sheril | February 16, 2009All the tropics folks have a habit of going on and on about species diversity, but it turns out the poles aren't as desolate as many expected. The Census of Marine Life has just released a report documenting about 7,500 species in the Antarctic and 5,500 in the Arctic including several hundred critters possibly new to science.
Stories circulating the media call the tally 'astonishing', but I'm honestly not surprised given how little we know about these regions. The most interesting revelation... Despite the 8,000 miles between them, at least 235 species live in both polar seas. Pretty…
cmooney | February 14, 2009
Sane people right now are celebrating Valentine's Day.
I am holed up trying to read Nicholas Copernicus's On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium). Having been an official student of the history of science for two weeks now, and not feeling particularly satisfied with my progress, I've decided it is far past time for me to cast aside Ptolemaic and Aristotelian things, and enter the modern world.
I'll have plenty more to say about the experience of reading Copernicus once I've gotten somewhere. And after Copernicus, it's Galileo. But for now, here's an…
sheril | February 13, 2009Thanks so much to everyone for thoughtful emails and comments. I'm back home and reading them has definitely been helping with recovery :)
Chris and I also want to wish our readers a very happy Valentine's Day...
cmooney | February 13, 2009Folks, it has been a really rough time for Sheril--she may or may not tell the full story herself, but suffice it to say that she has been hospitalized for several days and has only recently been allowed to come home, and this unfortunate turn of events has prevented her from attending the AAAS meeting in Chicago, where she was set to headline at the high profile "Science of Kissing" panel on Valentine's Day.
That's a very sad missed opportunity; but luckily, Sheril has also done a freelance article for New Scientist about the same subject, which has just come out and which you can read here…
cmooney | February 13, 2009Science Debate has done a great analysis of the science funding that has emerged from the House-Senate reconciliation process on the stimulus bill. For the most part, science funding was restored through the reconciliation process: $ 3 billion for NSF; $ 2 billion for DOE Science; $ 5.4 million for DOE research on efficiency and renewable energy; and 10.4 billion for NIH.
You can check out the full analysis here. Assuming this bill gets to the president's desk and is signed--which seems a fairly safe assumption at this point--then this is great news for science and American innovation.…
cmooney | February 12, 2009Over at Science Progress, I've been involved in putting together not one but two items timed for Darwin Day.
The first is an op-ed coauthored with my prof here at Princeton, D. Graham Burnett, who teaches Darwin. We argue for historical nuance, which leads one to reject the idea that Darwin should be considered an icon of conflict between science and religion. In fact, we call that idea "a hackneyed story, lacking in historical nuance and ultimately running counter to the project of drawing helpful lessons from the life of one of history's greatest scientists." A brief excerpt:
...Science-…
cmooney | February 11, 2009This is a post simply to ask for comment on my last three (here, here, here) as a kind of genre exercise. Each post has been about my new foray into studying the history of science here at Princeton and testing out what it's like to be a student again. (The most insane kind of culture shock, is the short answer.)
Anyway, this is a very different kind of thing for the Intersection, although certainly not outside of its mandate. And so far, I like the response it has generally prompted. But I don't have to blog about the history of science for the next three to four months...it's just a…
cmooney | February 11, 2009I'm posting this on Sheril's behalf, as she is in the hospital right now:
Dear readers and friends in and out of the blogosphere,
I am extremely appreciative for so many emails during the past week. Thanks for offering your guestrooms, travel recommendations, and road trip advice. Thank you for invitations to speak at universities along the way and participate in dinners and happy hours. I am very glad to know so many thoughtful people follow our blog and have been happy to hear from several old friends I did not realize were readers.
Last week I also began getting emails from many planning…
cmooney | February 11, 2009We're pleased to repost the latest email from ScienceDebate:
Dear Friend,
Last Friday you and others in the science community took action and helped to restore $3.1 billion in cuts to science that had been planned in the Senate compromise version of the stimulus bill. That was a good victory for U.S. Science, but it was just the warm-up act. Now we all need to come together as a community for the real show.
Even after the $3.1 billion restoration, the final approved Senate version of the stimulus bill falls far short of the House version when it comes to science and technology. You can…
cmooney | February 10, 2009In the last post, I introduced Francis Bacon--chiefly via the New Atlantis--and described a very interesting, if ultimately perhaps too strong, feminist reaction. But it's as though some feminists are Bacon's only enemies.
Neoconservative bioethicists, for example, see Bacon as the place where it all started to go wrong. Leon Kass, the great granddaddy of this school, and first head of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, took Bacon to task in his 1985 book Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs, a polemic against many new reproductive and biomedical technologies. As Kass…
cmooney | February 10, 2009
Male chauvinist pig? Or worse?
I haven't even read Copernicus yet, and probably won't at least until this weekend. As far as my reading goes, the scientific revolution hasn't yet started and I'm still stuck with Ptolemaic glasses on.
History 293, though, is churning away, and yesterday we did our section on Francis Bacon and The New Atlantis. (Not satisfied with the course packet excerpt, this is the version I ordered from Amazon.) Man, here was a dude who, although writing in the early 1600s, sounds stunningly "modern"--a term I must now put in quotes due to the fact that I'm studying…
cmooney | February 9, 2009So...it is not exactly easy to find history of science classics at your average--or even your well above average--bookstore.
The class I'm officially taking here at Princeton, History 293, focuses heavily on a course packet and so doesn't have many officially assigned books. It does have a few; they are Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species--which I already own and have read, although right now they're somewhere in the middle of the country in transit--and Michael Adas's Machines As the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell Studies in…
sheril | February 8, 2009Follow up reposted from ScienceDebate:
Several people have emailed asking about the cuts to the proposed
increases to DOE/Office of Science, and what about NIH, USGS and other
agencies we didn't mention. Some clarifications are in order.
1. These are NOT agencies' existing budgets - this is about new money in addition to existing funding levels.
2. Science Debate only focused yesterday on the proposed CUTS to the
INCREASES proposed in the original SENATE bill. So we didn't mention
NIH funding increases, for example, which the amendment left alone.
Nor did we mention a $330M increase…
sheril | February 7, 2009Reposted from ScienceDebate:
(February 6, 2009) - Well
it's been a long, long day with thousands of emails and phone calls, but we are happy to
report that your efforts, and those of the rest of the U.S. science and
technology community, have paid off in a big way - for the time being.
Senators
Nelson, Collins, Lieberman and Specter held a press conference earlier
this evening, also crediting Senator Snowe, and followed up by Senate
Majority Leader Reid, declaring a compromise bill has been reached on
the stimulus package. You can read the exact line items of the bill here in an xls…
sheril | February 6, 2009
It's February once again, just a week away from that very special holiday in which we celebrate the one we love (or bemoan the greeting card industry). Last year, I composed a post called The Science of Kissing provoking all sorts of interesting discussions on and offline. Now that I'm about to participate in the upcoming AAAS symposium of the same title, let's talk osculation (the scientific term for kissing). Here's the original entry...
I expect most of us hope to experience the 'ever-elusive, out-of-the-ballpark-home-run, earth-shattering, perfect kiss,' but what exactly is it? How…
sheril | February 5, 2009
An article in this week's PNAS reports ocean acidification and climate change threaten reef clownfish. Changing CO2 levels disrupt larvae's sense of smell, which is crucial to survival.
According to Dr Philip Munday, "What our study is showing is that animal behaviour is affected by the acidification of the oceans. It's opening our eyes to another issue of acidification that we need to be aware of."
More at ABC Science...
cmooney | February 5, 2009My latest Science Progress column takes on those, like right wing columnist Deroy Murdock or Lou Dobbs, who persist in trying to claim that winter weather refutes global warming. There are so, so, so many reasons this argument is dumb; and yet at the same time, who can dispute that the prevailing weather at a given time does highly influence the trajectory of the climate debate?
So while it's intellectually silly to pretend that winter weather refutes global warming, it was also strategically silly to hold the giant United Nations conference in Copenhagen this December.
You can read the full…
sheril | February 4, 2009
The Continental Divide runs north-south from Alaska to northwestern South America. It separates waters flowing into the Pacific Ocean from those flowing into the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico.
We stopped in New Mexico to document traversing this natural boundary...