A fundamental challenge of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is to distinguish methane (CH4) produced by degradation of relict organic matter ("fossil" fuel) from that produced by inorganic synthesis or from the activity of microbes ("methanotrophs") in the deep biosphere. This grant supports a project to develop and build a tandem gas-source, electron-impact mass spectrometer with sufficient mass resolving power and sensitivity to make it possible to analyze the rare isotopologues of gas molecules present in hydrocarbon deposits, deep crustal reservoirs, and other settings. The proposed instrument will be the first to combine exceptionally high mass resolving power with a gas source inlet to a mass spectrometer. The full cost of the instrument is $2 million. Proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Energy (DOE) for $1.15 million have won very favorable reviews, and both agencies have indicated a desire to fund the instrument, with Foundation funding completing the funding gap. The Foundation believes support for the mass spectrometer powerfully exemplifies the effective leveraging of Sloan funds, and a working instrument within 24 months could produce significant published scientific results on the provenance of deep methane in natural environments within three to four years.

When the Foundation initiated support for the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), advisors and reviewers emphasized the importance of timely instrument development. The success of the DCO's ten-year plan depends not only on network building, fund-raising, and drilling but on instruments ready to do the range of analyses foreseen. Much effort since the July 1, 2009 launch of the DCO has gone into understanding and addressing instrument needs. The DCO leadership invited ten groups to submit requests and plans for instruments that the international leadership deemed especially important and promising. This resulted in seven highly promising projects totaling $1.7 million. This grant will support six of these seven instrument development projects, oversight of which is to be conducted by the Deep Carbon Observatory leadership at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The seventh project is funded through a separate Sloan Foundation grant to the University of California at Los Angeles. The instruments to be developed and the developing institutions to be funded under this grant are: Institution Instrument University of Southern California Down-hole logging instrumentation University of New Mexico Volcano gas monitoring Stanford University Synchrotron X-ray spectrometer Institute of High Pressure Physics, Troitsk Russia Diamond-anvil cells (high pressure-temperature devices) Moscow State University Gas chromatograph Institute for Physics of the Globe, Paris Gas-source mass spectrometer The inherent challenges of technical progress as well as required matching funds introduce considerable uncertainty into the process of instrument development, but the Foundation believes these projects position the Deep Carbon Observatory well for timely success in this crucial dimension of its activity.

Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the federal budget for its Weatherization Assistance Program jumped from $250 million per year to $5 billion. But how much energy will retrofitted weatherization really save among households eligible for such support? Researchers Catherine Wolfram and Meredith Fowlie want to know. They have designed large-scale randomized-control field trials to study if and when consumers take advantage of the newly available federal funds to support weatherization. The U.S. Department of Energy is interested in supporting research on its Weatherization Assistance Program, but cannot provide funding in a timely manner. Sloan funding will allow the project to move ahead now rather than waiting another year or more for the U.S. Department of Energy to provide support.

The decisions individual households make about consumer financial products can be complicated, and so many people rely on expert advice. But is such advice any good? How well can consumers tell if it is or it isn't? Antoinette Schoar, a finance professor at MIT, and her collaborators have already conducted a pilot "audit study" to address the first question by dispatching trained actors to visit selected advisors. In addition to expanding this research on the supply side of the market for retail consumer financial advice, Schoar's team also plans new laboratory experiments to investigate the demand side of that market by measuring how consumers react to videotapes of different financial advisors. This project has already secured some highly competitive funding from the National Science Foundation, but more is needed to cover the experimental costs of sample sizes large enough to be statistically convincing. Sloan support will provide the necessary funds.

The Foundation's Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) science program initiated in 2009 aims to revolutionize understanding of the carbon at great depths in Earth's crust and even below, in the mantle. With Foundation support, the sea floor scientific drillers, now united worldwide in the International Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), propose to meet with the emerging deep carbon community, to explore whether the time is ripe to pursue a project to drill a borehole down to the boundary between the Earth's crust and its mantle and whether such an effort should be associated with the Deep Carbon Observatory. Funds from this grant will support this meeting, hosted by the DCO leadership at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which will aim to achieve clarity about the risks, costs, and benefits of such a project with an eye towards a well-informed decision by the Deep Carbon Observatory about whether it should form a part of the DCO.

This grant to the WGBH Educational Foundation provides development funds for a screenplay about physicist Lise Meitner, who, with Otto Hahn, did the critical research leading to the discovery of nuclear fission, but who was excluded from the Nobel Prize that went to Hahn. Funds will go towards hiring a professional screenwriter to work with the director on the project and for a financing package that will enable a theatrical release and television broadcast on PBS's NOVA.

This grant provides support to the Coolidge Corner Theater, regularly voted the best movie theater in Boston and boasting a national reputation, as it continues its pioneering Science on Screen series and expands the series to movie theaters across the country. The Science on Screen series is notable because-in addition to screening traditional Sloan-style science films like Primer, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Brief History of Time-it takes non-scientific movies like American Beauty, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Fight Club and shines a serious scientific lens on major themes in these films, following each showing with in-depth discussions led by working scientists. At the Arthouse Convergence, a major meeting of Art House theater professionals held in advance of the Sundance Film Festival, Coolidge plans to make a formal presentation and hold a Science on Screen workshop, distributing the syllabus, showcasing videos of speakers, discussing programming ideas, and exploring potential marketing and audience development tactics. This effort is an experiment that seeks to build on build on Coolidge's existing successes and scale them up in a meaningful way.

This grant provides support to the The Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF), for continued development of its activities in the Sloan Film program. HIFF activities consist of a $25,000 annual feature film prize with multiple screenings, a panel with filmmakers and scientists, a reception, and an intensive screenwriting workshop with staged readings of works-in-progress at the festival. Previous Foundation support of HIFF has resulted in an impressive roster of Sloan-winning films and directors, including Darren Aronofsky, Julian Schnabel, Michael Apted, Bill Condon and Marc Abraham, all of whom participated-in person, on video or via letter-at the festival's tenth anniversary tribute to the accomplishments of the Sloan partnership in 2009. Funds from this grant will ensure continuation of this successful partnership through the next three years.

One of the objectives of the Foundation's Indoor Environment (IE) program is to establish a multi-disciplinary network of researchers and practitioners that will build the community and organize specialized workshops, annual meetings of grantees, and a capstone event. This grant will fund noted evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen and colleagues at the University of California, in collaboration with Hal Levin, a prominent building sciences expert, in their efforts to create the microbiomes of Built Environments network (microBEnet). The team plans to make use of diverse web-based, web-enabled, and in-person strategies to build a vibrant online and real community. Over the next three years, microBEnet will conduct activities in three areas: among existing Foundation grantees, with researchers in related disciplines, and with a broader public and scientific community. Among current Sloan grantees, the network will organize annual meetings and develop a wiki for communication. With researchers in related disciplines, microBEnet will organize special sessions at high profile meetings, and develop web communication resources.

Funds from this grant support a pilot project by Michael Schwarz of Kikim Media to produce and distribute six short web videos to accompany new scientific papers that appear in the Public Library of Science. The proposed videos-each five to seven minutes long-aim to translate the latest scientific findings into a broadly accessible language that can reach a wider audience than those who currently read academic science journals.