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Tons of BP Oil Is Still on the Bottom of the Gulf of Mexico

by JoeannCoghlan Posted on October 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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We all saw the images of oil-coated birds and shorelines in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. These were the most visible impacts of the catastrophe, but much of the oil that gushed from the busted Macondo wellhead 5,000 feet underwater never made it to the surface. Of the estimated 5 million barrels that spilled, approximately 2 million stayed trapped in the deep ocean. And up to 31 percent of that oil is now lying on the ocean floor, according to a new study.

Based on an analysis of sea-floor sediment samples collected from the the Gulf of Mexico, geochemists at the University of California-Santa Barbara were able to offer the first clues about the final resting place of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil. Their results were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The data, which was gathered as part of the ongoing federal damage assessment, shows “a smokingly clear signal, like a bulls-eye” around the Macondo well, said lead author David Valentine.

When oil first began to shoot out of the broken well, some 2 million barrels’ worth broke up into microscopic droplets before reaching the surface and became suspended in the deep ocean, Valentine said. His goal was to discover the fate of that oil, beyond the reach of any cleanup efforts, four years after the spill. The researchers combed through the sediment samples for traces of hopane, a chemical compound found in crude oil that doesn’t break down over time. Hopane was also used as a indicator of oil distribution following the Exxon-Valdez spill in 1989.

To test whether traces of hopane originated from the Macondo blowout—rather than from a natural seep or some other well—Valentine scrutinized both where they appeared in individual sediment cores and how concentrations changed at varying distances from the well. Both indicators strongly implicate the Macondo well, the study found. Close to the well, hopane concentrations were very high in the top half-inch of sediment, a sign that the chemical had been deposited recently and in great volumes. Even more telling was the spacial distribution: Within 25 miles of the well, hopane concentrations were 10 times higher than outside that boundary, Valentine said. A further clue was the distinctive splatter pattern in which hopane concentrations were found, which matched the pattern that would be expected from oil leaking from a well.

Add it all up, the study finds, and between 4 and 31 percent of the oil that originally was suspended in the deep ocean (roughly 80,000 to 620,000 barrels) has now come to rest on the ocean floor. The remainder, Valentine said, is still unaccounted for: It could still be suspended in the water column; it could have risen to the surface; it could have been eaten by bacteria, etc.

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Tons of BP Oil Is Still on the Bottom of the Gulf of Mexico

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Meet the First Woman to Win the "Nobel Prize of Mathematics"

by bloksaggfdflajn Posted on August 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman in 78 years to be awarded the prestigious Fields Medal, considered the highest honor in mathematics. She was selected for “stunning advances in the theory of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.”

The Fields Medal is awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union to outstanding mathematicians under 40 who show promise of future achievement. With the announcement of Mirzakhani and this year’s other awardees—Arthur Avila, Manjul Bhargava, and Martin Hairer—there now have been 54 male and 1 female medalists.

Many hope Mirzakhani’s Fields medal is a sign of change to come. “I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians,” she said in a press release. Christiane Rousseau, vice president of the International Mathematics Union, told the Guardian this is “an extraordinary moment” and “a celebration for women,” comparable to Marie Curie’s barrier-breaking Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry in the early 20th century.

And as Canadian math professor Izabella Laba wrote: “Mirzakhani’s selection does exactly nothing to convince me that women are capable of doing mathematical research at the same level as men. I have never had any doubt about that in the first place…What I take from it instead is that we as a society, men and women alike, are becoming better at encouraging and nurturing mathematical talent in women, and more capable of recognizing excellence in women’s work.”

Mirzakhani’s accomplishment is all the more groundbreaking in light of the well-documented disadvantages and biases women face in math and science. According to the National Academy of Sciences, there are no significant biological differences that could explain women’s low representation in STEM academic faculty and leadership positions (although that doesn’t stop prominent people from making claims otherwise.) Instead, NAS says we can thank bias and academia’s “outmoded institutional structures.”

For example, in a 2008 Yale study, professors were asked to rate fictional applicants for a lab manager position. When given an application with a male name at the top, professors rated the candidate more competent and hirable than when given an otherwise identical form with a female name. This bias was found in both male and female faculty members.

And that’s not all women in STEM fields have to contend with: A July report found that a full 64 percent of women in various scientific fields were sexually harassed while doing fieldwork.

These disadvantages—along with a history of men getting the credit for discoveries and inventions made by women—help explain why only 9 to 16 percent of tenure-track positions in math-intensive fields at the top 100 US universities are held by women. According to the American Mathematical Society, the share of women earning Ph.D.s in math has remained stagnant for decades:

(Additional AMS data used in the above chart found here.)

Mirzakhani, who grew up in Iran before earning her Ph.D. at Harvard and becoming a professor at Stanford, told the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2008 that she did not initially realize her strength in math: “I don’t think that everyone should become a mathematician, but I do believe that many students don’t give mathematics a real chance. I did poorly in math for a couple of years in middle school; I was just not interested in thinking about it. I can see that without being excited mathematics can look pointless and cold.”

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Meet the First Woman to Win the "Nobel Prize of Mathematics"

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Humans Have Tripled Mercury in the Oceans

by Perry67Yfbpuqm Posted on August 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, researchers released the first comprehensive study of mercury in the world’s oceans over time according to depth. Their finding: Since the Industrial Revolution, the burning of fossil fuels and some mining activities have resulted in a more than three times increase in mercury in the upper 100 meters (about 330 feet) of the ocean. There, it builds up in carnivorous species like tuna—a food staple in the US that health experts have been concerned about for years because of its high mercury levels. Much of the 290 million moles (a unit of measure for chemical substances) of mercury in the ocean right now is concentrated in the North Atlantic.

A neurotoxin, mercury is especially dangerous for children and babies: The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that exposure to it can lead to “poor mental development, cerebral palsy, deafness and blindness.” In adults, mercury poising can lead to problems with blood pressure regulation, memory, vision, and sensation in fingers and toes, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. And if that wasn’t scary enough, it’s invisible, odorless, and hiding in fish meat.

The researchers say that the increase in mercury levels is starting to overcome the natural ocean circulation patterns. Typically, the coldest, saltiest water in the world’s oceans naturally sinks and brings much of the mercury along with it, offering shelter to marine life from the chemicals. But now, because of the sheer volume of the stuff, the circulation of water can no longer keep mercury out of shallower depths. According to co-author Carl Lamborg, humans are “starting to overwhelm the ability of deep water formation to hide some of that mercury from us.” According to David Krebbenhoft, a geochemist working for the US Geological Survey, these shifts are directly correlated to the increase in mercury outputs over time.

The good news: If we can curb power plant mercury emissions and buy more products with reduced mercury, we can expect to see ocean mercury levels drop in the future. Says Krebbenhoft, “It’s cause for optimism and should make us excited to do something about it because we may actually have an impact.”

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Humans Have Tripled Mercury in the Oceans

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Dark Snow Is Accelerating Glacier Melting From the Arctic to the Himalayas

by DomingoPollard Posted on July 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When American geologist Ulyana Horodyskyj set up a mini weather station at 5,800 meters on Mount Himlung, on the Nepal-Tibet border, she looked east toward Everest and was shocked. The world’s highest glacier, Khumbu, was turning visibly darker as particles of fine dust, blown by fierce winds, settled on the bright, fresh snow. “One-week-old snow was turning black and brown before my eyes,” she said.

The problem was even worse on the nearby Ngozumpa glacier, which snakes down from Cho Oyu—the world’s sixth-highest mountain. There, Horodyskyj found that so much dust had been blown on to the surface that the ability of the ice to reflect sunlight, a process known as albedo, dropped 20 percent in a single month. The dust that was darkening the brilliant whiteness of the snow was heating up in the strong sun and melting the snow and ice, she said.

The phenomenon of “dark snow” is being recorded from the Himalayas to the Arctic as increasing amounts of dust from bare soil, soot from fires, and ultrafine particles of “black carbon” from industry and diesel engines are being whipped up and deposited sometimes thousands of miles away. The result, say scientists, is a significant dimming of the brightness of the world’s snow and icefields, leading to a longer melt season, which in turn creates feedback where more solar heat is absorbed and the melting accelerates.

In a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of French government meteorologists has reported that the Arctic ice cap, which is thought to have lost an average of 12.9 billion tonnes of ice a year between 1992 and 2010 due to general warming, may be losing an extra 27 billion tonnes a year just because of dust, potentially adding several centimeters of sea-level rise by 2100. Satellite measurements, say the authors, show that in the last 10 years the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet has considerably darkened during the melt season, which in some areas is now between 6 and 11 days longer per decade than it was 40 years ago. As glaciers retreat and the snow cover disappears earlier in the year, so larger areas of bare soil are uncovered, which increases the dust erosion, scientists suggest.

Research indicates that the Arctic’s albedo may be declining much faster than was estimated only a few years ago. Earlier this year a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that declining Arctic albedo between 1979 and 2011 constituted 25 percent of the heating effect from carbon dioxide over the same time.

According to Danish glaciologist Jason Box, who heads the Dark Snow project to measure the effect of dust and other darkening agents on Greenland’s ice sheet, Arctic ice sheet reflectivity has been at a near record low for much of 2014. Even a minor decrease in the brightness of the ice sheet can double the average yearly rate of ice loss, seen from 1992 to 2010.

“Low reflectivity heats the snow more than normal. A dark snow cover will thus melt earlier and more intensely. A positive feedback exists for snow in which, once melting begins, the surface gets yet darker due to increased water content,” says Box on his blog. Both human-created and natural air pollutants are darkening the ice, say other scientists.

Nearly invisible particles of “black carbon” resulting from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels from diesel engines are being swept thousands of miles from industrial centers in the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia, as is dust from Africa and the Middle East, where dust storms are becoming bigger as the land dries out, with increasingly long and deep droughts. Earlier this year dust from the Sahara was swept north for several thousands miles, smothered Britain and reached Norway.

According to Kaitlin Keegan, a researcher at Dartmouth College, the record melting in 2012 of Greenland’s northeastern ice sheet was largely a result of forest fires in Siberia and the United States.

Any reduction in albedo is a disaster, says Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Oceans Physics Group at Cambridge University.

“Replacing an ice-covered surface, where the albedo may be 70 percent in summer, by an open-water surface with albedo less than 10 percent, causes more radiation to be absorbed by the Earth, causing an acceleration of warming,” he says. “I have calculated that the albedo change from the disappearance of the last of the summer ice in 2012 was the equivalent to the effect of all the extra carbon dioxide that we have added to the atmosphere in the last 25 years.”

Ulyana Horodyskyj, who is planning to return to the Himalayas to continue monitoring dust pollution at altitude, said she had been surprised by how bad it was.

“This is mostly manmade pollution,” she said. “Governments must act, and people must become more aware of what is happening. It needs to be looked at properly.”

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Dark Snow Is Accelerating Glacier Melting From the Arctic to the Himalayas

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This Pharmacist Is One of Greg Abbott’s Biggest Donors. Here’s Why.

by UBZJacelyn Posted on May 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Greg Abbott, the Republican attorney general of Texas, has many of the usual suspects funding his gubernatorial campaign: Energy tycoons, construction company magnates, leveraged buyout moguls, sports team owners. But one of his biggest backers hails from an industry not typically known for bankrolling political campaigns. J. Richard “Richie” Ray is the owner of a compounding pharmacy, one of those loosely regulated entities that have been mixing up lethal injection drug cocktails for prisons as these pharmaceuticals have become harder and harder to obtain. According to a new report from the nonprofit Texans for Public Justice, Ray, the owner of Richie’s Specialty Pharmacy in Conroe, Texas, has given Abbott $350,000 to help him defeat democratic challenger Wendy Davis.

Ray’s big investment in Abbott comes as death row inmates and good-government groups are trying to force Texas to disclose the supplier of its lethal injection drugs, thought to be a compounding pharmacy. The pharmacies themselves are under fire for selling tainted and mislabled medicine that has killed dozens of people in recent years. During Abbott’s tenure as AG, he has already taken on one Texas compounder, ApotheCure, after three people in Oregon died after taking painkillers from the pharmacy that were eight times more potent than the label indicated. (In 2012, Abbott settled state civil charges against the company.) Last summer, tainted medicine from an Austin compounding pharmacy caused blood infections in 17 people; two deaths are suspected to be related to the products, which are still under investigation.

Abbott is also in the middle of a pitched legal battle over whether the state has to identify the supplier of its lethal injection drugs. Over the past several years, international pharma companies have started refusing to sell execution drugs, including pentobarbital, to US prisons for use in lethal injections, and the EU has banned their export. This has left state prisons desperate to find replacement drugs to continue moving the machinery of death. After several states were caught illegally importing the drugs from abroad, state officials have tried obtaining their execution drugs from compounding pharmacies, which can legally mix them up but that have been plagued with problems like those in Texas. Defense lawyers have argued that their condemned clients have a right to know what they’re going to be injected with to ensure that the executions will not violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and they’ve cited the well-documented problems with drugs produced by compounders in their challenges. The botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma only reinforced those claims.

In October, in response to a formal request under the state’s open-records law, staff who handle such requests in the AG’s office said Texas law required disclosure of the execution drug supplier, a move that resulted in the exposure of Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy as the state’s lethal injection supplier. Woodlands promptly quit supplying execution drugs. As a result, the state is now fighting disclosure of the name of its new supplier, and Abbott is caught in the middle, with his lawyers arguing in state and federal court that the name of the pharmacy doesn’t have to be disclosed, even as his open-records staff say it does.

In the midst of all this controversy, Richie Ray has become a major donor Abbott’s campaign. He gave $100,000 in June 2013, just before the state bought several doses of compounded pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy. (By comparison, Ray has given only a little more than $40,000 to Rick Perry’s campaigns.) Ray’s pharmacy is not supplying execution drugs to the state, according to the Texans for Public Justice report, apparently because his pharmacy isn’t certified as a “sterile” facility. However, Richie’s is a member of the Professional Compounding Centers of America (PCCA), a Houston-based national trade group that not only owns the lab that tested some of the state’s compounded execution drugs for purity but also sold Woodlans the raw materials to make one of the drugs.

Ray himself is active in fighting tougher regulation of compounding pharmacies. He’s the director of the Texas Pharmacy Association PAC and chairman of the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists’ federal PAC. His employees are the top donors to the campaign of Sen. John Barasso (R-WY), a doctor and the Senate’s leading defender of compounding pharmacies like ApotheCure.

Given the massive conflicts between his current job and one of his biggest campaign contributors, Abbott can only hope that defense lawyers manage to drag out the legal battles over lethal injection long enough for him to get elected in November.

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This Pharmacist Is One of Greg Abbott’s Biggest Donors. Here’s Why.

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EPA’s McCarthy slams the agency’s anti-science critics

by CesarColmenero Posted on April 30, 2014

EPA’s McCarthy slams the agency’s anti-science critics

By

Albert H. Teich

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy has some sharp words for those who criticize the agency’s use of science in drawing up regulations, most notably fossil fuel companies and climate deniers in Congress.

“With science as our North Star, EPA has steered America away from health risks and toward healthier communities and a higher overall quality of life,” McCarthy said during the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington on Monday. “That’s why it’s worrisome that our science seems to be under constant assault by a small — but vocal — group of critics.”

Here were McCarthy’s really choice comments, as reported by Greenwire:

“I bet when those same critics get sick, they run to doctors and hospitals that rely on science from — guess who — Harvard University and the American Cancer Society. I bet they check air quality forecasts from EPA and the National Weather Service to see if the air is healthy enough for their asthmatic child to play outside that day. I bet they buy dishwashers with Energy Star labels, and take FDA-approved medicine, and eat USDA-approved meats.”

We would also add that the ultimate fossil-fuel defender, Dick Cheney, wouldn’t stand a snowflake’s chance in climate-changed hell of being alive today if it weren’t for the wonders of modern science.


Source
McCarthy slams critics’ ‘dangerous game’ of trying to discredit agency science, Greenwire

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Will the White House Crack Down on Gas Emissions?

by Ronald Fagiani Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The White House on Friday opened the way to cutting emissions of methane from the oil and gas industry, saying it would study the magnitude of leaks of the powerful greenhouse gas.

The announcement seemed designed to please the international community—which is meeting in Yokohama to finalize a blockbuster climate report—as well as environmental groups suing to force the Obama administration to regulate the oil and gas industry.

The new strategy announced by the White House on Friday did not immediately direct the Environmental Protection Agency to begin drafting new climate regulations for the oil and gas industry.

Instead, the White House said the EPA would undertake a series of studies to determine the magnitude and prevalence of methane leaks from fracking sites, compressors, and gas pipelines.

The agency would decide by the autumn of 2014 whether to propose new controls on the industry. “In the fall, we will determine the best path forward to get reductions,” a White House official told a conference call with reporters.

If the EPA does go ahead and propose new rules, the White House official said the agency would aim to complete the process by the time Obama leaves office.

Methane—the primary component of natural gas—is more than 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame. Oil and gas sites are the biggest industrial source of methane.

The gas accounted for about 14 percent of US climate pollution in 2013, according to the EPA’s greenhouse gas inventory, and that share is expected to grow.

Environmental groups have been pressing Barack Obama for months to come up with a plan to cut methane.

Without those controls, Obama cannot meet his commitment to cut US greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels.

There are big political risks in taking on America’s powerful oil and natural gas interests.

Obama has embraced “natural gas” as part of his all-of-the-above energy strategy, arguing that the shale revolution would help move the US away from more heavily polluting coal. But there is growing evidence methane leaks are far more pervasive than originally thought.

Methane is escaping into the atmosphere from all along the supply chain—from flaring gas wells that light up the night sky in North Dakota to aging pipes in the Northeast.

A study published by the National Academy of Sciences last November found that the EPA had grossly underestimated methane releases from gas drilling.

Ninety environmental groups wrote to the EPA last December demanding the agency introduce new regulations on the oil and gas industry.

Methane pollution is projected to increase to a level equivalent to over 620 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution in 2030 without additional action to reduce emissions.

The White House said the EPA would propose new rules for future landfills in the summer of 2014, and was considering new regulations on existing landfills.

The Department of Energy will meanwhile begin exploring the potential of capturing and storing methane in underground waste dumps.

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Will the White House Crack Down on Gas Emissions?

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Scenes from the Postdocalypse

by SpencerGrady Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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How do you become a scientist? Ask anyone in the profession and you’ll probably hear some version of the following: get a Bachelor’s of Science degree, work in a lab, get into a PhD program, publish some papers, get a good post-doctoral position, publish some more papers and then apply for a tenure-track job at a large university. It’s a long road—and you get to spend those 10 to 15 years as a poor graduate student or underpaid postdoc, while you watch your peers launch careers, start families, and contribute to their 401(k) plans.

And then comes the academic job market. According to Brandeis University biochemist Dr. Gregory Petsko, who recently chaired a National Academy of Sciences committee on the postdoctoral experience in the US, less than 20 percent of aspiring postdocs today get highly coveted jobs in academia. That’s less than one in five. Naturally, many more end up in industry, in government, and in many other sectors—but not the one they were trained for or probably hoping for. “We’re fond of saying that we should prepare people for alternative careers,” explains Pesko, “without realizing that we’re the alternative career.”

Ethan Perlstein was one of these postdocs—before he decided he’d had enough. He had gotten his Ph.D. at Harvard under Stuart Schreiber, the legendary chemist, and then gone on to a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship in genomics at Princeton. He’d published in top journals, like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Genetics. He’d put in 13 years. But that “came to a close at the end of 2012,” says Perlstein on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, “when I encountered what I have been calling the postdocalypse, which is this pretty bad job market for professionally trained Ph.Ds—life scientists, in particular.” After two years of searching for an assistant professorship, going up against an army of highly qualified, job-hungry scientists, he gave up.

But it wasn’t just the competition for jobs that deterred Perlstein. Once you land a tenure-track job, you often have to get a big government grant in order to actually get tenure. And those grants are becoming ever more competitive, meaning that young faculty members usually need to apply multiple times before securing one. That is, if they actually do get one before the university that employs them loses patience.

“I guess I just thought, well, I don’t want to keep waiting any more,” recalls Perlstein. “At the time I was 33, and thought, well, I’m also seeing the statistic that says that the average age at which an independent biomedical research gets their first big grant from the NIH is 43 or 42. And I just thought, ‘Another 10 years of just waiting around for my turn in line?'”

You’ve probably heard the claim that the United States needs to produce more scientists, like Perlstein, to remain competitive with up-and-coming science powerhouses like India and China. It is a familiar litany whenever we hear laments about American science and its disturbing habit of resting on its laurels. But what you rarely hear in this argument is the fact that we don’t have nearly enough jobs to put to work the scientists we currently have. “U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings,” writes Harvard researcher Michael Teitelbaum, “the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more.”

Ethan Perlstein.

This situation is not new. Eight years ago, in 2006, George W. Bush’s National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni lamented that by denying young scientists the opportunity to try out their ideas, we’re in effect “eating our seed corn,” likening the situation to farmers who fail to prepare for the future. And that was before budget fights and sequestration dealt a further blow to the science funding stream that heavily influences whether or not our country can provide opportunities for its talented young researchers.

The life sciences, the field in which Perlstein works, are a case in point—and arguably the most challenging arena of all. According to the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients, between the years 1993 and 2010, the number of US biomedical scientists with Ph.Ds rose from 105,000 to 180,000, even as the percentage employed in academia decreased from 58 percent to 51 percent, and the number holding tenured or tenure-track academic jobs decreased from 35 percent to 26 percent. That, in a nutshell, is the postdocalpyse. (Note that the vast majority of these Ph.Ds do find jobs somewhere, but fewer and fewer find the sort of academic jobs for which the postdoctoral experience is designed to train them.)

The ultimate cause? Funding. “Obama put out the latest 2015 budget for NIH—flat again. It’s been $30 billion ever since I basically entered grad school,” says Perlstein. “I was in college in the late 90s, when the NIH budget was doubling. So I remember someone telling me for the first time, ‘They pay you to go to graduate school.'” The NIH itself recognizes that its own budget largely determines how many Ph.D. students in life sciences there are, because these students are supported by grants: training grants, fellowships, and research grants.

A doubling of the NIH budget from 1998 to 2003 created dramatic growth in the biomedical science field—positions, infrastructure, postdocs, and everything else. But that set many people up for a fall. As Science magazine reported in 2007, the doubling “provoked a massive expansion in biomedical research, and expectations of federal support surged to a level that could not be sustained when the budget stopped growing. The crash is hitting labs, careers, and the psyches of scientists with a vengeance.” How did that affect postdocs? You can see as much in this NIH figure, showing that as the agency’s budget doubled, the length of time spent as a postdoc decreased, but once the doubling ended, it shot up:

National Institutes of Health

That’s right: The Postdocalypse is partly the result of science funding policies put in place by our legislators, who love science until they don’t any more, who double budgets and then slow or freeze them.

So what do the more than 80 percent of postdocs who leave academia do? Some get jobs in industry, with large pharmaceutical companies or engineering firms. Some get MBAs or law degrees and use their scientific training to carve out a niche in a different industry. Some teach. Some write. Some few remain unemployed.

Perlstein did something radically different—something gutsy and surprising that has garnered him recent profiles in The Wall Street Journal and Science Careers. He decided to break from tradition and forge a new path: build, fund and run his own independent science lab. To become an “indie scientist.” To in effect hack the scientific system, work within it yet outside of it, and support himself through crowdfunding, a compelling social media presence, and, of course, good ideas.

He’s not just building a biotech startup or monetizing some scientific finding. He is using alternative revenue sources to fund basic research, hearkening back to the 19th century, when citizen-scientists usually had family money, a rich patron or a day job

Doing science outside of science these days is far from easy or simple. Just consider the fact that if you’re not part of a university, it is very hard to get your hands on the research papers that are the lifeblood of knowledge exchange. “I’m part of the pay-walled 99 percent, the masses who don’t actually get access to all these great journals,” says Perlstein.

Then there’s the growing costs of technology, with most scientific endeavors relying on very expensive equipment. A university department might be able to purchase a multi-million-dollar MRI machine, for example. But it’s a lot harder for an independent scientist to make that investment.

But Perstein has figured out a way to make it work. His independent research focuses on so-called “orphan diseases,” which the FDA defines as conditions that afflict fewer than 200,000 people in the US. The NIH estimates that there are more than 6,800 rare diseases, which in aggregate affect more than 25 million Americans. Perlstein’s focus on orphan diseases satisfies his passion for basic science—giving him the opportunity to make long-lasting contributions to our understanding of our bodies—while also having a clear application that makes the work fundable. You might think that biotech and pharmaceutical companies would have little incentive to develop drugs for these diseases because the market is small compared to ailments than affect millions of people, like diabetes or Alzheimer’s. But orphan diseases have other incentives for investors: premium drug pricing, protection from competition, and expedited development timelines.

And then, there are the rich patrons who want to see them cured. Perlstein now has to actively court them. Foundations or wealthy families with a stake in finding a rare-disease treatment are increasingly becoming important funders of research. Perhaps the best example is the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which committed $75 million dollars to the development of an innovative new CF treatment approved in 2012.

“I want to take the best elements of academia, the best elements of industry, try to make a business model that is sustainable, and then push forwards toward a real scientific objective,” says Perlsten. “I call it a rare disease moonshot.”

To do his work, Perlstein raises money through crowdfunding sites like Experiment.com, and rents his own lab space in a San Francisco incubator called QB3, which offers the “biotech equivalent of garages: small spaces for entrepreneurs to lay the foundations for companies that may spearhead new industries.” Organizations like QB3 are now partnering with major research universities to create innovation hubs. In these hubs, you can rent bench space or share costs of expensive equipment with other independent scientists or academics, without having to make multi-million dollar investments yourself. This strategy reduces waste—not every lab needs an expensive MRI machine. If you can simply rent some time on a machine to meet your needs, science becomes much cheaper.

So is Perlstein an anomaly, or is he the new face of science? Maybe he’ll succeed as an indy scientist, and maybe he won’t. It’s hard not to cheer for him. But at the same time, perhaps the most resounding lesson is to lament a system that is forcing some of today’s best scientific minds out into the cold.

To listen to the full Inquiring Minds interview with Ethan Perlstein, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a story about the upcoming release of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report on global warming impacts, and a discussion about the difficult question of when screening for disease conditions is (and isn’t) a good idea.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Scenes from the Postdocalypse

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Flight 370 Pilot Rejected Boston Marathon Conspiracy Theory

by AlysaHeiman Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Malaysian police announced that a flight simulator belonging to Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the captain of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, was missing data that had been erased about a month before the plane disappeared, potentially as part of routine computer maintenance. In an investigation that has produced precious few clues—on Thursday Australian officials were investigating debris found via satellite imagery—Shah’s background, naturally, is being closely analyzed by authorities, including the FBI. But Shah—who liked to cook, watched atheist videos, and who was a fan of a democratic opposition leader in Malaysia—didn’t express any suspicious sentiments on his public Facebook page. On the contrary, in an exchange that occurred shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings, he criticized his Facebook friend, Muhammad Khatif Mohd Talha, a self-identified former captain at Malaysia Airlines, for promoting the conspiracy theory that the bombing was a “False Flag attack by the Satanist elite.”

To convince Shah, Talha posted a clip from a press conference during which Boston authorities ignored a shouting conspiracy theorist who claimed that local officials had called for public calm before the bombings. Shah didn’t buy this, and he told Talha it would have been natural for authorities to request calm and order during a large public event.

In the second part of the discussion thread, Talha posted a tweet from the Boston Globe, reporting that Boston officials had announced a controlled explosion as part of post-attack bomb squad activities, as if this supported the notion that the Boston Marathon was some sort of inside job. Shah replied, sarcastically, “Wow now we get to believe the police (GOV) of blewing up people.”

The public Facebook postings do not indicate what kind of relationship Muhammad Khatif Mohd Talha and Shah maintained, if any, in real life. (Talha is one of Shah’s 239 friends.) But they do have several mutual Facebook friends who work in the airline industry. On his Facebook page, Talha, who refers to himself as a former pilot for Malaysia Airlines, expresses support for a wide range of conspiracy theories: “satanic” symbolism in Katy Perry videos, weather warfare, and vaccines and autism. He writes often of a coming apocalypse and is a member of a “Malaysian Preppers” Facebook group, and he posts regularly about his religious beliefs (including his support for Islamic law) and what he believes is the imminent collapse of the global economy. Shortly after the plane’s disappearance, Talha posted, in Malaysian, “Thank you all for your wishes for me. God- willing, I pray for the best for everyone.” Talha did not respond to requests for comment.

Yazran Ahmad, who replied to Talha’s Facebook post above, was Facebook friends with Talha and Shah, and he notes on his Facebook page that he studied at the Malaysian Flying Academy. On March 8, he wrote a poignant note regarding the missing airline. (Ahmad did not respond to request for comment.)

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Flight 370 Pilot Rejected Boston Marathon Conspiracy Theory

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Read the New York Times’ 1853 Report on the Solomon Northup "Kidnapping Case"

by Guadalupe Williams Posted on March 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Sunday, 12 Years a Slave won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film tells the true story of Solomon Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man who was drugged and kidnapped in Washington, DC, in 1841 and sold into slavery. Northup, a violinist and family man based in Saratoga Springs, New York, was forced to work on Louisiana plantations for 12 years.

On January 20, 1853 (the same year Northup’s memoir Twelve Years a Slave was published), the New York Times ran a report on Northup titled, “The Kidnapping Case,” promising “interesting disclosures” (it spells his name “Northrup”):

nytimes.com

“By the laws of Louisiana no man can be punished there for having sold Solomon into slavery wrongfully, because more than two years had elapsed since he was sold; and no recovery can be had for his services, because he was bought without the knowledge that he was a free citizen,” the story reads.

During his acceptance speech, 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen dedicated the award to the tens of millions of people still in slavery today.

(h/t the New York Times’ Facebook page.)

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Read the New York Times’ 1853 Report on the Solomon Northup "Kidnapping Case"

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