Edge magazine has posted the Edge World Question for 2007. This year's question marks the tenth year in which Edge publisher and editor, John Brockman, has sent the yearly question to prominent thinkers, scientists, dot-commers, and writers around this. This year, 158 individuals sent in their answers, including Craig Venter, Xeni Jardin, Leonard Susskind, and Simon Baron-Cohen (the second cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen). Think about your answer before reading the contributors' answers. Feel free to post your answer in the comments.

The primary function of Element List is to help you find links to science research labs and publicly available scientific data through the Element List science link directory. This site was partly inspired by a paper that I wrote for Science in 2001, which was based entirely on oceanographic and earthquake data that I downloaded over the web. U.S. research labs and funding agencies have been working over the past several years to make their archives of scientific data available to the public online. Before Element List, there was not a good place on the web to find links to these databases. Now through a combination of online scientific databases, downloadable data analysis tools, major research libraries, education resources, and links to scientific research labs, you can do your own scientific research using Element List as your guide. You could find data for a class science project, a scientific magazine article, even a Ph.D. thesis. The research labs links could potentially help you obtain lab access that you need. If there is anything you're looking for but can't find, write to us, and we'll tell you where to find it on Element List or we'll add missing links as necessary.

While some bloggers seem to think that Google is invincible, there are plenty of people racing into the web search game with new approaches. One new search engine is EigenCluster. Developed by a small group of MIT and Yale researchers, EigenCluster is a meta-search engine that groups the results of a websearch like leaves along a single branch of a tree. A search on the phrase "chemistry links" produces groupings such as college courses, science departments, and library resources. The total number of results is less than that found in a Google search, but who reads past the first few pages of search results anyway? The EigenCluster About page limits information about the search engine to two academic papers, which you can read here.

You stopped buying paper mags when You realized that You could find the same information on the web faster for free. Then came blogs - opinionated, unedited, occasionally lacking in journlistic integrity. You couldn't get enough of them. You even wrote them Yourself. Then You became Time Magazine's Person of the Year. Now thanks to You, Time Warner is revamping its website, publishing a thinner, more expensive paper magazine, hiring opinionmakers like Jeffrey Sachs, and laying off 280 editorial employees with more cuts to come. It is all. Your. fault.

Today's New York Times covers the recent changes in Time Magazine in its article Slimmer Time in the Age of the Internet. The best line comes at the end:

We were surfing around the web a while back looking for background on a tip regarding NASA hiring Army soldiers to become seismologists (anybody got any info?). We didn't exactly find what we were looking for, but during our search we came across an amazing website called Storming Media,

"a private, independent reseller of Pentagon and other US federal government reports on many subjects. Whether you are interested in biochemistry or military strategy, weapons or noise pollution, or anything in between, Storming Media delivers the information you need with speedy and courteous service and with our money-back guarantee that you will be satisfied. You may order any of our government reports in printed and/or downloadable PDF formats."

We were so intrigued that we emailed the company to find out what the site was all about. Was it run by ex-government employees? Ex-spies? It turns out that the owner, Jock Friedly (Is that his real name?), is a former investigative reporter and former senior managing editor at The Hill newspaper. Way cool. Jock wrote,

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, was interviewed about his book last year by Naomi Oreskes, Director of the Science Studies and Professor in the Department of History at UC San Diego. The roughly 30-minute-long interview covers, like his book, such topics as stem cell research, evolution, global warming, and the concerted efforts by Republicans to ignore or distort science to serve their political and economic interests. The interview is a bit old (circa March 2006), but it is particularly relevant now that the political landscape has changed and Democrats have promised to make advances on many of these issues, particularly greenhouse gas emissions. A vote to end billions of dollars worth of subsidies for big oil companies and invest in renewable energy is currently scheduled for January 18 as part the House Democrats' First 100 Hours legislative agenda (see calendar after the jump).

In the interview, for example, Chris Mooney gives a good summary of the scientific consensus on global warming:

As the headline says, Element List finally has a science community forum webpage where you can post questions about any area of science or science life and chat with other visitors about science. You can also use the forum to post questions and feedback regarding anything in the Element List website and link directory. The forum is chock full of features that, frankly, we're not even sure how to use yet. But one thing is for sure, you need to sign up as a member to have access to all the cool features such as being able to edit your posts and use the instant messaging and chat features. The forum is integrated with the link directory, so if you've already signed up as a member of the Element List science link directory, then you already have a login for the forum. One feature that we particularly love is the Shoutbox, where, if you are logged in, you can post anything and it will instantly be viewable on the front page of the forum by other members. Post away happy campers, and let us know if you find any bugs. We'll be seeing you in the forums.

You've heard about the Stanford Prison Experiment. Now you can watch the video on YouTube. The experiment was conducted in the basement of the Stanford Department of Psychology in 1971. It gives some insight into how atrocities like the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal can happen. Interestingly enough, according to Wikipedia, "the study was funded by the US Navy to explain conflict in its prison system and the Marine Corps." Video: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. If you don't want to watch all of the videos, the last video in the sequence (#5) is a round-up of lessons from the experiment.
Update: Jake Young at Pure Pedantry was a teaching assistant for Dr. Phillip Zimbardo at Stanford not too long ago. Young says that it was Zimbardo's graduate student Christina Maslach who convinced him to stop the experiment by the sixth day. Zimbardo was dating his graduate student, Ms. Maslach at the time, and now they are married.

We are not in our parents' world.

We're operating with new rules and we have the manual from the last operating system.

First, build yourself a beautiful science building ... or find a school that has one. These amazing photos by Kurt Bevington of the new Scott Laboratory, which now houses the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Ohio State University, are so clean, colorful, and perfect that they almost look like they came straight out of a CAD program. Click here to see the slideshow.

1. National Center for Biotechnology Information

2. Entrez

3. PubMed

4. NatureJobs

5. Botanical

6. Nature

7. National Center for Infectious Diseases

8. American Society for Microbiology

9. Sigma-Aldrich

10. BioMed Central

Here's a quick comparison of Alexa site traffic stats between five of the top US government science agencies, the US Geological Survey (USGS), NASA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). As our previous post on popular biology websites might suggest, NIH has the most site traffic of the five agencies, surpassed only by occasional spikes in NOAA traffic during major weather-related events, like hurricanes in late August. Poor little NSF, currently wondering why the doubling in funding promised by President Bush hasn't come to fruition, might want to see what it can do to attract more attention to its website. It barely registers above zero on the chart relative to the rest.

In case you haven't already heard, science bloggers from around the country will be converging in Chapel Hill North Carolina this Saturday for the 2007 Science Blogging Conference. What happens when you bring 160 science bloggers together in one place? Do they put their laptops down? To be sure, the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference this Saturday has already made plans to keep the bloggers blogging by providing wifi during the conference and even a projector and screen at dinner! So why did I just buy an airline ticket to fly to North Carolina? To watch these people blog in person, obviously! Hopefully we'll get to see a few people step out from behind their monitors, like Janet Stemwedel from Adventures in Ethics and Science, and Dave and Greta Munger from Cognitive Daily. I'll be taking my camera along to capture the action and will post pics here. See you soon, bloggers.

As the melting of ice sheets such as Greenland's threatens coastal cities around the world, architects are beginning to think aloud about what it might mean for the cities of the future. Melting of the Greenland ice sheet alone would raise sea level 23 feet. As part of the architecture competition Engineering an Empire sponsored by the History Channel, the architecture firm ARO imagined New York City in 2106 under catastrophic flooding conditions. Such flooding would render entire neighborhoods in Manhattan uninhabitable with the exception of skyscrapers that reach above the new sea level.

They moved the clock up two minutes! Two whole #$%!@ minutes! [The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists] - Note that climate change now ranks up there with nuclear threats.

Quote: "A truly mind-blowing confection of some of Europe's most awesome architecture, the City of Arts and Science in Valencia is fast becoming one of Spain's top tourist attractions. This futuristic "city within a city" must surely rank as one of the world's most exciting and imaginative millennium projects. The entire complex, designed to celebrate the arrival of the 21 st century, looks as though it might have been beamed down to earth from another planet.

All of these words are ringing in my ears the way noise does when you get back from a loud rock concert. I'm back in my hotel from the 2007 Science Blogging Conference and want to say that I had a great time meeting everyone. I can't thank Anton Zuiker enough for putting the conference together. It was one of the rare times, actually the first time, where I could have long conversations with people who understand both the scientific life and the dot-com life. There are sooo many great science websites out there and new ones that are coming out, which I will write about here soon.

So I was reading Valleywag (so meta!) on my Treo last Friday, which luckily supported Google Maps enough to give me directions to the airport, and attempting to photoblog stuff on my way to the Science Blogging Conference (so meta!), when I LOL'd at the last post of the day by Nick Douglas (wasn't he fired?) on How to be a jerk about Web 2.0. I laughed of course because I would never be a jerk about Web 2.0. I mean, who even says Web 2.0 anymore? It's so over, right?

Then I came across this part:

When a confused non-techie asks you "What is Web 2.0?" what do you say?

You've probably seen the Creative Commons symbol, but might not have known exactly what it means. We could explain it to you here, but this Creative Commons video is much more fun to watch. For more info on choosing Creative Commons licenses for your research, go here on the Creative Commons website for an explanation. It could come in handy for those wishing to post scientific data or research results on the web.

There was a lot of talk at the Science Blogging Conference about sharing ideas and scientific data through blogs, wikis, and such. Practically no one, however, seemed to be aware of the latest user-generated content site for data called Swivel, which is described as a YouTube for data. Any type of data can be uploaded from financial data to weather data to population data. Swivel not only allows you to share data with others, but it allows anyone to plot data using graphing tools on the website and embed the graphs on any other website. Swivel is current operating in "Preview" (i.e., beta) mode, after which Swivel will offer a professional edition that will allow users to purchase a private account for a monthly fee:

The retro-meta meme is propagating all around the web. People are proposing funny analog versions of our digital lives that were designed to simulate life that what was once performed only in the analog domain. I could take my Second Life into my First Life, but then I wouldn't be able to fly. And what fun is that?

From Second Life to First Life: It's your world. Sorry about that.

From E-Mail to P-Mail: It's like e-mail only slower.

We're having a geek crush on Swivel, the data sharing site that launched in preview mode in December (though a little Googling shows it has been in beta, oh, since at least 2005). Swivel CEO and Co-Founder Brian Mulloy stopped by Element List a couple of times to comment on some of Swivel's cool features (always available! always downloadable!) and answer a few questions.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI, pronounced "whooie") and NASA have teamed up for a cool science trick this week. Two scientists, one on the International Space Station and one in the deep-ocean submersible Alvin above the East Pacific Rise, will chat science, trade dried fruit recipes, and talk about how lonely they are.

"He is two miles under water; she is 200 miles up in the atmosphere. He works in a small, confined space, looking out onto a vast, unpopulated expanse--and so does she. He is out of the reach of sunlight, buried in a blanket of constant darkness, she sees the Sun rise 15 times a day...if she has any time to look for it. Both are explorers of the last frontiers....

We're working to make Element List a better place to both find scientific information on the web and chat with other scientists, students, and science aficionados. The new and improved science link directory and forums now have the ability to tell you when other members are online, as shown in the picture at right. Clicking on the member's name will take you to their profile page. Clicking on the bubble next to the active member's name will open a window where you can send them an instant message. It's a great way to find out when other members are on the site and available to answer questions. Click here to become a member and try it out. Some of the features may be a little buggy. We expect to be working out kinks over the next month or two. Let us know what you think of the chat features and alert us of any bugs in the forums.

Chris Mooney wrote one of the best reviews of President Bush's State of the Union speech from the climate change angle this week. Chris is author of The Republican War on Science and has a new book coming soon called Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming.

The idea that George W. Bush—even a politically chastened, unpopular, lame duck George W. Bush—might fundamentally reverse his position on carbon caps and, by implication, enter into a post-Kyoto embrace with Europe turned out to be exceedingly farfetched. Bush had never so much as mentioned "global warming" or "climate change" in any of his five State of the Union speeches up to this point. Last night, he barely improved upon that record, mouthing the phrase "global climate change" once and only once and vaguely suggesting that it should be dealt with through un-described technological advancements.

From the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law: If you wanted to undermine the technological revolution of the last 30 years, using the law, how would you do it? Faculty Co-Director James Boyle provides answers at a Google Tech Talk.

Still looking for something to do this summer? DOSECC (Drilling, Observation and Sampling of the Earth's Crust) is looking for paid (yes, paid!) summer interns to help drill into the crust for scientific research. The projects cover a wide range of geological settings both onshore and offshore. This map shows past and present DOSECC drilling projects going on around the world. Both college students and grade school teachers are invited to apply for the summer program. But hurry up! Applications are due March 1st. From the announcement:

Applicants do not have to be attending a DOSECC Member Institution to be considered for this award. Internship funding will be available in the summer of 2007 and budgets of $2000 to $5000 are appropriate. Applications must be received by March 1, 2007 and awardees will be announced April 1, 2007. For additional information contact a DOSECC representative at a member institution, consult the information posted on the DOSECC website (www.dosecc.org), or email David Zur, DOSECC's Education and Outreach Manager (dzur@dosecc.org).

Imagine having open access to all of the world's scientific literature and scientific data. Now wake up, because if science publishers and even some scientists have it their way, it ain't gonna happen. The latest article by Jim Giles in Nature gives a glimpse of just how far publishers will go to not just keep their own publications behind a subscription wall, but also squash efforts by the government to require that taxpayer supported research results be made available to the public through open access journals or archives, such as PubMed:

Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull [Eric Dezenhall (pictured)] to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.

We plotted the daily reach statistics of five popular science magazine websites to see how their traffic compares according to Alexa ratings, which are based on visits by people using the Alexa toolbar (but see this). ScienceBlogs' traffic ramped up almost as soon as it launched to match that of Scientific American and Science. It's interesting that Nature and New Scientist, which both happen to be UK-based science publications, have roughly twice the traffic of ScienceBlogs, Scientific American, and Science, which are all US-based magazines. Could it be that the UK has more science fans? Or do the UK science magazines enjoy a broader readership base in the US and UK, while American science magazines are shuned by half of the English-speaking world?