The 2007 Webby Award winners have been announced, and they include a large selection of science sites in several categories. The Webby for the top science site went to HubbleSite, a site about the Hubble telescope produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute. Other science sites that won in or were nominated for other categories include:

Scientific American Podcasts - Podcast Webby Nominee.

Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch - Education Website Webby Nominee.

Yellowstone National Park - Tourism Website Webby Winner.

The Science of Sex - Student Website Webby Winner

Earth Guide - Science Website Webby Nominee

The awards will be presented to the winners on Tuesday, June 5 in New York City. For the full list of winners and nominees, click here.

For those who haven't been keeping up, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been spending the last six years on the Fourth Assessment Report on climate change and just last week released the final report of the latest three-part assessment. The IPCC was established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988 to regularly assess the state of the science on the risk of anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change (i.e., global warming), its impacts, and what we can do about it. The first part of the Fourth Assessment on the state of the science on climate change, "The Physical Science Basis," was released in Paris on February 2, 2007. Part two, "Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability," was released in Brussels on April 6, 2007. And just last Friday on May 4, the third report "Mitigation of Climate Change" was released in Bangkok, Thailand. The announcements only marked the release of the summaries for policymakers. Editing remains to be done for the release of the full reports, except for part one, which is now available online. If you're not familiar with climate change science, or even if you are, these summaries are good starting points for understanding what we know about global warming and climate change at this time. Scientific literature references for further reading can be found at the end of each chapter of the full reports.

See also:

• IPCC Homepage
• Webcast of the Working Group III Report press conference
• Climate Panel Reaches Consensus on the Need to Reduce Harmful Emissions [NY Times]

Is your state one of the lucky dozen that stands to gain millions in U.S. Homeland Security Department research dollars and as many as 300 jobs for a new, high-containment biodefense lab? What is a high containment biodefense lab, you ask? It's a place where they grow lethal germs like anthrax so that they can lose them study them in the interest of public safety. Sounds risky, right? It is. The proposed new facility, which will contain the most lethal germs and chemicals in the U.S., will be built to replace an older lab in Plum Island, NY, which was criticzed by government officials for security lapses after the 9/11 attacks. Opponents of the proposed facility in several potential host communities have protested in city council meetings and with "No Bio-Lab" signs. According to the AP news release,

The lab will have the highest-level security rating, BSL-4, meaning it would be equipped to handle the most lethal, incurable disease agents. The lab will be the only one in the country to integrate study of lethal agents that could be used as bioweapons on humans and in agriculture, research on diseases that could be passed between animal and human, and foreign animal diseases.

Coincidentally, the current issue of Science reports on the case of Set Van Nguyen, a senior technician at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory (a biodefense lab), who, in 2001, died almost instantly after stepping into an oxygen-depleted containment room that had been malfunctioning for at least four days. The containment room was used to store lethal pathogens such as a bat virus. No one realized Nguyen was missing until his concerned wife showed up the next day and the staff found his body on the floor of the airlock.

The entire hour-long talk that Larry Page gave at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February is available on YouTube. His talk spans a wide range of subjects, including science's marketing problem, the importance of having people in power "who understand things," doing non-incremental research, climate change, poverty, energy, scientific publishing, and more. The talk itself is only 40 minutes long. The last 20 minutes is a Q&A session with more than a few cringeworthy questions by nutballs in the audience. It makes you almost sorry for Larry Page. He probably has to put up with questions like these from strangers on a daily basis. (Thx, mndoci)

After spending the last hundred years pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through automobiles and smokestacks, can we cool the atmosphere by pumping in sulphur dioxide? Mt. Pinatubo did it. But if we could do it, could we end global warming or would we be encouraging more burning of fossil fuels? A few prominent scientists have taken this problem on, including Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen, who is most familiar with the effects of chemicals on our atmosphere from his studies of ozone depletion. Crutzen and others have suggested that by pumping sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, we could shield the earth from the sun's rays in much the same way that sulphur dioxide erupted from Mt. Pinatubo did in 1991. This week's issue of Nature covers the prospect of geoengineering to mitigate global warming in the article "Is This What it Takes to Save the World?":

"A little geoengineering might make an equivalent objective a lot more achievable.... Imagine an aerosol effort that starts fairly soon and is quickly ramped up to a Pinatubo's worth of sulphates being injected into the upper atmosphere every two years, before being phased out completely after 80 years. The resulting cooling effect would allow carbon dioxide emissions to keep climbing for a few more decades without the world warming any more than if they leveled immediately."

That's right, kids. According to this article, one Mt. Pinatubo every two years for 80 years would give us another "few decades" to keep driving Hummers before carbon dioxide build-up would be too much for one more little Mt. Pinatubo to handle. Let's get back to working on those fuel cells.

The Darwin Correspondence Project has announced that it is opening an online database of approximately 5,000 letters exchanged by Charles Darwin, including letters from his college days, his HMS Beagle voyage, and letters exchanged around the publication of The Origin of Species. The database is part of an ongoing project and website developed by Cambridge University's Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET). The project homepage features a daily quote from the letters with a link to the full text and links to related materials, such as a page on Darwin and religion. The DCP began in 1974 as an effort to compile Darwin's letters and is being accelerated in advance of the Darwin Bicentenary to be celebrated at Cambridge in 2009, which will be the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary the of publication of The Origin of Species.

We just heard the CNN morning weatherman say that New York City has not been hit by a major hurricane since "maybe" 1410. If he had done a little research, he'd know that the New York City region was directly hit by a hurricane in 1821 and has been hit by four additional hurricanes at varying degrees of strength since then, most recently in 2004. Here's quick summary of NYC's history of hurricane activity since 1821 that took only one quick Google search to find:

1821: The only hurricane in modern times known to pass directly over parts of New York City pushed the tide up 13 feet in one hour and inundated wharves, causing the East River and the Hudson River to merge across lower Manhattan as far north as Canal Street. Deaths were limited since few lived there at the time.

1893: A category 1 hurricane destroyed Hog Island, a resort island off the Rockaways in southern Queens.

1960: Hurricane Donna created an 11-foot storm tide in the New York Harbor that caused extensive pier damage. Forced 300 families to evacuate Long Island.

1999: Floyd, weakened to a tropical storm, brought sustained 60 mph winds and dumped 10-15 inches of rain on upstate New Jersey and New York State.

2004: The remains of Hurricane Frances in September flooded city subways, stranding some passengers aboard trains that had to be stopped by flooded tracks.

SOURCE: New York City Office of Emergency Management, LiveScience reporting

We were just tossing out some old science journals when we came across this January '07 Lancet issue. Not only is the cover incredibly plain, but we don't know what the quote means! We're not quite sure if it's in English in the first place. Not being medical doctors ourselves, what about this cover is supposed to make us want to open this journal at all? And how many people can pronounce "trastuzumab" much less define it?