You're better off not listening to the PR spin about the latest IPCC report on GLOBAL WARMING, but I'm posting the links at the bottom here anyway. Just read the report. It's only about 10 pages of text with lots of bullets and 7 pages of figures, which will look lovely on your refrigerator or office wall.

• Download the IPCC Summary for Policymakers, "The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change," Working Group I report.
• Listen to the Webcast of the IPCC Press Conference.

For your amusement, see also:

• The White House on the IPCC Report - We knew it all along, but we can't say it's global warming because we're not allowed to say "global warming."
• Democratic Majority Report (Barbara Boxer, D, California) - Addressing Global Warming is Our Duty and Our Challenge
• Republican Minority Report (James Inhofe, R, Oklahoma) - Inhofe Calls UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers 'Corruption of Science'

The Alvin scientists and crew just finished swimming around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to look at deep sea vents on the ocean floor of the East Pacific Rise spreading center and goof around, as you can see in the picture at right. This isn't just any old research cruise, though. It's a SEAS: Student Experiment at Sea cruise, complete with a grade school teacher onboard, who will no doubt encourage her students to pursue a life of stress and poverty as research oceanographers. The mission of the Alvin cruise was to study the site of fresh lava and vent communities on the ridge axis of the East Pacific Rise that were found by another group of scientists in May 2006. This area of study is one of the focus areas of the Ridge2000 program, a decade-long program designed to bring scientists from many different disciplines, from biology to seismology, to collectively study a small geographic area on a fast-spreading ridge. You can read the online cruise log on the SEAS website.

Here's a new open access science journal that is making the most of the web. The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) publishes online videos of biological experiments with the objective of sharing complex experimental techniques used in the lab. Just like your favorite cooking show! The goal of JoVE is to improve the reproducibility of published experiments, particularly by making the video database open to everyone. The site is very YouTube-like in that it lets you embed streaming videos in any website. The categories of techniques cover neuroscience, developmental biology, microbiology, plant biology, and cellular biology. The currently featured video by Dieter Egli and Kevin Eggan of Harvard University presents a techique for nuclear transfer in mouse oocytes.

In graduate school, there's a saying that you're not ready to graduate until you can explain your dissertation in three sentences or less. The trick is identifying the important elements of the story and knowing which information you can afford to leave out. Now Discover magazine is holding a contest to see who can create a video that best explains string theory in two minutes or less. If Eric Schulman can tell the history of the universe in 60 seconds, certainly someone can come up with a video explaining string theory in two minutes, right? The winning video will be selected by physics professor Brian Greene from Columbia University. What's in it for you?

In case you haven't seen it yet, check out the video of oceanographer Tim Shank in the Alvin submersible speaking to astronaut Suni Williams in the International Space Station. They spoke through 2 miles of water and 220 miles of air. But 222 miles? That's just the distance from New York to Boston. The real trick, of course, was reaching the submarine through the 2 miles of water. We wish we had a better picture, but this is pretty much what most of the conversation between the Alvin and the ISS looked like. [Quicktime]

The Planetary Society is sponsoring an effort to send a DVD with messages from Earth aboard the NASA spacecraft Phoenix, which will land on the arctic Martian surface in May 2008. The DVD, specially designed to last hundreds to thousands of years, will contain a sampling of space literature from famous scientists and science fiction writers as well as a personal recorded message from Carl Sagan (mp3). Between now and Monday, February 12, you can sign your name to the DVD and receive an official participation certificate by going to the Messages from Earth website. See NASA's Mars Exploration Program website for more info on the expedition.

We've added Snap previews to the Element List science link directory. Now if you want to get a quick look at a site without having to download the page, just hover your pointer over the Snap link to bring up a thumbnail image. Note that the Snap preview option doesn't work on the internal Element List page links, so those of you who find Snap previews annoying can browse our site without Snap previews appearing over every hyperlink.

Harvard University, the first and oldest university in the U.S., named Drew Gilpin Faust its first female president today. Now fully half of the eight ivy league universities have female presidents. Only four more to go. [NY Times]

It's too easy to point to Newton, Darwin, or Einstein and celebrate them as science heros. These three in particular only reinforce the impression that science is dominated by old, dead, white men. While the world is celebrating Darwin Day, why don't we think about all the other scientists, living and dead, who have changed the way we look at the world. Forget choosing Nobel Prize winners. They're too easy. Choose a scientist whom most people haven't heard of, who maybe made an important, but unsung discovery, or who hasn't yet been honored with their picture on a postage stamp. I'll post my picks in follow-up posts.

I haven't liked Neal DeGrasse Tyson ever since he was snooty to me once after a panel discussion at the Hayden Planetarium on life in outer space. But today's All Things Considered on NPR has a sorta funny clip on where the gold in your Valentine's Day gift came from (gotta have that V-Day tie in). Turns out that gold is from stars. Yes, stars! How do stars make gold, you ask? Well, just listen to the clip of Robert Krulwich interviewing Neal de Snooty Grasse Tyson to find out. You'll never look at gold the same way again. (The editing of the radio broadcast, by the way, is a good example of how to create a catchy podcast.)

The National Weather Service has an online photo library of historical meterological events, such as this 1969 picture at right of a waterspout photographed from an airplane off the Florida Keys. Other images include lightning storms in Boston, the Great Dustbowl of 1935, and colorful aurora australis photographed at the South Pole station. One of the oldest historical storm records on the website is a 1772 letter from Alexander Hamilton to his father recounting a hurricane that passed overhead in St. Croix. The NWS album is part of a larger NOAA photo library of over 20,000 images. Unfortunately, the site design itself is rather dated (they use tables!!), and the album website isn't as easily searched as, say, Flickr, but it's a great site for free, publicly available, uncopyrighted images.

NASA launched a payload of five satellites on Saturday that will orbit Earth for the next two years to study auroras in the magnetosphere. (Click here to watch the liftoff.) Dubbed the THEMIS mission, which stands for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms, the objective is to learn more about the physical causes of substorms that create auroras. (Click here to see a NASA movie about the THEMIS mission.) The figure at right shows roughly where the satellites will be positioned within the Earth's magnetosphere. In addition to the five satellites, 20 THEMIS All-Sky cameras are being deployed across Canada and Alaska to simultaneously record images of auroras from the ground. The THEMIS-Canada webpage covers the Ground-Based Observatories research:

You've heard the term Net Neutrality, but do you know what it is? Everyone with a website should be informed and concerned about this issue. Watch this video and see more videos after the jump.

Nature Network Beta Boston, which we first covered in December, is now Nature Network with the London node soon to be released in March. The features on Nature Network seem to have grown since that last time we last checked in. There are now forums, groups, people homepages, and, of course, blogs.

We're looking for a few good science bloggers to contribute wit and charm to our happy science blog.

One of the big trends in the web this year appears to be the emergence of data visualization and sharing websites. Swivel launched in December, soon followed by IBM's Many Eyes. Now Data360, which officially launched in October 2006, has undergone a recent facelift and is working to become a place to share data on "important cultural, environmental, social and economic issues."

Nearly 100 companies and organizations ranging from Alcoa to the National Council of Churches last week endorsed what is being called a "bold post-Kyoto framework" for addressing climage change at the Global Roundtable on Climate Change, hosted by the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Even Oscar-winner and former Vice President Al Gore attended. We received this letter from Jeffrey Sachs, esteemed economist, professor, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University about the achievements made at the conference and what you can do to help:

We've entered an exciting new era in the fight against human-induced climate change. As you may now know, on Tuesday, Feb. 20th, The Global Roundtable on Climate Change, hosted by the Earth Institute, issued "The Path to Climate Stability: A Joint Statement by the Global Roundtable on Climate Change."  This consensus statement spells out a framework for global cooperation to meet the world's growing energy needs while also protecting the environment.  

If the first thing you think of when you hear the word 'dating' is carbon-14, you really need to get out more and be sure to stop by Science Connection, the singles site for scientists. February's Discover magazine reports on the science dating site founded by Anne Lambert, a wildlife biologist, who started the business when she discovered that the local birdwatching outpost had become a magnet for singles. The site went online in 1995 and currently has 1000-1400 members enrolled at any one time. What makes scientists so different from the general population that they need their own dating site? One Science Connection member, high school biology teacher Elliot Grant, said, "I'm overwhelmed with reasonably intelligent people who ask for my sign or recommend homeopathic remedies. I'm tired of being regarded as weird."