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rugged. The earth sciences employ much of the sophisticated lab hardware of chemistry and physics to decipher the nature and origin of rocks and minerals, oceans and atmospheres.
    Most American earth scientists belong to the Washington-based American Geophysical Union, whose 50,000 members encompass a broad range of research, from planetary geology and physics to meteorology and oceanography. The Geological Society of America, headquartered in scenic Boulder, Colorado, represents more than 20,000 experimental and field geologists. Both societies are active in international projects because the earth sciences are global in scope and require global cooperation.
    Biologists study life, the most complex systems of all. There are so many levels at which to study living things—molecules, cells, organisms, ecosystems—that biologists are a rather fragmented group. The concerns of zoologists working at zoos are quite different from those of industrial genetic engineers or hospital medical researchers. Consequently, there is no central American biological society, nor is there a strong lobbying presence in Washington, D.C.
    Most funding for American scientific research comes from the federal government (your tax dollars at work). In 2007, the total U.S. research and development budget was about $130 billion. Most research outside the defense sector is devoted to human health, so the National Institutes of Health receive the largest piece of the research pie—nearly $30 billion. The National Science Foundation, with an annual budget of about $5 billion, supports research and education in all areas of science. Other agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, fund research and science education in their own particular areas of interest, while Congress diverts additional money (the notorious earmarks) for special projects.
    Most individual scientists support their labs by submitting grant proposals with an outline of the planned research and a statement about why the work is important to the appropriatefederal agency. The funding agency asks panels of independent scientists to rank proposals in order of importance and funds as many as it can. Depending on the field, a proposal has anywhere from about a 10 to 30 percent chance of being successful. Without this support from federal grants, which buys experimental equipment and computer time, pays the salaries of researchers, and supports advanced graduate students, much of the scientific research in the United States would come to a halt.
FRONTIERS

Complex Chaotic Systems
    Newton’s laws of motion and gravity were published more than 300 years ago and his so-called classical mechanics is now a well-established part of any freshman physics course. But although the regularity and predictability of the universe has become an ingrained assumption of our science, recent studies of complex systems like your heart and the weather are making scientists rethink the meaning of predictability. The dynamic field that studies such complex systems goes by the name of chaos or “complexity theory.”
    Many day-to-day systems are predictable in the conventional sense. Automobiles, tennis balls, and grandfather clocks act pretty much the way we expect them to. If you drop a tennis ball from waist-high, it hits the ground at one speed; drop it from a little higher up, it hits the ground at a slightly higher speed. A falling tennis ball is a conventional Newtonian system.
    There are, however, systems in nature that don’t display this sort of pleasing regularity. Open the tap on your faucet and you get a small, slow stream. Open it a bit more and you are apt to get a rushing, turbulent flow. In the jargon of physics, the behavior oftap water is extremely sensitive to the initial conditions. A system with this property is said to be chaotic; turbulent streams, growing snowflakes, your heart rhythms, and many