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Can you go home for the holidays?

Having filed grades and extricated myself from the demands of my job, at least temporarily, I have come with my better half and offspring to the stomping grounds of my better half's youth. Well, kind of. The grandparents-who-lurk-but-seldom-comment actually live a couple towns over from where they did when my better half still lived at home. In fact, they only moved from that house a few years ago, so I'm much more familiar with the immediate vicinity of the childhood home than I am with the environs of the current house. But we do this thing that folks in this part of the country are…

How much science is there in elementary school "science"?

My better half has been a frequent classroom volunteer leading science lessons in younger offspring's kindergarten class. This has made it fairly apparent to us that there's very little of what either of us would identify as science in these lessons. Most recently, the science lesson centered on nocturnal animals. However, the activity the kids did was primarily a matter of drawing and coloring and cutting and affixing paper with glue. There was a wee bit of classification in here (glue the nocturnal animals on one page and the diurnal animals on the other), but significantly less…

Lobster vs. Sea Hare

Ah, Aplysia. Also known as the sea hare, Aplysia is a common preparation used in neurobiology labs; it's a good sized beastie with the interesting defense mechanism of spewing out clouds of mucusy slime and purple ink when agitated. I well remember coming into the physiology lab in the morning to find a big bucket full of squirming muscular slugs in a pool of vivid purple goo. And then I'd reach in to grab one, and they were all velvety soft and undulating and engulfing my whole arm in this thick, slick, wet, slippery knot of rippling smooth muscle… Ahem. Well. Let me compose myself for a…

UPDATE: UARS delays impact slightly, all bets off on location.

Newer update from NASA: Update #11 Fri, 23 Sep 2011 23:30:46 GMT As of 7 p.m. EDT on Sept. 23, 2011, the orbit of UARS was 90 miles by 95 miles (145 km by 150 km). Re-entry is expected between 11 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23, and 3 a.m., Sept. 24, Eastern Daylight Time (3 a.m. to 7 a.m. GMT). During that time period, the satellite will be passing over Canada, Africa and Australia, as well as vast areas of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. The risk to public safety is very remote. The Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies now says that the entry time is 4:04AM 23 September UTC (11:04…

125 sq km of ice knocked off Antarctica by Tsunami

The Honshu tsunami of March 11th (the one that caused the Fukushima disaster) caused the otherwise stable Sulzberger Ice Shelf to calve giant hunks of ice. Climate scientists call this "teleconnection." I call it a big whopping bunch of whack knocking off a gigunda chunka stuff. Either way, this is important and interesting. Scientists figured this out by modeling the movement of the tsunami's energy across the Pacific and correlating this with the calving event observed from s satellite. That sounds easier than it was: By the time a tsunami wave travels a few tens of thousands of…

Thrust Fault

The law of superimposition says that stuff found on top is younger than stuff found lower down, in a geological or archaeological column. This is generally true, but there are exceptions, mostly trivial and easily understood. If a cave forms in a rock formation, the stuff that later ends up in that cave is younger in depositional age than the rock underneath which it rests (the rock in the roof of the cave, and above). One of the coolest examples of what seems to be (but really is not) a violation of this Law of Geology is a thrust fault. A thrust fault is essentially a horizontal fault (…

4000

Yesterday it was announced that 4000 American Soldiers had been killed, in total, in Iraq. I am not sure if this counts contract soldiers (such as Blackwater; Added: See notes below. It does not.), and I do not know if it includes American deaths since the very beginning of Iraq involvement or since the current invasion (though I think the latter). It does not matter too much, as the number 4000 is a fairly arbitrary thing ... if we used a numbering system other than base-10, some other number would feel like a milestone. But this does give us an order of magnitude of the sense of the…

Iain Murray paints himself into a corner

Via Chris Brook and Anthony Cox, I find that Melanie Philips took the same combination of ignorance of science and utter certainty that the scientists are wrong that she used to "prove" that global warming was a scam and conducted a grossly irresponsible scare campaign against vaccination. On this issue, for once, Tech Central Station is on the side of the angels, with several articles debunking the scare.\* My favourite one is by Iain Murray, who writes: [A Cardiff University report] examined the public's understanding of the issues surrounding the MMR vaccine, which has been…

The Australian's War on Science 76: Dad Jokes

Whenever we had bean salad, my Dad would always ask "What's that?" When told what it was, he would say "Don't tell me what it's been, tell me what it is now!" That's a Dad joke. The defining properties of a Dad joke are that it is not funny and that Dad keeps repeating it. In their ongoing war on science The Australian is now committing war crimes by deploying Dad jokes (which I recall were banned by the Geneva Convention in 1949). Imre Salusinszky, who declared global warming to be dead in January of last year has repeated the same unfunny joke this January: Last year, other parts of the…

Chad Orzel on Science Blogging

Chad Orzel, of Uncertain Principles, has a nice article today in Inside Higher Ed about the value of science blogging, both in his own career and in the scientific process in general. This is a view that I of course agree with and think is important, and Chad brings a unique perspective on the issue. Go check out his article, but here's a taste: As essential as this [communication] step is, it is in many ways the weakest link in the scientific process today. While there are more scientific papers published today than ever before, a combination of technical sophistication and scientific…

Recent Stuff

A lot of interesting evolutionary genetics research gets published, and I don't have time to write an insightful commentary on all of it (some may argue that I have never written an insightful commentary on anything). Here's a brief overview of the stuff I have missed in the past few weeks: A population of sheep was started with the introduction of two individuals on a remote island in the southern region of the Indian Ocean. Surprisingly, genetic diversity has increased over time in this population (reported here). This increase in heterozygosity (measured by the amount of microsatellite…

Huxley and the Pacifier Problem

The question of pacifiers (and for that matter bottles) arises when there is a new baby. In the case of Huxley, he will be breast milk fed if possible, but that involves bottle feeding at some point. Also, since our society does not practice cross nursing all Western babies go through a risk period when they begin to starve while the mother's milk is not yet in. Sometimes that is a couple of days, sometimes longer. In any event, the question comes up, do you let a baby anywhere near a nipple that is not attached to a human breast, and a related question is do you use a pacifier if the…

The Transient Nature of Academia

Yesterday, while driving up to Ipswich to spend the day at Crane beach and watch the see the annual July 3rd Fireworks, a group of us gabbed about the transient nature of being an academic. Living from place to place, moving until you are in your late 30s, an academic is expected to travel and see the world. You live in various places; experience the day to day hustle of different cities, towns and often countries. You absorb the local customs, the ideas, the history. You attempt to form relationships with coworkers ... but in the end it's all very transient. I've made many good friends…

Orcas and Oil

When a scientist is writing a scientific paper we look for that one quintessential figure that tells the whole story. Other figures are ancillary to fill in the specifics but the 'cardinal figure' is where all the meat of the paper is distilled to one remarkable graph. A senior scientist once told me that deciding on and constructing this figure is the hardest part of writing the paper. After the "cardinal figure" everything else writes itself. Think of the "cardinal figure" as manuscript feng shui. An off-balance figure with improperly aligned objects lead to paper disharmony. Bad figure…

Name That Orb Weaver!

Since Labor Day weekend has passed, it's time to put away those white shoes and to take note of the late summer orb weaver spiders. Orb Weaver spiders are members of the Araneidae family. These include the ubiquitous yellow and black garden spider and familiar genera such as Mangora spp. and Araneus spp. When my kids were little, they referred to the more common Araneidae as "Charlottes" after E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. Chimp Refuge field observers, Dawn & Bobby, recently shared a photo of an Araneidae arachnid that has set up her shop behind their house: This is a pretty spider to…

The Chimpanzee's place in the Chain

When Linnaeus was attempting to organize "the Creation," he gave the chimpanzee the binomial Homo troglodytes. Since Edward Tyson's 1699 dissection of a "pigmie" (a juvenile chimpanzee [see Gould's essay "To Show An Ape" in The Flamingo's Smile]), the close resemblance between apes and humans has been recognized, even if a recognition of our actual evolutionary relationship has been harder won. Sometimes Tyson's landmark work is heralded as a true understanding of the relationship between humans and apes, but in fact it was primarily an attempt to weld on a "missing link" in the Great Chain…

Education and Emotion

Last week, I criticized David Brooks for his conservative interpretations of modern neuroscience. This week, I'm happy to report that Brooks' policy recommendations are much more interesting (and scientifically accurate, at least in my opinion): If we want to have successful human capital policies, we have to get over the definition of education as something that takes place in schools between the hours of 8 and 3, between the months of September and June, and between the ages of 5 and 18. As Bob Marvin of the University of Virginia points out, there is a mountain of evidence demonstrating…

Bill Gates Dreams of Robots

If I was a smart man, I'd go out and invest in the stock of some robot companies. Bill Gates (yes, that one) is convinced that the 21st century will be the age of the robot: Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies... But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms. Projects are complex, progress is slow, and practical applications are relatively rare. In fact, for all the excitement and promise, no one can say with any certainty when--or even if--this industry will achieve critical mass…

MythBusters pulling on a phone book: You are doing it wrong.

The MythBusters aren't really doing it wrong, but they give me a chance to talk about some physics. In the latest show, they tested the myth that two phone books with their pages alternating were indestructible. To test this, they put the two phone books together and then pulled them apart in a sort of tug of war. Here is a diagram:  Looks great, what is wrong with this? The problem is that by pulling this way, the MythBusters produces 320 pounds of force on the book - but they could have done twice that. This…

Social Networks

I've got a new essay on social networks and the research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in the latest issue of Wired: There's something strange about watching life unfold as a social network. It's easy to forget that every link is a human relationship and every circle a waistline. The messy melodrama of life--all the failed diets and fading friendships--becomes a sterile cartoon. But that's exactly the point. All that drama obscures a profound truth about human society. By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made a…

Amy Bishop and lactose intolerance

It just gets weirder. Ipswich neighbors recall confrontations with Amy Bishop: Bishop once stopped a local ice cream truck from coming into their neighborhood. According to WBZ-1030 radio, she said it because her own kids were lactose intolerant, and she didn't think it was fair that her kids couldn't have ice cream. "That's who it was!" Lafoe said. "When we were younger the ice cream truck just stopped coming around. That's strange." Bishop & her husband both seem to have a history of self-centered anti-social behavior. There seems a precedent of many actions aimed at optimizing their…

Rumor and Politics

Humans are exquisitely social animals, and yet we're vulnerable to some pretty stunning flaws in social cognition. Unfortunately, most of these flaws are on full display during a presidential campaign. Consider the false rumor, which can influence our beliefs even when it has been debunked. The most powerful example of this phenomenon, of course, is the swift-boating of John Kerry. It didn't matter that every reputable news source found most of the charges to be misleading. The sheer fact that Kerry was being accused of lying was enough to impugn his honesty. Even when we're found innocent, a…

Airspace begins to open as Eyjafjallajökull calms down

Eyjafjallajokull erupting on 4/17/2010, image by Marco Fulle. Note the "rooster tails" of ash and steam, typical for Surtseyan eruptions. European airspace has slowly begun to reopen as the explosive eruptions at Eyjafjallajökull have become less intense over the last 24 hours. However, there is still lots of hazardous airspace and airports around places like London and across the UK remain closed - leaving people stranded. We will still have to wait to see what the political ramification are, especially after EU officials claim "flaws" in their decision and the over $1 billion losses by…

Where were you, 30 years ago today?

May 18, 1980 is when Mount St Helens blew its top. I was newly married, in my first year in graduate school in Eugene, Oregon — far enough south that we saw little of the ash, typically only seeing cars filmed with gray every day. My in-laws, though, all lived right in the shadow of the mountain, in Longview and Castle Rock, Washington, so we got regular reports on days dark as night and shoveling paths through the mess. National Geographic has a fine article on the recovery of the region. Biology is bouncing back in the few decades since the disaster. As a natural lab to study the rebirth…

Volcano Profile: Rabaul

Sorry about the dearth of posts. It has been a busy week here in Davis and I've been a little distracted by the upcoming election. Combined with the relative lack of volcano news this week, the posting has been lackluster. However, that being said, I will try to make up for some of it by starting my Volcano Profiles series that will bide the time between volcano news. I start with a volcano that was suggested by Eruptions reader Thomas Donlon: Rabaul. VOLCANO PROFILE: RABAUL   Location: Papau New Guinea Height: 688 m Geophysical location: Boundary of Australian plate and Pacific…

A genetic test to tell you what "population" you are?

One of the major reasons that so much human genetic work is fixated on ascertaining the nature of population substructure is that different populations may respond differently to particular drugs. Of course population identification is only a rough proxy, but in many cases it is a good one. Years ago, Neil Risch reported the utility of genetic markers in differentiating individuals into distinct groups, and the high fidelity of these identifications with self-report. But this sort of generalization is contingent on particular conditions. In Brazil centuries of admixture have resulted in a…

Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments (book review)

One of the more popular books I've ever reviewed here, judging by the number of people who read the review, was this one on home chemistry. Now, let's see if we can meet or beat the physical sciences with this new title:Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture (DIY Science). Robert Bruce Thompson, author of the chemistry book, has teamed up with Barbara Fritchman Thompson, to produce this new work. The book has a lot of experiments in it, organized in a reasonable way, with complete instructions on everything. I would prefer to see more graphics illustrating the…

Why does New Zealand have so many earthquakes and volcanoes?

A 6.3 earthquake has just struck the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, killing dozens and leaving dozens more buried in rubble with rescue workers trying to dig them out. On the TV this morning, the mayor of Christchurch told his story: Having just left a series of meetings, he was sitting on a balcony outside the city offices in a tall building with his executive assistant planning their next activities when the quake struck. They tried to re-enter the building but were repeatedly thrown back away from the entrance way. When the powerful earthquake stopped, he picked himself up off the…

"I eat you": A cannibal greeting

Here's a nice follow-up to my article about prion diseases. It's an excerpt from Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health, by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Rhodes. The book documents the work of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, the American physician who provided the first description of kuru. Gajdusek travelled to Papua New Guinea in the late 1950s and lived among the Fore peoples. He studied their culture and performed autopsies on kuru victims. William Arens, an anthropologist at Stony Brook University, notes that Gajdusek didn't actually witness the Fore's ritual…

Friday Random Ten, 4/23/2010

Stellardrive, Inlandsix: Reasonably good instrumental prog. They're not particularly exceptional, but they're decent. Gong, "The Octave Doctors and the Crystal Machine": Gong is a perfect example of one of the differences between the great prog bands, and a lot of the neo-progressive stuff. I can't quite describe exactly what it is - but you listen to a band like Gong, and you never get bored. You can listen to it over, and over - and it's always interesting. Even though the individual features of the music are similar to what a lot of less brilliant bands do, they manage to…

The Real Murphy's Law

I know better than to attempt to write an april fools day post that really tries to fool anyone. I'm not a good enough writer to carry that kind of thing off in a genuinely amusing way. On the other hand, I love april fools day pranks, and I generally like the silly mood of the day. So I thought I'd write some posts in the spirit of silliness. As someone working in engineering, one of my favorite rules is Murphy's Law. The thing about Murphy's law is that odds are, what you just thought when I said "Murphy's Law" is not, in fact, Murphy's Law. Odds are, you think that Murphy's law says "…

Why You Should Always Run Controls

One of the things that's hammered into your head as a baby scientist is the importance of running controls. Typically, you run a positive control--a 'gamed' experiment where you know what the outcome should be and which tells you that the experiment is working--and a negative control which should not give any results at all (e.g., a PCR reaction without any DNA) to make sure there's no contamination or other spurious results. It's always puzzled me why people don't like to run controls because if you don't do the controls, you'll have to redo the experiment, which is a lot more work than if…

I get email — and create a contest!

Want another reason to avoid debating creationists? It's like giving a mangy, limping, scab-encrusted starving fleabait cat a saucer of milk — you'll never be rid of the whimpering dependent. Ross Olson of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association has taken to pestering me and Mark Borrello with his plaintive demands, and unfortunately I can't just stuff him into a carrier and drag him down to the humane society or the vet. Here's his latest missive. He cuts right to the chase and Godwins with the very first word. Hitler Dr. Myers, The most emotional audience response in the debate came…

William D. Hamilton was wrong

Last week I reviewed some seminal early papers of the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton. Hamilton was arguably the most accomplished theoretical biologist of the second half of the 20th century; Richard Dawkins referred to him as the most "...distinguished Darwinian since Darwin." My review of the papers I selected from Narrow Roads of Gene Land I allowed me to reacquaint myself with his prose style after a few years away, and as it came on the heals of my reviews of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory I could not help but note contrasts. On occasion Hamilton veers into such…

Shame on Washington state

My home state! In a region with some of the highest percentages of godless people in the country! And they have this awful law on the books. Washington's law specifies that a person treated through faith healing "by a duly accredited Christian Science practitioner in lieu of medical care is not considered deprived of medically necessary health care or abandoned." Other religions are not mentioned. Christian Science is not science, and it is definitely not medicine. I presume some religious lobby got this evil exemption on the books years ago, but now it's time to remove it—it's killing…

Biology as a second language: what is a vector?

Vizzini: He didn't fall? Inconceivable! Inigio: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. - William Goldman, The Princess Bride Excuse me while I temporarily interrupt the genome sequencing series to define a word. Artifacts in the classroom It's disorienting. You learn a word in certain context. You're sure of it's meaning and then you end up in a situation where people use the word in a completely unexpected way and no one else seems bothered by this! I had this happen once with the word "artifact." I had organized a conference and some workshop…

New York City trip - Part VIII: Around Manhattan

Sunday, May 28th Keeping with our strategy of making sure the kids are having fun (instead of trying to see everything we wanted to see), we decided on Sunda morning to do what kids wanted to do. So, we checked out of the hotel early and took a long walk west towards the river. At the pier, we got on a Circle Line ferry and took a three-hour trip all around the island of Manhattan. The guide was an obnoxious guy, inserting too much personal and political opinion, but he knew enough about the history and importance of various buildings for us to learn more. We got really close to the Statue…

Pandemic preparedness: a pat on the back or a kick in the butt?

Another report, another story: the world is not ready for a pandemic. Before you click away (you've heard it before) I'll be saying something more about it than just reiterating the dire prognosis if we don't shape up. But first the message, from the UN and the World Bank: The world remains unprepared to cope with a pandemic in humans arising from bird flu, a UN and World Bank report released Thursday found. "Although a massive global effort to control highly pathogenic Avian Influenza (or severe bird flu) has led to improved responses to outbreaks in poultry in many countries during the last…

The threat of emerging poxviruses: replacements for smallpox?

1980 marked a milestone in infectious disease epidemiology: the World Health Organization declared the smallpox virus eradicated in the wild. However, while smallpox currently exists only in frozen stocks, poxviruses as a class certainly haven't disappeared. A related virus, monkeypox, regularly causes illness in Africa, and even spread half a world away in the American midwest. Additionally, Africa isn't the only area with endemic poxvirus infections. Brazil has been dealing with their own poxvirus outbreak, and poxviruses have popped up in Europe as well. More on both of those after…

Answers in Genesis mentions the name of the devil!

I am astounded. Usually AiG simply refers to me as "the Professor" or "the atheist", but in their latest screed they actually mention me by name…and they even spell it correctly! Of course, they get everything else wrong. A well-known University of Minnesota-Morris professor who has a history of hate speech against creationists—especially Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum1—inadvertently admitted recently that we were not wrong. This was kind of a blessing in disguise and also reveals much about his character. Professor Paul (P.Z.) Myers said: First, there is no moral law: the…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Daylight Saving Time: Clock-shifts Affect Risk Of Heart Attack: Adjusting the clocks to summer time on the last Sunday in March increases the risk of myocardial infarction in the following week. In return, putting the clocks back in the autumn reduces the risk, albeit to a lesser extent. This according to a new Swedish study. Programmable Genetic Clock Made Of Blinking Florescent Proteins Inside Bacteria Cells: UC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The…

New and Exciting on PLoS-ONE

A whole bunch of papers got published on PLoS-ONE yesterday. I did not have time to check them out very closely yet, but a few titles immediatelly caught my attention: High Costs of Female Choice in a Lekking Lizard by Maren N. Vitousek, Mark A. Mitchell, Anthony J. Woakes, Michael D. Niemack and Martin Wikelski The cost to males of producing elaborate mating displays is well established, but the energy females spend on mate choice is less clear. This study monitored the heart rates of female Galápagos marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) and found they expended almost a days' worth of…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Prey Not Hard-wired To Fear Predators: Are Asian elk hard-wired to fear the Siberian tigers who stalk them" When wolves disappear from the forest, are moose still afraid of them? No, according to a study by Wildlife Conservation Society scientist Dr. Joel Berger, who says that several large prey species, including moose, caribou and elk, only fear predators they regularly encounter. If you take away wolves, you take away fear. That is a critical piece of knowledge as biologists and public agencies increase efforts to re-introduce large carnivores to places where they have been exterminated…

Seeing in the Dark: LISA 6

Bats' ears at AMNH To really see in the dark, at some point you must abandon the light... You can go far in faint light by using high efficiency detectors, large collecting areas and amplification; but, as nature discovered a long time ago, to really find things in the dark you need to switch to an entirely different spectrum and look at vibrations. This is also true if you want to look at Black Holes. You can do a lot with light, but to really probe what is going on with black holes, to come close to the event horizon, to test relativity, to measure spins and test astrophysics of formation…

Infrared imaging confirms Jupiter impact

JPL scientists confirm new impact by a comet or asteroid on Jupiter using NASA infrared telescope in Hawaii. Independent confirmation by UC scientists using Keck telescope. NASA's InfraRed Telescope Facility on Hawaii got near-IR images of the new dark spot on Jupiter. As I speculated, a recent impact would bright in the infrared. Sure enough, there it is. Cool. Very cool. NASA IRTF image showing infrared glow of new dark spot - click to embiggen from JPL Keck also got it. Keck near IR imaging - Kalas et al - from Keck- click to embiggen New Scientist story with Keck image Here is the…

Funnels and Tornadoes and Lightning, Oh my!

MAJeff with your morning weather. My dad took this picture and sent it to me last weekend. It's a cold water air funnel. I thought it was cool, so I'm sharing it When I first saw the picture, my reaction was, "OH, NO!" A couple summers ago, my dad's business was hit by a tornado. As he tells it, the sirens went off, so he and everyone in the building went to the central storage room because it had no windows (no basement in this building). The building starts to rumble and shake, as it tends to do when you take a direct hit from a tornado. After a bit, things start to calm down, and folks…

Word salad, with math

I guess most of us missed a bizarre poster at the Evolution 2008 meetings tonight. It was basically a paper titled The Evidently Imminent Phyletic Transition of Homo sapiens into Homo militarensis (the military hominid), by Richard H. Lambertsen. It's garbage from the first page, I'm afraid, in which the author tries to demonstrate that there must be direction and intent in the evolution of life, and that "Earth's largest blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) swimming at peak velocity most precisely represents the central tendency of evolution." This is followed by many pages of oddball math in…

The WTO Just Ruled Against India's Booming Solar Program?

Says HuffoPo. It is bullshit, of course, but lots of people seem to have fallen for it. I found the HuffPo link because mt posted it; and DA quotes FOE saying Trade agreement trumps climate accord: WTO rules against India solar program. As usual, the usual suspects are so busy being outraged they barely tell you what the actual issue is. The WTO ruling is here. There's some lawyerly blather, but not much of it, and its not too hard to read. Skip to the "Summary of key findings" which starts: The claims brought by the United States concern domestic content requirements (DCR measures) imposed…

125/366: Flash! (Aaah-aaaaaahhhhh!)

One of my Christmas gifts this year was an external flash unit for my DSLR, replacing one that broke a while back. Given that the camera has a built-in flash, you might wonder why I need this extra bulky gadget, so to answer that question, here's a composite of five pictures I took today: Composite image showing various flash settings. The top is the intentionally underexposed case with no flash. Top left is the direct flash, bottom left direct flash with the diffuser. Top right is indirect flash at a 45 degree angle, bottom right is indirect flash straight up. I put the camera in full…

Seepage: Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community

The title of this post is also the title of a new peer reviewed paper by Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Orskes, James Risbey, Ben Newell and Michael Smithson, published in Global Environmental Change. The article is Open Access, available here. Stephan Lewandosky has a blog post on it, in which he notes, ... we examine the effect of contrarian talking points that arise out of uncertainty on the scientific community itself. We show that although scientists are trained in dealing with uncertainty, there are several psychological and cognitive reasons why scientists may nevertheless be susceptible…