Beaker Hill: We Put New Stories in Our "Year in Review"

A town that celebrates (or at least tolerates) the geeks among us never has a shortage of science news, and 2008 was no exception. We kicked off the year with the shocking revelation that ESP was DOA, according to researchers at Harvard. Distraught by the news that Miss Cleo and her ilk were frauds, we found that Harvard had set up a more scientific look at love just in time for Valentine's Day. (Maybe it was all part of the plan?)

Once again, congratulations are due to Osamu Shimomura, BU Medical School professor and winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Bostonist glowingly discussed Shimomura's discovery of GFP (green fluorescent protein) in October. In other weekly roundups, we catalogued the litany of interesting work coming out of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Some of the discoveries made by HSCI this year may allay ethical concerns that have plagued stem cell research since its inception, and help researchers find cures for many fatal diseases.

Since August, the addition of a regular science feature has allowed Bostonist to travel far and wide (well, to Cambridge a few times) to cover local science events. In November, we ran a three-part series on the iGEM competition held at MIT, giving you a look at the rapidly-developing field of synthetic biology. (Not to brag too much, but we jumped the AP's coverage of the topic by over a month.) We also attended the keynote speech by Oliver Morton at the Fourth Conference on Clean Energy, and sat down with Morton two weeks later to get his thoughts on the path we must take to meet our future energy needs. In December, we heard Shai Agassi describe his workable plan to distribute electric cars to the masses.

Not all local science news was as universally well-received. Plans are still going ahead with the construction of a new biodefense facility as part of the Boston University Medical Center complex, a locally controversial topic in the South End. Given the sensitive nature of the project, the NIH held two meetings in Boston about the lab (in May and October), as well as two at NIH headquarters in Maryland. We weren't really able to do the issue justice this year, but our New Year's resolution is to have a feature on the new lab in early 2009. We're already starting to line up some interviews, so keep watching!

As promised, only in this column do we include new stories in our Year in Review piece. Buried amidst the pre-Christmas snowstorms and the holiday break, a research group from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shed new light on the fundamental structure of the universe. One of the many oddities in cosmology is that the stuff we can easily describe (stars, galaxies, clouds of gas and dust, etc) only makes up around 4% of the mass of the universe. The remaining 96% can be found in two mysterious entities: dark matter and dark energy.

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the CfA team led by Alexey Vikhlinin looked at the expansion of galaxy clusters near and far, and found that their relative lack of growth was consistent with Einstein's theory of general relativity--in particular, his inclusion of an element called the cosmological constant, once thought to be a giant mistake. (The essence of the cosmological constant is that there is innate energy present in a vacuum: that "nothing weighs something.")We talked to Vikhlinin before the holidays to gain further insight into the nature of his research.

Prior to this research, astrophysicists had only one way to describe the expansion of the universe: looking at far-flung galaxies and seeing how quickly they are moving away from us. But as Vikhlinin said, "We studied another process operating in the expanding Universe--the growth of structures--and found that it is happening exactly as predicted by the models with cosmological constant. This puts constraints on other theories that attempt to explain the accelerated expansion without invoking a cosmological constant or some other form of vacuum energy." Having two ways to determine the properties of dark energy severely narrows the range of possibilities, the same way that giving someone directions by saying "go 2 miles" is not very helpful, while saying "go 2 miles north" gives him a real destination.

In fact, it appears that this result is well on the way to giving researchers a real destination in the study of dark energy, by singling out the cosmological constant as the leading contender. By combining the results of both the old and new sets of data, Vikhlinin claims that the value of one key factor is "within 5% of the value expected for the cosmological constant. That is why we say that the cosmological constant model is favored."

From geeks looking for love in Cambridge to the essence of our vast expanding universe, and everything in between, 2008 proved to be an eventful year for science in Boston. No doubt there will be more of the same next year, and we'll be there to keep you informed...and hopefully entertained.