TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 2010

SCIENCE SCAN

COSMOLOGY

First things first

“BANG! THE UNIVERSE VERSE: BOOK 1” (JAMES LU DUNBAR)

James Lu Dunbar, a 26-year-old artist from Oakland, Calif., has written, illustrated and self-published a comic book about the beginning of the universe. “BANG!” is for all ages and could be particularly helpful for edu- cators looking for a snazzy way to teach this complicated subject. “If you don’t un- derstand everything, don’t worry, no one does,” Dunbar writes in the beginning of the book. “That’s why I made it rhyme and added lots of pictures.” “BANG!” is the first in a three-book series; the next two will cover the origin of life on Earth and evolu- tion. Dunbar did most of his research in Boston libraries, where he pored over sci- ence texts, graphic novels and children’s

books for inspiration and information. The book consists of his pencil-and-ink drawings (doctored with Photoshop) and verse such as this: “Then lickety-split, things got going fast/ That dense little dot did not get to last/A bang and a boom and a really massive blast!/In every direction existence was cast.” People can view a slide show of the book at www. jldunbar.com/JLDunbar.com/BANG!.html or order a hard copy for $12.95. He may even e-mail you a free PDF if you ask nicely.

—Rachel Saslow

SCIENCE NEWS

Online games may not boost brainpower

People playing computer games designed to improve their cognitive skills might as well be playing Super Mario, accord- ing to a new study. More than 8,600 people ages 18 to 60 were recruited from among viewers of a British TV science show and asked to play online brain games designed to improve their memory, reason- ing and other skills for at least 10 minutes a day, three times a week. They were then compared to more than 2,700 people who didn’t play any brain games but spent a similar amount of time surfing the Internet and answering general knowledge questions. All participants were given a sort of IQ test before and after the experiment.

Researchers said the people who did the brain training

didn’t do any better on the test after six weeks than people who had simply been on the Internet. On some sections of the test, the people who surfed the Net scored higher than those playing the games. “If you’re [playing these games] because they’re fun, that’s absolutely fine,” said Adrian Owen, assistant director of the cognition and brain sciences unit at Britain’s Medical Research Council, lead author of the study published online April 20 by the journal Nature.“But if you’re expecting [these games] to im- prove your IQ, our data suggests this isn’t the case.” Computer games that supposedly enhance memory, reason- ing and other cognitive skills are played by millions of people worldwide, though few studies have examined whether the games work. “There is precious little evidence to suggest the skills used in these games transfer to the real world,” said Arthur Kramer, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Illinois. He was not linked to the study and has no ties to any companies that make brain-training games. Instead of playing brain games, Kramer said, people would

be better off getting some exercise. He said physical activity can spark new connections between neurons and produce new brain cells.

he said.

“Fitness changes the building blocks of the brain’s structure,” Other experts said brain games might be useful, but only if

they weren’t fun. “If you set the level for these games to a very high level, where you don’t get the answers very often and it really annoys you, then it may be useful,” said Philip Adey, an emeritus pro- fessor of psychology and neuroscience at King’s College in London. If people are enjoying the brain games, Adey said, they probably aren’t being challenged and might as well be playing a regular video game. He said people should consider learning a new language or sport if they really want to improve their brain power.

—Associated Press

Post Carbon

6www.washingtonpost.com/postcarbon

Adapted from The Post’s climate change blog.

A call to arms

The Carbon War Room has come to Washington. The Virgin Group’s Richard Branson, who founded the nonprofit advocacy organization last year along with six other entrepreneurs, said in an interview that the cadre hopes to identify opportunities for businesses to cut both costs and carbon emissions. The group already has a Washington office, but it held a two-day conference here to formally launch the organization and generate ideas about how to leverage market forces to, in Branson’s words, “get on top of carbon.” “We are potentially facing World War III, and we’ve got to

treat it that way,” he said, adding that the group is looking at everything from maximizing energy efficiency to exploring geoengineering techniques. “Man should be able to come up with an answer.” The effort, which kicked off lastWednesday with its

“Creating Climate Wealth Summit 2010,” includes an array of initiatives. One of the most interesting is getting ships to declare how fuel-efficient they are, so shippers, companies and port authorities can give preferential treatment to vessels that emit fewer greenhouse gases. Former Costa Rican president José Maria Figueres, a speaker at the conference, noted that given all the greenhouse gases emitted by shippers worldwide, “if they were a nation, they would be the sixth-largest emitting nation in the world.”

Last month was the hottest March

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies have determined that last month ranks as the hottest March in recorded history. NOAA concluded that the combined global land and ocean

average surface temperature in March was 1.39 degrees above the 20th-century average. The Goddard Institute made a similar finding, concluding that March’s temperature was a record-breaking 1.9 degrees above the 20th-century average. “This is more impressive evidence that the oceans and

atmosphere are rapidly warming, increasing such risks as massive sea level rise,” said Rafe Pomerance of the advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet.

— Juliet Eilperin

W

KLMNO

FIELD OF INQUIRY

INTERVIEWS WITH PEOPLE IN SCIENCE

EVOLUTIONARY GENETICIST FRANCISCO AYALA wasn’t always

attracted to life in the laboratory. As a young man in Spain, Ayala was ordained as a Dominican priest. Within a year, though, he gave up it up to study genetics at Columbia Uni- versity. Since then, Ayala’s research has focused on parasitic protozoans, tiny organisms that cause malaria and other diseases. But what this much-awarded scientist, now 76, may be best known for are his efforts to keep creationism and intelligent design theories out of the classroom. In 1981, he was as an expert witness in a federal case that over- turned an Arkansas law mandating the teaching of crea- tionism alongside evolution. Today, Ayala says he lives “in heaven” in a house with a

“

view of the Pacific Ocean just a mile from his office at the University of California at Irvine, where he is a professor of biology and philosophy. On May 5 he will be honored at Buckingham Palace when he receives the 2010 Templeton Prize for what the Templeton Foundation said was his “clear voice in matters of science and faith.” We spoke to Ayala on the phone about both those matters

— and about what he plans to do with the $1.5 million in prize money.

—Rachel Saslow

Why did you leave the priest-

hood?

I became a priest out of ideal- ism, is the best way I can describe it. I wanted to be a missionary and go to remote places like the Amazon. It was a slow, gradual process that culminated in the last two years of the five that I studied theology. I decided, “I don’t want to live the life of a priest. . . . I want to become a sci- entist.”

How did you decide on genet-

ics?

I had studied science as an un-

dergraduate at the University of Madrid, and I continued to be in- terested in it. When I was study- ing theology, I started to read much more about human evolu-

tion and genetics. In particular, “The Phenomenon of Man” by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He was also a priest. I studied genetics because it seemed to me that the best way to approach the evolution of hu- mans was genetics.

Do you spend most of your time researching parasitic pro- tozoans or talking about evolu- tion and intelligent design is- sues?

My work is mostly doing sci- ence, not only in malaria, but ge- netics and evolutionary biology. And a good part of my time is spent teaching, which I enjoy. I am invited to talk about evo- lution very often. Probably, I will lecture this year in more than 50

CHAS METIVIER/ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER FROM TEMPLETON FOUNDATION

I decided, ‘I don’t want to live the life of a priest. . . . I want to become a scientist.’ ”

cause it’s familiar to everyone is the human jaw. It’s not big enough for all of our teeth, so we have to have the wisdom teeth re- moved, or we have to go to ortho- dontist to have them straight- ened. If an engineer had de- signed the human jaw, he would’ve been fired the next day. Are you going to blame God for that?

Is creationism becoming more or less prominent as a be- lief?

I think it was much more prominent around the time of the 1981 Arkansas decision. Of course, in recent times, partic- ularly now in the context of this prize, it has gotten attention from the media, but the attention is probably very little compared to what happened in ’81, when many newspaper articles and several books were published. My own evaluation, which is purely subjective, is that the possibility of [creationism and intelligent design] being taken seriously in biology class has diminished over time.

universities. I also have written about and lectured on wine.

Wine?

I own a vineyard where I pro- duce wine grapes. I have orga- nized it so it runs by itself. I talk to my manager a couple of times a week from my cellphone when I walk to work.

From your point of view, what are the flaws in the intelligent design argument?

Nothing in the living world is really intelligently designed; if it was, it would be designed by an engineer. There are defects you would

expect from natural selection. The example I always give be-

Are you still Catholic?

I never respond to that ques- tion. I claim that my views are in- dependent of whether I’m Catho- lic or a person of faith or whether I am not. The idea that I am de- fending should be valid for peo- ple of faith or agnostic or athe- istic. I don’t want to be labeled.

What are you going to do with the $1.5 million in prize money from the Templeton Founda- tion?

Irvine, where I am, may get most or all of it. I might give some to the National Academy of Sciences, but I have not made a final decision yet.

Come on, won’t you set aside

a little for yourself?

I will have a nice dinner, but

with my own money, not with the prize money.

A bounteous source of power may lie right beneath our feet

HOW AND WHY

Ben Harder

ind, water, solar . . . Who needs the tired, old elements? Each of those

energy sources has had its proverbial day in the sun. It’s time to move aside, ye olde renewables, and make way for a truly abundant and unceasing power source: our limbs, our clothes, our cars. The world is a frenetic, kinetic kaleidoscope that hums with the constant motion of 6 billion people and their accouterments. Take a good look at the crushing multitudes on K Street at rush hour or at the vehicles rumbling around the Beltway. There’s energy in them thar commuters. All that motion might well hold a key to much-sought energy independence. We just need to bottle some of that juice. Certain materials produce an

electrical current whenever they’re flexed, bent or otherwise deformed. This occurs because these so-called piezoelectric materials — which are as diverse as quartz crystals, leaded ceramics and bone — contain pockets of positive and negative charge. When the material is flexed, those charges shift around, creating the potential for electrical current. Thanks to this piezoelectric effect, such materials can be used to convert the motion that distorts them into electricity. A few piezoelectric-based

devices have been around for years, including pedal-powered bicycle lights and hand-held and flintless gas-grill lighters. The science behind them dates back to 1880, when 21-year-old Pierre Curie, who would later share a Nobel Prize in physics with his wife, Marie, co-discovered the piezoelectric effect with the help of his older brother.

But engineers are only now beginning to see piezoelectricity as a source of abundant energy. They’re using novel materials and techniques to harvest the “free” (i.e., untapped) energy that people generate when they move. Think of it as a giant energy recycling program. And it literally uses flex fuel. A journey of a million

kilowatt-hours begins with simple footsteps. Engineering teams worldwide are embedding piezoelectric materials in flooring and paving materials so the

ALAMY

Inventors claim that the foot power of pedestrians is sufficient to illuminate streetlights.

ground can absorb the energy from our moving feet. One company claims that five hours of busy pedestrian traffic over a portion of sidewalk could power a dim streetlight all night. Some engineers have designed backpacks, shoes and other wearables that draw energy from the wearer’s motions. Two years ago, in the journal Science, Canadian researchers described a modified knee brace that produced five watts when worn walking. That’s enough to power several cellphones. Before long, though, phones

may effectively charge themselves. This year, Nokia filed a patent for a piezoelectric device that could let a phone battery draw a small charge each time it gets jostled in your pocket. If your phone still somehow conks out? In theory, just shake it and dial. Engineers are also weaving piezoelectric fibers into clothing and other textiles. Some are experimenting with microscopic piezoelectric wires of zinc oxide. When flexed, these wires generate currents that could charge a battery or power portable electronics connected to the garment.

Other researchers have embedded piezoelectric materials in silicone rubber that can be stretched, say, across someone’s

chest to draw power from the rise-and-fall motion of his lungs. You don’t have to get all out of

breath about it, either. Even couch potatotes like me produce free energy. It’s called body heat. Thermoelectric materials, which are akin to piezoelectric ones, can produce electricity in response to temperature changes within the material rather than from shape changes. That means the radiant warmth of my skin is a potential source of power. Perpetua Power Source

Technologies, for instance, is working to create garments that use such heat to support a “wireless body area network” capable of, for example, monitoring a sick person’s vital signs. By the time I develop hypertension from sitting around too much, my clothing may be capable of alerting me to my high blood pressure. Of course, my body heat is nothing compared with the furnace that is a car’s engine. That’s one place where thermoelectric power could really come into its own. Some experts estimate that only a quarter of the fuel a typical car consumes is utilized to power the vehicle. (Hybrids do a bit better in this department, thanks to their electrodynamic regenerative braking, which produces energy when vehicles

slow down, a form of energy harvesting.) Researchers are testing systems that could salvage some of that heat emitted by the engine and convert it back into usable energy. A particularly interesting breakthrough was reported last month when Zhong Lin Wang and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology published a study of two tiny piezoelectric generators that they had created. Each is about the size of a paper clip. When squeezed, one produces roughly the same voltage as an AA battery. The other does the same when it’s bent. Together, these devices are the

first that engineers have been able to create that can pack so much voltage in such a small package. Such generators could be used to operate small sensors powered by sources as simple, Wang said, as sound waves, vibrations or even the flutter of a flag. In other words, there’s free

energy in the brave wave of the Star-Spangled Banner. When it comes to energy independence, you can’t get more patriotic than that.

health-science@washpost.com

Harder is the director of health and science at U.S. News & World Report.

Science

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