This week’s Research Unplugged tackled American college traditions, always a popular topic in these parts! Our speaker? Acclaimed folklorist Simon Bronner, Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Folklore at Penn State Harrisburg, and Director of their Doctoral Program in American Studies.
Continue reading What’s the rush? Research Unplugged tackles college traditions
I recently had the opportunity to visit Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, when I attended the National Association of Science Writers annual conference. There are many perks to attending the NASW conference — including meeting amazing science writers and learning about the great research going on at other universities around the country. But one of my favorite perks is the field trips!
This year as part of the field trip portion of the conference, I visited the newest facility built by Medicago Inc. with 20 or so other science writers. While I had a general idea of what I was getting into — checking out a flu vaccine plant — I was in for a treat at this super-efficient greenhouse and laboratory.
When we rolled up on our tour bus, we were quickly escorted into a conference room where I swear a version of the cast of The Big Bang Theory awaited us. Everyone was friendly and seemingly eager to tell us all about what they do. And no wonder. They’re pretty much going to save the world.
Medicago — rhymes with Chicago — was basically given a challenge by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency): create and perfect a process to produce 10 million doses of a pandemic influenza vaccine. Oh wait, and not just that — the process needs to take no more than a month.
My new Medicago friends rose to the challenge.
The most common way to develop a flu vaccine is to incubate the virus in a fertilized chicken egg. Medicago is using tobacco plants. The plants can be created more quickly and the virus incubation time in the tobacco plant is less than in the egg.
Medicago succeeded, and received a $21 million dollar grant from DARPA. So should the nation face a flu pandemic anytime soon, DARPA will call on them to produce these vaccines, stat.
We got a tour of their very new facilities — they were completed about a year ago — and saw the greenhouse and the equipment used to infiltrate the tobacco plants with the virus.
I might have been exaggerating a bit when I said Medicago is going to save the world, but their technology is pretty neat. And I think it’s awesome that we can do something healthy and possibly even life-saving with tobacco.
What will researchers come up with next?
A bunch of the Penn State Research Communications team attended the National Association of Science Writers annual conference at Raleigh, N.C. last weekend.
Unfortunately, for me, it was an abbreviated conference. With Sandy bearing down on the East Coast and with me terrified of being stuck in the Detroit airport — no offense Motor City! – I decided to bug out early.
Continue reading Zombies, Taxis and Science: Lessons From a Science Writer’s Conference
As the East Coast tracked the approach of Hurricane Sandy, Research on the Road beat a path westward to bring acclaimed Beatles scholar Kenneth Womack to Santa Monica where he gave a talk on Sunday to our enthusiastic Los Angeles area alumni chapter.
The venue couldn’t have been more appropriate for Ken’s talk on “50 Years of The Beatles.” The Britannia is a popular restaurant/pub with Penn State alumni (and an eclectic mix of local hipsters and British ex-pats) in the L.A. area and has Beatles’ memorabilia adorning the walls.
Continue reading Research on the Road brings The Beatles to L.A.
On a good day in the science writing business it’s not so much the breakthroughs that impress us. It’s the process, and the people.
Back in 2004, when Penn State’s Moses Chan and his graduate student Eun-Seong Kim reported the “probable observation of a supersolid helium phase” in a letter to Nature, they made headlines around the world. It was, as Science News noted this week, “one of the most exciting physics discoveries in recent years.”
What Chan and Kim had apparently discovered, after all, was nothing less than a brand new state of matter, “a mysterious substance that could float through ordinary solids like a ghost through walls,” according to physicsworld.com. Science News’ Alexandra Witze calls it “the stuff Nobel prizes are made of.”
In the eight years since, Chan, one of the University’s most distinguished (and most personable) researchers, has been attempting to repeat that amazing result. So have his colleagues in other condensed-matter labs around the world: trying either to uphold Chan’s finding or to knock it flat: this, after all, is the sober majesty of science.
Over the years, Witzke reports, there have been some experiments that seemed to confirm Chan’s observation, and others that did not, but none that has been found to be conclusive. John Beamish, a physicist at the University of Alberta in Canada, whose own work cast doubts on Chan’s result, notes, “It was continually surprising to those of us working in the field just how hard it was to confirm or disprove the existence of supersolidity.”
Chan himself went back to the drawing board relentlessly, rebuilding his experimental apparatus again and again, trying to eliminate any possibility of distorting effects. Repeating the initial experiment.
Last week, in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, he announced his new findings. They do not confirm his earlier conclusion, but reverse it. It was not the behavior of a supersolid that he and Kim observed in 2004, Chan now contends, but the ordinary stiffening of helium at extremely low temperatures.
I find Chan’s accompanying comments, reported in physicsworld.com, to be quietly compelling. He expresses, understandably, a sense of disappointment. It was “embarrassing, in a way,” he says, that the reinterpretation had taken so long. “It would have been nice,” he adds simply, [if supersolidity had held up], “but Mother Nature had her own way.”
Maybe all this is just par for the course. Maybe it is (or ought to be) less than remarkable. Moses Chan surely doesn’t need me to commend him, at any rate. But if we science writers are—and well we should be—ever quick to sound the claxons when a researcher cheats or cuts corners, I think it’s also worth noting when one of them so clearly models diligence and integrity.
Chan’s colleagues apparently agree. In the physicsworld.com article, Beamish praises him for pursuing the science “with amazing energy, even when his new experiments disagreed with his interpretation of his initial experiments.” An accompanying photo of Chan, lecturing recently in University Park, includes a fitting caption. It reads:
“Moses Chan shows how science should be done.”