July 6, 2009
Category:
At the recent WCSJ, and particularly after winning this prize, loads of lovely people came up to me and said that they read and enjoyed this blog.Which always comes as a surprise, because by and large, I have no idea who reads this blog.
So this seems a good a time as any to resurrect a thread that I started ages ago to find out more about you - my readers.
Identify yourself in the comments. Even if you've never commented before, speak up. Who are you? Do you have a background in science? Are you interesting lay-person, practicing scientist, journalist, sentient virus, or something else? Are you a close friend, colleague, acquaintance or stranger?
Enlighten me.
E
Posted by Ed Yong at 4:00 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 5, 2009
Category: Animal behaviour • Animals • Bees • Insects • Invertebrates • Predators and prey
Earlier today, I published a post on how Japanese honeybees defend themselves from hornets with a mass defence that relies on heat and carbon dioxide. This article was originally written two years ago, and describes the slightly different tactic of Cyprian honeybees.
When Oriental hornets attack, Cyprian honeybees mob them in a huge ball that targets the breathing apparatus in the hornet's abdomen. The hornets can't breathe without expanding their abdomens and with sheer numbers, the bees strangle the hornets to death.
Hornets are giant wasps that pack a powerful sting. To most people, they can be a painful nuisance, but to honeybees, they're killing machines. Hornets greatly outsize and overpower honeybees and a few individuals can decimate entire colonies.
Asian honeybees have developed a remarkable defence called 'heat-balling' against their local hornet, Vespa velutina. A giant ball of bees piles onto the predator, weighing it down while vibrating their wing muscles. The frenetic activity greatly increases the temperature inside the ball to about 46C - hot enough to cook the hornet alive, but five degrees under the bees' maximum tolerated temperature.
Cyprian honeybees face a different predator, the Oriental hornet Vespa orientalis and unlike its wimpier cousin V.velutina, this species can take the heat. The Oriental hornet lives in hot, dry climates ranging from Central Asia to the Mediterrenean and it tolerates temperatures just as high as honeybees.
Heat-balling shouldn't work on them. And yet, Cyprian bees still encase Oriental hornets in large balls. Surprisingly, the strategy works - despite their heat tolerance, the hornets still die. The bees' stings are useless against the hornet's tough cuticle and they barely use them. What could they be doing instead?
Read on »
Posted by Ed Yong at 2:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Animal behaviour • Animal defences • Animals • Bees • Insects • Invertebrates
Rising temperatures and high carbon dioxide emissions are the means through which humans are inadvertently causing the decline of several species. But one animal actively uses both heat and carbon dioxide as murderous weapons - the unassuming honeybee.
With their stings and numbers, bees already seem to be well-defended but they are completely outgunned by giant hornets (right). These two-inch long monsters are three times longer than several times heavier than tiny honeybees and raiding parties can decimate entire hives. European bees mount little in the way of an effective defence, but Japanese bees aren't so helpless. When their hives are invaded, they launch a mass counterattack.
Swarms of workers dogpile the hornet, pinning it down while vibrating their wing muscles. At the centre of this "heatball", the frenetic buzzing heats up the hornet to a roasting 45 degrees Celsius.
Scientists have long thought that this manoeuvre bakes the hornet alive, for the bees that surround it are more resistant to high temperatures. But Michio Sugahara and Fumio Sakamoto from Kyoto Gakuen University have found that this isn't the whole story.
Read on »
Posted by Ed Yong at 10:00 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 4, 2009
Category: Animals • Beetles • Birds • Ecology • Insects • Plants
Walks through a forest are often made all the more enjoyable by the chance to watch brightly coloured birds flit between the trees. But birds are not just mere inhabitants of forests - in some parts of the world, they are the key to the trees' survival.
The Serengeti is one such place. Since 1950, around 70-80% of riverside forests have disappeared from this area. Fires seem to be a particular problem, opening large gaps in the canopy that forests can't seem to recover from. To understand why Gregory Sharam from the University of British Columbia has been monitoring the density of the forests since 1966. From 1997-2006, he studied 18 particular patches at varying stages of decline.
During this time, as the forest density declined, so too did the number of bird species in the area. The total number halved and fruit-eating species were especially hit, declining from 16 to 6 species. These fruit-eaters perform a valuable service for a wide variety of trees, eating their fruit and dispersing their unharmed seeds. In pristine forest, around 70% of all seeds on the forest floor have previously passed through the guts of birds. In fragmented open forest, that proportion falls to 3%.
Without fewer birds, seeds that simply fall to the ground become more important for the trees' survival but these too suffer without their feathered friends. They are destroyed by seed-eating bruchid beetles. The beetles generally avoid seeds that are still on trees and for some reason, they also steer clear of seeds that have been previously eaten by birds. But seeds that naturally drop to the ground are fair game and as tree density fell, the beetles' attack rate climbed from 20% to 90%.
Read on »
Posted by Ed Yong at 2:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Journalism
One of the highlights of the World Conference of Science Journalists was the final day's heated debate about embargoes. For newcomers to the issue, journalists are often given press alerts about new papers before they are made publicly available, on the understanding that they aren't reported before a certain deadline - the infamous embargo. This is why so much science news magically appears at simultaneously across news outlets. All the major journals (and many minor ones) do this with their papers, as increasingly do universities and other research institutions.
Vincent Kiernan (who has written a book deriding this practice) launched the first volley against embargoes by urging journalists to "just walk away" from them. He described them as a set of "velvet handcuffs", leashing journalists to the goal of providing "infotainment or carry[ing] water for scientific establishments" instead of their giving people the information they need. To him, embargoes play on the "pack mentality" of journalists, luring them in with the fear of missing a story. Far from duplicating the same news as everyone else, society, he says, needs journalists to "follow news noses to find stories that establishment doesn't want you to cover". That is the key to flourishing in the era of new media - to provide unique content not via embargoed material.
Kiernan paved the road for an even more brutal (and much louder) onslaught by Richard Horton, editor of an obscure medical journal called the Lancet, who suffers from a 14-year embargo addiction. Looking like he was on the verge of spontaneously detonating (and noting with possible accuracy that he was about to get himself fired), he derided journalists for "equating reproduction with communication" and writing material filtered through the lens of biased press releases. "You're sold your soul to publicity masquerading as science," he shouted, adding that embargoes hand power over to journals, allowing them to dictate to institutions that have actually done the work.
To me, both these arguments are reflective of the massive conflation that pervaded the entire debate. The anti-embargo side consistently equated embargoes (which, let's face it, are just time constraints) with the press releases they are actually constraining. Geoff Watts of BBC Radio also noted this conflation. A further logical leap was made in assuming that the very existence of press releases (and thus embargoes) necessarily leads to shoddy churnalism, and I'd like to think that this blog, at the very least, is an exception to that model.
Similarly, the concept that ridding science reporters of embargoes would foment more investigative journalism is surely too simplistic. As Nick Davies discussed in his much earlier session, PR leads to poor journalism by exploiting structural problems that are already present - lack of reporters, tight deadlines and increasing workloads which lead to less time per story.
These overarching factors, much more so than any inherent laziness, are the reasons that even enterprising journalists regurgitate press releases. Stripping away embargoes, or even those releases, isn't going to magically solve the underlying lack of time. Fiona Fox of the Science Media Centre rightly picked Kiernan up for this failure to make the case that embargoes have precipitated a loss of investigative reporting. When pushed, he conceded that the "real problem is not the embargo", it's the competitive system we work in and time-specific nature of editorial demands.
What of the reverse question - will the loss of embargoes lead to a deluge of scoops? Watts thinks not, saying that scoops are relatively uncommon in science journalism. When they exist and are sufficiently big, they aren't drowned out by other embargoed material. Indeed, Mark Henderson, Science Editor at the Times, noted that the embargo is a simple, benign "bilateral agreement about information provision that is often fetishised as a big rule". It's often not appreciated that if information is sourced through another route (investigative ones, say, rather than press alerts), then embargoes don't apply and journalists are at liberty to report at their convenience (as Paul Sutherland did with his Mars scoop).
In light of this, Henderson noted that the much bigger problem is the Inglefinger rule, the draconian policy where a journal will only consider publishing research if it has not been submitted elsewhere or already reported. The rule scares researchers away from talking about their work for fear of the journal's retribution. But critically, at that point in the proceedings, the news has not been embargoed and no press release has been written.
Watts summed it up by dismissing the embargo issue as a "minor technicality in larger debate about media". He eloquently compared the lot of the journalist to that of a fighter pilot - parachutes aren't desirable because it's better that the plane doesn't crash at all but until that risk is non-existent, you'd be daft to disregard this necessary safety measure. Likewise, embargoes provide both journalists and science as a whole with benefits that it would be remiss to ignore.
For a start, they "bring a measure of order to chaotic flow of events". Predictability allows you to allocate time to more thorough investigation, contacting people, digging into background and so on. I wholeheartedly agree. I find it a tremendous help to be able to plan what I want to write about in a given week, to select the most interesting of forthcoming papers and to take time over assessing the quality of potential fodder. And I do this in my spare time; it's even more pertinent for people working on busy news desks and particularly for broadcasters who need to deploy film crews.
But first and foremost, the main benefit of embargoes is that they lead to more overall science coverage. While they may certainly skew the balance away from smaller journals, they also skew the balance towards smaller stories. Watts alluded to this, positing a hypothetical embargo-free world where important stories will get covered anyway, but those that fail to shatter earth (such as this piece on the learning ability of sticklebacks) simply won't get in. If these interesting but less practically important works do somehow fight off competition for column space in one paper, it is unlikely that opposition outlets will pick them up. And that will be a massive shame for science and the general public alike.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the winning argument. I am a scientist first and a journalist second and my concern is far less for the prevalence of investigative journalism than it is for giving the public more and more opportunities to hear about science. It is those opportunities that are in danger of becoming endangered should embargoes vanish.
You could, of course, argue that this greater quantity of science coverage is a shallow victory when so much is regurgitated or inaccurate. But, as I've noted earlier, this is not the fault of the embargo - it's a fault of journalistic practices fuelled by other structural problems. For many journalists, embargoes actually give you the time to not regurgitate and to craft material more carefully. This is especially true for the biggest stories (ironically those would probably get covered without an embargo, and indeed, whose embargoes are most commonly broken) that need good analysis.
More on science journalism
Posted by Ed Yong at 7:00 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 2, 2009
Category: Medicine & health • Viruses
The swine flu pandemic is well under way. With the WHO citing almost 60,000 laboratory-confirmed cases at the time of writing, the race is truly on to understand more about the virus. Now, two new studies have painted a fresh but partly contradictory picture about two of the virus's most important aspects - its infectivity (its ability to spread from host to host) and its virulence (its ability to cause disease in a host). These two traits will largely determine the threat that the virus poses, especially in relation to more familiar garden varieties of seasonal flu.
Both groups, one based in the US and the other in the Netherlands, tested the virus's behaviour in ferrets. These animals are affected by flu viruses in much the same way as humans, mimicking both the severity of our infections and ease of our viral transmission.
Both studies found that the new swine flu virus takes a slightly greater toll on its host's health than the usual strains of seasonal flu. These strains limit their infections to a ferret's nasal passages but the new swine flu virus makes its way into the lungs too. The Americans, led by Taronna Maines at the CDC, even found traces of the virus in the ferrets' gut.
This helps to explain the unusual profile of symptoms associated with swine flu. Most patients experience typical mild flu symptoms but an unusually large proportion (around 40% or so) have also suffered from unusual symptoms like vomiting and diarrhoea. Some have also been hospitalised due to severe pneumonia and respiratory failure, occasionally with fatal consequences. A flu virus that is unusually good at infecting the lungs and gut certainly make sense of these cases.
However, when it came to the virus's ability to spread, the two research teams disagree. The Americans found that swine flu is less easily transmitted from ferret to ferret than other seasonal viruses of the same H1N1 subtype. However, the Dutch team, led by Vincent Munster from the Erasmus Medical Center, found that the new virus transmits just as easily as its seasonal counterparts.
Read on »
Posted by Ed Yong at 4:00 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Animals • Climate change • Environment • Evolution • Mammals
The island of Hirta, on the western coast of Scotland, is home to a special breed of sheep. Soay sheep, named after a neighbouring island, are the most primitive breed of domestic sheep and have lived on the isles of St Kilda for at least a millennium. They're generally smaller than the average domesticated sheep, and that difference is getting larger and larger. Over the last 20 years, the Soay sheep have started to shrink.
They are becoming gradually lighter at all ages such that today's lambs and adults weigh around 3kg less than those from 1986. Their hind legs have also shortened to a similar degree, suggesting that they have indeed shrunk, rather than fallen increasingly ill.
The reasons behind this downward trend have now been revealed by a group of British scientists led by Arpat Ozgul from Imperial College. Using decades' worth of data, the team showed that natural selection normally favours larger sheep, as the odds of survival increase with body size. But this evolutionary pressure has been overwhelmed by the effects of climate change. Warmer winters have led to easier conditions, and less need to pile on the pounds in the first years of life. The lambs can afford to grow more slowly and they become smaller adults, who are only physically capable of raising small young themselves.
Soay sheep live in a closed population that doesn't have to deal with human interference, predators, migrants (either in or out), or significant competitors. That makes them an ideal population to study if you're an evolutionary biologist interested in how animal populations change over time. One such group, including Ozgul and his colleague Tim Coulson, have been studying the Soay sheep since 1985 and have brilliantly called themselves SLAPPED (short for Studies in Longitudinal Analysis of Population Persistence and Evolutionary Demography).
The group wanted to work out the extent to which the sheep's shrinking size is due to the influence of natural selection and to what extent it is just an ecological response to changing environments. To that end, they developed a mathematical job designed to analyse their 24 years of data and tease apart these contrasting effects.
Read on »
Posted by Ed Yong at 2:00 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 1, 2009
Category: Journalism
What a night.
Tonight, during the gala dinner of the World Conference of Science Journalists, I won the Association of British Science Writers' award for Best Newcomer 2009, collecting a certificate, an award and prize money in the Natural History Museum's central hall. In front of me: hundreds of international science journalists and Dippy the Diplodocus. Behind me: a statue of Charles Darwin. If that isn't reward for efforts in writing about science, I don't know what is.
Anyway, the award was a result of popular vote from members of the ABSW, so my heartiest thanks to anyone and everyone who voted, to Natasha for a lovely introduction and to everyone who came up and said congratulations. It's a superlative honour and it was a pleasure to have met you all. Memo to self: winning an award makes networking, an activity I loathe and dread with a fiery passion, remarkably easy and passive.
I find it incredibly interesting that amid the unsaid conference themes of saving journalism, the rise of new media, and what actually qualifies as journalism, that this award should go to someone who freelances as a journalist but also works in science communication and blogs. I'm going to start describing myself as a triple-reassortant science writer.
Anyway, a couple of amusing things are worth noting. Firstly, my name is spelled wrongly in different ways on both the certificate (Ed Wong) and the tube it came in (Ed Young). A lovely lady from the ABSW took my address down to send me a corrected version, but I may try and see if any particularly wealthy Ed Wongs would like to buy the original.
The book I was given is this, and I have a history with it. I wrote about 2% of it as one of my first ever freelance gigs about two years ago. The cheeky publishers never sent me (nor any of the other contributor, nor indeed the editors) any copies so it's great to finally have one (and amusing to hear screams of, "I never got a copy either!" throughout the evening.
And finally, the setting was really special. I first came to London almost 20 years ago to the day, and the Natural History Museum was one of the things that made me fall in love with the city and, indeed, the country. It was where I saw my first dinosaur skeletons. It was where I first heard of some guy called David Attenborough and bought something called Life on Earth. I go back every year for the photography competition and a spot of ice-skating. The NHM is one of my favourite places and the fact that this happened there just made it that much more special.
If there's one thing I regret, it's that later on in the evening, they played Carmina Burana through the speakers. Not exactly the music-of-choice for a relaxed chat over wine, but also why couldn't they have played it while I was climbing up to get the award? That would have been awesome.
Posted by Ed Yong at 7:17 PM • 45 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Animal behaviour • Animals • Insects • Mimicry • Predators and prey • Spiders
It's been just three weeks since I last wrote about the dark-footed ant-spider Myrmarachne melanotarsa, but this is one species that just keeps getting more and more interesting. To quickly recap, M.melanotarsa is a jumping spider that protects itself from predators (like other jumping spiders) by resembling an ant. Earlier this month, Ximena Nelson and Robert Jackson showed that they bolster this illusion by living in silken apartment complexes and travelling in groups, mimicking not just the bodies of ants but their social lives too.
Now Nelson and Robert are back with another side to the ant-spider's tale - it also uses its impersonation for attack as well as defence. It also feasts on the eggs and youngsters of the very same spiders that its ant-like form protects it from. It is, essentially, a spider that looks like an ant to avoid being eaten by spiders so that it itself can eat spiders.
Its actively raids the silken nests of other spiders and snatches the eggs and hatchlings within. These youngsters would be safe from any normal ant but being a spider in ant's clothing, M.melanotarsa has no problem with moving through silk. But they still have to get past the parents.
Read on »
Posted by Ed Yong at 11:30 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
