Florida Citizens for Science

Scientists dig bugs to help lakes’ health

TAVARES — Like a fortune-teller poring over leaves in a tea cup, Sandi Hanlon-Breuer studies the worms and insect larvae living in the bottom of lakes to see the future.

The Lake County Water Authority biologist has a giant collection of creepy-crawlers she has culled from the bottom of two of Central Florida’s biggest lake systems, the Clermont and Harris chains, during the past year.

They tell her what has been going on in the lakes and offer clues about whether they should continue to stay healthy. It’s all part of a biological checkup of the two chains — the latest weapon the environmental scientists can use to protect water quality.

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If the lake is healthy and has good water quality, the samples will have relatively few bugs to pick through. But the healthy lakes usually have a wide diversity of species — often including larvae of mayflies, caddisflies and dragonflies in addition to snails, crayfish, leeches and other species.

Lakes with poor water quality tend to be home mostly to aquatic worms and midge larvae and have little diversity.

It’s not a job for the squeamish.

Most of the bugs are dead by the time she gets around to studying them, but a few are still moving.

“You get some that are still crawling around, and that’s a problem,” said Hanlon-Breuer, who has a master’s degree in lake science. “This isn’t anything I learned in college.”

Research on the manatee shows that it’s no dummy. I especially loved the part about not liking fish and so being hard to motivate. Does that make them smarter than dolphins since they can’t be bribed so easily?

The manatee, sluggish, squinty-eyed and bewhiskered, is more likely to have its rotund bulk compared to “a sweet potato,” its homely, almost fetal looks deemed “prehistoric” — terms applied by startled New Yorkers this month to a Florida manatee that made an unexpected appearance in the Hudson River.

Cleverness is unhesitatingly ascribed to the dolphin. But the manatee is not seen leaping through hoops or performing somersaults on command, and even scientists have suspected it may not be the smartest mammal in the sea. Writing in 1902, a British anatomist, Grafton Elliot Smith, groused that manatee brains — tiny in proportion to the animals’ bodies and smooth as a baby’s cheek — resembled “the brains of idiots.”

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Far from being slow learners, manatees, it turns out, are as adept at experimental tasks as dolphins, though they are slower-moving and, having no taste for fish, more difficult to motivate. They have a highly developed sense of touch, mediated by thick hairs called vibrissae that adorn not just the face, as in other mammals, but the entire body, according to the researchers’ recent work.

And where earlier scientists saw in the manatee’s brain the evidence of deficient intelligence, Dr. Reep sees evolution’s shaping of an animal perfectly adapted to its environment.

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But he also suspects that rather than the manatee’s brain being unusually small for its body, the situation may be the other way around: that its body, for sound evolutionary reasons, has grown unusually large in proportion to its brain.

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For now, the question of how intertwined the sensory abilities of manatees might be remains unanswered. Yet even what is known reveals a degree of complexity that argues against labeling them as sweet but dumb — peaceable simpletons.

Dr. Domning of Howard could not agree more.

“They’re too smart to jump through hoops the way those dumb dolphins do,” he said.

Here is a nice story about famous underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau’s grandson doing his best to live up to the family name during a visit with manatees in central Florida.

Five years ago, intent on continuing the family legacy, the junior Philippe Cousteau and his sister, Alexandra, created EarthEcho International, an educational foundation dedicated to environmental concerns, in honor of their father.

The Blue Spring trip this past Tuesday was a part of that crusade. The very existence of the state park that encompasses and protects the spring and the manatees is largely due to an episode of Jacques Cousteau’s television series in 1971.

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“This story is not just about manatees,” he says. “They are an incredibly gentle, beautiful animal, and they have as much right as we do to live on this earth. But this spring is at the very heart of Florida’s ecosystem. It sustains us — our spirit, our economy, our future, even our past. It has been handed down to us. Who are we to destroy it?”

Meanwhile, we lose a science legend:

Physicist James A. Van Allen, a leader in space exploration who discovered the radiation belts surrounding the Earth that now bear his name, died Wednesday. He was 91.

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In a career that stretched over more than a half-century, Van Allen designed scientific instruments for dozens of research flights, first with small rockets and balloons, and eventually with space probes that traveled to distant planets and beyond.

This is a nice article about retirees volunteering time to help foster an interest in science in kids at the Orlando Science Center.

“I love kids. I love to watch the faces as I tell the stories,” said Morris, 77, a retired nurse who is one of the Science Center’s Gee Whizdom storytellers and a volunteer for 30 years at the center.

The program, which debuted this summer, uses retirees to tell stories to illustrate the mystery and magic of science and to inspire and motivate children to learn.

Gee Whizdom encourages and enables volunteers with strong scientific and mathematical backgrounds to use their own experiences and knowledge to teach children.

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Science is all about imagination at work, said Kim Hunter, vice president of participant experience at the center.

She asked what would happen “if scientists didn’t think ‘What if?’ or ‘What if we took a trip through the solar system?’ First you imagine it, then you do it.”

Remember the Muppets’ Pigs in Space? Good memories … good memories.

Anyway, an experiment concerning the effects of space on immune systems involved sending flies on the last shuttle flight. This article is a nice summary of what that experiment was all about and how science works.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — Nearly 100 left the launch pad but thousands returned.Although living quarters were tight, huddled inside Plexiglas containers, the tiny fruit flies with pin-sized brains gorged themselves on sugar, multiplied by the hundreds and morphed from larvae into adulthood during their 13-day journey to space.

Could these tiny pests teach humans something new?

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The insects’ task was simple — pass molecular clues on to scientists about the stress their tiny bodies underwent during their time in outer space.

“The experiment was their immune system,” said Sharmila Bhattacharya, research scientist in the NASA-sanctioned project. “We are looking at changes (in the immune system) after a long time in space, to see if they have increased levels of proteins to fight infections.”

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“We anticipate that the stressful situation they were in will affect the immune system,” Bhattacharya said. “By using the fruit fly, its life cycle is quicker so we can study an animal that develops most of its life in space.”

A second reason the group chose the fruit fly is the insect’s immune system is simple to understand. The study, which only looked at the immune system and not the behavior of the fly in space, will be completed in about two years.

Researcher Laura Higgins said the flies seemed fairly normal upon their return.

“They didn’t act weird or anything,” she said while drawing blood from the species last month. “They didn’t come back with two heads, but then neither do astronauts.”

Florida Atlantic summer program schools students on sciences

This summer, high school students from Jupiter learned their ABCs: the ABCs of drug discovery, obesity and regulation of food intake.

Those were among the topics discussed in the summer science program at Florida Atlantic University, which ended Friday on a similar note: discussing basic biomedical research and advanced technologies.

The high school juniors and seniors enrolled in one of three honors college courses: biotechnology; bioethics; and evolution, psychology and human nature. They also got to participate in afternoon lectures led by FAU Honors College faculty and Scripps Florida scientists.

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Also discussed was a 2004 FDA report that revealed an “urgent need” for four areas of study: genomics, proteomics, imaging technology and bioinformatics. The last soon will become the single most in-demand career in the biomedical field, Orf predicted.

“Fifteen years ago it didn’t even exist,” he said. “Now we are generating so much biological data we need people to translate it.”

According to Orf, when tested in math and science, fourth-graders in the United States place in the top 10 percent compared with the rest of the world. When tested again in eighth grade, they score in the bottom 30 percent, and by high school graduation their results place them in the bottom 10 percent.

“We are losing kids in middle school, and most of the kids graduating think of science as dissecting frogs,” he said.

Female astronaut on a mission

CAPE CANAVERAL - Pam Melroy plans to board shuttle Atlantis a year from now and then do something only one other woman ever has done: Strap into the left seat.

Melroy, 45, nonetheless says she is astounded by the response she has received since NASA announced that she would become only the second woman to command a U.S. space mission.

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The retired astronaut, however, said she is troubled by the fact that Melroy is the only female pilot-astronaut left at NASA.

“Pam Melroy and Susan Still-Kilrain were the last two women pilots we hired, and that was in 1995. Eleven years ago, and we haven’t hired another woman-pilot,” Collins said.

“There aren’t that many out there that are qualified to do the job. So one of our goals is to encourage young women to choose careers in engineering, math and science,” she said.

“I encourage them to do that because (being an pilot-astronaut) is extremely exciting, challenging and I would say a very worthy job. So I would like to see more young women who are qualified, and I would like to see more young women apply,” Collins added.

Girls go bowling for science

Alyssa Show stood for a moment - poised and focused.

Then she unleashed a black bowling ball straight ahead and nearly all the pins tumbled down in a flash. The 14-year-old from Crawfordville threw her fists above her head when the thunderous result rang out, followed by cheers from her group.

To someone watching, it looked like a group of girls were having a good time bowling Thursday afternoon at Seminole Bowl on Tennessee Street. In reality, they were conducting experiments that contained four main steps: come up with a question, design an experiment, collect data and come to a conclusion.

It was one of many activities 16 girls entering the eighth and ninth grades have been introduced to during SciGirls summer camp. Since Monday, the all-girls camp has exposed them to experiments conducted by local scientists, the feeding habits of animals at the Tallahassee Museum of History and Natural Sciences and GPS as a means to conduct research on trees.

The goal of the camp is to turn girls on to science and to help them explore it as a possible career.

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Alex Wells, 14, had difficulty Thursday deciding which activity has been the best. She thought about it for a second, then said she enjoyed the “chemistry fraternity” conducted at FSU, where stations were set up to display different types of chemistry.

The girls also had a chance to feel a chill beyond their imagination when they stepped into a freezer that was minus 20 degrees Celsius at the Antarctic Research Facility at FSU.

“It was pretty cold, especially when you have on shorts,” Alex said, giggling.

They also took turns tasting “nitrogen ice cream” and learned how nitrogen plays a role in cooling magnets like the high-powered ones used at the Mag Lab, Dixon said.

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Jayshree Balakrishnan, 13, said the camp helped strengthen her dream to be a veterinarian.

“It really has been fun,” Jayshree said. “Some of the kids I told about the camp said it was going to be nerdy. But it really has been fun and hands on.”

Teachers get to fly weightless

Northrop Grumman Corp. is giving teachers a chance to experience weightlessness.

The aerospace giant is sponsoring what it calls “Weightless Flights of Discovery” — a program that recently began at Kennedy Space Center, with future flights scheduled in other states.

The program involves parabolic flights on planes in which the aircraft goes up and down in bell-shaped curves to simulate weightlessness. About 240 teachers, including some from Brevard County, have enrolled in the program to take the flights.

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Among those that who flew out of the space center was Cathy Hardesty, a middle school math and science teacher from Sebring.

“No textbook — not even the greatest science teachers of all time — can really open a student’s eyes wide to principles such as Newton’s laws of motion,” Hardesty said. “For my students to see their own teacher on video conducting experiments in zero gravity lets them know that there are no limits to what they can do, including becoming a scientist or engineer.”

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The program “is part of the company’s commitment to help NASA and the nation create the well-educated, technically trained work force needed to undertake and sustain a successful human space exploration program,” said Tom Vice, sector vice president for business development at Northrop Grumman’s Integrated Systems Division.

Is there anything better than such a glowing story about fun science done by talented kids and young adults?

“Geek Responsibly.”

That’s the unofficial motto of Team 1902 — Exploding Bacon, also sometimes known as Winter Park Robotics Inc., easily identified by its team emblem, a pig on a rocket.

Welcome to a brave new world of science and technology competition where everything is either amazing, astounding, incomprehensible or unbelievable.

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This is a group of students from Winter Park High, University High, Lake Highland Prep and Glenridge Middle School, assisted by a few University of Central Florida mentors and a couple of engineers. They designed and built a programmable entity that can do assigned tasks, that can react to electronically transmitted commands and that has rudimentary judgment skills.

That’s only a few doors down the technological hall from R2-D2 and C-3PO.
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You could tell that in addition to this being a learning experience, they had the time of their lives. That alone would qualify this as a success story, but that alone is only the introduction.

Not only did they manage to build a robot, but they also built one that managed to kick a little national and international butt, bringing home the bacon for Team 1902 from FIRST Robotics Competition events. The team’s honors include Florida Regional Finalist, Florida Regional Rookie All-Star, Florida Regional Highest Rookie Seed, Lone Star Regional Rookie Inspiration, Lone Star Regional Highest Rookie Seed, Lone Star Regional Gracious Professionalism Award, and World Championship Division Finalist (Archimedes Award).

Exploding Bacon, which was pulled together only about two weeks before this year’s competitions began, is approximately the 15th-ranked team in the world.

Ratings vary, but being anywhere close to that is impressive in a world that includes Japan and China and other such places where the kids are supposed be smarter than us and outwork our kids. That’s 15th among 1,185 teams representing 20,000 to 30,000 students.

Why don’t we all know more about these kids than we know about Michelle Wie, Dwight Howard and Britney Spears?

Website: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a multinational non-profit organization, that aspires to transform culture, making science, math, engineering, and technology as cool for kids as sports are today.