I'm from the Pittsburgh area, so I have no small love for professional athletes -- particularly those who play football. When Troy Polamalu intercepts a pass and dashes downfield, my spirits soar. When, say, the Ravens score a touchdown in the last few seconds of the fourth quarter, clinching the win, my hopes are crushed along with the rest of the Steeler Nation's. Like most sports fans, we celebrate with the team's successes, we share the anguish of their defeats, and then we place way too much weight on how those events will impact the future.
Here are the successes we don't typically see on the front page of the paper: Two Virginia Tech scientists develop a relatively painless cure for aggressive, deep-seated cancers; a team of aerospace engineers designs an airliner capable of burning 70 percent less fuel; two civil engineers create a structural system that helps buildings survive magnitude seven earthquakes. The future impact of those developments -- all Popular Mechanics 2010 Breakthrough Award winners -- should be obvious. But how many kids are they inspiring? Not as many as Hines Ward, the Steelers' top wide receiver.
Don't get me wrong: Clearly Sunday football is not the downfall of science education. But interest in science and technology trails -- miles -- behind the cultural significance of the NFL. The consequences are worrisome: Five years ago, the National Academies of Science released a report concluding that if America is to compete in the global workforce, and continue to improve its standard of living, it must preserve an adequate supply of scientists and engineers capable of performing imaginative, cutting-edge work. A few weeks ago, the study's committee provided an update: Instead of improving, our nation's outlook in that respect has gotten worse.
In the past decade, our population has grown and the importance of science and technology has expanded -- while the number of bachelor's degrees in math, engineering and the physical sciences awarded by U.S. universities has stagnated. According to the National Science Board, in standardized tests involving students from 30 nations, American 14-year-olds rank 25th in mathematics and 21st in science. (They also spend an average of seven and a half hours a day in front of a video game, TV or computer.) The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. 48th in the quality of its math and science education. Plus, 49 percent of American adults still don't know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun. Ouch.
The stakes are higher -- and, in a time of recession, hit closer to home -- than most realize. While only four percent of the nation's work force is composed of scientists and engineers, the report's authors point out, this group disproportionately creates jobs for the rest of us. Mapping the human genome -- the accomplishment of PM's Breakthrough Leadership Award winner, J. Craig Venter -- opened up a wide array of potential new jobs in fields like medicine. What's more, each manufacturing job created by inventions like gearless wind turbines or cheap, flexible solar panels -- made possible by Breakthrough honorees Larry Fullerton and Harry Atwater -- generates, on average, another 2.5 unrelated jobs.
So how do we turn around this trend of underachievement? The legislation that authorized many of the original report's recommendations, the America COMPETES Act -- which itself wasn't funded until the 2009 stimulus package -- is scheduled to expire this year. Those initiatives included things like providing scholarships for future math and science teachers and the creation of ARPA-E, to stimulate energy research. All of the committee's recommendations could be implemented for many billions of dollars less than Americans spend on cigarettes each year.
But at Popular Mechanics, we also believe in the incalculable power of a much cheaper fix: Celebrating the scientists and engineers who are making our world a healthier, safer and more sustainable place. That's why we came up with the Breakthrough Awards -- to recognize our kind of heroes. People like the team behind the LCROSS Mission, which slammed 2 tons of rocket parts into the moon in order to confirm whether it contained water. (The answer is yes.) And Aydogan Ozcan, a UCLA engineer who turned a cellphone into a digital microscope that can diagnose disease anywhere in the world.
"We live in a time of enormous change...," the authors of the National Academies of Science report write. "A nation that does not embrace innovation will soon be left behind in the 21st century economy." We see innovation happening every day -- it's why we find what we do so fulfilling -- and we know it's not merely a relic of the Apollo program: The four young women who won our Next Generation Award, for example, were motivated by concern for rural Africans. They designed a soccer ball that generates electricity to power LEDs.
Next Sunday I'm still going to watch the Steelers take down the Browns. But I know the Breakthrough Awards ceremony this Tuesday evening will be far more inspirational (and, really, less stressful). Sure, conversation about running games comes naturally to me. But discussing Venter's plans to engineer microbes capable of producing clean biofuels? That's a whole lot more important.
I took a look at your site.
The nature of the fraud at NASA you allege includes a belief that the US did not visit the moon after 1968 and fraudulently pretended they did, right?
Lorraine Egan
Executive Director
Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation
And despair.
A huge number (tens of millions) of the US population is not only mired in medieval religious ideology, a material part of whose platform is antagonistic to science, but such ignorance is not only not regarded as appalling, but rather celebrated and manipulated by national populist political forces.
You'd better hope God is on our side because we got enough ignorance to perpetuate the problems we've got and grow plenty more where they came from.
http://www.bccmeteorites.com/frass/Frass.html
Then in I believe February or March 2005 a press conference was held in which some scientists from these Universities announced that one of the Mars Rovers had discovered a meteorite on the surface of Mars. (An object not native to the planet). Right away I noticed the panel was composed of scientists who had been visiting the aforementioned page repeatedly and the second thing I noticed was...........this discovery they were announcing was a statement I had made on our page months before their announcement. In other words they lifted this information from our site and did not credit us for it. Nobody outside that panel would have been credited with the discovery, not even you.
http://www.astro.cornell.edu/people/facstaff-detail.php?pers_id=112
I was happy they made the announcement and glad they could use our website to gain confidence, but make no mistake, government scientists are about maintaining the status quo which is limit competition, censor and suppress innovation and claim discoveries for themselves.
We are living near the end of this millennium in which is described as going threw the 'dark orb, or the navel or birth canel'. Threw this time, many new technologies are being developed that many people are not aware of or at what rate. To many, they will just be amazed at the speed of the changes, and not be aware that we are going threw the navel of time. When some watch basketball and cheer their team on, they may not be aware that when the ball goes threw the hoop, in the old days it meant that team made it threw the next millennium, and now don't have to worry about their team getting their heads cut off. :)
the solution to the problem is
for someone to design
a really cool videogame
that teaches science
(kind of like sugar coating on a bitter pill ??)
would be a good project for a Google or Microsoft to fund
.
they are great popularizers
we need more like them
The University where I work underfunds research and yet has an army of landscapers and spends serious money on camillias, mulching massive flower beds, etc. I've even seen guys wandering around the woods on campus picking up sticks. Appearances are more important than substance... and priorities being what they are, we might be ignorant but we look good playing the part of hypocrites.
How's that gravity free research going?
I see lots of politicians and industry shills (US Chamber of Commerce) say our students are lagging behind in science and math and older workers need "retraining". These are codes words. What they really mean is we are creating an artificial shortage of qualified employees and stamping workers untrained to create excuses and import more foreign cheap labor.
Bill Gates testified in front of Congress that we have a shortage of highly skilled IT workers hence needing to import more of them under the H1-B visa program. This is a big lie, they just don't want to pay decent wages to Americans. But the worst insult is when you are hired to train foreign workers who will replace you in 9 months throwing you back into the unemployment line.
Better to get some cash in the bank and then work in a garage.
you think we have a scientist recruitment problem because of a liberal global warming fantasy?
I'm not so sure about that. The sports team mentality seems to be taking over everything in our society. We can certainly see this in the political sphere, where winning seems more important than governing effectively. People side with a political party and cheer when for whatever their side does, even torture. But torture is clearly wrong, whether it's a Republican who orders it or a Democrat who passively endorses it through refusing to prosecute a Republican for doing it. Just picking a team and siding with it isn't enough - but that seems to be the message we give our kids over and over again through training them to compete in team sports.
We see people with the idea, "our team is for business, so we are against the environment," as though this kind of logic makes any sense at all in the real world. If the environment fails, there will be no business. Likewise, there are all kinds of business opportunities in switching to alternative energy sources.
Science education benefits everyone, but when one "team" sees science as belonging to the other side, they automatically resist efforts to improve it.