A Bit of Bilingual Science Outreach

When you can’t bring the masses to science, bring science to the masses. At least that’s the approach recently for many science outreach programs, including Explorando las Ciencias, or Exploring the Sciences, a bilingual community event held Oct. 23 on Madison’s south side that catered to both Spanish and English speakers. 

Five Interesting Things I Heard About: Solar Energy

One of the great things about living in a university town like Madison, Wis. is that there is a never-ending supply of interesting talks to attend and scholars willing to give those talks. While the talks are rarely dull and I do my best to pay attention, I’ve found that much of the material presented often escapes me soon afterward. You know, you get to worrying about work or school or what’s on your grocery list (daily life, in other words) and you forget the interesting stem cell development, the surprising statistic about corn ethanol production, or the fascinating hypothesis about mantle hotspot dynamics that you just heard. It’s not easy retaining so much information, even when it is interesting, surprising and fascinating stuff.

(Image credit: (c) pixor, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In the spirit of trying to preserve some of this awesome info that might otherwise be lost, I thought I’d mix things up with the blog here and introduce a new series of posts entitled “Five Interesting Things I Heard About: [blank].” This is a largely self-motivated exercise of course, but I hope I manage to keep it interesting for you, the reader, as well.

The first installment comes from a guest lecture by Sandy Klein, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Solar Energy Lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, as part of a course about energy resources. Klein spoke about the basics of energy use in the U.S., including solar, where solar technology is now and where it’s headed:

Crowdsourcing Science

In this age of the ever-expanding scope and complexity of cutting-edge science, researchers are increasingly using any and all resources at their disposal to expand their capacity for data collection and analysis.  This may mean borrowing time on massive, multi-user super-computers to run complex simulations (climate models, for example), or it may mean larger and larger interdisciplinary collaborations among scientists who each have their own equipment and expertise.

In this age of ever-expanding wired interconnectivity, there are also a growing number of opportunities for members of the everyday public to voluntarily offer up their services in the name of scientific awareness and progress.  These citizen scientists have been helping in everything from surveys of wildlife (see, for instance, my last post about the updated winter wolf count in Wisconsin, which relies in part on observations from knowledgeable amateurs) to surveys of interstellar gravitational waves.

Two Updates for Wisconsin Wolf Watchers

Photo by Christian Mehlfuhrer on fotopedia

The gray wolf (Canis lupus), like other apex predators, has been both feared and revered for centuries.  On the one hand, it is a wild animal that poses threats to the safety of people and their domesticated livestock and pets.  On the other, it is an important part of the ecosystem who has suffered the loss of much of its natural habitat due to human encroachment.

In the U.S., after being eradicated across most of its historic range as contact between wolves and humans increased, protection and conservation efforts enacted in the last several decades have helped the wolf population rebound.

I recently wrote about the status of the gray wolf in Wisconsin, where the population, thought to be zero in 1960, was estimated a year ago at about 700.  This past Friday brought news from the state’s Department of Natural Resources that the total is now around 825, more than double the management goal that the state set in the late 1990s.

Most of this recovery has occurred in the past decade, during which time the gray wolf has been reclassified under the federal Endangered Species Act from endangered to threatened once in 2003, and delisted altogether from protection on two separate occasions in 2007 and 2009.  In each case, though, the decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been overturned by federal courts under pressure from a handful of conservation and animal rights groups.