogen oxides and particulates from automobile exhaust were big issues in the 1960s and were largely mitigated through regulations and the development of the catalytic converter. But today we are faced with how to deal with carbon dioxide emissions that can cause global warming. About a third of the carbon dioxide emissions in the US come from transportation. Imagine how these problems will be exacerbated as the developing world, particularly China and India, start driving cars the way we do.

Policy makers, investment bankers, and manufacturers, as well as scientists and engineers, have been actively trying to understand the range of options available to power our transportation system. The objective is to develop a secure, sustainable, carbon-neutral way to fuel our vehicles, with benefits to our economy and the environment. Near-term and long-term solutions are being sought. A number of options are being actively investigated. They include efficiency increases through hybrid vehicles, advanced fuels derived from biomass, unconventional fossil fuels such as shale oil, direct storage of electric energy in batteries for electric or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and hydrogen.

All of the options under consideration have very interesting political, social, economic, and technical issues associated with them. For example, biofuels, particularly ethanol from corn, have raised the food versus fuel debate. Hybrid vehicles increase gas mileage significantly but still require fossil fuel. Electric driven vehicles have issues that must be overcome with overall driving range, battery capacity and costs, and the impact of a large number of electric vehicles on our aging electric grid. Hydrogen has issues associated with overall costs, infrastructure for transmission and delivery, and on-board storage capacity. There may be no single best solution. We will likely need to develop and implement a combination of fuels and technologies over a range of time frames to transform our transportation system.

Hydrogen powered vehicles using fuel cells offer one potential solution to the transportation dilemma. Fuel cells convert chemical energy in the form of hydrogen and oxygen directly into electricity with water as a byproduct. The energy conversion process using fuel cells is about twice as efficient as that for an internal combustion engine. Los Alamos National Laboratory has been working on hydrogen and fuel cells for over thirty years and is responsible for some of the key discoveries that are being applied in current technologies and prototype cars. Significant advances have been made, but further developments are still required for widespread implementation of a hydrogen-based economy for transportation. Advances are still needed to reduce the overall cost of fuel cells, which currently use expensive platinum catalysts in their electrodes. Hydrogen itself is not an energy source, but a carrier of energy. You cannot mine or drill for it, so you must make it. One of the appealing features of hydrogen is that it can be made from a wide range of energy sources including renewable energy; however, less expensive, more energy-efficient methods must be developed for its production. An infrastructure will also need to be developed to deliver the hydrogen to fuel the vehicles. Another issue is that hydrogen is not as dense on a volumetric basis as liquid fuels. So many researchers, including those at Los Alamos, are working to develop methods to store a sufficient quantity of hydrogen on-board a vehicle to allow for long driving ranges.

This Café will discuss the options for carbon-neutral, low emission vehicles and how much our transportation system could and might need to change. Will we all be driving cars powered by quiet fuel cells that emit only water and are powered by hydrogen generated from renewable energy? What other carbon neutral, low emission alternatives to petroleum such as plug-in electric hybrid vehicles or biofuels should we be also be considering?

Learn more here: http://www.lanl.gov/discover/fuel_cells_transform_cars.

About the Presenter

I grew up in small towns in Pennsylvania and upstate New York with three brothers. As a youth, I was much more interested in sports than schoolwork. My elementary school years were focused mainly on baseball, football, and basketball. I was not that bad, but certainly was not a star. Later, I became very interested in ski racing and then hot dog skiing, which is what teenage skiers did before snowboarding was invented! We lived near a ski hill where we could ski every weekday from 4-10 pm and every weekend from 10am to 10pm. Early in high school student, I thought I wanted to be an engineer because I liked math and science much better than my English and French classes. I was not really sure what engineers did, although I knew they did more than just drive locomotives.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity after my high school junior year to spend a summer at Ithaca College doing chemistry laboratory work. In addition to having fun living with a bunch of college kids in an apartment on campus, I got to work in a laboratory along with a number of talented undergraduate students who taught me a lot of chemistry. Despite breaking more than my fair share of glassware and one day having to quickly remove a pair of jeans that were rapidly dissolving because I spilled the entire contents of a large bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid on them, I decided that I wanted to be a chemist. I liked the concept of making new molecules and materials and trying to understand how they behave and what you could do with them.

In the Spring of my senior year in high school, I chose to go to Ithaca College rather than MIT or Caltech because of the research experiences I saw undergraduates enjoying at Ithaca. The fact that there were a lot of girls on campus and the students seemed to know how to have fun when they were not studying might have played more than a small role in my decision as well. As an undergraduate, I carried out chemistry research for eight semesters and four summers, including several weeks in Montpelier, France, a month at Northwestern University, and a semester as well in The Netherlands at Leiden University. I also had the opportunity to give a number of presentations on my undergraduate research at national and international conferences.

Although I had the pleasure of traveling a number of times to Europe as an undergraduate, I still had not been west of the Mississippi River and was determined to go to graduate school in California. I still remember the day I learned before my freshman year at Ithaca that you actually got paid to go to graduate school in chemistry and do not have to pay any tuition! As an undergraduate, I had developed an interest in the effects of solvents on chemical reactions and pathways. I decided I wanted to study organic molecules without any solvents in graduate school and became enamored with the work at Stanford University on gas phase ions. So, in 1980, I drove my Datsun B210 loaded with everything I owned (there was still plenty of room left in it!) to start graduate school at Stanford. In addition to watching John Elway play college football for three years, I carried out my thesis research investigating the fundamentals of organic gas phase ions using lasers. I became very interested in how transition metals catalyze chemical reactions, and went on to Caltech in 1985 to do postdoctoral work with Bob Grubbs who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006.

While at Caltech, I decided at the last minute that I did not want to be a professor and turned down several academic job offers to take a position at DuPont Central Research in Wilmington, Delaware. At DuPont, I carried out some exploratory research, but then became very interested in the environmental aspects of chemistry and chemical manufacturing. I was appointed as the Central Research representative on the Corporate Environmental Technology Panel, and carried out research to help DuPont determine how to best treat chemical wastes. I enjoyed sailing the Chesapeake Bay and then was delighted when my two daughters were born, but missed the mountains on a regular basis. I recall the day I asked my two-year old daughter what she wanted to do on a Saturday in Delaware. She responded, “go to the mall,” and I said to myself that “we are out of here” and started planning on how to move to the mountains and still do science.

I came to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1993 and started research on developing more environmentally benign methods to make chemicals. I had learned at DuPont that it was better to not make hazardous waste in the first place than to try to economically get rid of it. My postdocs, students and I focused on using compressed carbon dioxide in its supercritical state as a solvent for chemical reactions catalyzed by metal complexes, which allowed me to combine the expertise I gathered at Stanford, Caltech, and DuPont. In 1994, I became a group leader in the Chemistry Division and continued to carry out research. In the late 1990s, several colleagues and I helped start the Green Chemistry Institute which later became part of the American Chemical Society.

About 2003, I became very interested in energy applications, and soon after worked with a number of my colleagues to develop a Center of Excellence in Hydrogen Storage through a DOE competition. In 2006, I became a Program Director and am now responsible for Applied Energy Programs at Los Alamos, which span renewable energy, infrastructure, and fossil energy, including the hydrogen and fuel cell programs at Los Alamos.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to try to help us tackle the serious challenges in energy facing our society and planet.

Everyone knows that cancer is a horrible disease. The American Cancer Society reports 12 million new cases worldwide in 2007, with 7.6 million people dying from malignancies. But did you know that nearly 20% of cancer cases are attributed to infections with viruses or bacteria? This may be an under-estimate because there may be even more infectious diseases that contribute without our knowledge-this could be from organisms we know about AND those we have yet to discover!

Some examples of infection-associated cancers include nasopharyngeal (nose and throat) carcinoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Kaposi's sarcoma, liver cancer, gastric (stomach) cancer, and adult T-cell leukemia. The cancer with the strongest link to infection is cervical cancer, with human papilloma virus (HPV) infections causing more than 99% of cervical cancers. HPVs also cause other cancers of the genital tract, and some of the head-and-neck region. There is even evidence that certain HPVs might be involved in skin and breast cancers!

The word "papilloma" is Latin for "wart," and a wart is technically a skin tumor, it's an abnormal growth. HPVs cause nearly all skin warts. There are over 100 different types of HPVs, and different types cause warts on different parts of the body. Some HPVs cause only hand warts, some only foot warts, some only genital warts. Hand warts, for example, cannot be transmitted to the foot or to the genital types of skin. Importantly, not all tumors are cancerous, and only a few HPV warts turn into cancers. Although any abnormal cellular growth is a tumor, only when it can spread to other organs, or become "metastatic," does it officially become a cancer. It's usually the spread of the tumor to key body systems (brain, lungs, liver) that causes death.

Cancer arises typically later in life due to a series of DNA mutations in a cell that provide that cell with an increasing growth advantage over the cells around it. Generally, cells in our bodies can divide in a controlled fashion as needed, and the balance of programmed cell death ("apoptosis") in the same tissues keeps the average number of cells in our bodies constant. This can be called homeostasis. Tumors arise when this balance becomes disrupted, either because cell division increases or because cell death decreases. So, if a cell gains a DNA mutation that causes it to divide faster, or prevents it from dying when it should, it gains a growth advantage, and it can then gain another mutation, and another. If the cells fails to die, a tumor will arise. Mathematicians have calculated that a cell needs only to gain five DNA mutations in key growth promoting genes in order to cause cancer. Luckily, this does not happen very often. Our cells and our immune system are pretty good at maintaining cell growth in balance and keeping us healthy.

Some viruses that cause cancer do so because when they infect a cell they cause the cell to divide more rapidly, and then prevent it from dying. They don't do this to deliberately cause cancer; the viruses do this so they can carry out their "prime directive" - to make more viruses and permit their spread to new cells or to a new animal. Usually the cancer arises only as an accident, because the virus may push the infected cell to divide too rapidly, and mutations may arise during the increased cell division.

It's important to note that virus infections rarely cause cancer. For the most part our bodies keep infections in check, and only if those extra DNA mutations arise will a tumor progress to a cancer. For example, HPV infections in the epithelial (skin) cells of the genital tract are the most common sexually transmitted infections in the US, but only a handful of people will develop cancer from HPV infections. There are more than 5.5 million new genital HPV infections reported every year, and more than 20 million sexually active people (men and women) are currently infected with genital HPVs. In contrast, there are less than 5000 cases of cervical cancer per year.

Low cervical cancer death rates in the US are due to the fact that we have effective, but quite expensive, screening programs. Sexually active women are urged to have a yearly exam, wherein a Pap test is performed. This test samples cervical cells to determine if pre-cancerous or cancerous cells are present. Like most cancers, cervical cancer recovery is excellent if the cancer is caught early. However, in less developed countries, the death toll from cervical cancers is much higher. Worldwide, there are about 500,000 new cases of cervical cancer a year, and 290,000 deaths. Most of the cases and most of the deaths occur in poor countries where women do not have regular Pap tests.

You might be saying to yourself, "If some cancers are caused by infections, couldn't we prevent those cancers by eliminating the infectious that cause them?" You are absolutely right! And that is exactly the thinking behind the new HPV vaccines Gardasil® and Cerviarix® marketed as "Cervical Cancer Vaccines."

The HPV vaccine is made up of four HPV types, two that cause 70% of cervical and other genital cancers, and two that cause benign genital warts. The vaccine is given in three doses over 6 months time and is not infectious. The vaccine contains only the outside protein coats of the viruses that will cause the immune system to make antibodies, which can prevent future infections. We call these neutralizing antibodies, because they neutralize and prevent infections. Studies in the last five years have shown that this vaccine is safe and is almost 100% effective in preventing infections by the four HPV types in the vaccine, and the vaccine prevents genital warts and pre-cancers by these viruses too. Although, we have not followed vaccinated women long enough to determine that cancer incidences will decrease, the lower infections suggest that this will occur.

This vaccine has great promise! However, Pap screening in women is still essential, even if all susceptible people were to be vaccinated. This is because there are other HPV types not in the vaccine that can cause 30% of cervical cancers, and because we don't yet know how long the protection will last. The vaccine also may require a booster after five or so years. During the Café, we will also discuss important issues, including the cost of the vaccine, who should be vaccinated, and whether the vaccine will reach those who need it most. We will talk about some roadblocks to vaccination and some of the current research aimed at making more effective and easier use of vaccines.

Download a PDF of this presentation [2.5 Mb].

About the Presenters

Michelle A. Ozbun

I grew up in a very small town in rural northwest Colorado. When I started school my Grandma Ozbun gave me a 'school memory' book, where I wrote down what I wanted to be when I grew up, adding important art, photos, names of friends, report cards. Early on my parents bought the "World Book Encyclopedia" like many parents of the era, hoping their kids would come to know more about the world than they did. I loved looking at all the exotic photos and reading about far away places and different cultures. I also really liked learning about light, colors, and chemicals and the science projects that were included. To my mother's dismay, I also enjoyed performing the science experiments with vinegar, baking soda, batteries, fire. I mixed up lots of stuff in her kitchen. Since my dad actually blew himself up on a few occasions, usually smoking while filling his propane truck or while washing paintbrushes in gasoline in my mom's washing machine (!), I think my mom was understandably worried about me too! Luckily, I turned out to have slightly more common sense than my dad.

The early 1970s saw the recognition of cancer as an increasing health problem. President Nixon responded during his January 1971 State of the Union address by declaring "war against cancer." All the grown-ups were talking about who had cancer and the horror of cancer. I didn't really know what cancer was, but I knew that it was important and that doctors mixed up chemicals to try to help people fight it. I had seen this in the encyclopedia and decided in 4th grade I would be a "Chemotherapist" when I grew up (or so I wrote in my school memory book). I sold cards door-to-door so I could earn money for a microscope (which I have in my office today). But this science stuff was not all I did; it was a pretty small part of my life. I also earned a skateboard, and I loved to play cars and Barbies, go fishing and camping and river rafting, and explore my rural town. I played girls softball and coed soccer in school. I rode my bicycle a lot too. That is until my dad bought me a motorcycle when I was in 5th grade! That was great fun. Man, could I ride some wheelies and race all over town.

I greatly disliked school during my elementary years. I faked being sick a lot so I could stay home and watch TV game shows. I think I avoided school because I attended a private, Christian school where we sat isolated in cubicles and read alone from booklets every day. I missed the interaction of the classroom. I remember learning about cells and chemicals, and that was good. Finally, in junior high school, I adapted better to the environment and began to excel in school. I enjoyed learning, and had the opportunity to work at a geochemical lab in high school. We tested soil samples for various elements (iron, gold, silver, uranium), and I got to learn experimental design and laboratory techniques. I did well in math, chemistry, biology, physics. Although neither of my parents went to college, I had always planned for college, with my parents' encouragement. I decided in my misogynistic surroundings that I would become a nurse. That's what it seemed girls did if they were good at science. No one steered me otherwise.

I applied to Mesa College in Grand Junction, Colorado, as a nursing major, but was late getting my application in, so I started out in "pre-nursing". I took lots of psychology and all my basic science classes (anatomy and physiology, chemistry, biology). But I fell in love with microbiology lab. I actually got a "C" in the lecture, but aced the lab, and that was when I decided to change my major. First, I decided on a "Med. Tech." degree so I could work as a microbiologist. I transferred to Colorado State University. But again I got sidetracked. I next became enamored with Organic Chemistry -- the lab and the lecture. When I began to look around for an internship as a Med. Tech., I found out that I was an anomaly - most Med. Tech.'s didn't do well in organic chemistry, and the Med. Tech. jobs were becoming more automated. I changed my major to Microbiology with a minor in Chemistry so I could prepare for graduate school. I was now contemplating graduate school in organic chemistry to concentrate on synthesizing drugs-antibiotics and chemotherapeutics.

The mid 1980's was a time of social and political upheaval for me and my friends. There was a scary "gay plaque" and "gay cancer" spreading like wildfire, and President Reagan was blocking the US Surgeon General's attempts to educate people about this new and dreaded disease that was killing lots of young men. A number of people I knew were affected by what turned out to be AIDS, caused by infection with a new virus called HIV, and that peaked my interest in virology. As a Microbiology major, I planned to take virology, and decided to hold off on decisions about my future studies. Although I got a "D" on the first exam (because I didn't take the instructor's advice to learn all the virus families and characteristics), I stuck it out and obtained an A in the class. I had truly been captivated by the study of viruses, took a graduate level virology class and began working in a virology lab. My last semester of college I took 18 hours of science classes, worked as a workstudy in the organic chemistry prep lab and part-time in a virology lab, and played rugby. I made the Dean's List the only time in my life. I was having the time of my life!

I decided to get my Ph.D. in Virology at Baylor College of Medicine (not part of Baylor University) in Houston, Texas-primarily because 1) they had a focused and internationally recognized virology program, and 2) Texas was warmer than CO. Both were true for sure! Although I was interested in HIV and AIDS research, I decided to pursue my doctorate on a breast cancer research project, which was not related directly to viruses (at the time). I had a blast in graduate school. It was hard work, but also great fun with friends and colleagues, the thrill of victory, and much agony of defeat. Most of my experiments failed, but I was persistent. The pursuit of science, asking and answering questions, learning the scientific method, and thinking critically was and remains to me enthralling. I continued to play rugby and ride a motorcycle while in grad school. As a result, my adviser constantly pestered me: "I hope your lab notebook is up-to-date!"! I also ran the Houston Tenneco Marathon two times, once half, and a second time to 23 miles-both times with pneumonia! I've found running (in the absence of pneumonia) to be the perfect venue in which to reflect on and plan experiments or troubleshoot failed experiments, and I still use it as way to diffuse much of the innate frustration that comes with "doing" science. It's also good for reveling in the victory of that key experimental find!

I met my partner early in grad school. We moved to Hershey, Pennsylvania, for me to do my postdoctoral fellowship studying the new human tumor viruses, human papillomaviruses (HPVs), that had only recently been grown in the lab. My goal was eventually to move us back west, hopefully to my partner's home state of New Mexico and closer to Colorado. My hard work paid off! I've been at UNM now for 10 years (it's a good thing I started college when I was 6 years old! --- just kidding). In the last 10 years, I've had the great fortune to continue working in the exciting field of HPV research, amid great strides in understanding basic molecular infection events and the viruses' role in cancer. It was during this time that half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Professor Harald zur Hausen for showing that some HPVs cause cervical cancer!! I love the melding of two research worlds: infectious disease/virology and cancer biology. Nearly 4 years ago, I also attained another childhood hope: to be a mom. My son, Ridge, is a terrific little scientist, curious about everything in the world, and I love being a kid again with him. He likes making volcanoes at home and joining on a run once in a while. And he can't wait until he's big enough to go motorcycling with his mom!

Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." I think perseverance is equally necessary. There is a lot of failure in lab research experiments. In college I sold books door-to-door one summer. The mantra was that it took nine "nos" to get to one "yes." So we would try to get the nine "nos" out of the way quickly to get to those "yeses." I think the same is true in science. This equates to working hard and planning well. Many experiments are destined to fail, so get those failures out of the way!! Although it's hard work, I often say to folks who visit my lab, "don't tell anyone they pay me for this really terrific hobby!" I still love designing, overseeing, and performing exciting experiments in the lab. There are so many great aspects to my "job." The work really does make a difference in people's lives, I get to find answers to really cool molecular questions, and I get to travel to exotic and fun places all around the world, where I interact with scientists from all over, including young scientists like maybe some of you!

Rebecca Hartley

I grew up in a small town in southern New Mexico. Well, sort of. My dad was military and stationed at Hollomon Air Force base, but was originally from a town of 300 in southern Indiana. My mom was one of six kids growing up in central New Mexico. She was born in Quemado, and they moved back and forth between Quemado, Datil, and finally Socorro so they could finish high school. Once married, my parents moved back to Indiana so my dad could apprentice with his uncle as a tool and dye maker. But small town southern prejudice against my mom led my dad to re-enlist. I was the youngest of four girls, born in Washington State, but we moved to Albuquerque when I was five and then to Tularosa upon my dad's retirement from the Air Force when I was nine.

I graduated from Tularosa High School. There was never any question that I would go to college, even though my parents hadn't gone and they couldn't afford to send either my sister (only 11 months older) or me. Scholarships, Pell grants, work-study jobs and whatever help our parents and an older sister in Albuquerque could scrape together got us both through UNM. I majored in biology and had the opportunity to work in a lab as an undergraduate. My undergraduate lab work and a teaching assistantship inspired me to apply to graduate school. After researching several programs at different universities, I realized that if I pursued a Ph.D., I could get paid to go to school and do research-how could it get better than that?

I left sunny New Mexico for rainy Seattle to complete my Ph.D. at the University of Washington. My degree is in Biological Structure (a fancy name for Anatomy). My graduate research focused on adult skeletal muscle stem cells, determining where and when they arose during embryonic development. This work led to my interest in answering the question, how does a single fertilized egg become a whole organism? After finishing my Ph.D., I went on to pursue this question while performing post-doctoral research in two different labs, one in Denver, Colorado, at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, and the second at the University of Rennes in western France.

My first faculty position was at the University of Iowa School of Medicine. Here, I began research in my own lab and began teaching Anatomy to medical students and Cell Biology to graduate students. My research now was centered on early embryonic cell division and its resemblance to the uncontrolled cell division that is seen in cancer. If we could understand how and why cells of the early embryo divide rapidly with few controls, we could gain insight into how normal cells lose control of their highly regulated cell division to become rapidly dividing cancer cells. This is the main question that I work on, studying frog embryos as a model to study embryonic cell division and human breast cancer cells.

After moving to Iowa, I married a man that I had met in France. The transition from Europe to rural Iowa was not an easy one, so we began discussing moving out west. Right about this time, while attending a scientific conference in Phoenix, I ran into someone I had gone to school with at UNM. We had worked in the same lab as undergraduates and he was now a Professor in the same department. He mentioned that if I were interested in moving back to New Mexico, they were hiring. That was six years ago. My mom, sisters, nieces and nephews all live in Albuquerque (save one misguided Texan). I have many relatives throughout the state. My husband loves New Mexico and I no longer miss it. I've loved every place where I've lived, but there's no place quite like home.

A temperature 1000 times hotter than the sun. Pressures a million times those found in the deepest ocean. Speeds over a million miles per hour. Regimes of matter and physics unimaginable and untouchable to humankind. All of these and more can be created in an instant inside an atomic bomb. And the results are so potentially horrendous that fear of this massive power has held the world in check for over 60 years. This is the ultimate conundrum of the atomic age. A force so deadly, so complete, in its potential to wipe out humanity, that fear alone was sufficient to restrain the ambitions of countries and kings, dictators and despots, presidents and prime ministers.

For myself as a scientist, this unique, horrifying, and amazing amalgam presents an opportunity, an opportunity for my generation and yours to achieve something of lasting and incredible importance to mankind. A chance to tame the nuclear genie, to force him back to his bottle, to back away from the precipice that threatened to drop mankind into an endless chasm with the smallest accident, mistake or misstep.

Every generation should understand the dilemma posed by nuclear weapons. Whether we like it or not, they exist. Nearly a dozen countries have built nuclear arsenals. How to do we solve this problem? Is simply getting rid of nuclear weapons the answer? What about the nuclear materials left behind? These questions and more will impact every one of our lives, and you—the informed young citizens—should contribute to this debate.

Norris Bradbury, the longest serving Director at Los Alamos and the namesake for the Bradbury Science Museum, often said, “We don’t build nuclear weapons to kill people. We build them to buy time for future generations and leaders to find a better way.” What is that better way? Does science have a role to play in illuminating that solution? I think it does. Science shows the possibility for nuclear weapons, and a possibility for their ultimate reduction. As Edward Teller once said, “The Cold War is not a battle between armies. It is a battle between scientists and laboratories.”

And what did we learn in the advance of science related to atomic bombs? We learned how they work—how to have confidence that they would function. We also learned to make sure they wouldn’t function in cases of accidents or theft. And that knowledge itself is now a potentially potent asset. Can the knowledge itself become a deterrent?

This idea of a “capability-based deterrent” has important requirements that science and engineering can provide. Most important is the timing. If the capability is intended to provide a basis for deterrence, the weapons complex itself must be more agile and able to respond more quickly than a potential adversary could develop and deploy a rival nuclear arsenal. Let’s examine this concept a little more closely.

Today, we keep a nuclear arsenal numbering a few thousand deployed warheads. As large as that sounds, it’s actually a pretty small number compared to what we had at the height of the Cold War, when we had several tens of thousands of deployed weapons. Why so many? Mainly, to counter the deployed nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union and now Russia. Most of our nuclear weapons were fielded to counter their nuclear weapons or to ensure that at least some of our weapons would survive a first-strike from the Soviet Union. From a pure deterrence standpoint, many argue that only a few nuclear weapons are sufficient to deter almost any other state or group that might consider an aggressive act.

Thus, one reason we’ve been able to cut over 90% of our nuclear arsenal is that we agreed with the Russians to do this jointly. By most analysts’ accounts, the only credible threat that might require a re-armament of our nuclear arsenal would be a recidivist Russia or possibly an expansionist China. In either case, we would have years of warning, and that element of the timing is crucial in enabling a capability-based deterrent. Recall, during the Cold War, we had only minutes notice of a possible threat. This change—from only minutes to years—allows a very different posture that can rely on far fewer nuclear weapons, while still gaining the benefits of a deterrence strategy.

Is several years credible for a capability to design, certify, develop, and build a nuclear deterrent? With some changes to how we undertake this job, I think the answer is yes. Agility is key. Elements that once took 3-5years may be done in 12-18 months. Modern engineering and science tools give us confidence in nuclear designs, and allow us to quickly more through the development stage should that be required. This is why the government has proposed transforming the nuclear weapons complex, precisely to gain this agility and confidence in a more capability-based deterrent. In fact, the head of the government’s nuclear weapons programs said, “'because our nuclear weapons stockpile is decreasing, the United States' future deterrent cannot be based on the old Cold War model of the number of weapons. Rather, it must be based on the capability to respond to any national security situation, and make weapons only if necessary.”

Personally, I see this as an excellent, interim step toward a day when we hold vastly fewer nuclear weapons and we fulfill the challenge that Norris Bradbury and Hans Bethe made to our generations. This is the start of a better way to protect our security, while lessening the nuclear threat worldwide.

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• The Wrong Deterrence: The Threat of Loose Nukes Is One of Our Own Making This article from the Washington Post details the current situation of stockpile stewardship at home and abroad.
• Kissinger, Shultz, Perry & Nunn call for A World Free of Nuclear Weapons This article recalls the hopes of past to eradicate nuclear arsenal and reminds us of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which states (1) countries that do not possess nuclear weapons as of 1967 do not obtain them and (2) other countries in possession of nuclear weapons rid themselves of their nuclear stockpiles over time.
• Toward a Nuclear-Free World Read about the latest efforts in eradicating nuclear weapons.
• Los Alamos scientist criticizes federal approach to arsenal This article from the San Francisco Chronicle is an interview from Dr. Joseph Martz, of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

About the Presenter

For as long as I can recall, I have been interested in science. I remember reading the World Book encyclopedia several times, marveling at the entries on engineering, technology, and science. I moved from Texas to Los Alamos in 8th grade, and thought the old science museum at Los Alamos was the most amazing place I had ever seen. The fact that my father worked at Los Alamos was a source of tremendous pride. In high school, two key experiences set me on the course my career in science would take.

I heard about a contest to fly an experiment on the Space Shuttle in 1980. I submitted a proposal on purifying metals by passing electric currents through them in the vacuum of space. It was selected for the very first Space Shuttle “Students in Space” round of experiments. I’ll never forget traveling to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to talk to NASA scientists and sit in the space shuttle simulators! I remember watching the television in awe as John Young and Bob Crippin rode the first Space Shuttle mission. Imagine my surprise when, a few months later, I was sent a patch that had flown on that mission, along with a certificate!

The second key experience occurred in the year I graduated, when Los Alamos held the 40th anniversary reunion of participants in the Manhattan Project. The renowned physicist Richard Feynman only agreed to speak if young people would be in the audience. I was one of 30 high school students with VIP seating at the very front. Hans Bethe gave the talk I’ll never forget. He spoke of the physics of supernovas—most of this went over my head. But at the end he turned to the young people in the front row and pointed his finger straight at me. “It’s up to your generation to find a solution to this problem we created. You must find a way to move beyond vast nuclear arsenals to protect peace,” Bethe said. I was stunned. My first reaction was, “what an old kook.” But after I went off to college, I kept hearing Bethe’s words and soon understood their wisdom. My generation would have to find a solution in science to the great paradox of nuclear weapons and peace.

I finished my degree at Texas Tech, and went on to graduate school at Berkeley, where I developed a novel way to clean plutonium from the environment. My work made quite a media splash—it was featured on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. I was invited come to Los Alamos as a full-blown staff member. I accepted, and began research into the weapons-related issues around plutonium. Now was the time to gain the expertise to contribute to answering Bethe’s challenge.

My first breakthrough was on how plutonium corrodes—basically how it rusts. During this time, the country stopped nuclear testing and shut down it’s plutonium factory—the Rocky Flats plant outside of Denver. Tons of plutonium around the country was left literally overnight in temporary containers. What I had discovered was that this plutonium would degrade in a very special way, potentially bursting its containers. I briefed a special board—the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board—on these results. Fairly quickly, the Defense Board issued a formal recommendation to repackage all of the plutonium in the country to avoid these problems. I was a science celebrity! I was asked to train inspectors and help write a new standard for storage of plutonium. And all of this grew out of work to understand how plutonium degraded in weapons.

I was asked to lead the group at Los Alamos responsible for the nuclear cores of weapons, called “pits.” Then I was asked to lead the program looking at all weapon materials and how they age. This was timely because the government was debating whether it needed a replacement for Rocky Flats. If pits lasted long enough, then a big replacement factory wouldn't be needed. Editorials in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal talked about the issue. Again, science was at the forefront of a critical national issue, and my research was back in the newspapers!

Well, we did figure out that pits age gracefully, and the government decided it did not need to build an expensive new facility. This was a great example of how science could inform critical national policy decisions. More importantly, it showed a way that science could help reduce the number of nuclear weapons. I was excited! I began to study nuclear deterrence and policy. Could science substitute for weapons? I was asked to help lead the famous weapons design division at Los Alamos. I studied issues around weapons design and physics. For 20 years, the government had not designed or fielded a new nuclear weapon. And now they were asking an important question: Could we reduce some of the yield of the weapons, while making a more robust, more secure nuke? There were concerns, in this post-9/11 world, about terrorists stealing nukes.

Once again, I was asked to lead a team to study this concept—the Reliable Replacement Warhead. For almost 2 years, we worked night and day to explore concepts. We’ll talk about some of them at the Caf´e. We’ll also return to the opening theme: Can science substitute for weapons? Can science provide both security and a deterrent?

The advancement of computers in the past few decades has caught many by surprise. No matter where you go today, there are computers that you either recognize as such or that are hidden and invisible to your eye. Did you know that modern cars contain up to 100 small computers? For example, your car’s airbags are controlled by several computers and a few tens of sensors, which determine a passenger’s weight, the size, the angle, and the force of a possible impact, and then decide by means of complex algorithms and to the millisecond if and when to deploy each available airbag.

Computers are machines. That was particularly obvious some 50 years ago, when they made a lot of noise, occupied entire rooms, weighted tons, and worked very unreliably. Thanks to an astounding progress in the miniaturization of electronics, your cell phone can now do more calculations per second than early supercomputers and the tiny electronic chip in your credit card has more memory than the first personal computers. As a matter of fact, computers have changed much more rapidly than most other technologies, such as cars and airplanes. Why is that the case and how will this technological (r)evolution continue? What will computers look like in 20 years? How and where will they be used? Will computers be implanted in your body? Will computers allow you to expand your brain power? Will machines become more intelligent than humans and take over the world? There is strictly no reason to believe that machines will dominate us, but it’s an obvious fact that in many ways machines already do many things that no human can do.

Nowadays, the most promising areas for further progress in computers are the nanosciences, biosciences, and neurosciences. Nanotechnology allows us to build novel materials from scratch, to manipulate atomic-scale objects, and thus offers the potential to build even smaller computers. Bio-molecular components can be used to perform computations too, and it may be possible in the near future that you can for example swallow intelligent medication that decides in the body where to go and what exactly to fix. Finally, advances in neuroscience will allow us to better understand the brain and to replicate some of its functions by means of computers, nanotechnology, and biotechnology, and thus to create more intelligent machines.

Have you ever opened your computer? Do you know what the key difference between computers and other machines are? Do you know the basics of computer’s internal workings? Do you know that bacteria can perform computations too? This Café will explore the fast and fascinating advancement of computers, illustrate novel computing machines, and muse about what’s coming next. The only about half a century old story of modern computers is a clearly a success story, yet it’s only just the beginning of much more radical technological advances that will undoubtedly affect all of us. Come and explore together the unknown world of future and emerging computers at the edge of science fiction!

About the Presenter

One of my first major experiences with electricity was at 10, when I tried to measure how much current comes out of a power outlet with an ampere meter. That didn’t go well and resulted in an all-day power outage of our house and a melted ampere meter. Yet, that only made me more curious and in the next 10 years, I spent a major part of my free time soldering together electronic circuits for all kinds of applications. For example, I remember that my brother and I once built a remote controlled electronic ignition for fireworks. We felt like working for NASA. My first experience with computers consisted in watching my dad writing programs on a Commodore C64 computer, one of the first affordable personal computers. Soon, my brother and I knew much more about the peculiarities of programming that magic machine than my dad, after which he simply passed it to us kids and bought the first Apple Macintosh for himself. Needless to say that at that time, there was no e-mail and web.

The path to what I do today in life has been all but straight. The reason is maybe that I have a tendency for doing things in unconventional ways and don’t like to go with the main stream. I found alternative paths and decisions always more exciting and rewarding. After secondary school, I decided to seriously learn how to deal with electronics, electricity, electro mechanics, and computers, and therefore went to technical high school to become an electronics engineer. This was a great experience and made me a handyman for pretty much all technical things. My mentor taught me to always ask the question how you would fabricate a given object. Try it for yourself, it gives you a completely new perspective and appreciation of objects! I also had the occasion to participate in both the Swiss and the European contest for young scientists with a wind speed computer that I had developed with a friend. This unique experience paved the way to becoming a scientist later, and opened the new world of science and discoveries to me, which I wasn’t aware of before. After finishing technical high school, I really couldn’t imagine working in industry, maybe repairing TVs or computers, for my whole life, so I decided to go to college and university. I thought I’d go back to industry later, and becoming a scientist wasn’t the plan at all. At that time, I wasn’t sure whether to go for physics, math, or computer science. I’ve always been very fascinated by physics, but I felt that I lacked serious inherent talent that one needs to become really good in a field, so I went for computer science since I’ve become quite gifted with these stubborn machines over the years.

I’ve never been gifted with learning foreign languages and French and English really made me suffer a lot in college. Nevertheless, always attracted by challenges, I decided to go to university in the French speaking part of Switzerland. I ended up staying for 8 years, getting both my Masters and PhD degree in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. To my general surprise, I learned French to perfection rather easily. Compared to learning a foreign language at school, one is completely embedded in the foreign environment and I didn’t have to learn futile words and grammar. When I started at university, I didn’t quite know what a PhD degree was and how to get one. However, in my 3rd year as a Master’s student, I unexpectedly got a summer job in a lab at my university and that’s when I discovered the real fascination of science. Among many other things, this summer job also led to my first scientific publication and a trip to a conference in the US. From then on, I knew that science was what I wanted to do in life, and the decision to get enrolled in a PhD program was straightforward.

My PhD advisor was totally amazing, supported me unconditionally, and always encouraged me to do what I like and to like what I do. No sooner said than done! After my PhD, my wife and I both obtained a fellowship to do research at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD). We thought we’d stay a year or two in the US and then go back to Switzerland. That was in 2004. We’re still here and have no intention whatsoever to go back.

After my postdoc at UCSD, I became a postdoc at LANL, and later a Technical Staff Member. My current research focuses on the most exciting and adventurous part of computer science: the computers for the next 5-20 years. This cutting-edge research is about pushing fundamental and technical limits, realizing visions, and doing things that no one has imagined would happen a few years ago. It never gets boring because every day is a step into no man’s land, where lots of open questions and challenges are waiting. I’m a scientist because I’m curious by nature, love to explore the unknown, and can’t find rest until I know how things work or how a challenging problem can be solved.

Sea Ice, the Ocean's Fragile Cloak

Elizabeth Hunke, LANL

Will sea ice modelers soon be out of a job? After stunning sea ice losses last summer in the Arctic, one wonders! By the end of the 2007 summer melt season, the Arctic ice had shrunk by nearly 40 percent from its 1979-2000 average extent, and the fabled Northwest Passage was open to seafarers for the first time in human memory. Sea ice returns during the dark, cold, winter months, but will it recede to yet another record low next year? There are too many competing factors to know for certain, but the likelihood of an ice-free Arctic summer is rising.

The Earth's atmosphere and ocean act as heat engines, always trying to restore a temperature balance by transporting heat away from the equator, toward the poles. Arctic sea ice, which covers a huge area---greater than the lower 48 states in summer and twice that in winter---regulates these circulation patterns and therefore our weather. It's disappearance could have significant implications for life on the planet.

Sea ice is simply frozen ocean water. It forms, grows, and melts in the ocean. In contrast, icebergs, glaciers, ice sheets, and ice shelves all originate on land. Sea ice occurs in both the Arctic and Antarctic, growing during the winter months and melting during the summer months, and some sea ice remains all year in both regions. But sea ice is like the snowmen that appear in neighborhood yards after a fresh snowfall---as soon as the temperature rises a tiny bit above freezing, they start to melt and soon are gone!

Ultimately, sunshine is king. It drives the climate system and melts the ice. Its disappearance at high latitudes in the winter allows the ice to grow back. But other factors are at work too, including the sea ice itself. Cold air from Siberia or the Antarctic continent cools the ocean's surface and new sea ice freezes. Winds blow it around, crashing it into the coast or icebergs or other sea ice, causing it to pile up into thick ridges of ice. Ocean currents bring warm waters beneath the ice, melting it from below. Sometimes winds and ocean currents together move the ice into warmer waters, where it melts.

In this tussle between atmosphere and ocean, the sea ice is not a passive bystander. It has its own tactics for meeting the competition or, in some cases, becoming an accomplice to its own destruction. Sea ice is both ocean sunscreen and blanket, preventing solar rays from warming the waters beneath and thwarting ocean heat from escaping to warm the air above. But if gradually warming temperatures melt sea ice over time, fewer bright surfaces are available to reflect sunlight, more heat escapes from the ocean to warm the atmosphere, and the ice melts further. The cycle accelerates. Thus, even a small increase in temperature can lead to greater warming over time, making the polar regions the most sensitive areas to climate change on Earth. But as sea ice melts, it leaves a layer of fresh water at the ocean's surface that inhibits the ocean's global circulation, the "conveyor" that brings warm water toward the poles. Sea ice is both an obstacle and a catalyst for change, able to hasten the pace in either direction.

What happens when there's no more Arctic ice in the summer? Polar bears lose their hunting platforms, for one thing. And they're at the top of the food chain! The web of life will be affected in ways we can not yet imagine, but the news may not be all bad: sea ice in the Antarctic retreats almost completely every summer, supporting a rich ecosystem at whose foundation lie algae and other microbes that thrive in the seasonal ice habitat. Will the Arctic become more like the Antarctic? Stay tuned: some fear the Arctic sea ice has already reached its tipping point.

Big Fast Shifts in the Ecology of New Mexico Have Begun Due to Climate Change

Craig Allen, USGS

Climate change is beginning to be evident in New Mexico, with markedly warmer and drier conditions expected in coming decades. These climate changes will stress existing forests, and likely drive increasingly extensive and severe episodes of forest dieback. This process seems to have already started. In summer 2002, pinyon (Pinusedulis) began dying en masse from drought stress and an associated bark beetle outbreak. Similer kinds of forest stress and dieback are now becoming apparent in many parts of the world. Warmer, dry conditions will also amplify the severity of fire activity, which can trigger massive erosion in mountain watersheds that could clog reservoirs that store water for human purposes. Water resources likely will be directly strained in New Mexico as projections of less winter snow means less free natural water storage in mountains watersheds and earlier spring runoff peaks, reducing water available in streams and reservoirs for human uses. Despite these trends, there are actions (like forest thinning) we can take to increase the resilience of forests in New Mexico to these expected effects of climate change.

The Burning Ice: Will Methane Hydrate Destabilization Surprise Climate Scientists?

Scott Elliott, LANL

The clathrates are an exotic substance formed just below the bottom of the sea, due to the reaction of methane decomposing from dead organisms with water molecules trapped in coastal sediment. If you bring methane clathrate crystals rapidly to the surface for study, or even just for your own amusement, they look and feel like common ice but can be set on fire. They are quite literally ice crystals that burn. No one really knows how much of the stuff is out there. A small but real chance exists that sea floor warming induced by global climate change will melt enough of the substance to inject significant quantities of free methane gas into the atmosphere. There it acts as a greenhouse agent and is thirty times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, which gets much more attention from scientists and policy makers. So what can be done to nail this problem down? We need to figure out where the clathrates are and then use global ocean models to simulate the rate at which they are likely to hiccup. After several years of trying, our local Los Alamos climate team has just recently managed to get an okay to begin such a project.

Clathrate destabilization is in fact a good example of the many, greatly understudied but potentially significant climate phenomena that come under the general heading of "biogeochemistry". This may be defined as the study of everything happening near the surface of the planet that is not pure physics -in other words, all the interlocking biology, geology and chemistry of the ocean. atmosphere and continents. Biogeochemistry is a field of research just about to explode at the university and agency levels. Politicians and policy makers are beginning to realize that they cannot just study environmental change on an imaginary planet where there exists one element called carbon and one greenhouse gas constructed from it called CO2. Rather, they are compelled to consider the most complex chemical and biotic system known anywhere in the universe, the Earth, which is the place we happen to call home and are currently rebuilding in a major way. Biogeochemical feedbacks will have to be understood with relative completeness if we are to accurately predict the costs of altering and managing global climate.

An Introduction to the Science of Climate Change

Todd Ringler, LANL

Climate has always been a primary driver of civilization. Climate largely dictates what we wear, what we eat, what modes of transport we use and what type of dwellings we construct for shelter. Climate literally touches every facet of our lives. As such, climate has played a tremendous role in shaping the very fabric of our civilization.

Through millennia we have become accustomed to, and even comforted by, our relationship with the Earth's climate system. That relationship has always been a one-way relationship. The climate changes and we react to it. Even as we harnessed the power of nature by planting its river bottoms, damming its rivers, mining its ore and logging its forests we never fathomed the possibility that we could change the Earth's climate. How could we ever alter something so powerful and so immense as the climate by simply living our lives?

Through our own ingenuity and with gifts from nature, we have constructed our entire civilization on energy produced from oil, coal and natural gas. Unfortunately we are coming to realize that there are unintended consequences from our reliance on fossil fuels, mainly through the generation and emission of carbon dioxide. Once thought of as an innocuous gas, carbon dioxide is also a "greenhouse gas," meaning it traps heat within the atmosphere which, in turn, tends to warm the climate. So we are doing what was once considered unimaginable, we are changing the Earth's climate.

As we continue to study the Earth's climate system and how carbon dioxide is likely to alter it, we are continually amazed and humbled by the complexity and intricacy of the system. What starts as a small ripple in global temperature propagates into every part of the climate system where it can lead to consequences that far outsize the initial ripple. We are coming to appreciate the notion of "thresholds" in our climate system where a small changes acting over a long time, such as carbon dioxide emissions, leads to a large response that occurs over a very short time.

In this presentation I will try introduce the concept of global climate change along with the notion of thresholds. Examples of carbon-dioxide instigated thresholds in the climate system include rapid loss of Arctic sea ice, dramatic feedbacks driven by marine and terrestrial ecosystems and rapid sea-level rise due to melting ice sheets. I will touch on a few of these examples in an attempt to illustrate the two main points of the presentation. First, we have entered an era where we will determine the trajectory of the global climate system in ways we do not fully appreciate. And second, since the science of global climate change will continue to unfold for decades to come there are great opportunities for all of us, young and old.

What if the Ocean Conveyor Belt Stalled?

Wilbert Weijer, LANL

Imagine yourself drifting in the North Atlantic, attached to a bucket of water. You could be drifting in the middle of the ocean for months. Chances are that you will slowly drift towards the Caribbean, and enter one of the strongest currents on Earth, the Gulf Stream. Within a few weeks you will have been swept northward, past the coasts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. After passing Cape Hatteras, the current leaves the continent, and before you know it you will be in the middle of the Atlantic again. Now you have two choices. You can take the southern branch of the current, which will bring you straight across the Atlantic towards Africa. You might catch a glimpse of the Azores before you slowly drift south again towards the tropics. Or you can take the northerly branch. This will take you to Great Britain; from there you will drift north to Norway. Weather starts to deteriorate. The air gets colder, it starts to rain. Your call.

Suppose you took the northern branch. You might find yourself floating around in the Greenland Sea. Suddenly, your bucket of water will have cooled off so much that it becomes heavier than the water beneath you. It feels like the bottom drops out from under you, and you start to sink. You experienced a convection event, that will take you down to a depth of a few kilometers. Here, in the darkness of the abyss, you feel yourself slowly moving south again. You drift along the U.S. east coast again, but now in the opposite direction and several kilometers beneath the surface. You continue to drift, passing South America until suddenly you are swept eastward, you have entered the strong Antarctic Circumpolar Current. This majestic current flows around Antarctica, swept forward by the horrendous storms of the Southern Ocean. It might take you decades, and many trips around Antarctica, before you finally reach the surface again. If you happen to end up in the Atlantic Ocean, you will start to drift north again, first taking the Benguela Current to cross the South Atlantic from Africa to Brazil, then the North Brazil Current, across the Equator, until finally, hey! you are back in the Gulf Stream!

If you're still with me: congratulations! You just completed a loop of the global conveyor belt circulation! This ocean drift is very important for the climate system. When your water bucket cooled off in the Greenland Sea, it gave up its heat to the atmosphere, thereby heating the high northern latitudes, and in particular western Europe. There were times in the past when the water didn't get this far. During the ice ages, you would have sunk south of Iceland. Large parts of Europe, Asia and North America were covered by huge ice sheets, in part because the ocean couldn't get its heat as far north as it does today.

Climate scientists fear that there might be a hidden threshold in the conveyor belt. If the atmosphere heats up over the Greenland Sea, your bucket of water might not cool off enough to sink. In addition, chances are that the precipitation will increase as well. The extra freshwater in your bucket makes it even lighter in comparison to the cold and salty water underneath you. Without your bucket sinking, and drifting south, there is no place for new import of warm water. Global warming might thus slow down, and finally halt, the conveyor belt. If this happens, the impact will be felt mostly in the North Atlantic region; it will reduce or halt the trend of global warming. However, many consequences are hard to predict. What will happen to the sea ice in the Arctic? The ice sheets of Greenland? The North Atlantic fisheries that depend so strongly on the mild ocean temperatures? European agriculture? On the global scale, the impacts will be more subtle. The conveyor extracts a lot of heat and carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. Without this sink, will CO2 levels and global temperatures go through the roof? As the deep ocean warms and expands, will the resulting raising sea levels mean the end of New Orleans, parts of Florida, the Netherlands?

Download a PDF of this presentation (Hunke) [3 Mb].

Download a PDF of this presentation (Elliott) [4.4 Mb].

An Introduction to the Science of Climate Change

• Climate set for 'sudden shifts' - This article from the BBC is taken from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal and is a result of a study done by an international team of scientists who have studied what may cause shifts in our climate and believe "..that human induced global warming has begun to affect some aspects of our climate."
• Motivated by a Tax, Irish Spurn Plastic Bags - This article from the New York Times describes the effects of a 0.33¢ tax per plastic bag in Dublin, Ireland.
• Unnatural Preservation - This article from High Country News discusses the conundrums facing wildlife and public land-managers due to global warming.

Sea Ice, the Ocean's Fragile Cloak

• Antarctic Ice Loss Speeds Up, Nearly Matches Greenland Loss - An article from NASA
• Climate Science: Whither Antarctic Ice? - "Determining how much the Antararctic ice sheet may contribute to sea-level rise through global warming depends on an accurate and precise understanding of the mass balance of two broadly defined regions..."

A Hidden Threshold?

• Thermohaline circulation - A definition from Wikipedia
• Shutdown of thermohaline circulation - A definition from Wikipedia
• Gulf Stream slowdown? - This is an article from RealClimate that discusses the possibility of climate change in Europe due to a "Gulf Stream slowdown".
• The Source of Europe's Mild Climate - This article from American Scientist describes why Europe has milder winters.
• The Thermohaline Ocean Circulation - This is a fact sheet about thermohaline ocean circulation
• Are We on the Brink of a 'New Little Ice Age?' - This article from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution discusses the possibility of a periodical ice age that may be accelerated in its arrival due to global warming.

Ocean Circulation

• NASA Observes La Niña: This 'Little Girl' Makes a Big Impression - This article from NASA describes how La ñina forms and it's effects on the current weather in the United States.

About the Presenters

Elizabeth Hunke

I thought I would be a musician. My high school did not offer AP or advanced courses in science, mathematics, or anything else. Instead, I played in the band. I learned to type. I was pretty good in math class, but it was basic stuff. Physics was the hardest subject offered, and I managed to get through that because I could do the math. During my first year of college, I postponed choosing a particular degree program and took all kinds of courses, including math, science and music. I learned two important things: first that if I majored in music, my enjoyment would probably fizzle because it would be "work", and second that it would be much easier to make a living doing math or science, playing music for fun, than it would be to make a living playing music and doing math or science for fun.

My college guidance counselor, who was a math professor, introduced me to mathematical applications that were fascinating, things like population dynamics and the way drum heads vibrate. Then I got a summer job at AT&T Bell Labs, and that settled it: I wanted to work in a laboratory. I spent that entire summer sitting in front of a computer, trying to make a software program simulate the way certain atoms attach to other atoms in a potential superconductor. This was cutting-edge physics! But superconductors were inscrutable to me, and indeed much of physics beyond Newton's apple seemed rather esoteric. With a mathematics degree, I realized I'd have the basic skills to work on any scientific application that seemed interesting, and I could still work in a laboratory!

One day in Tucson, I listened to a professor give a mathematical description of how hurricanes work, and I thought I'd found my life's work. Even before moving to the desert, I thought clouds were beautiful and mysterious; weather has always been a critical element of my farming family's life. My Grandfather never missed a weather forecast on the TV. In Tennessee, remnant hurricanes produce deluges that turn gullies into roaring rivers, and my family never irrigated---they depended on the sky to rain the right amount at the right time of year. I was thrilled to study such a powerful aspect of the weather! This is the topic that became the focus of my graduate studies.

When I began looking for a job, climate change was just becoming a "hot" topic. Sea ice and hurricanes seem like very different phenomena, but the mathematical equations used to describe them are actually quite similar. As I had anticipated, the mathematical knowledge and skills that I developed in graduate school translated easily to my new job as a sea ice modeler for climate studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

I have been to Antarctica and taken samples and measurements of real sea ice, but I spend most of my time typing on a computer, creating simulations of how the ice grows and melts, crumples and moves. One of the things I love best about making music is the sensation of creating something beautiful from essentially nothing; not everyone would consider a computer program "beautiful," but I have gotten a lot of satisfaction from building our sea ice model. Designing a mathematical model for a particular scientific phenomenon and then writing a computer program to solve it is a creative process, and I am continually delighted when other scientists from all around the world express appreciation for my work, which enables them to design and carry out their own computer experiments to understand climate change.

As my understanding of global climate has grown, I have also enjoyed learning about how it affects day-to-day life on the local scale. As a pilot who likes to fly light aircraft around the West, I am interested in how climate changes affect the weather, particularly heat that makes for a bouncy ride or wind patterns that whiz me along to my destination. As a gardener coaxing tender plants to thrive alongside chamisa and cacti, I am fascinated by our desert precipitation cycle and how global climate changes affect our ability to live in a sustainable way on this landscape. Thus, my scientific career informs my daily life, and I still get to play my French horn all the time.

Craig Allen

I grew up in northeastern Wisconsin near Green Bay, the oldest of 6 kids. I have been lucky to have been part of a great family thru the years, I always felt close to my parents and have known all of my grandparents well into adulthood (one Grandma is still living on her farm at age 92). When I was 12 my Grandpa Allen bought a swampy, badly abused woodlot from a local farmer, and ever since my family has spent much time there, planting trees and thinning the forest, re-introducing wildflowers, picking blackberries and gardening for food, making firewood, and especially making maple syrup every spring in a perfectly small-scale family effort. Getting out in the woods often with my Grandpa was wonderful. He didn't have a lot of formal education and was a quiet soft-spoken man, but he knew so much about that place, and I learned a lot from him about the life of a forest, and about appreciating the natural world, the pleasures of simply being outdoors. Being involved in, and observing, the ecological recovery and healing of this land over the past almost 40 years has had a big influence on me. My Dad now cares for this land, and making maple syrup each March is the highlight of every spring for him, the key marker of the turning of the seasons. I'm sad to be missing it this year!

So, I've always loved trees and being outdoors, but had no idea about careers growing up, becoming a scientist certainly was not part of my vision then. After high school I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison and ending up majoring in geography as it gave me the freedom to study many things. At that time my aunt in Tucson convinced my Allen grandparents to retire in Bisbee, on the Arizona/Mexico border, and I started to visit the Southwest often. In 1979 I took my junior-year spring semester off from university to spend time in AZ with them, and on the return trip I stopped in Espanñola to volunteer at a school for 2 weeks that turned into 3 months, falling in love with a teacher there and the landscapes of northern New Mexico. Ever since I have basically been here, except when taking classes at universities, studying the ecology of these fascinating and beautiful landscapes.

I finished my B.S. in 1980 (and married Sharon), a M.S. in biogeography in 1984 also from Univ. of Wisconsin (thesis topic: "Montane grasslands in the landscape of the Jemez Mts., New Mexico"), and then went on to the Univ. of California at Berkeley to study forest ecology. Along the way I spent 3 months studying tropical ecology in Costa Rica (entirely in the field all over that lovely country, best schooling I ever did), and was going to do my Ph.D. research in extremely remote roadless mountain forests in southern Mexico (Oaxaca). But a major earthquake there and mostly becoming pregnant with our daughter Kiyana caused me to change plans, and so I came back here in 1986 to study changes in the ecology of the Jemez Mountains, supported by the National Park Service at Bandelier National Monument. When I graduated that turned into a job as an ecologist at Bandelier, and later the researchers were shifted to other agencies, so I have ended up working for the U.S. Geological Survey but my office and base of operations are still at Bandelier. Meanwhile we adopted twin sons, Ben and Nik, when they came into our lives at 3 weeks old they were only 4 pounds each, but now they're seniors at Los Alamos High and if you watch basketball you'll see them playing. For 22 years now, parenting and all of its pleasures and challenges has actually been the highest priority, and most satisfying, aspect of my life.

So, the Jemez Mts. have become my home, and I've been formally studying the ecology of northern New Mexico for over 25 years now (!!), it's amazing how fast the time flies, in part because it's been very busy and often a lot of fun. Although there have been some very hard times along the way too, professionally and personally, e.g., the Cerro Grande Fire that burned Los Alamos in 2000 was started as a prescribed burn by Bandelier in part from the advice of a certain ecologist there, and despite years of effort eventually my marriage failed, although Sharon and I remain solid co-parents and good friends. The past 10 years I've been increasingly focused on the effects of climate change, and comparing what's happening here to other parts of the Earth, working with many colleagues around the world (e.g., the past 3 years intensely with people in Spain). Overall, life as an ecological scientist has been very good. I just turned 50 this year so I suppose I'm not truly young anymore, but I'm still energized (most of the time at least!) by the pleasures of learning new things every day and having chances to make a difference in this world.

Scott Elliott

Scott Elliott of the Los Alamos ocean model team has had an obscure and checkered scientific career driven mainly by his desire to remain married to the same woman while simultaneously living in the Rocky Mountains. This has confined his professional opportunities largely to projects undertaken by remote and mysterious Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Lab is located deep in the Jemez range of Northern New Mexico and this is as close as he could get to UNM, the institution where his wife works as a biology professor. Elliott and this lovely lady have two smart, wonderful kids now moving through high school. They are a great joy to him, but basically they haven't got the slightest interest in what he does for a living. He nevertheless clings to the notion that his work is important and fascinating, and hopes perhaps that some of the Café participants will agree.

Since coming to Los Alamos, Elliott has sometimes been assigned to projects which are heavily defense or national security-oriented. He always participates with a smile and this goes to show what a flexible guy he is. Examples include the study of nerve agent release into city air following the Tokyo subway Aum Shinrikyo incident, or satellite detection of North Korean missile launches. But Elliott's heart is really in global change, and he is thus extremely thankful now to be working on the very topical and relevant issues presented by climate modeling. His original training is in chemistry but since joining the Los Alamos ocean simulation team he has become a self-taught, seat of the pants biologist as well. He performs research on geological scale cycling of the elements using these skills and hence can be termed a "biogeochemist". In his current job description Elliott is almost entirely unique. He is one of only two people in the world currently performing marine biology simulations at a nuclear weapons laboratory, and to make matters worse it is located on top of a mountain, in the middle of the desert, a thousand miles from the nearest body of water larger than a bathtub. Clearly Elliott's career to date has been somewhat nonstandard. But his colleagues on the Los Alamos ocean model team are so good that he is nevertheless quite productive and has a tremendous amount of fun.

Although he has no real oceanographic training, Elliott is proud to note that he has spent significantly more time in seawater over the course of his life than any of the formally educated specialists he interacts with on a professional basis. This is because when he was young, he happened to be a dedicated surfer and body surfer (dude!). To become proficient at these sports you have to spend many hours every day up to your neck in the ocean, summer after summer from the time you learn to swim until you go to college and get serious about life. Encounters with jelly fish, porpoises and whales are not uncommon, hence Elliott's fondness for the marine biology. You look down under your chin beneath the warm California sun and see lots of sparkly little dust particles whirling about mixed with chunks of bizarre green goo. So there's the geochemistry. Take that, oceanography snobs.

Todd Ringler

It is hard for me to imagine my life without science. Whether at home, at work, in the woods or strolling around town, trying to figure out how things work is always a part of my day. My life would be much poorer and the world would be much less exciting without this curiosity.

I grew up in rural Appalachia. My dad is a civil engineer and my mom a teacher. School was always important in our family. Thinking back to those childhood days, the natural curiosity is obvious. I can recall trying to figure out how to build a stronger dam to hold back more of the water flowing down the an ephemeral stream, or annoying my parents to help me build a better paper airplane that would fly farther and longer, or coaxing my dad to explain to me what "meters per second squared" meant and why was it important to building model rockets. The fact that I did not have the tools or knowledge to understand these things irritated me greatly, but it also energized me. The more I learned, the bigger and more exciting the world became. And that excitement continues to this day.

I worked my way through an undergraduate program in aerospace engineering at West Virginia University. I spent each summer working with a small crew to build, from beginning to end, a single home. Building houses let me see real-world applications to many of those college courses. One of the senior crew members (and former high school math teacher) once said in a moment of true frustration that I was "impossible to teach". While he did not intend it as a compliment, I took it as such. Finding the answers on my own has always been the most rewarding part of science.

As a senior in college I was astonished when a professor told me that engineering departments actually paid salaries to their graduate students. The thought of getting paid to learn seemed just too good to be true. So my fate was sealed: gradate school at Princeton and Cornell, a research scientist position at Colorado State, then on to Los Alamos National Laboratory. The path from aerospace engineering to climate science was mostly a gradual transition. It turned out that for me the most exciting part of aerospace engineering was the fluid motion and the ability to simulate that fluid motion on computers. Once I realized I could meld my curiosity of fluid motion with my love for the natural world, a career in atmospheric science was clear. The transition and broadening from atmospheric science to climate science has been driven mainly by the problem of global climate change.

Global climate change provides us all with a problem of enormous scientific and social complexity. So even though my passion for science is largely a selfish pursuit, the fact that I can work on a small part of this huge problem is really icing on the cake. Being a scientist working on a problem that is so centrally relevant to society is truly a dream come true.

Wilbert Weijer

I grew up in the Netherlands, a small country in Europe bordering the North Sea. Traditionally the Dutch have a strong relation with the sea. On the one hand they are constantly struggling to keep the water out, as large parts of the country lie below sea level. The Dutch reclaimed large areas from the water (polders) by first building dikes around an area, and then pumping it dry using wind mills. A lot of Dutch actually live on the bottom of the sea! This makes the nation very vulnerable to sea level rise. On the other hand, the Dutch became masters of the sea, as they developed into a successful sea-faring nation. The maritime tradition of the Netherlands strongly appealed to me when I grew up. I couldn't stop dreaming of the elegant sailing ships that once sailed the oceans, visiting exotic places on far-away continents or islands. I figured that by studying the ocean, if nothing else I could make these travels in my mind...

I started studying Physical Oceanography in 1989 at Utrecht University. Coursework included an oceanographic expedition to the Bay of Biscay. Here we learned several techniques to observe internal waves in the ocean. The expedition was a great learning experience, as it gave me a first close-up look of what the ocean looks like underneath the surface. Still, I became more and more interested in theoretical aspects of the ocean circulation. Based on simple principles like conservation of mass and energy, mathematical equations can be developed that allow oceanographers to study the ocean from their office, without getting cold, wet, or sea sick. Even better, these models can be solved by computers. So you won't get tired, either (if only that were true...!).

After I received my degrees in theoretical Physical Oceanography, I worked in Utrecht for a few more years as postdoctoral researcher. After that, I spent several years as researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. Scripps is one of the oldest oceanographic institutions in the United States, as it was established in 1903. It is situated on bluffs overlooking the Pacific. The ocean had finally brought me to an exotic place after all! I studied the circulation in the Southern Ocean, which is the only ocean that encircles the entire globe. Unhindered by continents, it behaves differently from the other oceans. It is here that I learned to appreciate what observations are telling us about the seas. I started working with so-called remote-sensing data: several satellites are equipped with instruments that measure, for instance, the height of the sea surface, or its temperature. From this information, you can infer how the ocean flows.

After a few years I found an opportunity to work in the climate modeling group of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Here in Los Alamos we are working on ocean models that can be coupled to models of the atmosphere and sea-ice. These coupled climate models are used to study the current climate system, and to predict how it may change when more and more carbon-dioxide is released into the atmosphere. So that is what I am doing here as oceanographer in the high-desert of New Mexico: developing ocean models, and using them to learn what drives the ocean and how it influences climate.

Imagine a world in which children are raising children because their parents have died. Such is the situation in much of Africa today because of the scourge of HIV/AIDS. Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is responsible for one of the largest epidemics of modern history. Today 40 million people are infected worldwide and more than 3 million die every year. In the country where I was born, Mozambique, one in six adults is infected. In neighboring Botswana, life expectancy is only 34 years; in 1985 it was 65. Most young adults in these countries die of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), leaving behind a rising number of orphans. Even in the USA, there are more than 1 million people infected with HIV. We urgently need a HIV vaccine, yet, it has remained out of reach after 25 years of research.

AIDS is the late stage of HIV infection, which occurs when the immune system is so weak that it can not fight the many infectious bugs that we are all exposed to daily. When people are sick with HIV, catching common infections, such as pneumonia, can be deadly. The ideal way to combat this epidemic would be to integrate prevention, vaccination and treatment. These are all difficult tasks. Due to HIV virus' modes of transmission (sexual activity and injection drug use), prevention involves changes of behavior that are very difficult to accomplish. Treatment is still very expensive, at least hundreds of dollars per person per year. In some of the poorer countries, a family can not afford more than a few dollars for health care per year. So the best hope for eliminating HIV is a vaccine.

The reason children get vaccinated is because vaccines are one of the best health measures ever developed. In the richer countries, vaccines have almost eliminated childhood diseases; indeed, smallpox has been totally eradicated worldwide! But so far it has proven exceedingly difficult to develop a vaccine for HIV infection. This is because: 1) HIV mutates rapidly, so a vaccine will have to cope with its variability; 2) HIV infects and destroys the immune system, which vaccines are supposed to prime to fight disease; 3) HIV in general is not very susceptible to the effect of antibodies, the basis for the success of many other vaccines. In this Café, we will explore the science of HIV and why it is so important to develop a vaccine for it. Success in developing such a vaccine will represent one of the greatest achievements of medical research in human history.

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About the Presenter

When I was a teenager, I walked to school everyday. I remember my imagination wandering widely in those 20 minutes. Often I was wondering how things worked. In those days, I was especially interested in astronomy. We had a local astronomy club, and would go out camping to remote places to see the marvels of the Universe. One very cold, damp December night—I was 17—we went out to see the Geminids meteor shower. Out there, in the middle of nowhere, as I lay gazing at the show of lights streaking the dark sky, it came to me: I would go to college to study physics. Achieving that was not easy, since good grades were required for acceptance. But I had a math teacher who pushed us to study hard, and although at the time it seemed all too much, it really helped me get into college. My physics and chemistry teacher, too. Some people thought she was crazy, but she was so excited about science and the world, and so interested in her students, that she really inspired me. In college I learned a lot about the physical world, but also had a lot of fun with the tight knit group of friends that I made. Long days in the lab were followed by late night hamburgers at the local diner. Many of my friends, like me, wanted to be scientists. The amazing thing is that all these people, from all over Portugal, rich and poor, men and women, outgoing and shy, with good grades or average, actually became scientists in all kinds of research areas: astronomy, particle physics, biology, solar energy, satellites, environment… One of them even became a CSI for the Portuguese police!

In my senior year at university, as I studied more and more esoteric areas of physics, I realized that the physics that I liked the most was that of our daily lives. I did not know what to do after graduation, and felt lost. I developed a nervous twitch in my eye. Almost without noticing it, I postponed my real decision by getting a job at an international management consulting company. I worked there for two years, learning about the business of banks, insurance companies, television and supermarkets. This job paid well, was prestigious, and gave me a clear career path. My parents were really happy! But slowly it dawned on me that my dream of becoming a scientist was slipping away. So I quit my job and applied for a fellowship to the University of Oxford in England to study HIV with Martin Nowak.

I had gone to visit Oxford, where some of my good friends from university were studying. I nervously appeared unannounced at my future supervisor's door. I can clearly see his office, which was in this really ugly, dark building, the Zoology Department, which recently was described as “a forbidding concrete structure that looks like an Eastern European police station.” My intention was to try to meet Nowak and ask for a position in his group. He looked me over coolly and said, “OK, we can talk for five minutes, because I need to go soon.” He really meant, “Who is this person and why is he bothering me?” We ended up talking for more than a hour. He introduced me to other researchers in his group. His excitement about his work spilled over to me. That was another turning point in my winding path to science. I ended up doing my doctoral work with him. The lesson I learned in leaving business and returning to science was that you should always follow your passion!

Graduate school was even harder work—and even more fun—than university. Work and fun are not incompatible! I never looked back. When I graduated, I came to Los Alamos National Laboratory, which I had learned was one of the best places in the world to do my research. Here I work with an amazing group of people that have a passion to understand infectious diseases and the immune system, and realize that this work can have impact in improving lives across the world. But what strikes me the most is the diversity of people I encounter. Nothing seems to be a barrier to becoming a scientist. Some people are older, some have children to care for, some are from far away, some do not speak English that well, some are well off, some just get by, some have parents who are scientists, some have parents that never finished high school.

The purpose of my research is to understand how different virus, such as HIV and hepatitis viruses, work and how the body fights them. I collaborate with scientists from all over the world. I develop models and computer simulations to help interpret data from experiments and clinical results conducted in New York, Thailand, Australia, and elsewhere around the world. I work hard, but I love to take off and go hiking or skiing or have my friends over for dinner. I love cooking—but only for other people!

I am a scientist simply because I love to learn new things and I like to know how things work. I have learned that science gives us a great perspective on the world, and empowers us to have real impact on the issues we care most about.