Carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere in great quantity by enterprising human beings. Much of it comes from burning fossil fuels, leading to both predictable and unpredictable perturbations in the earth’s climate.

Considerable effort has been expended in dreaming up ways to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. Such labors fall in two general categories: (1) reducing emission (largely a political problem); and (2) sequestering CO₂ (largely a scientific problem). Both are hard problems, but for different reasons.

A recent report from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University offers one way to make the scientific problem simpler (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, 9920–9925 [2008]).

The findings emerge from the propensity of gaseous CO₂ to react with Mg²⁺, Ca²⁺, or Fe³⁺ to form solid carbonates, which are relatively nontoxic and can’t re-enter the atmosphere.

Where to find the metals? Easy: in basalt under the ocean, of which very large quantities are potentially available.

The authors investigate the Juan de Fuca plate off the northwestern U.S. coast, which they demonstrate contains enough carbon sequestering capacity to trap more than 100 years of U.S. emissions.

There are a few problems, of course. They include how to transport the CO₂, how to inject it into rock, and how to coax a higher rate of reaction than the normally slowish carbonate formation.

Such problems are soluble with enough ingenuity, leading the authors to urge pilot studies on this process as one more arrow in the quiver for reducing climate problems in our collective future.

Project Zero, that is.

PZ is a center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education whose mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with one of its faculty members, Tina Grotzer, whose interests lie in science education.

Tina’s work is concerned with how children comprehend causality in science. She brings to bear a formidable array of complex psychosocial models to understand learning, and her work is published in topflight academic journals. What makes her scholarship practical, though, is a series of curricular workbooks that give teachers an impressive variety of tools to use in the classroom.

If you’d like to see how this is done with density, pressure, ecosystems, and electrical circuits (the first two being the closest to chemistry), check out http://www.pz.harvard.edu/ucp/index.htm.

The American Chemical Society(ACS) is just finishing its 236th national meetingthis week in Philadelphia. Comprising thousands of hale and hearty souls, the chemical world made the City of Brotherly Love its home for a few sweaty August days.

Why do people attend such occasions? Let me count the ways:

• First and undoubtedly foremost, for the science: to find out the latest and greatest, the newest and coolest, the hottest and intriguingest.

• And, of course, for the gossip on who’s doing what and to whom.

• Catching up with old friends, colleagues, former students, and other acquaintances is also one of the great pleasures of scientific meetings.

• Showing new work in technical talks and poster sessions is surely an activity that draws folks to ACS meetings.

• Hoping to snag some face time with the scientific glitterati, the Nobelists, the eminences of the profession is a not uncommon motive.

• Finally, and perhaps deservedly at the bottom of the list, the joy of travel. Hah!

Any other thoughts out there in blogsville about the attractions, pleasures, and perils of scientific conferences?

Back in 2005 Harvard President Larry Summers speculated at an academic conference that women may have less innate ability than men in science and mathematics. After the predicable outrage, Summers insisted he wasn’t drawing a conclusion, only suggesting a hypothesis that could be examined.

Summers is no longer at Harvard, but somebody has examined the hypothesis. Writing in Science, researchers from Wisconsin and Berkeley scoured current data available because of testing requirements in the No Child Left Behind act (25 July 2008, pp. 494–495). Smaller studies from the 1970s and 1980s seemed to suggest somewhat inferior math performance of females, especially in high school. The new data, though, find no such difference.

So why are women underrepresented in many scientific and mathematical fields?

One suggestion was that mean scores on tests of ability don’t reveal differences in the upper end of performance, which is where most working scientists will be. The new data does show a slightly higher variance for males on math tests, but not a large enough factor to account for participation levels.

An unexpected methodological problem emerged when the researches found that state-administered tests weren’t adequately challenging at the highest level of intellectual reasoning. This is probably a result of states wanting their kids to look good for federal inspectors.

So, while we still don’t know why women don’t go into science and math professions as often as men, we do know it’s not because of any significant difference in ability. That’s good, since it’s in nobody’s interest to lose talented people in the vital scientific disciplines.