Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications; "Buried Answers," one of his features for the Times Magazine, will appear in Houghton Mifflin's esteemed 2006 Best American Science and Nature Writing. The author of three books (see below), he is currently working on a book about the experience and neurobiology of fear. You can find more of his work at his website.
Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.”
The Great Gulf
An epistemological argument disguised as fish fight.
The Northern Forest (with Richard Ober)
An environmental debate misses the most essential relationships in the ecosystem at hand.
The studies in question find that bigger, more interesting cages and fatherhood both spurred growth of dendritic spines -- the neuron's info receivers -- in marmosets. I was quite interested to read this, since two years ago I moved into a bigger, funner house and soon after had another kid. The marmoset in me should be a lot smarter than it was a while back. Whether it is ... well, I'm not sure I'm smart enough to tell.
But this is fascinating stuff, and I recommend it highly. My intro to the posts (from the Mind Matters site) is below, or you can go straight there from here.
The last month or so I've been pondering what to photograph, as I walk around town, to convey the disturbing wierdness of the weather we've had these last months in Vermont. I live in Montpelier, which is the nation's smallest state capital and generally one of its coldest. (Also the only one without a MacDonald's). It's should be damn cold here by now -- it should have been cold weeks ago -- but we've had four months of autumn.
Posted on December 17, 2006 11:37 PM • 3 Comments •
Amid my guilt at not writing more on avian flu myself, I note well this typically excellent post from Effect Measure, pondering: Why so little word lately of bird flu? Its issues intersect, in a very rough way, with those raised about science journalism...
Red-cockaded woodpeckers, by Earl Lincoln Poole, from Harold Bailey's Birds of Virginia, 1913; via Wikipedia Commons._________________________________________________________________________________ North Carolina landowners are clearcutting pine forests to make sure those pesky red-cockaded woodpeckers don't set up shop, according to this depressing, distressing report in today's Times. BOILING SPRING LAKES, N.C., Sept. 23 (AP) — Over the past six months, landowners here have been clear-cutting thousands of trees to keep them from becoming homes for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. The chain saws started in February, when the federal Fish and Wildlife Service put Boiling Spring Lakes on notice that rapid development threatened to...
Posted on September 25, 2006 9:44 AM • 2 Comments •
Nature reporter Declan Butler, who has done some of best reporting on avian flu and (separately) the use of the internet as a means of communicating science, has updated his superb Google Earth avian flu maps to use Google Earth's new time series function. The resulting maps are both beautiful and even more informative and striking than before. The dynamics of the flu's spread are more clear, and the time series highlights the dynamic nature of this virus, particularly the way the flu has reappeared in some places, flaring up again — an important aspect that's otherwise easy to overlook.
It's good to see NASA hasn't completely abandoned its mandate to look after the home planet. As its Earth Observatory notes: Among the casualties of the conflict between Lebanon and Israel in the summer of 2006 was the Mediterranean. Israeli raids in mid-July on the Jiyyeh Power Station released thousands of tons of oil along the Lebanese coast, perhaps rivaling the Exxon Valdex accident in 1989. By August 8, the spill covered approximately 120 kilometers (75 miles). The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying onboard NASA’s Terra satellite took this picture on August 15, 2006. The United Nations, the European...
I enjoy most any mix of science and mountaineering — part of why I so like Mark Bowen's Thin Ice, his book about climatologist Lonnie Thompson's remarkable work documenting global warming in high-altitude glaciers. Scientific work done at rarefied altitudes. How can you not like it? The North Face of the Eiger, 2005 — aka the Eigerwand of climbing fame. The east face, photos of which I couldn't find, is out of sight around the corner. Photo by Dirk Beyer via Wikipedia Commons. I'm less thrilled to see global warming meet alpinism on the Eiger, where last Thursday about 400,000...
My interest in global warming grows apace, both because it stands to impose some very grim effects and because it makes an interesting (if dismaying) study in culture's attitude toward science (see my post on "Climate change as a teset of empiricism and secular democracy") and how vested interests can affect same. Florida at present (left) and what it will look like if seas rise 20 feet. from Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth The puzzle at this point is why so many people, including intelligent people with decent scientific literacy, still doubt humans are causing the earth to warm dangerously....
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...
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...
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $19.95. If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
Author and journalist 
