Science

WJZ meteorologist Bernadette Woods is leaving the CBS-owned station to join a non-profit firm in New Jersey focused on climate change, she said Wednesday night. Woods, who has been with WJZ for seven years, said she will remain at the station helping with the transition for the next month. After that, she, her husband and their two children will be moving to Princeton, N.J., where she will join Climate Central as staff meteorologist. "I'm very excited about the opportunity in Princeton," she said.

Coppin State University is moving forward with an $80 million Science and Technology Center that it hopes will boost sagging enrollment despite concerns that the West Baltimore school will not have enough money to operate the building. A ceremonial groundbreaking is scheduled May 14, though demolition has been completed and utility work is under way, said Maqbool Patel, Coppin's associate vice president for administration and finance. Completion is expected in early 2015. "We have to create an area that attracts students and faculty," said Patel, describing the quad-like atmosphere the building will create on the south side of West North Avenue at Thomas Avenue.

When Debra Buczkowski was 7, in 1976, NASA's Viking space probes were landing on Mars and sending images of the red planet back to Earth as part of their $1 billion mission. “I realized that no matter where I went on this planet, I couldn't pick up anything in those photos,” the New York native says, recalling how that mesmerized her. Her early appreciation for the wonders of astronomy led to a career mapping structures on other rocky bodies like Earth, such as Mercury and Mars, as opposed to the gas giants, like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, she says.

Baltimore City school officials say the nearly $1.2 billion budget the system unveiled last week will fund a raft of new academic endeavors, among them a new team to upgrade instruction in the sciences to meet the higher standards of the new national "core" curriculum and additional programs for academically gifted students. This is all to the good if it helps the city attract and retain more young families with children for whom strong public schools are often the most important factor in choosing where to live.

It's wonderful that in our age of instant communication, digital reality and unmanned aerial warfare, there are still those who believe in miracles. And yes, miracles are very real, though infrequent. I'm one who's also hoping for the complete recovery of Teresa Bartlinski ("Call for a miracle," Nov. 29). However, it is important to credit the "miracle" of modern science that has made this adopted girl's survival possible. I also consider it a "miracle" that the Bartlinski family can pay for all the medical care and upcoming operation out of pocket and were able to go into enormous debt doing so. It's refreshing and humbling the Bartilinski's have not relied on any help from the government or taxpayer funded programs.

The letter from Donald Boesch, "Climate change is real" (Oct 29) seems to typify for me the problem underlying many of these science vs. special interest debates that constantly roil public opinion in the U.S. and prevent the effective implementation of common sense public policy. Climate change and environmental policy is not the only example. Evolution and the origins of the universe are other famous examples which have affected education policy, and we see the first glimmers of new issues arising regarding vaccination and health policy.

The Page One article ("Obama rebuked over science," July 12) addressed concerns by various scientists that the Obama administration is disregarding science in decision-making to the same extent as did the Bush administration. Unfortunately, views of many of the scientists quoted in the article seem based on the false premise that science can provide unequivocal answers to difficult questions, and on the belief that their own answers (which the administration is ignoring) are the correct ones.

Science is a discipline that unravels so many mysteries of the world around us. Yet the field always seemed stumped by this quandary: How not to be so boring.If ever a subject glazed young eyes, it was science. The teacher with slide rule in the breast pocket monotoning his or her way through a presentation on the overheard projector; that's how science was typically presented in the past.Now there seems to be recognition that science wasn't being conveyed in its best light, that a numbing presentation of facts masked its appeal, even drama.

President Barack Obama's order this month striking down Bush-era barriers to embryonic stem cell research overshadowed his perhaps larger announcement on science that day: He directed his science adviser to develop a comprehensive plan to protect science from politics in his administration. That's a worthy enterprise, and it will be a challenge given the vast scope of the problem. During the Bush years, it was all too common for administration political appointees to suppress or reshape scientific findings.

Washington. -- Scientists shuddered when Lyndon Johnson declared his interest in ''what science could do for grandma,'' and ordered his science adviser to point the nation's research enterprise toward the solution of domestic problems.Science, however, is a tradition-bound enterprise that's ingeniously resistant to external directions. It did not radically change course then or in response to similar commands from later presidents. But today, an important conceptual turnabout is occurring in the elite echelons of the scientific community, forced by the interplay of stringent budgets and the shrinking time gap between discoveries and products that embody them.

Former Baltimorean Katherine Bouton abruptly lost the hearing in her left ear at age 30. One minute she could hear, and the next, she could not. Over the decades, her impairment worsened. By the time she was 60, she was functionally deaf. But her reluctance to disclose her ailment only increased. And who can blame her? She worked in a highly competitive environment, as a senior editor at The New York Times. In retrospect, Bouton says, remaining silent was a mistake; her hearing impairment contributed to her abrupt departure after 22 years at the newspaper.

City school officials said they will take extra security measures at a Southeast Baltimore charter school after five fires were set this week at the school, which also had an altercation that injured an administrator and a student arrest. Officials said they will increase the presence of school police officers and district staff at the Friendship Academy of Science and Technology Middle/High School, which they acknowledged has had "significant safety issues" this week. Among them were five trash-can fires - two Wednesday and three Thursday.

When Howard County authorities said they found the badly decomposed remains of Christine Jarrett beneath a shed in her own backyard, they moved swiftly to charge her husband - long a suspect - with the murder. That discovery - two decades after her disappearance - is expected to become the focus of Robert Jarrett Jr.'s first-degree murder trial as it enters its second week. Though the body proved to be the tipping point for investigators in the field, it has also become a target for Jarrett's lawyers, who say it doesn't prove their client is guilty.

Many Americans would be surprised to learn that chimpanzees are still being used in biomedical research and that millions of other animals are utilized in consumer product and toxicity testing. Others may find a sense of security in knowing that this practice continues to provide information on which chemicals and products are deemed safe. The fact is that it doesn't have to be this way, and there are a number of public health, economic and animal welfare reasons to change our ways. The evolving process by which the U.S. regulates chemicals is important to every American household.

Ellen and Greg Lehnert of Bel Air announce the engagement of their daughter, Kathleen, to Kenneth Robert McNeeley Jr., son of Ann and Ken McNeeley of Forest Hill. The future bride is a graduate of Cecil College, where she majored in secondary science education. She will graduate in May from Wilmington University with a bachelor's degree in behavioral science and a certificate in child advocacy studies. The prospective groom is a graduate from Newbury College, with a bachelor's degree in computer science, and from UMass Boston, with a master's degree in information technology.

These days, libraries offer much more than books. Most people know they can check out videos, music, video games, books on tape and toys. But in the Harford County Public Library system, patrons can also check out educational kits, filled with games, toys, suggested activities and sometimes even costumes. The library has been offering kits in one form or another for decades, said Melissa Harrah, the system's Learning and Sharing Collection librarian. The first ones, still in circulation, were created to help children go through scary experiences or life transitions, such as getting a new sister or brother, or having surgery.

IT'S NOT SURPRISING that, when given the opportunity, President Bush would send sympathetic signals to his Christian conservative followers to show his support for their causes. That may have been what he was doing this week when he endorsed the teaching of "intelligent design" along with the theory of evolution in a wide-ranging interview with a small group of reporters from Texas. Mr. Bush said that both theories should be taught "so people can understand what the debate is about." Well, thanks, Mr. Bush, but there really should be no debate.

Washington. -- At the intersection of science and politics, E David is rated very savvy. In 1971, as an accomplished researcher in underwater acoustics at the elite Bell Laboratories, he was recruited for thankless duty as science adviser to President Richard Nixon.Mr. David later went on to several top jobs in high-tech industry, ++ including the presidency of Exxon Research and Engineering. Now a successful international industrial consultant in a private practice based in New Jersey, Mr. David, as always, cheerfully espouses a faith in science and technology as humanity's ultimate weapons against ignorance and poverty.

When Debra Buczkowski was 7, in 1976, NASA's Viking space probes were landing on Mars and sending images of the red planet back to Earth as part of their $1 billion mission. “I realized that no matter where I went on this planet, I couldn't pick up anything in those photos,” the New York native says, recalling how that mesmerized her. Her early appreciation for the wonders of astronomy led to a career mapping structures on other rocky bodies like Earth, such as Mercury and Mars, as opposed to the gas giants, like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, she says.

“The combat system is the brain that helps you fire 'the bullet,' which is actually an extremely complex missile,” Danielle Hilliard says of her highly technical job in air and missile defense. She uses simple visual images to demystify her job as a rocket scientist working on ballistic missiles in APL's Space Department. As a program manager, the 41-year-old Clarksville resident has a dual role that requires her to work internally and externally. She communicates with engineers,  works across APL departments and with partners at such institutions as MIT and Penn State.