Eric Pianka and Gisela Kaufmann--Photo by Carsten Orlt

Pianka, a biologist who holds the Denton A. Cooley Centennial Professorship at the University of Texas at Austin, is the expert guide in “Lizard Kings,” a part of the Nova series on PBS. It will be shown on KUT at 7 p.m. Oct. 20, 2009.

And it’s all because Gisela Kaufmann, a documentary film producer, while waiting to see a doctor, read an article that Pianka and his colleague Samuel Sweet wrote about monitor lizards in the November 2003 “Natural History” magazine.

Pianka, one of the world’s foremost lizard experts, and Sweet, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote about how smart monitor lizards are.

A wizard of a lizard was the appropriate follow-up subject to “The Brainy Bunch,” Kaufmann’s previous documentary about cuttlefish. The Nova folks changed the name to “Kings of Camouflage” when they aired the program.

She read Pianka’s memoir, “The Lizard Man Speaks” and flew from her base in Australia to Austin to talk lizards.

And that’s what brought Kaufman and her five-member crew to Pianka’s isolated study site in the Western Australia.

It has the world’s greatest diversity of lizards, Pianka said. He ought to know since he’s studied the site for 30 years. He’s spent seven years of his life—about 10 percent—in Australia, he said.

Now Pianka, who’s perfectly happy to camp at the site with lizards, other wildlife and the wind for company, will share the site with millions of viewers.

“They took 600 hours of videotape to make what turned out to be a half an hour of me and my grad student Stephen Goodyear in the movie,” Pianka said.

Some of that video was shot from the vantage point of the lizards.

“The Oxford telemetry guys, Christian Rutz and Lucas Bluff, custom make these video cams for each lizard,” Pianka said. “The first thing they do is figure out how big the lizard is and then make it only a maximum of 5 percent of the lizard’s body weight or it’s too heavy.”

While Pianka is glad to show off the intelligence of monitor lizards, he hopes that viewers understand the strong concerns he has for the continued existence of monitor lizards, a planet inhabitant for more than 65 million years.

He has seen and documented changes at his study site that do not bode well for monitors.

In his interviews with Kaufmann, Pianka explained the relentless chain of changes he’s seen and documented at this site that threaten monitor lizards.

“I talk about climate change and explain how precipitation has increased markedly at my study site over the past few decades. I explain that the result is increased productivity and shrub encroachment, which increases vegetative cover and reduces open space–this in turn has an impact on the insect fauna (food for most lizards and birds) which translates into fundamental changes at the ecosystem level.”

Perhaps this Nova star turn for Pianka, and more importantly for monitor lizards, will result in greater awareness of their situation.

The video shows gold moving up the length of a germanium nanowire, which was encased in a carbon nano test tube, at high temperature. The image has been magnified 100,000 times and the video’s speed has been greatly increased.

John Goodenough

Goodenough, a professor of mechanical engineering, recently won the Enrico Fermi Prize.

Check out the Q&A at Berger’s SciGuy blog.

Prof. Kim Fromme in the Bar Lab.

The Bar Lab is exactly that: A bar laboratory. It’s where Kim Fromme, a professor in the Department of Psychology, and her students conduct research on college students and drinking.

It looks like a small neighborhood bar might look if it was staffed with a cleaning crew and smoking had never been allowed.

There are tables, bar stools, neon beer signs and a television on the wall. The lighting can go down low and the music can be pumped up.

The mirror at the back of the bar is one-way so the researchers can observe the participants, who are recorded and videotaped.

Fromme’s lab is one of eight in the country. Her graduate school mentor, Dr. G. Alan Marlatt, set up the first bar lab at the University of Washington.

In a bar lab, research participants react more realistically to experimental scenarios, Fromme said.

“Cues are important,” she said. “Particularly if you want to see how somebody drinks naturally, you’re better off putting them in a bar as a drinking situation than you would, say, a classroom.”

To get to the Bar Lab, participants walk through part of the Seay Building, which houses the Psychology Department. They sign informed-consent releases. They know they are in an experiment.

Still, Fromme said, it’s remarkable how quickly people forget they’re not in a real bar.

“Everybody comes in and says, ‘Yeah, I know you’re watching me. Where’s the camera?’ ” she said. “But within five minutes it’s, “Give me another drink.’ ”

Then there’s that favorite cocktail of the psychology set, the placebo.

”To this day the power of it never ceases to amaze me,” Fromme said.

It must be said, however, that the placebo the Bar Lab bartenders serve is more than a Shirley Temple garnished with a maraschino cherry.

“When you’re doing a placebo study, it’s got to feel, smell, act real,” Fromme said.

The researchers infuse the area with alcohol smells, rim the glasses with a small amount of alcohol and set the lights and music to appropriate levels.

“You’ve got all of these cues, your eyes and your nose and your taste is saying booze and that helps fool the brain,” she said.

She recalled an evening when she checked in on a project run by a graduate student. The scene was a bit boisterous.

“I pulled the student out and said, ‘Oh, alcohol night?’ and he said, ‘placebo,’ ” she recounted. “I mean I was fooled walking in and seeing the people laughing and talking and I smelled the alcohol.”

After one experiment, a participant took exception when she told him he had been drinking a placebo.

“He said, ‘No you didn’t. I’m drunk,’” Fromme said. “’I’m unsteady. I was flirting with the bartender.’ ”

They stepped over to the Breathalyzer, which showed his blood alcohol content was not even on the charts—at 0.00 percent.

At the end of an experimental session, the participants are required to stay in the lab until their blood alcohol content is below 0.02 percent. Even then they can’t drive themselves home. They are either provided with a taxi ride or make arrangements for someone to pick them up and take them home.

R. Dayne Mayfield

Mayfield, a researcher at the Waggoner Center for Addiction and Alcoholism Research, uses the brain tissue to study the genetic impact of alcohol on the brain.

READ MORE about ADDICTION research at www.utexas.edu on Oct. 5, 2009

The more he knows about the donors, the better the information obtained from the donors’ tissue.

The plan-ahead donors fill out a questionnaire detailing their background and relationship with alcohol.

“You have family history, you have the drinking histories,” he says. “We know how much they’ve drunk.”

And there’s more.

“We know age, sex, co-morbid conditions, period of drinking time,” he says. “Some people quit drinking so we have the abstinence period.”

That information allows the researchers to make correlations between what they find in the tissue and the history of the patient.

That kind of information is rarely available from donors who die unexpectedly.

Another advantage of the think-ahead donors is that their drinking data have been standardized.

“When we get the drinking histories rather than beers consumed or wine consumed we get standard drinks,” he says. “Everyone is normalized to the same standard.”

The brain tissue comes from the Tissue Resource Center (TRC) in Sydney, Australia. It is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Why Australia?

Here’s the answer from the TRC’s Web site: Australia has a large number of alcoholics who do not co-abuse other drugs. This makes the alcoholic population of Australia a unique resource for researchers studying alcohol’s long-term effects on the brain.

Too many drinkers in the United States abuse other drugs as well as alcohol, Mayfield says. That makes it more difficult to study alcohol.

Find more information about the TRC, go to http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/ResearchInformation/ExtramuralResearch/SharedResources/BrainBank.htm

And find information on donating your brain at http://www.braindonors.org/.

John Markoff, a computer reporter for the New York Times, has the story.

He was on campus last week (Sept. 17, 2009) interviewing Bob Taylor, the university alumnus who played a big role in developing he Internet and other tools of the digital age.

There’s also a university press release on Unvanish.

Vanish, created by researchers at the University of Washington, puts a time limit on digital data. When the time expires, the data turns to digital gibberish.

Emmett Witchel and Brent Waters, assistant professors in the Department of Computer Sciences, several students are on the Unvanish team with researchers from Princeton University and the University of Michigan. They succeeded in reconstituting the information.

Find more information at the Unvanish home.

Look for a story on cybersecurity research at The University of Texas at Austin the week of Oct. 12, 2009 on the university’s main Web page.

George Pollak

The result: evidence that suggests that male bats sing songs with distinguishable syllables and phrases to attract females, and in some cases, to warn other males to stay away. The paper written about the study was published in PLOS One.

The research was a collaboration of the owner of the barn, Barbara Schmidt-French of Bat Conservation International; George Pollak, a neurobiologist at The University of Texas at Austin; and Kirsten Bohn and Mike Smotherman, biologists at Texas A&M University.

Pollak explains how the project developed:

“Barbara French had a colony of about 70 Mexican free-tailed bats that she maintained in a barn in her backyard. Barbara loves her bats and ‘hung out’ with them for several hours a day, every day for several years. She knows them very well.

“Several years ago she came to my office and told me about the complex social behaviors these bats exhibit and that specific and different vocalizations are emitted during each behavior.”

Schmidt-French could hear just the sounds the bats made, but the higher frequency range of their communications was out of reach to human ears.

“She did not have the electronic equipment needed to record and analyze the sounds, but I did,” Pollak said. “So we began a collaboration to evaluate the various communication calls that the bats were emitting in Barbara’s barn.”

Here’s the description of the equipment presented in their paper:

The equipment included a Brüel and Kjær type 4939 microphone and a custom-made amplifier. A custom-made digital time expander recorded a maximum of one second that was expanded to 10 seconds at 16 bits and was played onto a computer at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz. In 2005 and 2006, calls were recorded directly onto a computer at a sample rate of 300 kHz using a high-speed data acquisition card and Avisoft recorder. Both systems allowed recordings up to 150 kHz, well above the frequency content of vocalizations.

What that means for those of us who aren’t audiophiles is that the researchers used sophisticated equipment that enabled them to capture and analyze the bat communications to within a millimeter of its life.

All that data needed to be analyzed.

Pollak that’s where statistics came in. It was Bohn, who goes by Kisi, who took the project to “an entirely new level both in terms of specificity and sophistication.”

“Kisi is not only a first rate behaviorist and evolutionary biologist, she is an expert statistician, and the dissection of the features of the calls and songs required sophisticated statistical analyses,” Pollak said.

“What she did is to not only confirm that the songs are composed of elements or notes that have an orderly combination, but she showed what the rules are that determine those combinations,” he said. “More specifically, she showed the rules that govern the sequence of notes in the courtship song and that the same rules are followed in two disparate populations, one population in Barbara’s barn in Austin and the other a wild population in College Station.”

Pollak is quick to say that the findings suggest, but do not prove, that the rules or syntax that are expressed in these calls are probably hard wired somewhere in the brain, rather than being learned from early experience.

Daniel Hamermesh

Do you expect the trend toward long-term unemployment to continue?

My guess is the percentage of long-term unemployment will keep on rising for a while. While the recession bottoms out it takes a while for people to get hired again. It’s like a rat going through a snake, a lot of it may get digested, but it’s still pretty clear that the rat is moving down the track.

Wendy Wagner

Wagner has written books with titles like “Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research” (co-authored with Texas law colleague Thomas McGarity) and “Rescuing Science from Politics: Regulation and the Distortion of Scientific Research.”

Could there be any other answer than yes?

Wagner joined 13 other experts on the Science Policy Panel of the Bipartisan Policy Committee.

The panel’s co-chairs were Sherwood Boehlert, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Donald Kennedy, a professor at Stanford University and former editor of Science.

Boehlert was considered among the most scientifically knowledgeable congressmen and women during his 12 terms in the House. Kennedy headed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the Carter administration and was president of Stanford University.

Other panelists were from academia, industry, and health and science organizations.

Science in the hand of government policy makers has never been a pristine business, but the administration of George W. Bush drew strong criticism from the scientific community for misusing science or ignoring it.

“There were a lot of pretty dramatic problems over the past five years with the use of science and policy and a lot of scandals,” Wagner said. “I think everyone on the panel felt that we could make some progress on some of those issues, and that just having a group that had diverse viewpoints agree on what was wrong and what was right would be really helpful.”

The panel issued its report on Aug. 5.

The panel’s recommendations included ways to improve the science advisory panels that work with regulators and to strengthen peer review of scientific papers.

For Wagner, who’s splitting her time between Austin and Case Western Reserve University, the panel was a way for her to apply the work she’s done for the past 15 years.

“It’s always nice to leave your little writing office and interact with people on issues that you’ve been thinking about mostly alone,” she said. “It was a good reality check and a good growth experience for the issues I’m interested in.”

The group met together three times in daylong sessions. There was a lot of e-mailing between meetings.

The panel was directed to work quickly. Wagner said that helped.

“The short time span helped keep it on track,” she said. “I think everybody realized that we each had to make concessions and give up things. But the report isn’t this sort of watered down namby-pamby report.”

Wagner said she understands that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is very interested in the panel’s recommendations.

“I think this report is actually intended to provide the OSTP with a template and I think they’re pretty receptive to it,” she said.

So if the panel’s recommendations are followed, science and government will coexist in peace and harmony?

Not quite, Wagner said.

Government has never been totally at peace with science nor will it ever be, she said. But things did get out of control in recent years.

“It’s almost like a five-year-old that has been brought up on chocolate and no discipline,” Wagner said. “I think we’ve turned it back into a normal, average kindergartener.”