AAAS Annual Meeting celebrates new ways to visualize science

[See page 1431] " ... Researchers can now use these advances to work across fields and to engage nonscientists in their work. In his plenary address at the meeting, for instance, University of Washington biochemist David Baker discussed how his research on predicting 3D protein structures has led to citizen science offshoots that ask the public to solve proteinfolding puzzles or to donate computing power to identify new structures for medicines and new materials. University of Chicago paleontologist and plenary speaker Neil Shubin also praised the potential of new imaging techniques to open up science to the broadest possible audience. His lab is preparing digital blueprints of Tiktaalik, his research team’s famous 'fins to limbs' fossil discovery, so that more people can print out a 3D copy. 'We’re entering an age where you don’t have to rely on a gatekeeper to study that fossil, you can use the Internet to study that fossil yourself,' he said ... "