What do ovarian cancer, asthma, and grilled chicken have in common? All three were the subject of the winning projects in the first ever Google Science Fair. The fair, created in partnership with CERN, LEGO, Scientific American, and National Geographic, received over 10,000 online entries from 91 different countries.  On July 11, 2011, fifteen global finalists flew to the Google headquarters to present their projects to a panel of renowned scientists.  From this pool of budding young scientists, three winners emerged—all girls!

Although the awards took place in July, the three winners had the opportunity to visit the White House a few weeks ago and present their projects to President Obama. Shree Bose, winner in the 17 -18-year-old category and the grand prize winner, investigated ways to counteract cancer cell resistance to a common chemotherapy drug, cisplatin—a drug used to treat ovarian cancer. The winner in the 15-16-year-old category, Naomi Shah, studied the effects of air quality on lungs, particularly for people with asthma. Lauren Hodge won in the 13-14-year-old category for her project that examined ways to decrease the production of carcinogenic compounds when grilling meats—she discovered that certain marinades (like brown sugar and lemon juice) worked the best. The girls found that the President genuinely showed an interest in learning more about their projects and reiterated his commitment to providing opportunities to increase the participation of all young people, particularly girls, in scientific pursuits.

The fact that all three winners are girls is impressive given the reality of the dearth of women in many science and technology fields. A 2010 report published by the American Association of University Women, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, found that the stereotype that boys are inherently better at math and science persists today. This is just one of the societal and environmental barriers outlined in the report that have limited women’s participation in the science, engineering, and math fields. According to the report, on average, girls take more science credits than boys in high school and tend to have higher grade point averages in the sciences. Once they get to college, however, many tend not to major in science, engineering, or math. Both male and female students change their minds in college—a recent New York Times article describes overall attrition from science and engineering majors across the board—but women show a much greater propensity to drop out of science- and technology-oriented majors. In 2006, women earned only about 20% of all of the bachelor’s degrees in physics and engineering conferred in the US.

Turning the tide on this trend is a priority here at the California Academy of Sciences, demonstrated by our participation in the GirlsRISE (Raising Interest in Science and Engineering) Museum Network (GirlsRISEnet).  The Academy, along with science centers across the country, serves as a regional training hub to promote professional development for informal educators and museum professionals to engage middle- and high-school girls in science and engineering—and to encourage them in pursuing these fields as a career.  The Academy held a workshop this past summer for informal educators from Bay Area museums and aquaria where we shared current research on women and minorities in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), explored hands-on activities for promoting STEM with girls and used an exhibit evaluation tool to assess how girl-friendly our exhibits are. We will be holding another workshop in 2012.

The results of the Google Science Fair and the Academy’s involvement in GirlsRISEnet remind us that our work on promoting science is not done. As Michelle Obama recently stated at an event related to women in science:

It’s about showing every child that a scientist isn’t just something you hear about in biology class, that a doctor isn’t someone you visit when you’re sick.  Instead, young people—particularly our girls—need to understand that doctors and scientists are something that anyone can become, no matter how much money your family has, no matter where you come from or whether you’re a man or a woman.  And that message is more important than ever in today’s world.

As my husband has said again and again, in order to meet the challenges of the next century, we have got to strengthen our role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological advancement.  We need to educate the scientists who will make the next big discoveries that will fuel our economy.  We need the highly skilled leaders who can teach in our classrooms, run our laboratories, and power our industries for decades to come.

And if we’re going to out-innovate and out-educate the rest of the world, then we have to open doors to everyone.  We can’t afford to leave anyone out.  We need all hands on deck.  And that means clearing hurdles for women and girls as they navigate careers in science, technology, engineering and math.

Eileen Harrington is the Academy’s Naturalist Center manager and reference librarian.

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

Publishing this week in the journal Nature, 40 scientists from around the world (and as nearby as UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), announced that they have now trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms, each for more than one-tenth of a second.

This is exciting news, because although the first artificially produced low energy antihydrogen atoms were created at CERN in 2002, until now these atoms have struck normal matter and annihilated in a flash of gamma-rays within microseconds of creation, keeping scientists in the dark about their properties.

From Universe Today:

Not only is this a science fiction dream come true, but in a very real way this could help us figure out what happened to all the antimatter that has vanished since the Big Bang, one of the biggest mysteries of the Universe.

The new experiments are happening at CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), under the name of ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus). In fact, ALPHA relies on the LHC. In order to make antihydrogen, the accelerators that feed protons to the LHC at CERN divert some of these to make antiprotons by slamming them into a metal target; the antiprotons that result are held in CERN’s Antimatter Decelerator ring, which delivers bunches of antiprotons to ALPHA and another antimatter experiment.

ALPHA then takes the antiprotons and cools them and compresses them into a matchstick-size cloud (20 millimeters long and 1.4 millimeters in diameter). Then, the cloud of cold, compressed antiprotons is nudged to overlap a like-size positron cloud, where the two particles mate to form antihydrogen. All this happens inside a magnetic bottle, cooled to 9 Kelvin (or -443.47˚ Fahrenheit), that traps the antihydrogen atoms for that magical 172 milliseconds, or a sixth of a second.

The sixth of a second is just long enough to let the scientists know they have actually trapped it. The ALPHA team spokesman, Jeffrey Hangst, a Danish physicist, describes it this way in a great video on YouTube:

The way you know that you’ve done it, is you capture some antihydrogen and then release it intentionally. You let it go, at a given time and you look for an annihilation. That’s how we detect this has actually happened and that’s what this article in Nature is about.

(He also has a great description of antimatter in the video.)

What if physicists were able to hold on to these antihydrogen atoms a little longer? “We are getting close to the point at which we can do some classes of experiments on the properties of antihydrogen,” said Joel Fajans, UC Berkeley professor of physics and ALPHA team member. From 80beats in Discover:

If the scientists can extend that time… Fajans says, they can begin to play around with antimatter and figure out how its personality differs from ordinary matter’s, and why we live in a universe dominated by matter rather than its opposite.

Image: CERN