Starting in a new group is fun, right? You get a new lab coat, new desk, new email address, and maybe even a new webpage. Our group website has a line for everyone where they can put what flavor scientist they are—microbiologist, environmental engineer, etc. I cannot, for the life of me, decide what I am in one or two words. Not like it’s a big deal, but I think it’s a sign of a much larger issue.

A few years ago, I remember hearing a former labmate of mine lament over a comment a committee member told him after a meeting. He was told not to become a jack of all trades and master of none. He needed to quit dabbling here and there in aspects of several disciplines, the committee member said, or else he would never be seen as an expert in his field (therefore, limiting his chances of finding a job in the future).

So what if a scientist doesn’t fit into a traditional category? So he’s not a geologist. Or a chemist. Or even a geochemist. Big deal.

I’d like to be able to say that’s garbage and if you do good work, it doesn’t matter. But lately I’m finding not being able to simply define my research more and more of a hassle and am beginning to see the point.

For example, how does one classify/market/publish their research when they don’t fit cleanly into a discipline or even sub-discipline? For me, deciding where to publish, where (and under which directorate) to apply for funding, and what meetings to attend are all easier said that done.

I initially attributed this difficulty to two facts regarding environmental research:

1. Nature is not in a neat little package where biology is separate from chemistry or physics—therefore it’s inherently interdisciplinary
2. We use/borrow/steal a lot from those more traditional fields just to apply them in a different context

But, on second thought, that last point may actually be a benefit to someone in a position similar to my own. Quite honestly, we are able to use those old techniques from established fields (e.g. physical chemistry, molecular biology, surface science) to publish in our own journals. No one in our field knows about these techniques and therefore they are seen as novel.

Additionally, if we’re studying natural systems, we have a lot more room for error in our experiments. Oftentimes, anything within an order of magnitude suffices! And I suppose we actually have more options than most scientists when choosing where to publish/present/seek funding. Geochemists, for example, publish all over in the chemistry literature, but also have their own specialized journals to choose from, traditional ‘geo’ and environmental journals, and even several ‘bio’ journals if there’s even a hint of biology in the research.

So maybe it’s not so bad after all. Although we may be jacks of many trades, maybe we can at least appear to be masters of some. Still, that doesn’t solve my inane problem of what to put on the group website.

I considered ‘live-blogging’ from the Swiss Light Source synchrotron for about a femtosecond until I remembered that 99% of ‘beamtime’ is boring and uneventful. That is, assuming everything goes well. For now, it’s boring—which is good. Need evidence? Here’s our standard operating procedure:

1) Secure hutch and open shutter to beam.
2) Does setting X look reasonable? If no, proceed to step 3. If yes, skip to step 4.
3) Click mouse button once and check again. Repeat until setting X reaches desirable value.
4) Begin data collection.
5) Wait eight hours
6) Change sample
7) Repeat steps 1-6 for several days (or until you can’t take it anymore and run out of the building screaming your head off).

Actually, I kind of like it. It feels like a privilege to be around such amazing engineering accomplishment. After all, there are only a few in the world. Note: I looked online for the actual number but it seems to be up to some debate. All in all there are about 70 so don’t rely on this listof_installations from wikipedia._

So… my posting frequency has dropped off a bit over the past couple months. But I have a good reason—last week I moved to Lausanne, Switzerland (pictured above) to begin my post-doctoral work! To be sure, there’s be lot’s of adjusting to do in the near future (e.g. these keyboards drive me nuts!), but I’m ecstatic to be here. After basically an entire summer spent wrapping up papers from my PhD research and goofing off, I’m actually excited to get back into the lab. Hopefully I’ll learn a bit about environmental policy in the Swiss and European systems to be able to provide some sort of intelligible commentary here, but I wouldn’t hold my breath—français est trés difficile!

I think it’s funny every time I see or hear someone ascribe human-like behavior or features to microorganisms. For example, the above figure is similar to one that is routinely published in the literature as a representative of our pet bacterium Shewanella oneidensis.

I also recently saw this sign posted in a bathroom the other day. “Drown a Germ… Wash Your Hands!” it proclaims. But you’re not ‘drowning a germ’ when you use soap and water.

I am admittedly guilty of doing it from time to time: instead of studying how “metal-reducing bacteria reduce iron-oxide minerals,” I/we often study how “bacteria breathe iron.” Is that easier to understand or more confusing? I’m not sure, but I have a hard time imagining a bacteria with lungs especially ones that have iron floating around in them.

Well, after being away from email, internet, and my RSS feeds for the last few weeks fly fishing and backpacking in Northern Michigan, I come to find out that I missed two fairly big web-based flare-ups (side note: nothing like a little nature to renew your interest in doing environmental research). The first, dealing with my former undergrad research advisor Richard Lenski and the creationist response to his recent PNAS paper on experimental evolution, is pretty much over but is worth catching up on if you haven’t read about it yet. The second is the backlash to an editorial written in Nature about the PLoS publishing model (see John Wilbanks’ blog here for his take on the action).

I’m not going to add much insight into the for-profit vs. not-for-profit model of scientific publishing, nor compare the ‘big’ journals like Nature and Science to the other journals. But I will say this: I do like the idea of open access papers, especially for emerging nations with growing interest and activity in science. PLoS seems like the biggest player in the open access movement right now along with BioMed Central, but that’s a problem for people like me; these journals are almost entirely ‘bio’ focused. Even though there is a strong bio component of my research, most of my work (and that of my colleagues) probably belongs in physical science journals. For geochemists specifically, there is one open access journal that I’ve ever read: Geochemical Transactions.

Geochemical Transactions has bounced around a lot from different societies/ownerships in its brief existence (American Institute of Physics and BioMed Central, now operated by the Geochemistry Division of the American Chemical Society but not operated through ACS Publications) and to my knowledge, didn’t start out with open access in mind. Not only is it struggling to find its identity, the journal is publishing a very low number of papers (so far, only eight papers have been published in 2008). The dropping impact factor, although a flawed method, is also worth noting. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals, there are 61 journals in environmental science and 57 in geology, but Geochemical Transactions is honestly the only one I’ve ever heard of, let alone read any of its content. In the chemical sciences, there are even less open access options.

So, the problem is what to do if you’re interested in publishing in an open access journal in Earth and environmental science? Why, along with many Web 2.0-based tools, is the focus primarily biology? If you need proof, look no further than the background of most Nature Network users. Is it simply a function of the number or researchers in the field? Nearly every university has geology, environmental science, environmental engineering, chemistry, etc. programs so I doubt the discrepancy stems from that. Seems to me that environmental issues have never been bigger than in society than today, but why is there no equivalent rise in the options for scientific publishing in these fields, not to mention the lack of science funding?

I guess the bottom line is that I’d love to even have the possibility of discussing the merits of open access publishing in our field (a la the recent Nature vs. PLoS feud) but it seems I’ll have to wait for us to catch up.

Nuclear (not nuke-u-lar) power is back at the forefront of Americans’ minds with presidential candidate John McCain adamantly supporting the construction of 45 new plants by 2030. When I was teaching labs for some introductory courses a few years ago, another TA and I created a debate for our labs where students took different sides of the issue (particularly, permanently storing waste products at Yucca Mountain) by representing specific interest groups. We had Citizens of Nevada, the Dept of Energy, and so forth. Included in these groups was the notoriously fiercely-environmental Sierra Club. Now, regardless of the students’ political views, they were all able to see how incredibly complex this issue is: nuclear is a very promising source of ‘clean’ energy but has some other serious environmental hazards, namely, what to do with all the nasty waste if we can’t reprocess it?

Where was I going with this? Ah yes… I was reminded of this exercise last weekend when I was driving around the country (it is indeed a good life in between grad school and post-doc). I found a typical conservative talk show on the A.M. dial, and a man who had all the answers to life’s problems unabashedly proclaimed that the blame of our current ‘oil crisis’ should very squarely be placed on the backs of pro-environmental groups like the Sierra Club because of their rejection of nuclear power. Right…

Personally, I do not think that there is any technology that is going to be the ultimate fix. It won’t be nuclear nor will it be Barack Obama’s ethanol. It will likely have to be a combination of a number of energies including both of these. But it will also need to be more traditional renewables like solar and wind. Unfortunately, until the U.S. government reallly commits to investing research money into new technologies and providing incentives for companies to utilize the existing technology, we’ll still be stuck debating what to do with all of our nuclear waste and the oft-trivial pros/cons of biofuels vs. oil.

I don’t usually venture into marine ecology or geochemistry—these worlds seem to be disparately separated from the terrestrial ecosystems I’m used to—so I won’t attempt to analyze the science that’s going on. But I read a recent article in Discover about the great pacific trash mass. It’s amazing how as we continue to generate (and throw away) all this plastic, it accumulates in every conceivable place on the planet and takes forever to break down.

But it got me thinking. When I was reading The World Without Us a while back, I remember the author mentioning how bacteria will likely evolve in landfills to thrive on plastics. But what about the ocean? Could this primordial plastic soup be the place where bacteria finally evolve to efficiently eat all those nasty synthetic polymers? Maybe someone should be out there should be testing that stuff to see if such species are already out there (maybe this kid)?

image credit: flickr

The debate on the switch from the printed page to electronic ‘ebook’ form has been brewing on Nature Network for a while (see here, here, and here), but there is factor that has yet to be addressed: the environmental impact of books vs. ebooks. Today I found this great article in Environmental Science & Technology in which the author compares the environmental costs for each medium. Overall, ebooks win out for their reduced carbon footprint, but still generate some potentially nasty waste when they’re thrown out.

I’ll let you read the article yourself, but I wanted to leave you with an interesting tidbit regarding the environmental impact of newspapers and the various ways to read them (i.e. in print, on an e-reader, or online):

“…reading online for 30 minutes has the same overall effect as reading a print newspaper.”

And here I thought that I was being ‘environmental’ (whatever that means) by avoiding actual newspapers like the plague.

I wonder with the life-cycle analysis of printing out journal articles vs. online vs. e-reader would show? As I am in the process of slowly moving my office overseas, I decided to get rid of virtually all the paper copies of journal articles that I had, and I can tell you that over the past five years, I accumulated an obscene amount of paper.

Slate Magazine: Gasoline is cheap!

For those in the U.S., here are a few arguments that suggest the quick fixes that aim to ‘solve’ our oil crisis are largely “delusional.” Next time someone uses raised gas prices as an excuse to increase drilling in protected areas needs to be reminded that the U.S. has been VERY spoiled with our gas costs over the years—and still is.

“Our (energy) problem in America gets solved when we aggressively go for domestic (oil) exploration. Our problem in America gets solved if we expand our refining capacity, promote nuclear energy and continue our strategy for the advancement of alternative energies, as well as conservation.” -GWB

I read this in a recent Washington Post article. Notice how he just threw ‘conservation’ in there at the end to make sure it got included in print? Nevermind the fact that his first strategy, drill the heck out of the country, is the polar opposite. AGGGGHHHH!