Shuttles, Turning Sedentary, Leave Pieces Behind for Science and Safety

As the agency gets its space shuttles ready to be shipped out to museums, it will not be sending them off lock, stock and barrel. The crews doing the prep work have been flooded with requests to squirrel away parts of the spacecraft for analysis. Valves, flight-control instruments, even the tires and windows — little is safe from the clutches of NASA engineers.

“I’ve got a list of hundreds of items that have to come off the ship,” said Stephanie S. Stilson, who is directing the preparation of the shuttle Discovery for delivery to the Smithsonian Institution next year in what NASA calls its “transition and retirement” program.

In April, NASA named the permanent old-age homes for its shuttles, which have been escorting astronauts to space for 30 years. The Endeavour, which completed its last mission early Wednesday with a pinpoint landing after 16 days in orbit, will bask in glory only briefly before it is groomed for delivery to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The Atlantis, which will make its final flight next month, is destined to live at the visitors’ center here at the space center.

The Discovery made its last flight in March and now sits in a maintenance bay, enclosed by platforms that would normally be crawling with workers inspecting and maintaining its many systems — including the thousands of thermal tiles that cover its skin — to be ready for its next liftoff. These days, as the shuttle program winds down and the staff has been winnowed by layoffs, technicians work on the Discovery only when there are no more pressing tasks. And rather than sprucing it up for another trip to space, likely as not they are taking something out of it.

“We in engineering, we want to hold on to things that we could potentially use, or we want to study them, which is a smart thing to do,” Ms. Stilson said. The shuttles are the only spacecraft that have been launched into orbit multiple times — the Discovery is the most-traveled, with 39 missions — and a better understanding of how the materials and equipment have fared could help future aerospace designers.

Ms. Stilson spoke near one of the Discovery’s main landing gears, where the tires used on the last flight had been removed in favor of what NASA calls “roll-around tires” — basically a bunch of old spares. On a higher platform, workers were putting the finishing touches on replacement windows for the spacecraft, the originals having been taken out so engineers could study what effect the microdebris encountered in so many trips in space had on the glass.

While those who are to receive the shuttles say they understand the need for research, they are a little surprised by how much will be missing.

“We’re considered to be the nation’s official repository of our past,” said Valerie Neal, curator for contemporary human spaceflight at the Smithsonian, which will display the Discovery at the National Air and Space Museum’s annex near Dulles Airport. “Our point of view would be to receive an orbiter in as intact a state as possible.”

Ms. Neal said that when she first started discussing the fate of the shuttle with NASA several years ago, “I rather na?vely thought it would be intact.”

Some of the removal work is dictated by safety concerns. There are small explosive charges all around the shuttle, including one designed to blow a latch and deploy the front landing gear should the normal systems fail. Although the firing mechanism has been disabled, “We don’t want to take a chance that if it’s sitting in the Smithsonian it could somehow detonate,” Ms. Stilson said.

The thrusters near the shuttle’s nose and the podlike maneuvering engines in the rear both contain propellants that are highly toxic and corrosive, even in tiny amounts. So these components have been removed and sent to a special facility where workers in hazardous materials suits will “cut and gut” them, removing much of the insides before shipping them back. “We’ll reinstall them, and from the outside they’ll look exactly the same,” Ms. Stilson said.

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When the Melody Takes a Detour, the Science Begins

And not just any jazz standard, but an especially ubiquitous one: "Autumn Leaves."

His point, during this panel called "Music and the Spark of Spontaneity," was to illustrate what some of the scientists sharing the stage had been talking about, that our brains have a kind of two-track approach to deciding what we like in the world.

On the one hand, we are wired to respond to things that are familiar, to predictability and patterns that help us make sense of what is around us. But at the same time, too much familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least ennui or complacency. Our brains like newness too, things that surprise and deviate from an expected pattern. ?

"I love the idea of this question of novelty versus familiarity," Mr. Metheny said. "'Autumn Leaves,' everybody knows that." And, he added, "for the first few choruses, I'm going to use one finger on one string. I'm not going to do anything that's more complicated than anyone who could play simply would do."

Easy for him to say. Even the stripped-down version he started out with was exceptionally musical, bending the familiar melody around Mr. Grenadier's exuberantly rhythmic bass. But as their performance became more intricate and adventurous, it underscored the science: They ?could travel miles from the melody, they could do calisthenics with the chords, but the audience still understood it as "Autumn Leaves," something they knew spiced with something entirely different.

Our preference for combining what we expect with what surprises us was demonstrated in recent studies on what makes music expressive by Daniel J. Levitin at McGill University, and also in brain imaging research by Edward Large at Florida Atlantic University. Both scientists used classical music: Chopin piano nocturnes or etudes in which the length and volume of notes were adjusted to varying degrees. They found that musicians and nonmusicians alike responded most to versions of the Chopin that included a lot of variety but not too much, and not variety that was just thrown into the mix in a random, out-of-context way.

The World Science Festival panel in the Great Hall at Cooper Union focused mostly on improvised music, especially the intuitive art of jazz, trying to address the question of what is actually happening when a musician spontaneously creates melodies, harmonies and rhythms that have never been played before.

After "Autumn Leaves," the moderator, John Schaefer, the host of the "Soundcheck" show on WNYC, gestured to the four scientists on the panel, and said to Mr. Metheny, "Before I ask these guys what was going on in your brain, let me ask you."

Mr. Metheny gave a thoughtful recitation of the elements in a jazz musician's toolkit. "The harmony, the basic flow of the rhythms, the way the chords are divided from key to key," he said, adding that "there's a whole set of options" from which an improviser can choose, including playing different musical scales or modes over a chord – “It could be Dorian, it could be Mixolydian."

But then he Cheshire Catted it, saying, "but the real answer is I wasn't thinking about any of them." Consider that "you just asked me a question in perfect English," he said to Mr. Schaefer. "Did you think, 'O.K., I need a verb?'" or "about how to hold your tongue?"

Mr. Metheny's answer pointed up another duality in the way our brains work,?that we have both conscious and unconscious brain processes, said one panelist, Jamshed Bharucha, a neuroscientist and the incoming president of Cooper Union, who is also a violinist. "The vast majority of stuff that goes on in our brain we do not have conscious access to," he said. "It's automatic."

But music requires?"years and years of practice in order to make what is conscious unconscious," he said.?Plus, improvisation is not just free-form playing – there has to be a mastery of structure and discipline. "If you want to fly off the edge of a cliff, you have to know where the cliff is," he said.

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Horace Freeland Judson, Science Historian, Dies at 80

The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter Olivia said.

Ten years in the making and based on interviews with more than a hundred scientists, “The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology” revisited the critical discoveries in molecular biology, notably the double-helix structure of DNA, its mode of replication and the role of RNA and proteins in carrying out its commands.

“It stands entirely by itself,” said the molecular biologist Matthew Meselson, who is prominent in its pages. “If he had not written it, there never would have been an account of the DNA revolution equal to its importance, that captures what really went on.”

With a novelist’s sense of pace and drama, Mr. Judson put arcane scientific information within the reach of the common reader while weaving a tale rich in incident, conflict and character.

“As scientists understand very well, personality has always been an inseparable part of their styles of inquiry and a potent, if unacknowledged, factor in their results,” he wrote. “Indeed, no art or popular entertainment is so carefully built as is science upon the individual talents, preferences and habits of its leaders.”

The physicist and author Jeremy Bernstein, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it “one of the best books of popular or semi-popular science writing I have ever read,” and pointed to the author’s dogged interviewing as a key to its power.

“It is as if one were in the classroom with a dozen or so of the world’s greatest biologists, with Mr. Judson acting as the informed student,” he wrote. “We learn as he is learning.”

Mr. Judson described his approach as a fusion of journalism and history, with a strong emphasis on first-person testimony. In an interview with the reference work Contemporary Authors, he said that “in an era in which more than half the scientists who have ever lived are still alive, I am repeatedly surprised to find that historians of science are reluctant to attempt interviews or rely on them.”

Horace Freeland Judson was born on April 21, 1931, in Manhattan. He contracted polio at 13, and the disease left him with a withered right arm, a disability he learned to disguise.

At 15, he entered the University of Chicago, where Mr. Meselson was a friend and classmate. After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1948, he spent a year in Berlin, where his father, an economist, was working for the Allied government.

On returning to the United States, he worked at writing and editing jobs in New York and wrote a book, “The Techniques of Reading,” before being hired in 1963 by Time magazine, for which he reviewed books and reported on the arts and sciences from London and Paris.

While interviewing Bob Dylan during his 1965 tour of Britain, Mr. Judson found himself on the receiving end of a Dylan tirade against Time that remains one of the more colorful scenes in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film “Don’t Look Back.”

Mr. Judson later said in an interview with Howard Sounes, the author of “Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan,” that he thought the outburst had been contrived to spice up the film. “The whole episode was entirely unprovoked,” he said. “That evening, I went to the concert. My opinion then and now was that the music was unpleasant, the lyrics inflated and Dylan a self-indulgent, whining show-off.”

While in Britain, Mr. Judson became acquainted with Max Perutz, the Austrian-born molecular biologist and Nobel laureate known for his work on hemoglobin. He planned a book on the discovery of the structures of cellular macromolecules but soon broadened his focus to embrace the history of molecular biology, and this became his project for the next decade.

Mr. Judson’s first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife, Penelope Jones, died in 1993. In addition to his daughter Olivia, of Berlin, an evolutionary biologist and the author of “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex,” he is survived by two sons, Thomas, of Brooklyn, and Nicholas, of Boston; another daughter, Grace, of San Diego; and a sister, Judith, of Arlington, Va.

Although Mr. Judson had no science degrees, he taught the history of science at Johns Hopkins University from 1981 to 1990 and spent four years as a senior research scholar at Stanford University before being named the director of the Center for History of Recent Science at George Washington University, where he taught from 1994 to 2003.

While researching “The Eighth Day of Creation,” Mr. Judson completed his second book, “Heroin Addiction in Britain.” He later published two other books on science, “The Search for Solutions” (1980), a series of essays on how scientists approach their work, and “The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science” (2004).

 

Improving the Science of Teaching Science

The research comes from a closely watched group led by Carl Wieman, a Nobel laureate in physics at the University of British Columbia who leads a $12 million initiative to improve science instruction using research-backed methods for both testing students’ understanding and improving how science is taught.

In one of the initiative’s most visible studies, Dr. Wieman’s team reports that students in an introductory college physics course did especially well on an exam after attending experimental, collaborative classes during the 12th week of the course. By contrast, students taking the same course from another instructor — who did not use the experimental approach and continued with lectures as usual — scored much lower on the same exam.

In teleconference on Wednesday, Dr. Wieman and his co-authors said that some instructors at the university were already eager to adopt the new approach and that it should improve classroom learning broadly, in other sciences and at many levels.

Yet experts who reviewed the new report cautioned that it was not convincing enough to change teaching. The study has a variety of limitations, they said, some because of the difficulty of doing research in the dude-I-slept-through-class world of the freshman year of college, and others because of the study’s design. “The whole issue of how to draw on basic science and apply it in classrooms is a whole lot more complicated than they’re letting on,” said Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia.

Dr. Willingham said that, among other concerns, the study was not controlled enough to tell which of the changes in teaching might have accounted for the difference in students’ scores.

In the study, Dr. Wieman had two advanced students take over one of the two introductory physics classes during the 12th week of the term, teaching the material in a radically different way from the usual lectures. Both this class and the comparison one were large, lecture-hall courses, each with more than 260 students enrolled. Instead of delivering lectures, the new co-instructors conducted collaborative classes, in which students worked in teams to answer questions about electromagnetic waves. The new teachers circulated among the students, picking up on common questions and points of confusion, and gave immediate feedback on study teams’ answers.

The techniques are rooted in an approach to learning known as deliberate practice, which previous research suggests is what leads to the acquisition of real expertise.

“As opposed to the traditional lecture, in which students are passive, this class actively engages students and allows them time to synthesize new information and incorporate it into mental model,” said Louis Deslauriers, a postdoctoral researcher who, with Ellen Schelew, a graduate student, taught the experimental classes. “When they can incorporate thing into a mental model, we find much better retention.”

At the end of the study, students in the experimental class who took a test on the material scored 74 percent, on average, more than twice the average of students in the comparison course who took the test. On midterm exams the two classes had scored almost exactly the same.

Yet this being college — and the end of the term, at that — not everyone showed up with their calculators. More than 150 of the students were absent from the test, most of them from the comparison class. The researchers had no way to know how those students, if they’d come, would have changed the overall findings.

Experts said, too, that it was problematic for authors of a study to also be delivering the intervention — in this case, as enthusiastic teachers. “This is not a good idea, since they know exactly what the hypotheses are that guide the study, and, more importantly, exactly what the measures are that will be used to evaluate the effects,” said James W. Stigler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, in an e-mail. “They might, therefore, be tailoring their instruction to the assessment — i.e., teaching to the test.”

Dr. Wieman said he strongly doubted that the new instructors had this kind of effect on the students. As a rule, he said in an e-mail, students in such large classes “are remarkably removed from any sense of personal connection with the instructor.? That does change with a more interactive class, but not enough and not fast enough to have any significant?impact on learning in a week.”

Either way, Dr. Stigler said, the study is an important step in a journey that is long overdue, given the vast shortcomings of education as usual. “I think that the authors are pioneers in exploring and testing ways we can improve undergraduate teaching and learning,” he said. “As a psychologist, I’m ashamed that it is physicists who are leading this effort, and not learning scientists.”