On most recent Science podcast, Kerry Klein interviewed Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Deborah Kaminskido about the gender breakdown among science and engineering faculty. When Kaminskido and her colleagues used publicly available data, she found gender disparity doesn’t appear to be quite as dramatic as she expected.

Across science and engineering–with the notable exception of mathematics–women seem to be staying at the same rates as male colleagues. Woman are also being promoted at the same approximate times (for women entering the system after 1990).

Kerry Klein: [W]hat do you think are the most important messages to take away from this?

Deborah Kaminski: Well, I think there’s several messages. One thing we haven’t talked about yet is the point-of-view of the academic administration. We have a very high rate of leaving [overall], so our retention in academia is low. We lose half our people in 11 years. Our start-up packages can be as high as one and a half million dollars. You’re investing in someone at the rate of $1.5 million, and in 11 years, half of them are gone. So this is an economic calculation that universities need to make. And I don’t think they’ve had this number before, this “11 year” number, to guide them in their judgment for what they have.

And the other thing we see is that it’s going to take a very long time, at the rate we’re going, to get women into the science and engineering faculties. That’s another major message.

The third message here is in the mathematics discipline, we actually have two problems there that are different from other disciplines. One of the problems is that we’re not retaining them as quickly as men, and, furthermore, in math, faculty leave even quicker than in other disciplines, like in physics or in chemistry or in electrical engineering. They’re leaving quicker in math. The women are leaving quicker than the men. And, in mathematics, what we have is that in the pool, it’s about 25% women in the Ph.D. pool, but only 20% of them are becoming assistant professors. So, when you put that all together, this really points to the need for another study on what’s happening in math.

Some of this is encouraging news. Some is not. From my perspective, academia has to fundamentally change if the goal is to retain more women. But it’s also important to remember that there are many ways to contribute in science beyond the traditional tenure-track trajectory.

In any case, you can listen to the podcast here.

I’m checking in from the 2012 AAAS meeting in Vancouver; an annual treat I look forward to. I love the opportunity to spend time with so many old friends gathered in one city. The only part I don’t like is that there are so many fascinating talks happening at once, it’s not possible to be at all of them. But then, that’s a pleasant predicament to be in.

So far, I’ve really enjoy the energy symposiums and learned a good deal in a panel that took place on Friday entitled: “Hydraulic Fracturing of Shale: Building Consensus Out of Controversy.” The event came the day after its organizers released a new report saying that there’s no direct link between groundwater contamination and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” For those unfamiliar with the topic, this is a method of extracting natural gas and oil from shale formations.

As one of the presenters explained: Fracking is a case where the science lags behind the technology. In other words, we developed the means to do it before we had the chance to study the short- and long-term impacts. And I’ll add, the public lags even further behind the science. So we’re left with a highly controversial topic that few Americans understand.

The extraordinarily rapid acceleration of shale gas development, made possible by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, has transformed the outlook for North American energy production.  Indeed, recent estimates indicate natural gas extraction from shale gas development could meet provide a relatively clean and affordable source for the continent’s energy needs for the next 100 years or more. Enthusiasm for shale gas as a game-changing resource is tempered, however, by fears that hydraulic fracturing could contaminate groundwater, worsen air quality, and even trigger seismic activity.  In response, some U.S. states and Canadian provinces have imposed moratoriums on shale development until more is known about hydraulic fracturing and its effects on the environment. The three-hour symposium will be moderated by Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, director of the Energy Institute at The University of Texas at Austin and former Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy.  Four participants, representing distinguished universities in Canada and the U.S., will discuss findings from a new study analyzing reports of groundwater contamination and other environmental effects ascribed to the practice; assess concerns relating to water use and water disposal during the shale gas development; examine claims of seismic activity in northeastern British Columbia; and explore prospects for fostering consensus among policymakers for the regulation of shale gas development in a sustainable energy future.

For the third chapter in Springbox’s Innovation in Austin series, they invited me in to chat about science, sustainability, and innovation.

More from Springbox’s Innovation in Austin series here →

Think you know…

What species are dogs most closely related to genetically?

When did the first domestic dog evolve?

What is the most remarkable type of intelligence in dogs?

Which is the most aggressive breed?

Which type of dog is the most intelligent?

My friends at The Duke Canine Cognition Center are conducting a survey to find out how much you know about your dog. Questions cover biology, evolution, and even your relationship with your dog. The survey is open to all dog owners (If you haven’t been to the canine cognition center, just skip that section).

Go take the interview!

Over at NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, Adam Frank has a wonderful and thoughtful piece about doing science. He begins by sharing own moment when math and science led him to a ‘bright burst of clarity’ upon discovering an answer he had been searching for in high school:

..the math spoke loud and clear. It gave me the answer.

The blue light we were probing had a wavelength of 470 billionths of a meter.

I was stunned. For a moment the world stopped spinning. For a moment I forgot about that girl at the next lab table I’d been hot for since 9th grade. For a moment, I forgot everything but the fact that somehow, in spite of its difficulty, the strange language of math and physics had just given me entry into a world so small that a mere moment before I couldn’t not even imagine its dimensions. Now we were intimate enough for me to trace its contours across pages of exhausting calculations.

Frank goes on to describe why science can be life-changing, the challenges for teachers, and explores why so many students drop science at universities. But more importantly, he highlights the way that intellectual challenges should be celebrated.

How remarkable is it that we have found a method that allows us to speak directly with the world? In form and content, science is designed to take us past bias, prejudice and preconception to see at least some aspects of the True and the Real.

–

We want to teach students more than just how to get jobs, we also want to teach them how to live with depth and for purposes that stretch beyond their own immediate interests. We should never forget that connection. If we do, we are in danger of losing more than just the next generation of science majors.

Frank’s excellent piece should be your required reading for the day, so go check it out..

Today in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

You must remember this — a kiss is seldom just a kiss.

For Sheril Kirshenbaum, this simple display of affection is akin to a droplet of water that contains the universe. A kiss, whether a chaste peck on the cheek or a full-on lip lock, helps define what is unique in our human species.

She makes her case in “The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips are Telling Us.” Let the poets, minstrels and songwriters rhapsodize about the smooch. Kirshenbaum, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, made it her mission to discover why we kiss, its effect on our bodies, its social function and its role in helping us choose a mate. Not only can most of us recall up to 90 percent of the details of our first kiss, according to psychologists, but it leaves a stronger impression than our first sexual encounter.

I’ve long been fascinated with zebras. They don’t sound quite like you’d expect and their elegant black and white stripes make individuals difficult to distinguish among a group.

Now scientists in Hungary and Sweden have come up with a theory that those stripes evolved to stave off blood-sucking horseflies that carry disease and distract animals from feeding.

Gábor Horváth and his colleagues have published new research in the Journal of Experimental Biology suggesting why:

[T]hese insects are attracted to horizontally polarized light because reflections from water are horizontally polarized and aquatic insects use this phenomenon to identify stretches of water where they can mate and lay eggs. However, blood-sucking female tabanids are also guided to victims by linearly polarized light reflected from their hides. Explaining that horseflies are more attracted to dark horses than to white horses, the team also points out that developing zebra embryos start out with a dark skin, but go on to develop white stripes before birth. The team wondered whether the zebra’s stripy hide might have evolved to disrupt their attractive dark skins and make them less appealing to voracious bloodsuckers, such as tabanids.

At a horsefly-infested horse farm near Budapest, they tested their idea using black and white striped patterns that varied by width, density, angle of the stripes, and direction of polarization of the light reflected. They found that patterns attracted fewer flies, which became most evident as stripes became narrower. On top of that, the stripe polarization patterns of reflected light from real zebra hides correlated well with the patterns least attractive to horseflies.

While it may sound like one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, perhaps the zebra got its stripes to fool the horsefly.

So begins a brilliant series by Garry Trudeau. Make sure to go read the week so far at Doonesbury..

“Water is already scarce, but in 18 years it’s projected we’ll have 40% LESS water than we actually need. That’s a phenomenal number.”

~ Rob McGinnis on global water scarcity