The Year Of The Higgs, And Other Tiny Advances In Science

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4, the long-sought building block of the universe. This image shows a computer-simulation of data from the collider.

Barcroft Media/Landov Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4, the long-sought building block of the universe. This image shows a computer-simulation of data from the collider.

Barcroft Media/Landov

It's a year-end tradition to cobble together a list of the most important advances in science. But, truth be told, many ideas that change the world don't tend to spring from these flashy moments of discovery. Our view of nature — and our technology — often evolve from a sequence of more subtle advances.

Even so, chances are good that this year's list-makers will choose the discovery of the Higgs boson as the most important discovery of 2012.

The Higgs is a long-sought building block of the universe. It finally put in an appearance at an accelerator in Europe. But though it was big news, it wasn't apparently a revolutionary discovery.

"There are certainly a number of physicists who are actually disappointed," says Sam Arbesman, a scientist and mathematician at the Kauffman Foundation. "They were hoping to find something a little different from what all the models predicted."

“ It's not necessarily true that we need to find these singular big discoveries. Because the truth is, the way we make discoveries is oftentimes based on the accumulation of a lot of smaller insights and smaller ideas and discoveries.

- Sam Arbesman, scientist and mathematician, Kauffman Foundation

Instead, they got a discovery that mostly assures them the universe works pretty well the way they thought it did. So big news doesn't necessarily change the way we look at the world.

Arbesman and science historian W. Patrick McCray took a few minutes recently to talk about the nature of discoveries in science and technology. Each has just written a book about the process of science and technology. Arbesman's is The Half-Life of Facts; McCray's is The Visioneers.

McCray, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says revolutionary discoveries don't necessarily announce themselves when they happen. Consider this story: In 1988, a French scientist and a German scientist independently discovered a basic physics phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance.

The discovery seemed so arcane it didn't make a splash, like the Higgs boson. But, as it turns out, this phenomenon provided an extraordinarily powerful new way to get data on and off a magnetic disk, "and became the basis for a multibillion-dollar market for computer hard drives," McCray says.

That fueled a technology revolution and eventually led to a Nobel Prize for the scientists. But Arbesman says even this story distorts how science often progresses.

"It's not necessarily true that we need to find these singular big discoveries," he says. "Because the truth is, the way we make discoveries is oftentimes based on the accumulation of a lot of smaller insights and smaller ideas and discoveries. And oftentimes in the aggregate, those kinds of things — the things that we expect or the things that we don't expect — are often what drive science."

One classic example of this is the observation that the Earth's surface is always rearranging itself, as continental plates drift around the globe. This theory, now called plate tectonics, was first proposed in 1912, "but it took decades for enough evidence to be accumulated to support the theory, and also for scientists to come around to the idea that the continents were moving," McCray says.

Plate tectonics is now an indispensable way of understanding many things about our world — not just about what drives earthquakes, but how animal species came to be distributed around the planet. This kind of slow burn happens more often than you might think.

"I think the laser, initially, in terms of a technology, was one of these great examples where it was a really cool thing, but I think no one had any idea what it could be used for," Arbesman says, "and now it's ubiquitous."

There's a lesson in that for Arbesman. It's not so easy to figure out what fields of science to fund in order to get breakthroughs in return.

"The truth is, we don't really have a good track record at predicting which ones are going to be relevant in the long term," he says. "And we want to make sure that we support the creation of knowledge. And to do that, we have to really make sure that we support everything all across the board."

That means, of course, most of the time we will be supporting research that may fill in facts around the edges but won't be revolutionary.

McCray argues that one of the most notable trends in science this year wasn't a discovery at all. It has to do with how much the public accepts what scientists tell them.

"Debates over climate change, evolution, whether vaccines cause autism, things like that — all are part of a larger debate about the role and place of experts in American society," he says.

Americans still accept that science is a way to learn truths, but people are less likely to trust scientists as objective experts, McCray says. "And I think it's certainly something that a decade from now, we might look back upon and find quite curious, and indeed, quite serious."

That trend affects how we make use of the discoveries that flow from science — so it also matters a lot.

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Research Moratoriums And Recipes For Superbugs: Bird Flu In 2012

Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., use eggs to see if the Asian strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus has entered the U.S. in this photo from 2006.

Andy Manis/AP Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., use eggs to see if the Asian strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus has entered the U.S. in this photo from 2006.

Andy Manis/AP

For scientists who study a dangerous form of bird flu, 2012 is ending as it began — with uncertainty about what the future holds for their research, but a hope that some contentious issues will soon be resolved.

Last January, dozens of flu experts around the world agreed to what was supposed to be a 60-day pause in controversial experiments on the H5N1 bird flu virus. But none of them resumed work as planned because all year long, the debate over the benefits and the risks just wasn't going away.

Virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands says he reluctantly went along with the moratorium, "but I've not been a great advocate of it because there is urgency in this type of research."

Fouchier gets funding from the National Institutes of Health to study H5N1, which is widespread in poultry in parts of Asia and the Middle East.

H5N1 rarely infects humans, but more than half of those known to have gotten sick with it have died. Scientists have long wanted to know if this bird flu could mutate in a way that could make the virus start spreading between people and cause a pandemic.

“ If this was a circumstance where there was an easy path forward, where you could simply write down in an afternoon how best to handle this, well, we would have done that.

- Francis Collins

So Fouchier's lab experimented with the virus and found that certain genetic changes did make it capable of spreading through the coughs and sneezes of ferrets, which are the lab stand-ins for people.

This discovery provided important new clues about how future pandemics might emerge from nature. But at the same time, the findings were basically the recipe for creating a superflu — one that might kill millions.

That's why a panel of government advisers initially recommended against publicly revealing the details of both this experiment and another one like it done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"I think the biggest fear that we had was that these experiments were going on without the appropriate public dialogue," says Paul Keim, a microbiologist at Northern Arizona University, who chaired the panel.

For years, biologists have talked about the question of how to handle legitimate research that might produce information that could be misused to cause harm. But this so-called dual-use problem was largely theoretical in the life sciences. The bird flu research made it painfully real.

"It upped the ante, both in terms of what's at stake here in terms of public health and what's at stake here in terms of potential risks," Dr. Amy Patterson, who helps to direct the NIH's Office of Science Policy, says. "It captured people's attention."

Months went by as everyone scrambled to figure out what to do. Scientists argued at conferences and published op-eds. The World Health Organization held a closed-door meeting of flu experts. Officials tried, unsuccessfully, to find some legal way of giving the key details only to people who needed to know.

In the end, science journals did openly publish full reports describing the studies in detail. But the research moratorium continued and people asked: Well, now what? Is it back to business as usual? Or is there a line that should not be crossed?

The NIH just held a public meeting to discuss whether, and under what conditions, it should fund future experiments that might make this form of bird flu more dangerous.

Officials have drawn up a set of draft criteria for making decisions, and they want to know what people think. They're accepting emailed comments until Jan. 10.

At the same time, government officials are finishing up a review of what kind of lab safety measures should be used when doing this type of work.

Fouchier, for one, says it's still unclear to him how things will go.

"It's critical who is going to do the vetting on this research, who decides what can be done and what cannot be done," Fouchier says. "If you ask infectious disease specialists about what should be done, you're going to get different answers than if you ask security specialists."

Some researchers who don't have to follow the NIH rules may decide to just go ahead with these experiments, despite the lingering uncertainties.

"I suspect that we will be seeing a lifting of the moratorium on the part of people who are not NIH-funded," Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said after the NIH conference. "They will do that according to their own guidelines of their own funders and the country in which they are doing the research."

And if everything still seems unresolved, that's because this situation is really hard, NIH director Francis Collins said at the end of the recent meeting.

"If this was a circumstance where there was an easy path forward, where you could simply write down in an afternoon how best to handle this, well, we would have done that," Collins said.

He thinks this bird flu situation will hopefully get people better prepared for the next time something in biology raises similar concerns.

"And if we can get this one right, then the hope is, we can go on to some of those other issues undergirded by something more in the way of a foundation than we've previously had," Collins said.

Because if there's one thing that everyone can agree on, it's that the challenge of potentially dangerous information in biology is not going to go away.

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Why Charities Need To Consider Donors' Politics

As American make contributions to various charities at the end of the year, there is increasing evidence that politics is playing a role in their decisions. Research suggests that the way the charity presses certain ideological buttons predicts whether liberals or conservatives will pony up a donation.

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Despite Uneven Results, Alzheimer's Research Suggests A Path For Treatment

Brain scans using Amyvid dye to highlight beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. Clockwise from top left: a cognitively normal subject; an amyloid-positive patient with Alzheimer's disease; a patient with mild cognitive impairment who progressed to dementia during a study; and a patient with mild cognitive impairment.

Slide courtesy of the journal Neurology

It's been a mixed year for Alzheimer's research. Some promising drugs failed to stop or even slow the disease. But researchers also found reasons to think that treatments can work if they just start sooner.

Scientists who study Alzheimer's say they aren't discouraged by the drug failures. "I actually think it was a phenomenal year for research," says Bill Rebeck, a brain scientist at Georgetown University.

Rebeck is optimistic because during the year, several very different lines of research all began to suggest a new way of thinking about Alzheimer's — that it has to be stopped before it damages the brain.

"Once you start to lose a lot of synapses, once you start to lose a lot of neurons, your brain can't recover from that," Rebeck says. "And so when we start with people who have symptoms of the disease, treating them turns out to be unsuccessful."

That explanation comes in part from studies that used a new research tool approved by the Food and Drug Administration in April. The tool is a drug called Amyvid that's injected into the bloodstream and travels to amyloid plaques in the brain. Those are the plaques associated with Alzheimer's.

The dye, also called florbetapir, lets researchers detect even tiny plaques using a positron emission tomography, or PET, scanner.

"In the PET scan you can see whether somebody has amyloid in their brain...before [they show] symptoms of the disease. I think that's huge," Rebeck says.

Researchers have already used the technique to show that amyloid begins to build up decades before people start having problems with memory or thinking. Rebeck says it should also provide a much quicker way to gauge whether a new Alzheimer's treatment is working.

Another advance this year was a study showing that the brain begins to function differently long before symptoms of Alzheimer's appear.

Lori Beason-Held of the National Institute on Aging presented the study at the Society for Neuroscience meeting. She says previous research had found brain changes among people in the early stages of Alzheimer's.

"Our study has gone back even further and discovered changes in the brain that occur up to 11 years before any symptoms occur in individuals who eventually become cognitively impaired," says Beason-Held. And the changes probably start even earlier, she says.

That might sound discouraging, but Rebeck doesn't see it that way. "What that says is there's an opportunity, there's a window when if we could stop that amyloid from accumulating, or start to clear it out of the brain, then you could prevent those symptoms from actually ever happening," he says.

Another study this year suggests a way to do that. Researchers in Iceland discovered that families with a rare gene mutation are much less likely to get Alzheimer's. The mutation appears to interrupt a key step in the formation of amyloid.

In order to form amyloid, the brain has to first cut up a larger molecule, explains Robert Vassar of Northwestern University. That step requires an enzyme called beta-secretase or BACE 1.

"BACE 1 is like a pair of molecular scissors, and what the mutation does is sort of interfere with the way the molecular scissors can cut. It sort of like, dulls the blades," Vassar says.

Just a few months ago researchers came up with a drug that does the same thing that the gene mutation does naturally, says Rebeck. This drug, though, may have to be administered before amyloid has begun to build up.

Michael Raffi, of the University of California, San Diego, says the new thinking about amyloid and Alzheimer's is a bit like the current approach to cholesterol and heart disease. Doctors don't wait until someone has a heart attack before putting them on drug that lowers cholesterol.

"Really the ideal situation is to have checked their cholesterol levels 15 years prior, and seen whether it was elevated, which would imply that they have an elevated risk of having the heart attack, and starting the medication then," Raffi says.

It's still not clear, though, whether amyloid is the new cholesterol. "It took a long time for us to make that connection between cholesterol and heart disease," says Rebeck. "That's been very successful. It's been very helpful in so many people's lives. We're just [at] earlier stages in studying Alzheimer's disease."

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Birds Hang Around Mistletoe For More Than A Kiss

Researchers in Australia found that when they removed mistletoe from large sections of forests, vast numbers of birds left.

BSIP/UIG via Getty Images

For the Druids, mistletoe was sacred. For us, it's a cute ornament and maybe an excuse to steal a kiss. And of course it's a Christmas tradition.

But for a forest, mistletoe might be much more important. It's a parasite, shows up on tree branches and looks like an out-of-place evergreen bush hanging in the air.

Its seeds drill through bark with a threadlike probe and then grow by sapping the energy of its host. And certain types can be nasty pests, especially dwarf mistletoe in the American West.

But it may actually be useful, and more than just as an excuse to make out with someone.

David Watson, an ecologist at Charles Sturt University in Australia, had long suspected this. But nobody had really proved it experimentally. So he did an experiment in an Australian forest.

He just took the mistletoe out.

"Me and a team of 12 volunteers in cherry pickers" — he recalls — "we removed just over 41 tons of mistletoe."

It took five months and then another visit the next season to get it all out.

Three Years Later ...

"The simple act of removing mistletoe led to losses of over a third of the woodland dependent species [of bird]," Watson says. All these birds just left. And weirdly, the birds that took the biggest hit were insect-eating birds.

"Especially the ones that eat insects on the forest floor," Watson says.

What do insects have to do with mistletoe? "It's a byproduct of how parasitic plants do their parasitizing," explains Watson. Parasitic plants are packed with nutrients that they gobble up from their hosts. They suck up all these salts and minerals to create a water gradient between them and their host so they can draw water out of their hosts.

"Parasitic plants the world over have 15 [to] 20 times more concentrated nutrients than their hosts," Watson says.

And because they're moochers, they don't really care about conserving their resources — they can just suck out more. Not so with regular trees, which pull out the good stuff from their leaves before allowing them to fall. But mistletoes just drop their leaves with all the vitamins inside.

"So there is this rain of enriched litter — a bit like mulch, a fertile mulch," as Watson puts it, that falls onto the forest floor under infected trees.

More goodies on the soil, more bugs, more birds that eat the bugs — it might mean more lizards and more mammals too, says Watson. Because of the apparently significant and widespread effects of mistletoe on a forest, he calls it a "keystone resource." He published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Brian Geils, a retired forest pathologist for the U.S. Forest Service, says the jury is still out. As to whether mistletoe in the United States improves forest biodiversity in the way that it appears to in Australia, dwarf mistletoe in the Western U.S. doesn't have the same amount of leaf litter. And that particular type of mistletoe can kill trees. So he's hesitant to credit the parasitic plants with a blanket mantle of positive effects.

"It's quite complex to come up with a simple good or bad, more or less," Gelis says

Even so, he does agree that mistletoe has, for its size, a lot of bang for its buck in a forest ecosystem. For example, he says, it can cause some conifers to grow into what are known as "brooms" — strange-looking, twiggy, bushy poles that can act as ladders for fire and that attract a population of insects not normally found in the canopy.

Daniel Nickrent, a professor of plant biology at Southern Illinois University, is convinced mistletoes do have a similar role in North American forests as they do in Australian ones, particularly the phoradendron mistletoe found in the Eastern U.S.

"So does this keystone idea apply to some of the North Americans ones? I think they do," Nickrent says. "There's evidence they do."

Endangered snowy owls, for example, prefer to nest even in the pathogenic dwarf mistletoe. And, Nickrent says, some mistletoes appear to expand the fungal community that lives in soil beneath infected trees. The biggest instances of tree death by mistletoe aren't in natural forests but rather in human-created groves for lumber.

"This is like a beautiful petri dish that's not inoculated yet," he says of the large tree plantations that can be so afflicted by dwarf mistletoe. They're "just waiting for the mistletoes to come in and feed on this. So the human-altered ecosystems are heavily damaged by dwarf mistletoes."

However you look at mistletoe — keystone font of diversity or pathogenic parasite — being under one is a big deal, and not just for people.

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Stem Cells Treat Lou Gehrig's Disease, In Mice

Reporting in Science Translational Medicine, researchers write that neural stem cell implants were able to slow the onset of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, in mice. Study author Evan Snyder discusses the stem cells' protective effect, and why human trials may not be far behind.

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Why Some Kids Have An Inflated Sense Of Their Science Skills

If you're a student at the halfway point of the academic year, and you've just taken stock of your performance, perhaps you have reason to feel proud of yourself.

But a recent study suggests some of the pride you feel at having done well — especially in science — may be unfounded. Or at least your sense of your performance may not be a very accurate picture of how good you actually are.

A massive analysis of some 350,000 students at nearly 14,000 schools in 53 countries has uncovered a paradox: Students in many countries that are mediocre at science have an inflated sense of good they are.

First the good news: The United States isn't among the worst offenders. Students in countries such as Thailand, Jordan, Mexico and Brazil seem to be worse than U.S. students when it comes to science knowledge, but they have even higher levels of self-esteem when it comes to their beliefs about how good they are at science.

But compared to countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Japan, South Korea and Great Britain, American students appeared to have an inflated sense of their science abilities. Students in those other countries were better when it came to scientific knowledge than American students, but it was the Americans who had the higher opinion of themselves as students of science.

The study, published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, focused on the academic performance of 15 year-old students. It was conducted by Eva Van de gaer, Aletta Grisay, Wolfram Schulz and Eveline Gebhardt.

The paradox between performance and students' impression of their performance has been noted before. The paper proposes an explanation for it: The reference group effect.

The study argues that countries have very different standards when it comes to science education.

In countries with elite science education standards, you can be a very good science student but, since you measure yourself against an elite standard of performance, you think of yourself as mediocre. On the other hand, if you live in a country with average (or mediocre) science standards, you might be just a decent student, but compared to general expectations of how good students are supposed to be, you feel like a genius.

In an interview, Schulz offered me an analogy. He asked me to think about a person who was 5-foot-10 in China and a person who was the same height in the Netherlands. The Dutch, on average, are taller than the Chinese.

"The person would in China probably think of themselves as a tall person," Schulz said. "If you go to the Netherlands, such a person would rather say, 'ah, I'm a short person,' because you compare yourself to those who surround you."

The same thing happens with science education, he said. Students in countries with elite science standards are much more likely to think of themselves as mediocre, whereas students in countries with mediocre standards are much more likely to think of themselves as elite.

Schulz works at the Australian Council for Educational Research, which studies educational issues in science, mathematics and reading.

Schulz told me the reference group effect could potentially be a double-edged sword: In terms of preparing students for competition with one another, it makes good sense to get a realistic sense of how good you actually are compared to, say, your peers in South Korea. On the other hand, Schulz said, there was also something to be said for having an inflated sense of your own abilities.

"For motivating students to take up science studies, how you perceive yourself is actually more important than how much you know," he said. "If your general belief (is) you're not that good at science, that might have this powerful effect of saying, 'Ah, I'd better stay away from it in the future.' "

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