Blood transfusions are an essential component of modern-day medicine, saving lives in a variety of situations, ranging from genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia to road accidents. But, the history of blood transfusion is a rocky one. For instance, did you know that a German physician founded the world’s first blood transfusion institute in 1926 because he believed blood transfusions led to immortality?

Dr. Alexander Bogdanov started some crude blood transfusion experiments on himself by injecting blood of other young men into his own system. After 11 such transfusion sessions, he claimed to have improved vision, arrest hair loss, and produce youthful skin. This led him to believe that blood transfusion was the path to immortality and eternal youth. But, as you can expect, this practice, combined with poor understanding of the blood transfusion process at that time, killed him years later.

Kiran Musunuru was shocked. In a few days, on Nov. 27, 2018, scientists from all over the world would meet in Hong Kong to set standards for the use of the CRISPR gene-editing tool on human embryos. Yet the paper in front of him suggested that in China, gene-edited twins were already growing in their mother’s uterus, with the help of scientist He Jiankui.

“I was horrified,” Musunuru recalled as he spoke to science writers gathered in State College, Pa. 11 months later, for the ScienceWriters2019 conference. “This is an historic event, the first gene-edited babies. And this is a horror show.”

That day, Associated Press reporter Marilynn Marchione had requested the opinion of three experts in genetics on an unpublished paper. Musunuru, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, was one of them. The claims made by He, the paper’s lead author, were grandiose and terrifying: he had implanted gene-edited embryos.

When statistician Nicole Lazar published an editorial in The American Statistician earlier this year advocating changes in the way scientists handle the troublesome issue of statistical significance, her father—who trained as a sociologist—asked her, "Are you getting death threats on Twitter?"

Lazar, a professor of statistics at the University of Georgia, doesn't use Twitter, but the question reveals how contentious the issue of statistical significance is. "You don't often think about statisticians getting emotional about things," Lazar told an audience of writers attending the Science Writers 2019 conference held in State College, Pa.,"but this is a topic that's been raising a lot of passion and discussion in our field.” Lazar spoke on Oct. 27 as part of the New Horizons in Science briefing organized by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW).

Many scientists determine whether the results of their experiments are “statistically significant” by using statistical tests that result in a number known as the “p-value.” A p-value of less than 0.05 is commonly considered significant, and often erroneously characterized as meaning the findings are not likely to be the result of chance. What the number actually reveals is less straightforward, and even scientists have trouble explaining the precise meaning of the p-value. Using the threshold of p < 0.05 has been shown to be problematic, misleading, and even dangerous. Lazar’s editorial, “Moving to a World Beyond 'p < 0.05',” discusses several possibilities that will give researchers alternatives to an arbitrary p-value cut-off.

Beneath the ocean waters off Antartica, massive buried shelves of ice function like buttresses, supporting the continent’s massive ice sheets.

If those buttresses fail, Richard Alley told science writers at a recent conference in State College, Pa., global sea levels will not rise by inches, as predicted by recent climate reports—but instead by as much as 186 feet.

Alley, professor of geosciences at Penn State University, discussed the perilous consequences of rising sea levels, and society's options in the face of an uncertain future, on Oct. 27 during the New Horizons in Science briefing organized by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, part of the ScienceWriters2019 conference.

“We can either treat climate change science like a tweet—pretending like it’s an evil liar—or we can use knowledge,” Alley said.

As climate changes, rising sea levels are a concern for countries that border the world’s oceans. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—also known as the IPCC—sea levels will continue to rise for the foreseeable future.

Science has given doctors more and more powerful drugs to deploy against infectious diseases and cancers in recent decades, and yet many new therapies have failed to live up to their promise. Andrew Read has some ideas about how to change that. 

As an evolutionary biologist, Read views much drug therapy as an impossible game of "whack-a-mole," where microorganisms and cancer cells evolve and change to resist drugs and survive. Speaking to writers at the New Horizons in Science briefings presented by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing during the ScienceWriters2019 conference in State College, Pa., on Oct. 27, Read suggested that more and powerful drugs may not be the solution. Instead, he called for managing evolution to prevent the emergence of drug resistance in the first place.

“I’m an observer,” said astronomer Jason Wright. “I’ve always enjoyed the little corners that are being neglected.” In recent years Wright has been exploring one such neglected corner—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. He is optimistic that it will soon be full of activity.

Wright, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, expressed this hope to science writers visiting State College, Pa., for the ScienceWriters2019 conference. Speaking as part of the New Horizons in Science briefing organized by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing on Oct. 28, he shared a vision for SETI’s future.

That future, Wright pointed out, hasn’t always looked promising. The official SETI program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was frequently a target of congressional ridicule and was terminated in 1993. Since then, other branches of SETI have suffered and dwindled owing to a lack of federal grant funding. SETI research has survived thanks to philanthropic donations.

Seven years ago, Rob Jackson and his graduate student drove around the city of Boston—back and forth, back and forth, up and down every block like a lawnmower. With a laser instrument in tow, the scientists mapped more than 3,000 natural gas leaks. This collaborative effort, involving Jackson’s Duke University team and a Boston University group led by Nathan Phillips, produced the first public map showing natural gas leaks in a city.

Two years later, the Massachusetts legislature passed a safety bill that included accelerated natural gas pipeline replacements and faster cost recovery for utility companies. It was a win-win.

This is one of the success stories that Jackson, now professor of earth system science at Stanford University, can claim for his research. He spoke Oct. 28 on climate change problems and solutions during a New Horizons in Science session organized by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writers at the ScienceWriters 2019 conference, and sat down to talk about his career. 

Bigger, slower-developing brains may distinguish humans from their non-human primate relatives, says George Washington University anthropologist Chet Sherwood, but these obvious brain differences are only the beginning of what we can learn about our evolution by studying our primate cousins.

Understanding how brain shape and function differ among primate groups could help answer many questions about the human brain, from the neurochemical controls of social behavior to the reasons people develop mental illness.

Upside-down jellyfish growing in a lab in Pennsylvania could help protect endangered coral reefs in the world’s oceans.

The creatures serve as a stand-in for corals off the southern coast of Florida that spawn once a year, seven days after a full moon, exactly three and a half hours after sunset — and at the height of Florida’s hurricane season.

For more than 10 years, Penn State University biologist Mónica Medina made hazardous annual pilgrimages to the Florida reefs to capture coral embryos during this narrow window of opportunity. Until she turned to a more accessible species — Cassiopea xamachana, the upside-down jellyfish, which can thrive in a lab — to provide a faster route to understanding and supporting coral reef health.

David Keith has a tool for fighting climate change, and a big challenge: convincing the rest of the world to use it. Speaking to science writers gathered in State College, Pa. on Oct. 28, Keith, a professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard University, said he understands why some are apprehensive about his approach.

“This topic is controversial,” Keith said, “and it should be.”

Keith spoke during the annual New Horizons in Science briefing presented by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing as part of ScienceWriters2019.

A newsmaker from an unexpected encounter has offered scientific news from an unexpected source—poop.

As I looked for stories at a science writers’ conference in State College, Pa., it was the fellow student scientist who sat down next to me who provided a rich story about the potential for pathogens called reoviruses—commonly found in human and other animal waste—to advance the control of cancer cell growth.

A deadly fungus decimated populations of frogs and other amphibians around the globe in the late 20th century. Today a new, even more lethal one is on the march. Biologists are taking lessons from the previous “amphibian apocalypse” to try to hold off the next big wave of deaths and extinctions.

Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians might not stir warm thoughts, but their existence—and their decline—affects humans and other animals in critical ways. The global drop in amphibian populations has drastically affected ecosystems, lowering water quality, harming algae and water insects and destroying food webs critical for the preservation of a range of species.

Imagine a world where a trip to the moon is as easy as running to the grocery store. Visiting nearby stars might be a routine cross-galaxy flight, and you may even have a layover at a galactic travel hub on a place like Batuu from Star Wars. In this imaginary universe, many stars and planets would be connected, and their societies could communicate as a part of a galactic civilization.

Given our limited spaceflight capabilities, it might seem obvious at first why this hasn’t happened. It took even one of our fastest small probes (New Horizons, which visited Pluto in 2015) almost 10 years to get to the outer solar system, and we haven’t yet sent humans any further than the moon (and that was back in the 1970s). With our current technology, it would take around 100 human lifetimes to cross the unimaginably large four light years to our nearest neighbor star, Proxima Centauri.

Astronomers are getting closer to figuring out where the dividing line lies between neutron stars and black holes

Do you use a Fitbit or another type of technology to track your exercise? Do you find yourself trying to walk more after checking your daily steps? If so, you are taking advantage of reactivity – when people alter their behavior in response to their behavior being measured.

Typically, researchers try their best to avoid reactivity in their studies. If you are interested in observing someone’s natural behavior, you would not want to change it simply by observing it. However, reactivity can occasionally become the subject of research itself, and this is exactly what is happening with a measure used in learning research.

In 2015 I was on the verge of publishing my first scientific journal article. The culmination of hundreds of hours spent filming defensive behavior in snakes seemed to be paying off in a big way: an exciting new conclusion about how the rattlesnake's namesake rattle evolved. But there was a problem.

While almost every data point I collected about viper behavior supported our hypothesis—that snakes more closely related to rattlesnakes shake their tails more quickly—one critical species bucked the trend: the cottonmouth. These large venomous snakes from the Southeastern U.S. shook their tails a measly 10 or 15 times per second—half as quickly as most other rattlesnake cousins.

Staring at my computer screen after analyzing the videos, I realized two things. One, cottonmouths were going to complicate an otherwise straightforward story that would reduce the strength of my conclusions, meaning I might not get my paper published in a top-tier journal. And two, since I was the only person in my lab analyzing this data, it was completely within my power to fudge the numbers.

U of T students, faculty represented at Canada’s first national science communication conference for graduate students

Science communicators from universities across Canada sharpened their skills at ComSciConCAN, the country’s first national science communication conference for graduate students, held from July 18 to 20 at McMaster University.

The two-and-a-half-day event drew inspiration from the US-based ComSciCon workshop series on science communication, which was first held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2013.

ComSciCon has since expanded to include flagship workshops across the US, but ComSciConCAN marks the first time the conference has been hosted in a different country.

The inaugural Canadian conference featured four panel discussions, six hands-on workshops, and over 25 experts from a diverse range of science communication careers.

In attendance were 50 graduate students from 26 different institutions across Canada, who were selected out of a pool of over 400 applicants from a wide array of scientific backgrounds.