It'll be a long time before scientists figure out why this branch is white.
And even longer before the public finds out.

Is there any place to check in for updates on this research?

Timothy Jordan asked this question on Chris Bauer’s blog about figuring out the genetics of redwood albinism. Unfortunately, the answer is that there really isn’t any place to see how the research is going.

This is because science is this weird combination of secrecy and openness. Research projects start out as proprietary but once finished, they become open source.

What this means is that no results will be released until a good chunk of the research is done and it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. This usually takes a year or more and albino redwoods will probably take even longer.

Part of the reason for this is simple caution on the part of scientists. No one wants to release results so early that that they have to retract them later. Like everyone else, scientists don’t like to be proven wrong in public.

But this only explains not communicating preliminary results. Once a result is pretty solid, it should be OK to broadcast publicly. Except that it still isn’t.

This isn’t the fault of many of the scientists doing the research. I remember wanting to shout my latest results from the mountaintops as soon as I got them. Lots of scientists I have talked to feel the same way.

The problem has more to do with how science is funded. It simply isn’t designed to allow incremental progress to become public.

Scientists rely on the federal government for most of their funding. The NIH, NSF, DOE, and a few other agencies supply the lion’s share of research dollars.

Labs are awarded these grants based on the work they have done. There is absolutely no incentive for sharing their work early. In fact, sharing work too soon can cost you grant money and maybe even (eventually) your lab.

The graveyard of the scientific careers of those scientists who released their data too soon. Photo by Corpse Reviver.

To be credible, scientific results must be published in a peer-reviewed journal. This is the “coin of the realm” in the scientific world. To succeed as a scientist, you need lots of these in the top journals and of course, successful scientists are the ones who get funded.

These journals frown on releasing data before that data can make a big splash for their journal. This forces scientists to not release information to the general public (although they can talk about it at some point at scientific meetings). To keep from perishing, scientists need to keep their results under wraps.

Not only that, but scientists are not above stealing someone’s data and using it to get to the full story first. Smaller labs in particular are vulnerable to this sort of predation. Again, this forces scientists to keep their results to themselves rather than broadcasting it far and wide. Otherwise, they’ll have nothing to show for their work and they won’t get funded.

The only way to overcome these barriers and get results presented to the public in a more timely manner would be to change how science gets funded. Make it so there is lots of money to go around so that scientists will get money whether their lab makes the breakthrough or someone else uses your preliminary results to make the breakthrough.

Of course this won’t happen. For one thing, you wouldn’t be able to screen out the bad and/or lazy scientists nor reward the true go-getters. And besides, there are already way too many labs chasing way too few grants. Given that our government is sliding into insolvency, it is very unlikely that they will throw any more money at science so the public can get information any sooner.

A new way to fund science also wouldn’t change other aspects that keep our current system in place. For example, many scientists like to get a result first and beat the other guys. No funding tweaks are going to change this competitiveness.

Looks like we’ll have to stick with the current way that science is set up. It has done a great job of explaining our world and how it works. We just need to be patient and wait for the findings to eventually be released. As soon as they are, I’ll update you right here.

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Hawkins isn't your ordinary astronomer. She began her career in an ordinary way: Ph. D. in Astronomy from UCLA, using mathematical models and computer simulations to give meaning to her observations. Along the way, she began to learn about how ancient people studied the sky. She's worked with us on our Ancient Observatories website, and hosted an equinox webcast from the top of the Mayan pyramid in the ancient astronomical site of Chichen Itza. And she's devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to understanding and appreciating how the knowledge of ancient people complements what modern scientists study today.

Most scientists today don't learn much about ancient knowledge. Observations such as measurements of the sun's movement across glyph-crusted temples don't usually meet the rigorous criteria of the scientific process: observe, create hypothesis, test, reproduce results.

In some instances, ancient people followed similar practices that were very similar to those used by modern scientists, observing things systematically and trying to devise explanations that will result in correct predictions. And sometimes the knowledge they gathered was, in fact, so "scientific" that modern researchers use it in their work today.

Take, for example, the knowledge of the Aymara Indians in Peru. The well-being of these adept weather-watchers was dependent on knowing how to time the planting of their vital potato crop with the arrival of the season's first rains sometime between October and December. They did this by making observations like meteorologists might today. They watched the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters constellation rise each night, and noted how fuzzy or clear it looked in the sky. Fuzziness caused by cirrus clouds high in the sky, meant rains were a ways off, and potato planting should be postponed. A clearly visible set of Sisters meant rains would come soon.

In 2002, Ben Orlove an environmental scientist at UC Davis, published a paper about the accuracy of the Aymara's observations of the Pleiades. It turned out that these ancient observations could be used by modern scientists to discern El Nino patterns in the past. Fascinating, since these measurements were taken long before there was a formal science of meteorology. Ancient knowledge becomes data points in modern research.

Hawkins cited another example: Ruth Ludwin, a seismologist at the University of Washington, has used generations-old folk tales of the Coast Salish Indians to help inform her computer modeling of earthquakes. The tales recount a serpent that knew where and when an earthquake would strike. By adapting location information from the stories into her computer models, Ludwin has found several small faults in the Seattle area that may have been active hundreds of years ago when the stories were created and may still pose a risk to local communities.

"It's interesting that what we call evidence can come in many forms," Hawkins says. "It might be part of a song, or a glyph writing or an artistic piece or a story."

And sometimes the records we keep and the stories we tell have more meaning than we can imagine when we create them.

Robin Marks is a journalist and science writer who current serves as a Multimedia Projects Developer for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA.

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Credit: NOVAIf you tune in or point your web browser to PBS this week, you'll see a whole bunch about evolution. It's not Charles Darwin's birthday, but it's a celebration that may one day carry much more significance: it's the two year anniversary of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial. In 2005, parents of high school students in the Dover, Pennsylvania school district took the education board to court over attempts to teach intelligent design as a bona fide alternative to evolution in public high schools. The juryless trial assembled a first-rate list of witnesses for the plaintiffs (pro-science, pro-evolution), all of whom eloquently spoke about the foundations of science and evolution, and how we know what we do about the history and diversity of life. Intelligent design advocates, in their defense, had to present evidence supporting intelligent design as a genuine scientific argument. In the end, the judge (who was named one of Time's 100 most influential people last year) ruled that intelligent design is not science and that, furthermore, teaching intelligent design is unconstitutional. His verdict is well worth reading in its entirety (for legal fans out there), or you can check out summarized versions online.

NOVA online has great clips from the show, including additional interviews elaborating on the science behind evolution. Interestingly, there are many Bay Area connections in the show. NOVA prominently features Oakland-based National Center for Science Education (including Eugenie Scott and current Cal graduate student Nick Matze), clearly reflecting the center's long-standing support for science standards in education, especially in biology. Kevin Padian, a Cal professor in integrative biology, provided articulate explanations of evolution as part of his expert testimony, and many of the clips on the website include examples that are now textbook cases of evolutionary processes, some of which are explained the on the Understanding Evolution website, hosted by the UC Museum of Paleontology and the Berkeley Natural History Museums.

Overall, the case is now seen as a landmark event in the on-going battle of teaching evolution and championing science literacy in the public. Intelligent design, which is really creationism in a different guise, fails in clear and dramatic ways to explain the natural world in the way that evolution, by natural selection, has successfully done for over 150 years. For more, be sure to check out the NOVA online features or the Understanding Evolution websites. After all, who doesn't want to live in a scientifically literate society?

Nick Pyenson is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the department of integrative biology and the museum of paleontology.

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