Category: Brains and minds
Now here's a provoking notion: PTSD in elephants .In an arresting article in Seed, Gay Bradshaw, a professor at Oregon State University, describes the implications of several studies of elephant groups in which wayward youngsters went a-wilding, essentially, murdering rhinos and creating mayhem. The young male elephants were from social groups that had been fragmented and lost the social structure that most elephants grow up in. Bradshaw speculates that the loss of that social structure gave the rogue elephants what amounts to post-traumatic stress syndrome. This offers plenty of interest on its face. It also suggests some intriguing philosophical implications....
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:25 PM • •
Category: Culture of science
In a promising experiment, Nature reports that it is beginning a trial in which it will evaluate submitted papers through two tracks, one using its current, traditional closed peer review system and another using open peer review. As the blog O'Reilly Radar notes, this is a highly encouraging and significant trial, and one with Nature's aggressive and creative exploration of how the Internet can enhance and improve scientific publishing. The O'Reilly article, well worth reading (and short), reports Nature's open peer review will allow anyone in a paper's field to comment on a submitted paper, which will be accessible via...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:24 PM • •
Category: Culture of science
The cover of the May 27 New Scientist bluntly asks, regarding climate change, “What Does It Take?” What will it take, that is, to convince our political leaders to start braking the accelerating runaway train we’ve created in global warming? I won’t review the (overwhelming) evidence here; for that, see some of the good writing on climate change lately, such as Mark Bowen’s Thin Ice or Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe. My concern here is not the evidence but our failure to act on it. Global warming is serving, in a way that, say, evolution doesn’t, as a...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:21 PM • •
Category: Environment/nature
from New Scientist, 30 May 2006: Wild birds have helped transmit the deadly H5N1 bird flu across Eurasia, a meeting of 300 scientists at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) concluded on Wednesday. But killing them to prevent further spread of the disease is not the answer, they warn. I wrote an article about this in Audubon this spring, concluding from the divided and tenuous opinions and facts at hand then that wild birds almost certainly did help spread avian flu. Since then, opinion among scientists has swung a couple of times as the evidence bounced about. The appearance...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:14 PM • •
Author and journalist 
