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Kids in poorer countries more interested/excited about science

If you had to guess where in the world kids are the most enthusiastic about science and technology, you might figure that places like Norway and Japan would seriously outdistance, say, Uganda and Botswana. If you did, you'd have it exactly backwards. An article in the new online journal Science in School reports on a study of teenagers in 35 countries. Across a variety of measures, kids in poorer countries -- those whose economies depend much less on science and technology -- had a much more optimistic attitude about science than kids in wealthier nations. Take a look at this figure showing…

Soft as the womb of a marshmallow mermaid

San Francisco based company Cordarounds seems hell-bent on living up to every stereotype about that quirky city. Their store is online-only and features a trippy blog. Their catalog ads involve horizontal corduroy pants worn by attractive-and/or-grungy people drinking, eating, playing guitar, camping, reading The Satanic Verses in a reversible smoking jacket, that sort of mundane thing. They offer free shipping - but only to Greenland, of course. Best of all, they're not afraid to offend people with their uberedgy science: Okay, maybe that's actually pseudoscience. If it's not, I really…

Neuroscience on JoVE

The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is a pioneering open access online journal devoted to the publication of peer-reviewed biological research in video format. The JoVE website was launched in December 2006, and now has about 200 films, which are divided into 7 categories, and which describe all sorts of experimental procedures. The neuroscience category contains videos describing basic techniques such as culturing mouse neocortical neurons, and more sophisticated procedures, such as implanting a glass-covered "brain window" for in vivo imaging in rats. (In March of last year, I…

Winding down this blog

This is the last blip before Scienceblogs.com/thescian fades into the background. I am no more a blogger. The past few years has been a memorable journey and your company was wonderful. A big thank you to you, the readers, and to Scienceblogs who made this a great experience for me. Please visit TheScian.com to relive those old times. I am publishing, as text and audio, the best posts of this blog since 2006 along with reader comments. The articles and audio will go online every friday starting today. You can subscribe to it via iTunes and other apps. I am in the process of revamping…

New web-based scientific tools & sites

The Graduate Junction The Graduate Junction provides an easy way for Masters, PhD and Postdoctoral researchers to see what current work is being undertaken by their peers and communicate with those who share common research interests in a global multi-disciplinary environment. It was created by a team of graduate researchers at Durham and Oxford University. With this website, they hope to build an online graduate research community. www.graduatejunction.com Labmeeting.com Labmeeting.com is a new, web-based tool to help researchers organize and search their collection of PDFs, find out about…

Science Online 2010

Blogging is liable to be sparse next week, as I will be at Science Online 2010 to do a workshop about institutional repositories, and talk about libraries generally alongside the inestimable Stephanie Willen Brown. Here are the slides for my half of the latter: So you think you know libraries I'm not doing slides for the workshop; it's a workshop and I want it to be hands-on and participant-driven. I expect we'll do some SHERPA/RoMEO trawling, some test uploads and metadata, some cold reads of publication agreements, things like that. If you'll be there next week, please come say hi; I look…

Why Definitions of Science Literacy Matter

Everyone claims it's a major societal problem, but what does science literacy exactly mean? What does past research suggest are the valid definitions of this frequently used term? Similarly, what is meant by the "public understanding of science"? Is it the same thing as "public engagement"? As I explain in our Framing Science article at Science and in the Speaking Science 2.0 road show, these definitions matter when it comes to effective public communication. Over at my blog Framing Science, I repost a 2005 column that I wrote for Skeptical Inquirer Online. The short piece offers a lot for…

Big Drills and THE NEED OF AN INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH

An oddly incomplete article is over at the Tenerife News Online. Despite its revealing title of An Interview with Professor Searle - MICHAEL - IN NEED AN INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH - WHO DID THE INTERVIEW ETC , Searle provides some interesting commentary on the first expedition of the RSS James Cook.. The drill could produce some good samples of mantle rock, but as I said the sediment cover in many places was thicker than we expected. We are therefore thinking about writing a proposal for funding to bring a larger drill here to penetrate deeper. But don't worry, the mantle substance at the…

Science academies working in concert?

The Independent Online Edition >Independent makes a tantalizing announcement: The world's scientific community united yesterday to launch one of the strongest attacks yet on creationism, warning that the origins of life were being "concealed, denied or confused". The national science academies of 67 countries warned parents and teachers to ensure that they did not undermine the teaching of evolution or allow children to be taught that the world was created in six days. So far, though, I've only found this one source that mentions it, and neither the National Academies or Royal Society…

Wikipedia Wants To Know

Jimmy Wales has a question for you: Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license? Hmmm...I'd start with a good newspaper archive, like The New York Times. I'd make every article ever written completely accessible and free. Then, for purely selfish reasons, I'd go ahead and make Bob Dylan's entire music catalogue open access. If I had any money left over, I'd put introductory textbooks online. Shouldn't every kid have access to a lucid book on the basics…

Unions and Blogs

Two unions representing professions involved in the entertainment industry are on strike right now - Broadway stagehands in New York, and writers for both big- and little-screen productions nationwide. These strikes - especially the writers' one - have stirred up some discussion about online writing in general (and blogging in particular), and how non-traditional writers might benefit from unionization. From fellow Scienceblogger Chris Mooney: Meanwhile, on to bloggers, who are entirely dismissed as workers ... because blogging is somehow supposed to be fun or a hobby. Well, guess what:…

Religion, Happiness, and History

Kevin Drum wades into a discussion over a claim that religion leads to happiness (started by Will Wilkinson and picked up by Ross Douthat), and offers an alternate theory for why religious people are happier in America by unhappier in Europe: This is way outside my wheelhouse, but here's another possibility: Europe has suffered through centuries of devastating religious wars that didn't end until fairly recently. If you live in Western Europe, there's a pretty good chance that you associate strong religiosity with death, destruction, and massive societal grief, not with church bake sales. So…

God and Fraternities

There was a faculty-student happy hour event last week for St. Patrick's Day, and I spent a bunch of time drinking Irish beer, listening to Irish music (one of the English department faculty is an accomplished piper, and brought a bunch of other local musicians in to play for the party), and talking to some students from one of the local fraternities. Inevitably, one of them asked me what I really think about frats. This is a hot topic on campus, because fraternities have historically been huge at Union, but there are a number of people on the faculty who make no secret of their opinion that…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Elia Ben-Ari

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Elia Ben-Ari of the To Be Determined blog to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is…

Your rights: long may they waive

This both made me laugh and made me mad. Corey Doctorow over at Boingboing relates how he was contacted by a new online service to write a letter of recommendation for a former student applying to graduate school. Using a web-based interface the same letter could be submitted to multiple universities. Good idea. Like a lot of professors I have to write a lot of these and making it easier is good for me and good for students. The catch was that this one came with an end user license agreement (EULA) requiring the submitter (who is doing everyone a favor, including the web-based application…

That Fruitfly Will Beat You Up

Fruit Fly Aggression Studies Have Relevance To Humans, Animals: Researchers in the North Carolina Sate University genetics department have identified a suite of genes that affect aggression in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, pointing to new mechanisms that could contribute to abnormal aggression in humans and other animals. The study, led by doctoral student Alexis Edwards in the laboratory of Dr. Trudy Mackay, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Genetics, appears online in PloS Genetics. Feisty flies themselves may not be very scary, but their genes and biochemistry have more in common…

Links for 2011-04-07

Revenue Streams 2010 « Whatever "In my continuing quest to demystify things related to the business of writing, at least inasmuch as they relate to me, today I am going to talk revenue streams. As many of you know, I am a huge proponent of writers having multiple revenue streams, so that when one of them cuts out on you -- and it will cut out on you -- you still have money coming in while you look for something to replace the income you've lost. I am also a huge proponent of recognizing that even within an individual stream of income, there can and will be substantial variation from year…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Evaporating Water

Here is another question from Ask a ScienceBlogger. Reader Uday Panta asks: How does water evaporate in the seas? Doesn't water evaporate at 100 C? There were some very good responses in the comments where the question was, but I am going to answer it with some more details. Small Particle Model This is where we need to start - the small particle model of liquids and gases. This model treats the liquid as being made up of a lot of particles (well, obviously). If there is a gas (or liquid) at a certain temperature, then there are particles moving around at different speeds. Often it is…

Parrots, People and Pedagogies: A Look at Teaching and Education

tags: psychology, behavior, pedagogy, education, learning, teaching methods, model/rival technique, Avian Learning EXperiment, Avian Language EXperiment, ALEX, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club ALEX the African Grey Parrot and Dr Irene Pepperberg. Image: The ALEX Foundation. Like anyone who has taught science courses, and probably like anyone who has ever taught anything to a classroom in the history of mankind, I've wondered how to motivate my students to really care about the material they are learning, beyond simply "studying for the test." For example, I have…

"It's quietâtoo quiet;" with a digression into online social media

Other people are doing NPG vs. CDL link roundups better than I am, so I'll limit myself to a few links: Think this is a one-off moment of insanity on NPG's part? Bernd-Christoph Kaemper demonstrates the pattern. Steve Lawson of Colorado College shares text of an email he sent to faculty at his institution. He is graciously allowing the rest of us to plunder his wording. Go ye and spread the signal! The next domino? How many more will there be? Have you read Bethany Nowviskie's Fight Club Soap post yet? If you haven't, do. If you have, you might want to check back for the comments, some of…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Study Finds How Organs Monitor Themselves During Early Development: Scientists at NYU School of Medicine have unraveled the signals in a feedback loop governing ovarian development. This work has been several years in the making and is being published on August 27 in the advance online issue of the journal Nature. This is a big, complicated and exciting study in Drosophila. Scientists Discover Memory Molecule : Scientists have succeeded in erasing memory in animal models. These findings may be useful for the treatment of disorders characterized by the pathological over-strengthening of…

Parasite of my parasite is not my friend

Re-post from May 17, 2006, under the fold... When teaching biology, one has to cut up the syllabus into edible and digestible chunks, and it makes sense to cover various subdisciplines in separate lectures. As you know, I strive to find ways to make connections to students so they don't leave with a sense that all those subdisciplines are disconnected from each other, almost like separate sciences. One obvious way to do it is to place everything heavily into an evolutionary context. Another way - and the two go hand-in-hand - is to find really cool diseases, like malaria, in which findings…

The New Essentials?

This list popped up on my screen this morning, and I thought it was an interesting window into a worldview. The article lists ten things that despite the economy, we aren't cutting back on: Portable computers. The iPad might be the latest must-have gizmo, but the power of computers transcends trendiness. Brianna Karp, for instance, discovered lots of homeless people online, many logging in through their own laptops, like her. Shipments of notebooks have skyrocketed over the last three years, with sales in 2010 likely to be double what they were in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics…

Tracking investigators' findings about on-the-job fatalities

Hedilberto Sanchez, 26, was killed on Monday (Jan 11, 2010) at a construction site in Elmhurst, NY when an 18-foot high cinder block wall collapsed on him. He leaves behind his wife, and two sons, Luis, 6 and Edison, 3. Three other workers were injured in the incident, including Mr. Sanchez's brother. The men worked for a subcontractor (who I've been unable to identify) who was hired by the property developer Thomas J. Huang. Mr. Huang has been described in some circles as a one-man wrecking crew for his disregard for building codes, zoning rules and other laws. The New York Times'…

Ada Lovelace Day post: Justine Cassell

For my Ada Lovelace Day post, I wanted to focus on someone who is doing interesting and interdisciplinary work in computer science, and whose work has interesting and important applications. Justine Cassell, Director of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior at Northwestern University, is just such a person. I first heard about Dr. Cassell's work in this article: Using "virtual peers" -- animated life-sized children that simulate the behaviors and conversation of typically developing children -- Northwestern University researchers are developing interventions designed to prepare…

Does valuable information want to be free?

The November 5, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an editorial by Rudy M. Baum [UPDATE: notbehind a paywall; apparently all the editorials are freely accessible online] looking at the "Google model" for disseminating information. Baum writes: I did a Yahoo search on "information wants to be free." The first hit returned was for Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online encyclopedia; according to it, the phrase was first pronounced by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Brand was quoted as saying: "On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because…

Mike the Mad Biologist Says... [The Rightful Place Project]

Our Benevolent Seed Overlords ask "What is science's rightful place?" which refers to a line from Obama's inaugural address where he vowed to "restore science to its rightful place." Since ScienceBlogling Jake discussed the importance of basing policy on evidence--as well as correctly recognizing that the method we use to solve problems does not shed much light on whether we should address those problems in the first place--I want to bring up one problem that science faces: it is, to a great extent, elitist. Before all of the TEH SCIENTISMZ R EVUL!!! crowd gets all hot and bothered, what I…

Mike the Mad Biologist Says...

Our Benevolent Seed Overlords ask "What is science's rightful place?" which refers to a line from Obama's inaugural address where he vowed to "restore science to its rightful place." Since ScienceBlogling Jake discussed the importance of basing policy on evidence--as well as correctly recognizing that the method we use to solve problems does not shed much light on whether we should address those problems in the first place--I want to bring up one problem that science faces: it is, to a great extent, elitist. Before all of the TEH SCIENTISMZ R EVUL!!! crowd gets all hot and bothered, what I…

Swine flu: pandemic pre-history

However this pandemic evolves, we are going to learn a lot about how pandemics evolve -- or maybe even start. A paper just published online in Nature sets out a bit more of what we know about this pandemic strain (yes, we can officially refer to it that way now) and makes some observations about its prehistory (its history before it became known and documented by we mortals). Maryn McKenna has an excellent run-down over at CIDRAP News, which you should read. Here's our take on it. First, we'd like to make a "meta-science" observation. This paper is unusual in several ways. The least…

Help me put together The Anthology of the Best Science Blogging!

You may have seen (or even bought and read) those annual collections of science-related articles that were published in print press over a course of a year, e.g., The Best American Science Writing 2006 or The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006. Wonderful stuff, written by real pros. But we are bloggers - the TIME persons of the year! We think differently. We want amateurs, not pros. We want best in the world, not just American. The idea about an anthology of best science writing came from Lulu.com, a local online publishing company, which has initially offered to print a…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Ken Liu

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Ken Liu from Scivee.tv to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background? KL: I am a serial entrepreneur…

Dr. Oz: America's doctor and the abdication of professional responsibility

Believe it or not, there was once a time when Dr. Mehmet Oz didn't bother me that much. At least, for all his flirting with woo, I never quite thought that he had completely gone over to the Dark Side. Although I probably knew deep down that I was fooling myself. Maybe it was because Dr. Oz is a surgeon--and not just a surgeon but a cardiac surgeon. After the enthusiastic embrace of pseudoscience by so many surgeons, and in particular Dr. Michael Egnor's embrace of "intelligent design" creationism and mind-brain dualism, maybe I didn't want to believe that yet another surgeon had fallen for a…

Gluten-free ≠ healthier

One of the more annoying health crazes going around right now is the gluten-free diet. While it’s a boon to the very small proportion of the population who have real celiac disease and thus truly cannot tolerate gluten, at the same time gluten has become the health demon that is touted as the cause of virtually all health problems, be they major or minor, with the cure—of course!—being the now nearly ubiquitous gluten-free diet. The gluten-free diet has become so popular that restaurants and food manufacturers ignore it at their financial peril. Indeed, restaurants that don’t have some gluten…

Article-Level Metrics at PLoS - Download Data (updated with links)

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are certainly aware that PLoS has started making article-level metrics available for all articles. Today, we added one of the most important sets of such metrics - the number of times the article was downloaded. Each article now has a new tab on the top, titled "Metrics". If you click on it, you will be able to see the numbers of HTML, XML and PDF downloads, a graph of downloads over time and a link to overall statistics for the field, the journal, and PLoS as a whole. Mark Patterson explains (also here and here), what it all means: We believe…

Thar's gold in them thar "cures"

One of the favorite gambits that alternative medicine mavens like to use to defend their favorite remedies when a skeptic starts asking uncomfortably pointed and specific questions their scientific and evidentiary basis is to accuse said skeptic of being "in the pocket of big pharma." Indeed, I've written before of the "pharma shill gambit," where alties accuse skeptics of being nothing more than shills for the pharmaceutical industry (to which I always respond that it would be a dream come true to be paid for doing nothing more than posting skepticism about non-evidence-based medicine to a…

The pain of not getting cited: oversight, laziness, or malice?

Those of us who publish technical research papers like to see our work cited by our colleagues. Indeed, it's integral to one's success as a researcher (whatever 'success' means) that others cite your work, in whatever context. You might not like to see the publication of a stinging attack that demolishes your cherished hypothesis and shows how your approach and data analysis (and maybe overall philosophy, intellect and ability to write) are flawed, but the fact is that someone has at least read, and is citing, your work... and that's still a sort of success. These days - sad to say - the '…

Schadenfreude again over David Irving

Since I seem to have attracted several truly idiotic Holocaust deniers in the comments after this post, including, believe it or not, Eric Hunt, the anti-Semite who attacked Elie Wiesel at a San Francisco hotel in 2007 and who now runs a blog full of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism where he recently bragged about attending an appearance by arch-Holocaust denier David Irving and bleating about a vacuous legal suit he's bringing against Steven Spielberg and Irene Weisberg Zisblatt over what he considers to be a "defamatory" documentary. How do I deserve such "honors"? In any case, while I'm…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Rethinking The Genetic Theory Of Inheritance: Heritability May Not Be Limited To DNA: Scientists at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) have detected evidence that DNA may not be the only carrier of heritable information; a secondary molecular mechanism called epigenetics may also account for some inherited traits and diseases. These findings challenge the fundamental principles of genetics and inheritance, and potentially provide a new insight into the primary causes of human diseases. This wasn't new 50 years ago... Adaptation Plays Significant Role In Human Evolution: For…

Canadian isotopes fiasco foreshadows troubles for nuclear industry everywhere

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Thursday that Canada is getting out of the medical isotope business. The implications of the decision, which appears to be motivated primarily by a desire to avoid further political embarrassment, go beyond the confines of the country's health-care system. It also hints at some tough times ahead for those responsible for overseeing the world's nuclear industries. First, Canada until recently produced close to 40% of the world's supply molybdenum-99, a radioactive isotope that decays quickly to technetium-99, which is widely used to help diagnose cancers…

A neural system for mindlessness

If you are like me, you spend a lot of time not thinking about anything in particular. You read a couple papers, get a little work done, and then you stare off into space for a period of pleasant mindlessness. From a neuroscientist's perspective, we spend a lot of time determining how we react to particular stimuli or how we accomplish certain cognitive tasks. We tend to view the brain as a little black box that coordinates responses to particular stimuli -- admittedly elaborate responses, but responses nonetheless. What we don't spend much time doing is figuring out what we are doing…

Open Access publishing at ScienceOnline 2009

So ScienceWoman and I will be sharing live-blogging duties today, at least until our batteries give out. We're both starting at the Open Access publishing session, although I was also intrigued by Peggy Kolm's session about science fiction on science blogs. I'll have to catch up with her later. Also, please note: this is liveblogging. There may be grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, unfinished sentences. But it's hot off the press. I'll try to come back and clean things up afterwards. FYI. I wanted to go to the open access talk because my department is talking about publication needs…

Boreal and South American Birds

Fall, a very sunny, very breezy day on the lake, Amanda and I sitting in the cabin minding our own business. Suddenly, ...thwack... ... well, it was a sort of tiny miniature thwack, but a thwack nonetheless. Peering outside through the window, we could see the the last death throws of a tiny greenish bird that had run into the window. The lighting conditions must have been just right for this bird to think that it could fly through the cabin, because this was an odd and unusual event. (We later made further adjustments to the window to see to it that this did not happen again, of…

To Restore Science to Its Rightful Place, We Need to Redefine Elitism

Our Benevolent Seed Overlords ask "What is science's rightful place?" which refers to a line from Obama's inaugural address where he vowed to "restore science to its rightful place." Since ScienceBlogling Jake discussed the importance of basing policy on evidence--as well as correctly recognizing that the method we use to solve problems does not shed much light on whether we should address those problems in the first place--I want to bring up one problem that science faces: it is, to a great extent, elitist. Before all of the TEH SCIENTISMZ R EVUL!!! crowd gets all hot and bothered, what I…

Is the Speaker of the House Insane?

Just look at this transcript from Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, an interview with Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert: HASTERT: Well, you know, that doesn't do any good. You know, but look behind us at this convention. I remember when I was a kid watching my first convention in 1992, when both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party laid out their platform, laid out their philosophy, and that's what they followed. Here in this campaign, quote, unquote, "reform," you take party power away from the party, you take the philosophical ideas away from the party, and give them to these…

Good grad student advice from the Chronicle

A colleague of mine sent around this link to the Chronicle (behind firewall, boo!) for some advice on how to stay healthy, even perhaps happy, while working on your dissertation. See the ideas after the fold. By author Piper Fogg: Learn to recognize the signs of depression and anxiety and don't be afraid to seek medical evaluation and treatment. Consider various options -- such as therapy, medication, relaxation techniques, and other forms of alternative medicine. Familiarize yourself with the campus counseling center as well as off-campus options. Follow your mother's advice: Eat a…

Hot Politics: the dirt on climate change

Nobody emerges looking good in Hot Politics, a PBS Frontline documentary on the politics of the first Bush, Clinton and second Bush administrations. It aired last night, but the whole thing is available online. Not a lot we didn't already know, but it's sobering to be reminded that the inertia that has prevented serious action on global warming long predates the current federal government. For example... A lot of us had forgotten how poorly the Clinton Administration scored on the environmental front. Clinton and VP Al Gore (there he is again), started off gangbusters with a radical proposal…

Challenge to climate deniers: Can you top this?

The British (including the Northern Irish) have all the fun. Guardian columnist George Monbiot has just launched the Christopher Booker prize, to be awarded to whoever "manages, in the course of 2009, to cram as many misrepresentations, distortions and falsehoods into a single article, statement, lecture, film or interview about climate change." It's named after a columnist at the competing Telegraph, a man who manages to get just about everything wrong, and not just about climate change. Booker's most recent column, in fact, is a collection of misrepresentations on the subject of biological…

Apple to sell DRM-free music

The University of Chicago's Randy Picker discusses the implications: Apple and EMI announced today that they would start selling higher-quality DRM-free music on iTunes at a price of $1.29 per track, 30 cents more than iTunes’s standard 99 cents price. This is an outgrowth of Steve Jobs’s Thoughts on Music (my post on that here). The press conference slides indicate that 84% of surveyed European consumers would like to be able to move their music files between devices and this will make that possible. This is an interesting expansion of the iTunes business model, and one that should further…

The Blogging Personality

tags: Who Blogs, blog writing and personality, Big Five personality inventory, social psychology, technology, computers, internet, researchblogging.org You all read blogs, and many of you write them, too. But what sort of person writes a blog? Are there particular personality traits that make certain people more likely to write a blog? If so, what are those personality traits? Do you have them, too? A team of scientists, led by psychologist Rosanna Guadagno from the University of Alabama, wondered what personality traits made some people more likely than others to write blogs. To answer…

NASA team provides free satellite public health data to researchers and communities

by Dominika Heusinkveld, MD, MPH Researchers at NASA and the University of Arizona, among others, are hoping to make real-time air quality forecasting a reality in the next few years. The NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team, or HAQAST, is collaborating with health departments, county and state agencies, and university researchers to get the word out about its satellite data. The data, available for free online, can help track air quality indicators, heavy metals in air, dust, and other atmospheric components which can affect human health. Photo courtesy of NASA Image Library…