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Listen to our story about Michael Pennock’s work here.

He is our guest in this Science Forum discussion. Pennock is a public health expert with the Provincial Health Services Authority in Vancouver, British Columbia. Until recently, he worked at the Vancouver Island Health Authority in Victoria.

In 2006, Pennock and his wife, Martha, helped Bhutan develop its Gross National Happiness Index by creating a survey to measure happiness. They have since designed a similar survey for their hometown, Victoria, and it is being adopted by other cities elsewhere in the world. The idea is that these happiness indices can help governments create policies that improve the public’s quality of life.

When a colleague first invited Pennock to help with Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, he was skeptical. “We [in Western countries] have a bit more discomfort with the idea of happiness as a government policy issue,” he says. “You know, if you use that phrase over here, they’d probably wonder what you’d been smoking.”

Pennock’s skepticism stemmed from the fact that, in Western countries, governments focus on economic development. The assumption is that happiness will follow. But, as Pennock came to learn, that isn’t necessarily the case.

“In a lot of developed countries, despite the fact that in the last 20-25 years we’ve seen a substantial amount of economic growth, the percentage who say they’re satisfied with their life is completely flat and. in some cases, [has] dropped off,” he says.

That has led several countries to adopt Bhutan’s approach. The U.K., France, China and Ecuador are measuring happiness in their populations in order to develop happiness indices.

Because happiness is a subjective thing, these surveys leave it up to the respondents to use their own definition of happiness. The idea is to measure not just how happy people are, but also how satisfied they are with their lives. (In Pennock’s survey, happiness and life-satisfaction levels are taken together as a gauge of quality of life.) The surveys also ask people about factors known to influence happiness, like health, trust in government, quality of the environment and a sense of community and social support.

Pennock’s happiness survey revealed that the people of Victoria are pretty content with their lives. They scored their happiness and life-satisfaction levels at 7.6 on a 10-point scale. Victorians rated themselves highly on their sense of community and the state of their environment. However, most respondents said they were struggling to live a balanced life. The city government is trying to figure out how it can ease the time crunch Victorians experience. Whether the city succeeds in this effort will be revealed by future happiness surveys.

Additional Resources:
The Happy Planet Index
‘Britain to introduce ‘happiness index,’ on American Public Media’s Marketplace.
More on the U.K.’s and France’s efforts to measure happiness.
Learn more about happiness and well-being from one of the world’s foremost well-being researchers, Nic Marks.

Photo by Tom Paulson

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Listen to our interview with William Foege here.

William Foege was one of the scientists who led the global campaign to eradicate smallpox, a deadly disease that plagued humankind for centuries. At the time, he was working for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. His new book about the eradication campaign is called House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox.

Foege is now a senior fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he is our guest in this Science Forum discussion.

When Foege first started working for the smallpox eradication campaign in the late 1960s, the plan was to vaccinate everyone in affected countries. But while working in Nigeria, he found himself facing a shortage of vaccine supplies. So he enlisted local missionaries to find affected communities and only vaccinate people in the immediate vicinity of patients. The strategy is what public health officials call “surveillance and containment,” and it ultimately succeeded in eradicating the disease globally.

More than thirty years later, smallpox remains the only human disease to be eradicated. (The United Nations has just announced the first eradication of a livestock disease—rinderpest. Click here to read/listen to our story.) There are efforts to eradicate other diseases like polio, Guinea worm, and malaria.

Is eradication a feasible goal for all diseases? When should we decide to eradicate a disease versus just control it?

Bring your thoughts and questions for Foege. He’ll be participating in this discussion until July 12th.

Additional Resources:

• A review of  ‘House on Fire,’ The Wall Street Journal.
• William Foege on eradicating other diseases, NPR’s Humanosphere blog.
• Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
• Eradicating Guinea Worm Disease, PRI’s The World.

Penny is an Associate Professor and Visiting Scientist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In the course of his career as an astronomer, he has worked on the photometry of bright stars, extra-solar planets and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.

He spent a year at the SETI Institute in California, which has now been forced to put its search on hold due to funding issues. For now, its telescopes are in “hibernation.” The analysis of the data already collected, however, does continue at the SETI Institute.

Penny calls the SETI Institute’s funding crisis “a severe blow.” But he says he remains committed to searching for alien signals. He is currently the Principal Investigator on a project that hopes to use Europe’s Low Frequency Array, or LOFAR, radio telescope to scan the skies for what could be signals created by alien civilizations.

So what exactly is Penny listening out for, and how can LOFAR assist in that search? What would an alien signal sound like, and how would we respond if we heard it? Bring your thoughts and questions to the conversation.

Rosemarin is an expert on sanitation. He works at the Stockholm Environment Institute, and he’s our guest in this Science Forum discussion. He’s taking your questions about sanitation and toilets.

Why talk about toilets? Because even today — in the 21st century – a third of the world does not have access to basic sanitation. The result: water and soil pollution, and widespread health problems like cholera and dysentery.

Sanitation is “something that human beings have… trouble talking about,” says Rosemarin. But he contends we must get over our aversion to the subject if we are to solve the earth’s sanitation challenges.

So how can we provide basic sanitation to those who don’t have access to it? And would you be willing to trade your flush toilet for a more earth-friendly design? Bring your thoughts and questions to the conversation.

Although the modern flush toilet carries away our waste and reduces the transmission of disease, it uses a lot of water. In China, toilets account for up to half the water used in a typical household, worsening the country’s chronic water scarcity.

Rosemarin would like to move people away from flush toilets, but that is no easy task. When he tried to introduce a sustainable, dry-composting toilet in a Chinese city, unforeseen problems prevented the toilets from working properly. You can listen to that story at the top of this page, or read it here.

Follow our Toilet Tales from China, India, Haiti, and the U.S.

Van Huis is an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and he was our guest in this Science Forum discussion.

Crickets, dung beetles and giant ants may not be your idea of an ideal meal, but millions of people around the world rely on insects for food. Crickets are so popular in Thailand that people farm the critters. Big-bottomed ants are a delicacy in Colombia. (Check out our story by reporter John Otis here.)

Van Huis argues that people in developed countries should also make insects a regular part of their diet. Insects are nutritious, inexpensive and environmentally sustainable.

So, would you consider cricket pad thai for dinner if it helped the environment? Join the conversation!

In the late 1990s, van Huis took a three-month trip across Africa to interview people about edible insects. He found people reluctant to talk. They were worried that a Westerner like him would ridicule their eating habits as primitive and barbaric.

In fact, many Westerners do consider the practice repulsive, but van Huis calls that a misconception. ”We think that people eat insects [just] because they are hungry, which is complete nonsense!” he says. “They eat insects because they really like it.”

Insects can also be an important source of nutrition. They’re easily available and inexpensive to rear. And as van Huis and his colleagues showed in a recent study, insects emit lower amounts of greenhouse gases than conventional livestock, like cattle, pigs and chickens.

Van Huis worries that people in developing countries may give up eating insects to adopt the meat-heavy diets of developed countries. That, he says, could worsen food security and environmental problems.

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) is promoting edible insects as a valuable source of income and a solution to food shortages in developing countries. (See this 2004 report about insects being an important component of African diets.) Van Huis is advising the FAO in its efforts.

Learn about insect delicacies in Laos in the video.

Colombian dinner: Big-butt ants:

Additional Resources:

The FAO held a recent workshop on insect farming in Laos.

‘The Six-Legged Meal of the Future,’ The Wall Street Journal.

The FAO’s Edible Insect Programmes.

‘Bugs as Food: Humans Bite Back,’ National Geographic.

Mealworm french fries, Banana worm bread, Chocolate Chirp Cookies and more recpies.

Gillespie is a geographer at UCLA. Two years ago, he and his students attempted to predict where Osama Bin Laden may be hiding.

Gillespie is no terrorism expert. He spends his time studying how species survive in different environments. But he and his colleagues thought some of the theories used to predict the survival of endangered species may apply to predicting Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Using those theories and satellite images, Gillespie’s team estimated that there was an 88.9% chance that Bin Laden was hiding less than 300 kilometers from his last known location in Tora Bora. The region included Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Bin Laden was shot dead this past Sunday. (However, Gillespie’s findings didn’t highlight Abbottabad, and he readily admits that he hadn’t even heard of the city until Osama Bin Laden’s death.)

Gillespie also predicted that Bin Laden would not be hiding in a cave but would likely be found in a compound with high walls, electricity, and at least one tree.

We interviewed Gillespie about his work two years ago. Listen to that interview here.

What does tracking terrorists have in common with the study of species diversity? And how do researchers like Gillespie normally use these methods?

Learn more about Gillespie’s work. Join our online conversation. He’s taking your questions until May 11.

Additional Resources:
More about Gillespie’s work on finding Osama Bin Laden in Science magazine.
More on Gillespie’s work on biodiversity and remote sensing.

UPDATE: Since broadcasting this story, Dutch scientist Diederik Stapel has admitted to fabricating data in dozens of published studies. Among the possibly tainted reports was one which we reported on here. The World’s Rhitu Chatterjee updated this story on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2011.

Lindenberg is a cognitive sociologist at Tilburg University and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.  He studies how our physical surroundings shape our thoughts and behaviors, and he joined us as a guest in this Science Forum discussion.

If an urban environment is covered with graffiti, are people more likely to litter?  If there is litter on the ground, are people more likely to steal? Lindenberg has conducted controlled experiments of these questions and found that the answer is yes.

In a new study published in the journal Science, Lindenberg and colleague Diederik Stapel investigated whether littered and disordered surroundings promote stereotyping. They asked Caucasian train passengers at a railway station in Utrecht to take a survey about their views of Muslims, homosexuals, and the Dutch.

At a time when the railway’s cleaning crew was on strike and the station was a mess, passengers were far more likely to express strong stereotypes than when the station was clean and orderly. During the strike, white passengers were also less likely to sit near a passenger who was black.

See photos from Lindenberg’s study in the slide show below.

(For captions, open the slide show in a new window and click on ‘Show Info’)

Lindenberg believes his study has clear policy implications: “Diagnose environmental disorder early and intervene immediately” to promote social cohesiveness.

Read what people had to say. Feel free to add your own thoughts:

• Do you agree with Lindenberg’s policy recommendation?
• If you found a wallet on a dirty downtown street, would you keep the money? Would you do the same if you found the wallet in a clean, upscale neighborhood?
• How do your physical surroundings shape your views of other people?

Descamps is a Belgian astrophysicist working at the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole. She is one of 49 workers spending the winter there, and she was our guest in this Science Forum discussion.

The sun has set over the South Pole and the last plane has left for the season. Descamps and her colleagues are now spending six months in darkness on a desolate continent.

Today, scientists like Descamps can spend the entire winter in Antarctica without worrying about the extreme temperatures. Things were very different a century ago when Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team made the first successful trek to the South Pole, arriving on December 14, 1911. A month later, a team led by British explorer Robert Scott also reached the pole, only to perish on their way home.

Although his expedition ended in tragedy, Scott is considered a hero by many who work in Antarctica today. Listen to our story about Scott’s legacy by reporter Eric Niller here.

See this slide show of pictures taken at the South Pole by Freija Descamps.

So what is life at the South Pole like for researchers today?

And how do you remain sane in such a frigid and desolate place?

Descamps answered your questions all the way from the South Pole.

He’s a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey whose expertise is studying ancient earthquakes and tsunamis, and he joined us as a guest in this Science Forum discussion.

Atwater digs in the soil for evidence of natural disasters that occurred in the past — to provide clues to the risks we face today.

Atwater says the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck northeastern Japan last week had a precedent.  It occurred in the 9th century.  Based on written records from that time and sand deposits left in the ground, Japanese scientists conclude that on July 13, 869, a tsunami swept more than 4 kilometers inland in the area around the modern-day city of Sendai.

Using similar detective work, Atwater concludes that a massive tsunami struck America’s Pacific Northwest more than 300 years ago.  He and his colleagues found evidence of this tsunami in sediments along the coast of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.  They believe this is the same tsunami that was recorded striking Japan in January 1700, and that it originated on this side of the Pacific.

Atwater and his colleagues recount their detective work in The Orphan Tsunami of 1700–Japanese Clues to a Parent Earthquake in North America.

Read our conversation with Atwater below:

• Which coasts are threatened by tsunamis?
• What can old documents and sediments tell us about today’s tsunami hazards?

Additional Reading

Trimble is coauthor of a new book, The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge. He teaches at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and he was our guest in this Science Forum discussion.

Countries around the world are investing in science and technology in hopes of spurring economic growth. (Listen to/read a story by reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro about Japan’s efforts to interest students in science careers.)
Here in the U.S., President Obama wants to boost government spending on science to help the United States “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” But Trimble says investing in science won’t guarantee innovation and prosperity.

Improved science education and research may produce more marketable ideas, but Trimble says that’s just a first step. Those ideas still have to be commercialized. “We also need financing and managerial talent that can take those innovations all the way to fruition,” he says.

For example, for an established company to take an innovation all the way to market may require the creation of new departments and subunits within the company–units that are very different from existing ones. The task is  “like asking a horse to give birth to a penguin,” Trimble says.

To ensure prosperity, Trimble says the U.S. must invest not only in training scientists. It must invest in training managers.

Read the conversation below:

• Have you had a great idea that never came to fruition? Why didn’t it?
• Do you think science and math are the most important skills to produce innovative ideas?

Additional Resources
Education and Innovation: The Economist hosted an online debate on this topic last year, and concluded that math and science education is the best way to spur innovation.
The innovation blog of Vijay Govindarajan, who coauthored The Other Side of Innovation with Chris Trimble.