Now on ScienceBlogs: Surgical masks versus respirators for flu protection
David Dobbs on science, nature, and culture.
I write on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. (Find clips here.)
I've also written three books, including Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career — an elemental dispute running some 75 years. Oliver Sacks found Reef Madness "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant." Check it out.
If you'd like, you can subscribe to Neuron Culture by email. You might also want to see more of my work at my main website or check out my Tumblr log.
Category: Culture of science
"In one case, for instance, a revised manuscript arrived at his office with four named authors, but when he examined the metadata, he discovered an additional author was making substantial contributions."
Posted by David Dobbs at 10:10 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Books
The coral reef argument was fascinating in its own right, both scientifically and dramatically -- for here a very capable andn conscientious scientist, Alexander Agassiz, struggled to reconcile both two views of science and the legacies of the two scientific giants of the age, one of whom was his father.
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:50 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture of science
The turf between science and religion is -- well, it's a gray area. And it seems perfectly fine to me to treat it the way Gray did: as a region not to tread in your day job. Science was empirical, and if it wasn't empirical, it wasn't science. Religion was belief -- a domain beyond proof. That's why they call it faith.
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:21 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture of science
I think it helps to have a sense of the history of science, which embeds in a writer or observer a sense of critical distance and an eye for large forces at work beneath the surface. Machinations in government surprise no one who has studied the history of government and politics. Likewise with science.
Posted by David Dobbs at 11:16 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Healthcare policy
What's been distracting me lately from the big story I need to finish writing ...
Posted by David Dobbs at 10:25 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture of science
Among the many treats in Carl Zimmer's piece on fireflies and sex, I particularly liked this quick peek at how a life and a career can take a sharp turn for the most unplanned of reasons.
Posted by David Dobbs at 7:52 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
Most of us recognize the power of the urge to conform , but you don't often see it evoked and displayed so starkly as in this old Candid Camera segment.
Posted by David Dobbs at 2:04 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Art
In a few slender leg bones and fragments of milk-stained pottery, archaeologists recently found evidence of one of the more important developments in human history: the domestication of horses. Unearthed from a windswept plain in Kazakhstan, the remains were about 5500 years old, and suggested that a nomadic people now called the Botai had learned to ride a creature that had captured mankind's imagination thousands of years earlier.
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:48 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Healthcare policy
The evolving Swine Flu story [Effect Measure] The skinny on a scary run of deadly swine flu, from people who've been doing this a while. ... Eli Lilly Tops List of Drug-Company Pay to Vermont Docs Altogether, 78 drug companies spent just shy of $3 million dollars in payments to health professionals in Vermont last year.
Posted by David Dobbs at 7:51 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
"If you stick a robot--I don't care if you're talking about grade school kids or high school students--if you put a robot in the middle of the room, there is something captivating about the technology."
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:50 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Highly Allochthonous 11.05.2009
Eruptions 11.05.2009
Not Exactly Rocket Science 11.05.2009
Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
