Council for the Advancement of Science Writing

Nurses everywhere know the drill: “Tell me how bad your pain is on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the worst pain you’ve ever experienced.” Linda Bartoshuk wouldn’t use such a poor question to make decisions about pain medication. Bartoshuk studies the senses, especially taste, and she made her mark with research revealing why the experience of taste varies across individuals. Now she’s trying to fix the way scientists measure perception.

Climate scientists have been watching Greenland with alarm in recent years as its massive glaciers melt, crack and break off, losing ice at a rate that has doubled in the past 10 years. Ellen Martin and her collaborator Jon Martin are spending summers capturing a geochemical record of Greenland’s change, hoping to use this natural laboratory to inform paleoclimate studies. Ellen Martin studies the global carbon cycle by analyzing isotopic signatures of continental weathering.

What will the strawberry field, grocery store, florist’s greenhouse and space station of the future have in common? In Kevin Folta’s vision, they’ll all have automatic lighting systems and reflective surfaces that use varying colors of light to fine-tune nutrition, flavor and many other attributes in plants. Since the dawn of photosynthesis, many aspects of the lives of plants have been managed by photoreceptor chemistry.

Burning tanker trains, oil sands, fracking, pipeline wars. A quarter-century after the G20 nations agreed on a target for reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide, local and regional ecological crises dominate the debate over energy and environment. Mark Jaccard sees international economic and political systems as paralyzed by a sort of mass delusion about global carbon. Jaccard, a contributor to the early IPCC reports, will offer an economist's perspective on North American energy controversies as well as the IPCC reports coming out this fall.

How close is medicine to a world in which your treatment for hypertension, coronary artery disease or pain is fine-tuned to your genotype? Weaving a path through the thorny issues surrounding “personalized medicine,” Julie Johnson and her colleagues are now showing that a genotype-driven approach to drug dosing can work. An example is the blood thinner warfarin, where the therapeutic daily dose can be anywhere from 1 to 20 milligrams, and patients must have frequent blood tests to prevent dangerous bleeding and strokes.

What are cells? Among other things, most are pumps, and that’s how Tommy Angelini sees them. Animal cells are built to generate contractile forces; they pull on each other and can generally pump an amount of fluid 10 times their internal volume in an hour. This mechanical perspective turns the notion of cell signaling on its head. A biochemist might imagine cell signaling as a diffusion process; Angelini, understanding cells as machines, says cells respond to mechanical signals by pushing signaling molecules through their pores.