With a little help from our members, the Chicago Science Writers will post samples of science news from our area. This blog, assembled by Jon Van, retired Tribune science writer, and current freelancer, doesn’t purport to provide a complete or even representative cross section of all the news. But we do hope to provide a window into just some of the interesting work being done in Chicago.
We welcome comments and suggestions. In the spirit of science, this can be regarded as something of an experiment.
Winter 2010
Our first bit of news comes from Northwestern University, where Chad Mirkin has received an unusual honor.
Chad Mirkin elected to all three branches of the National Academies
Northwestern University scientist Chad A. Mirkin, a world-renowned leader in nanotechnology research and its application, has been elected a member of the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IOM).
He is the first at Northwestern and in the Midwest and the 10th in the world to be elected to all three branches of the National Academies. Mirkin was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year and a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2009.
The conplete story is available here: http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2010/10/mirkin-institute-of-medicine.html
At the University of Illinois Chicago campus researchers offer some insights into why plants would choose to have sex with themselves. Or not:
Most flowering plants, equipped with both male and female sex organs, can fertilize themselves and procreate without the aid of a mate. But this may only present a short-term adaptive benefit, according to a team of researchers led by two University of Illinois at Chicago biologists, who report that long-term evolutionary survival of a species favors flowers that welcome pollen from another plant.
"We've shown that a strong, short-term advantage experienced by individuals that have sex with themselves can be offset by long-term advantages to plant species that strictly avoid self-fertilization," says Boris Igić, UIC assistant professor of biological sciences. The result is "an apparently unending competition between these two reproductive strategies," he said, "contributing to disparities in species diversity observed among different groups of plants."
The findings are reported in the Oct. 22 issue of Science by Igić and lead author Emma Goldberg, postdoctoral research associate in biological sciences.
See http://tigger.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/newsbureau/cgi-bin/index.cgi?to=Release&id=3046 for the full story.
From the University of Chicago comes advice that parents ought to start talking hard numbers to their offspring, early and often:
Children whose parents talked more about numbers were much more likely to understand the cardinal number principle — which states that the size of a set of objects is determined by the last number reached when counting the set.
“By the time children enter preschool, there are marked individual differences in their mathematical knowledge, as shown by their performance on standardized tests,” said University of Chicago psychologist Susan Levine, the leader of the study. Other studies have shown that the level of mathematics knowledge entering school predicts future success.
“These findings suggest that encouraging parents to talk about numbers with their children, and providing them with effective ways to do so, may positively impact children’s school achievement,” said Levine, the Stella M. Rowley Professor in Psychology.
http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=2156
At FermiLab, they are trying to shed a little light on dark matter:
A Fermilab theorist and his colleague at NYU might have found clues to some of the universe’s juiciest secrets at the center of the Milky Way.
In their analysis of public data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Dan Hooper, Fermilab scientist, and Lisa Goodenough, a graduate student at New York University, report that very-high-energy gamma rays coming from the center of the Milky Way originate from dark-matter collisions.
“We went out of our way to consider all causes of backgrounds that mimic the signal, and we found no other plausible astrophysics sources or mechanics that can produce a signal like this,” Hooper said. http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2010/10/22/fermilab-theorist-sees-dark-matter-evidence-in-public-data/
And finally, for this edition of our little effort, comes security-busting news from researchers at Argonne Lab. It reminds me of the problems bicyclists faced a few years back when it became known that Bic pens could be used to compromise high security U-locks:
The high-tech access control device was secure, sophisticated, and complex; it was intended to protect nuclear materials and other important assets. But security experts at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory defeated it with parts from a Bic pen.
Argonne security experts have revealed the dirty secrets behind electronic voting machines, "high-security" electronic locks, iris and fingerprint scanners and even GPS navigation systems.
Roger Johnston heads Argonne’s Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT) spends its workdays trying to defeat security devices.
http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/News/2010/news101026.html