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An Open History of Science - ScienceOnline2010 (#scio10)

This is the brief presentation I gave on Saturday, Jan. 16 as part of this year's ScienceOnline conference. I was thrilled to have PZ Myers, Greg Laden and Janet Stemwedel present (the latter of whom posted her thoughts on the session). John McKay and I led a discussion on the intersection between open access and scientific innovation. See the program description here and these posts for more information. In John's section he emphasized how the early history of scientific publishing was one where individual researchers simply pooled their letters into journals and shared them with one…

Why are creationists creationist?

Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 611] A question I have wondered about for a long time is this: why do people become creationists? I mean, nobody is born a creationist (or an evolutionist, or a Mayan cosmic-cyclist, etc.). These are views that one acquires as one learns and integrates into society. But we live, notionally, in a society in which science has learned more about the world in 300 years than in the prior million or so. So, why do people become…

Wilkins en route

In which our hero discovers the joys of walking... Next on my trip, I visited David Williams, a paleobiologist at the Museum of Natural History in London. We talked at length about the nature of systematics (which is something I am increasingly less certain about) and of the history of species concepts. Then he showed me some of the marvellous architecture that Richard Owen commissioned when he built the place. It really is made to look like a Cathedral of Science, with mock Gothic architecture and vaulting ceilings, all decorated with biological themes, I am pleased to say. Despite his…

Darwin on species 3: The Notebooks and the Correspondence before the Origin

Most historians of evolutionary biology have contended that Darwin did not believe that species were real. Instead, they claim, he believed species were arbitrarily delimited from each other, and the species was nothing more than a more distinct variety. Thus, according to Mayr, Darwin did not attempt to solve the problem of speciation because he did not and--because of his species concept, could not--appreciate that there was a problem to be solved. Since he did not consider the species a distinct natural unit, it was only natural that he did not see the need to explain how species multiply…

Chronicles of Higher Ed Symposium on Academic Blogging

The Chronicle of Higher Education is running a symposium on the benefits of academic blogging. This symposium addresses ostensibly the failure of Juan Cole, a prominent Middle East scholar and proprietor of the blog Informed Comment, to recieve tenure at Yale University. Many have attributed that failure to his publishing his views on the Internet, though Yale has thus far refused to comment. Many of the contributors to the symposium also talk in depth about the benefits of academic blogging. Here are some choice morsels: Brad De Long: The hope of all of us who blog is that we will…

My ethnic story, part II

In an attempt to do my part to displace whiteness from "normal" in terms of thinking about diversity and science, I'm telling my ethnic story. This is part II; part I is here. More below the fold... The story of my mom's side of the family is quite different from my dad's. My mom's parents both grew up in the North of England, with my grandmother's family being coalminers. My grandmother went to school until the equivalent of 8th grade, and then she came home and helped look after her 9 siblings. I'm not sure where my grandparents met, or how they came to live in London. That's where…

Do Women Need to Have Periods?

This is actually not a silly question. Birth control pills on the market such as Seasonale allow women to postpone having their period for three months and to only have four periods total per year. The way these oral contraceptives (OCs) work is relatively simple. Monthly birth control includes a withdrawl phase where the progesterone is removed. Without the hormonal support the endometrium dies, and the woman menstruates. OCs that extend the cycle to 3 months simply exclude the withdrawl phase for two of those months. However, this begs the question as to whether the withdrawl phase is…

Animal Rights and Animal Research

So there's a Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper in press on the cognitive differences between human and nonhuman animals that is related, in some ways, to my own work (it even cites me twice... yay, the citation count for that paper just jumped to, like, 4). The paper is sure to be controversial for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the title, but I'm fairly convinced by its arguments. But I'm not really writing this post to talk about the article. When it's published, with all its peer commentaries (BBS publishes target articles and then a bunch of peer commentaries, along…

I get email — arrogant insincerity edition

I try to be patient with all the email I get, I really do, and usually the greatest forebearance I can offer is to simply set a piece of email aside and go on. There simply is not enough time to answer everything, especially when my correspondent is better off going to the library, and most especially when the only reply I'm inspired to give is to snarl, "Go away, kid, you bother me." So let me introduce you to young Mr Rosenberg. He has written me twice, the first time with a fairly routine set of questions that I politely set aside because I get a few hundred of these every week, and…

Questions I have for Paul Davies after reading his NYT op-ed.

This New York Times op-ed, to be precise. My questions for Paul Davies can be boiled down to these two: What kinds of explanations, precisely, are you asking science to deliver to you? Just why do you think it is the job of science to provide such explanations? Let's back up a little and look at some of what Davies writes in his op-ed: ... science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends…

DVD review: Physicians - Speaking for Research.

The other day I received a DVD made by Americans for Medical Progress called Physicians - Speaking for Research. (They indicate on their site that the DVDs are free for the asking.) This is a DVD aimed at physicians, rather than at research scientists or the general public. However, the aim of the DVD is to help physicians to be better at communicating with the general public (primarily their patients, but also their family members and neighbors) about the role animal research has played in medical advances upon which we depend today, and the continued importance animal research will…

Brain-Friendly Giftables, part 4: Measuring devices.

Brains enjoy getting information about the world around them. Although our sense organs do a pretty good job of keeping the data flowing to the brain, the occasional sense-organ-extending measuring device can add a whole new set of experiences for our brains to chew on. We wrap up the brain-friendly giftables list with a selection of measuring devices. A (lab) notebook or sketch pad would make a fine accompaniment to any of these. A microscope. Hands-down, this was the most recommended giftable measuring device, and I don't think this is just a matter of ScienceBlogs skewing heavily…

IGERT meeting: the Digital Science panel.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I was recently part of a panel on Digital Science at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting in Washington, D.C. The meeting itself brought together PIs, trainees, and project coordinators who are involved in a stunning array of interdisciplinary research programs. Since the IGERT program embraces mottos like "get out of the silos" and "think outside the box", my sense is that the Digital Science panel was meant to offer up some new-ish tools for accomplishing tasks that scientists might want to accomplish. The panelists included Jean-Claude Bradley, who spoke…

The mechanics of getting fooled: the multiple failures in the fraud of Jan Hendrik Schön.

There's an interesting article in the Telegraph by Eugenie Samuel Reich looking back at the curious case of Jan Hendrik Schön. In the late '90s and early '00s, the Bell Labs physicist was producing a string of impressive discoveries -- most of which, it turns out, were fabrications. Reich (who has published a book about Schön, Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World) considers how Schön's frauds fooled his fellow physicists. Her recounting of the Schön saga suggests clues that should have triggered more careful scrutiny, if not alarm bells. Of…

Patient satisfaction versus quality of care

If there's one thing that purveyors of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)--or, the preferred term these days, "integrative medicine" (IM)--and hospital administrators seem to agree on, it's that "patient satisfaction" (whatever that means) is very, very important. Hospital administrators live and die by patient satisfaction surveys, in particular a common measurement derived from Press-Ganey surveys. In fact, Press-Ganey itself sells its services as "driving performance excellence" in health care. The inherent assumption is that if patients are satisfied then they are doing a good…

Maybe there is hope after all, or: A most unexpected change of heart

Since I was still recovering from TAM9 last night and crashed on the couch at around 9 PM, I didn't have time for one of my usual logorrheic posts. I did, however, have time to take note of an update on a story I started covering six years ago. One of the greatest things about having a long running blog (six and a half years) is that sometimes, after not having heard anything for a long time, I'll be surprised by new information on a story I commented on years ago and can update my readers. So it is with this rather bizarre story about two teenaged girls who formed the group Prussian Blue…

This is what happens when you trust a naturopath to treat a real disease

Naturopathy is a cornucopia of quackery with a patina of plausibility applied in the form of some seemingly reasonable recommendations about diet and exercise. Under the patina, however, lies virtually every form of quackery known to humankind. Be it homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, applied kinesiology, iridology, bogus diagnostic testing, reflexology, craniosacral therapy, or even organ repositioning (nonsurgical, I hasten to point out), no form of pseudoscientific medicine is rejected by naturopaths based on science. This is not surprising, given that naturopathy is based on…

Robert J. Krakow and David Kirby race each other to the bottom commenting on the Autism Omnibus trial

With the Autism Omnibus trial having finished its first week looking at the first test case of Michelle Cedillo, a very unfortunate girl with multiple medical problems and autism, for whose "vaccine injury" her parents are seeking compensation, it's not surprising that we'd find some slime bubbling up to the surface. First off, we have the ludicrous spectacle of a website that's allegedly supposed to be a source of good information about autism providing a forum for a lawyer named Robert J. Krakow looking to encourage parents of children with autism to sue. Negative comments over his being…

The ASCO Meeting: The swag!

Dedicated advocate of evidence-based medicine that I am, I am sometimes labeled by those who do not understand skepticism as a "shill" for big pharma. Of course, such accusations are simply the logical fallacy known as poisoning the well, in which the credulous engage in preemptive ad hominem attacks designed to associate me with the hated big pharma, but it's a common enough tactic that sometimes I can't help but joke that I wish pharma did actually pay me for my little hobby here. After all, why do for free (or for a pittance from my Seed overlords) what, if you believe the alties, I could…

Another young life claimed by a misguided faith in alternative medicine

A number of readers have mailed me links to this story, and, yes, it is right up my alley. In reading it, I fear that it's a vision of the future for two young cancer patients who are very unlikely to survive their cancers because their parents eschewed evidence-based medicine in favor of woo, Starchild Abraham Cherrix and Katie Wernecke, both of whom had relapsed when last I discussed them. The case is one with which I had not been familiar, namely that of Noah Maxin, of Canton, OH: CANTON No one in the courtroom nearly five years ago wanted this day to come. Not Noah Maxin's parents. Not…

The perfect bird family tree

I've reposted this once already, but it is so important and cool .... we're going to do it again. (And by "it" I mean the research, not this post!) The perfect bird family tree ... ... is certainly still in the future. But we have seen a step in that direction in a new paper, coming out this week in Science. This research applies intensive and extensive genomic analysis to the avian phylogenetic tree. The results are interesting. This paper is summarized in a number of locations, most notably here on Living the Scientific Life. Here, I will summarize it only very briefly. However,…

Let's beat the Chinese at their own game: Civilization.

How can a nation call itself civilized if it executes its own citizens? The story goes like this. A famous scientist whom you've likely never heard of was in China for several years excavating a famous archaeological site that you certainly have heard of. During that time, he felt the need, as we all do now and then, to hold in his hand a defleshed human skull. It would be nice to have available the skull of a modern human, in order to compare it with the skulls of not-so-modern humans he was busily digging up. So he inquired. He asked local officials and notables who might be able to help…

CAM usage and vaccination status

I've often discussed how potentially misleading anecdotal evidence and experience can be. Indeed, I've managed to get into quite a few--shall we say?--heated discussions with a certain woo-friendly pediatrician, who, so confident in his own clinical judgment, just can't accept that his own personal clinical observations could be wrong or even horribly mislead him. Sadly, I've never managed to persuade him just how easy it is for us humans to be deceived or even to deceive ourselves. However, just because anecdotal evidence can deceive us does not mean that it is worthless. Contrary to the…

What I did on my summer vacation: "Proof of "intelligent design" (and an old "friend")

Work and a conference intervene to prevent a fresh dose of Respectful Insolence today. Fortunately, there's still classic Insolence from the archives that hasn't been moved over to the new blog. This amusing little trifle originally appeared on August 25, 2005. Well, I'm back. Yes, I know I blogged a fair amount while on vacation, my promise to restrain myself notwithstanding. Nonetheless, with the exception of the posts about the traffic wreck that screwed up our trip home and the tragic death of an autistic boy receiving chelation therapy this week, it was mostly fluff or carnival barking.…

Evolution of sensory signaling

How we sense the world has, ultimately, a cellular and molecular basis. We have these big brains that do amazingly sophisticated processing to interpret the flood of sensory information pouring in through our eyes, our skin, our ears, our noses…but when it gets right down to it, the proximate cause is the arrival of some chemical or mechanical or energetic stimulus at a cell, which then transforms the impact of the external world into ionic and electrical and chemical changes. This is a process called sensory signaling, or sensory signal transduction. While we have multiple sensory…

Linking without Thinking part 2

Andrew Bolt should have been embarrassed with his unthinking linking, but he is unrepentant: If someone claims to find 24 mistakes in your work and you manage to kind-of defend just three, it might be wiser to actually stay quiet. If you don't actually have the integrity to admit and repent, that is. I picked three representative examples from the 24 mistakes Beck alleges I made to show that not only is Beck wrong, he is obviously wrong and he won't admit it no matter how absurd a position he ends up in. The other 21 aren't any better and it would be extremely foolish to give Beck any…

The Prickly Finger

Ok, this is just bizzarre. If you’re easily freaked out, don’t read this. It might start off nice and pretty... This story begins sometime in the mid-1990s, when I was still young enough to do stupid things with friends who had too much to drink. It involves a sort of tradition for those of us who grew up in the Front Range of Colorado, a world famous natural amphitheater, and a close encounter with the local flora. It was late on a warm summer night. A group of us had decided, just on the spur of the moment, to go over to Red Rocks Amphitheater, and see who was playing. Now, this didn’t…

Motion Sickness

I have a very weak constitution. It doesn't take much time on a moving vehicle of any type to make be barf, and I've hurled all over gorgeous coastal areas in tourist destinations around the world. There was that one time in Italy, snapping photos of the incredible shoreline caves (now dubbed barf grottos), that one time scuba diving in Belize (after I had made it to the surface, thankfully), and in lobby trashcans of various finally stationary destinations (the video is of me, my sister, and my fiancé inadvisedly spinning around while at an archeological site in Greece earlier this summer…

The ACTN3 sports gene test: what can it really tell you?

Disclaimer: I was one of the authors on a 2003 study reporting a link between ACTN3 and athletic performance, but I have no financial interest in ACTN3 gene testing. The opinions expressed in this post are purely my own. An article in the NY Times yesterday describes the launch of the grandiosely named Athletic Talent Laboratory Analysis System (ATLAS). The ATLAS test looks at a common genetic variation within the ACTN3 gene, which has been associated in numerous studies with elite athlete status and with variation in muscle strength and sprint ability in the general population. The company…

Silver Spoon Hyenas: Maternal Social Status Affects Male Reproductive Success

Figure 1: A mother hyena with her cubs. Early developmental experiences can have significant implications for the growth, behavior, survival, and reproductive success of an individual. In many species, one of the most important factors that affects an individual's early development is the maternal environment. However, mothers not only provide an environment for their offspring, but also half of their genes, making it difficult to separate the effects of nature and nurture when investigating developmental outcomes in the offspring. Moreover, because male mammals usually disperse from the…

Why do cavefish lose their eyes?

It's another Dawkins question! Why do cave-dwellers lose their eyes? They’re useless, but are they harmful? Costly to make? Or eroded by rain of uncorrected mutations? I thought I'd already addressed this in a blog post long ago, but I searched, and I didn't -- it was my inaugural column in sadly defunct Seed magazine, way back in the paleolithic, I think. Fortunately, I still have the copy I sent in to the editor, so I resurrect it here. Degeneration and developmentIt’s not disuse that leads to loss of organs in evolution, but competitive genetic interactions Reduced or degenerate organs,…

Oh no! My cell phone's going to kill me! (The revenge)

Here we go again. I've written a few times before about the controversy over whether cell phones (a.k.a. mobile phones in most of the rest of the world) cause brain cancer, concluding on more than one occasion that the evidence does not support a link. For example, there has not been a large increase in brain cancer or other cancers claimed to be due to cell phone radiation in the 15 to 20 years since the use of cell phones took off back in the 1990s, nor has any study shown a convincing correlation between cell phone use and brain cancer. Of course, one would not expect a priori, based on…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Back to Atlantis

Remember Life Technologyâ¢? Back when I actually used to do Your Friday Dose of Woo each and every Friday before subjecting myself to such woo-tastically extravagant bits of unreason every week led me to decide to cut my weekly feature back to on an "as the mood strikes me" basis, Life Technology produceds some of the finest installments of this recurring series. Who could forget Vir-X⢠homeopathic boner pills? Or the the Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet Professional Version 1.0â¢? Or the Tesla Purple Energy Shieldâ¢? Good times, for sure. As I sat down last night to decide upon a…

Have Atlantic Hurricane Seasons Gotten Longer?

Probably. Or, to be more exact, the seasons seem to end later these days than they did in those days, if "those days" is defined as the first decade or so during which reasonably good (though not perfect) data were collected compared to now. A more immediate question may be: When will this year's hurricane season end? Officially, the Atlantic Hurricane Season runs from June 1st through November 30th.1 I am not certain, but it is probably the case that those dates were picked some time ago in order to include all of the days during which we were likely to have Atlantic storm activity of…

Naturopath challenge--follow up

Yesterday I issued a challenge to naturopathic physicians to justify why they should be considered competent primary care physicians. The best and most comprehensive answer received so far is the one from "Mona". Here is my analysis. Her response, while not entirely "wrong", shows a frightening level of chaotic thinking and unsophistication. As a naturopathic physician graduated from National College of Naturopathic Medicine in 1988, and having done a year's residency there in Family Practice I am happy to answer your relatively easy question. I see many diabetic patients who come with…

Massachusetts passes legislation licensing naturopathic quackery. Only the governor can stop it now.

In a perverse way, one almost has to admire naturopaths. If there's anything that characterizes naturopaths in their pursuit of legitimacy and licensure, it's an amazing relentlessness. In this, they are not unlike The Terminator. As Kyle Reese described him in the first Terminator movie, the Terminator "can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!" The difference is that naturopaths won't stop until they are licensed in all 50 states and science-based medicine is, for all intents…

Andrew Wakefield and the Tribeca Film Festival: Criticism of a bad decision ≠ "censorship"

Ever since I mentioned on Tuesday that the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival had taken a massive dump on reality and science by selecting for screening Andrew Wakefield's antivaccine propaganda "documentary," Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe, dedicated to the so-called "CDC whistleblower," the topic has taken over, as topics sometimes tend to do here. In response to the mounting criticism for featuring a film by a scientific fraud clearly intended as an "I'll show you all" moment to persuade viewers that Wakefield was right after all about his long discredited claim that the MMR vaccine…

Deep-sea corals have complex microbial assemblages, just like shallow corals

This is the second in a series of five referenced articles about shared characteristics between deep and shallow water corals Special guest post by Christina A. Kellogg Just as humans have beneficial bacteria living on our skin and in our intestines, corals have symbiotic microbes in their mucus, tissues, and skeletons. Unfortunately, there are also disease-causing microbes that can infect corals. These coral-associated microbes include all three of the major domains of life: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya (fungi, and in shallow-water corals, algae) and also viruses (Rosenberg et al. 2007…

How We Are Surviving Snowpocalypse 2010

Arborvitae. It is snowing. Again. Snow, then freezing rain, then more snow with a vengeance that promises to keep on all day through to midnight. This is on top of the batch we got last Saturday. Philadelphia got 28.5 inches though round these parts it seems we "only" got about 17. It was enough to give the arborvitae quite a beating, even though we brushed and shook the snow off them as soon as possible. That snow last Saturday was light and fluffy. This batch is wet and heavy and the arborvitae are sad, sad, sad. Arborvitae, you will recall, are supposed to be upright, hedge-like…

Darwin Day 2008

199 years ago today, Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England at the home of his family (known as the Mount). By pure coincidence, Charles would have published one of the most important books ever written 50 years later in 1859, and next year will mark not only the bicentennial of Darwin's birth but also the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Indeed, next year will give us cause for raucous celebration, but this year I have been asking myself why Darwin's work is important enough to still get excited about it nearly a century and a…

Chewing the Fat Facts: Thoughts on Carnivory, pt. 1

The whole of natural history fascinates me, but everyone has their own favorite topics, and one of the most intriguing subject areas (to me, at least) is predator/prey interactions. Herbivores are interesting in their own right, surely, but for me it is the predators that are the most thought-provoking and impressive. Given this proclivity to ponder carnivory , I've chosen to write up my term paper for a seminar course I'm currently taking (Topics in African Prehistory) on the entrance of hominins into the "Carnivore Guild," especially in terms of hunting small prey in forests, scavenging…

No metazoan is an island

I'm one of those dreadful animal-centric zoologically inclined biologists. Plants? What are those? Fungi? They're related to metazoans somehow. Lichens? Not even on the radar. The first step in fixing a problem, though, is recognizing that you have one. So I confess to you, O Readers, that my name is PZ, and I am a metazoaphile. But I can get better. My path to opening up to wider horizons is to focus on what I find most interesting about animals, and that is that they are networks of cells driven by networks of genes that generate patterned responses of expression by cell signaling, or…

Evaluating scientific credibility (or, do we have to take the scientists' word for it?)

In response to my first entry on Steve Fuller's essay on Chris Mooney's book, The Republican War on Science, Bill Hooker posted this incisive comment: Fuller seems to be suggesting that there is no good way to determine which scientists in the debate are most credible -- it all comes down to deciding who to trust. I think this misses an important piece of how scientific disputes are actually adjudicated. In the end, what makes a side in a scientific debate credible is not a matter of institutional power or commanding personality. Rather, it comes down to methodology and evidence. So, in other…

Those who forget their history are … Casey Luskin

A couple weeks ago, the second creationist bill of the "academic freedom" generation became law. You'd think Casey Luskin, who seems to be the ringleader of the clowns pushing these bills, would be thrilled. But all he can seem to do is find reasons to be upset. First he was angry that Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam let the bill become law, but did so without signing it. Haslam's statement refusing to sign the bill observed that, by the defenders' own argument, the bill was essentially powerless, while there are ways in which it could make things worse. Noting that laws ought to "bring…

Who is a scientist?

T. Ryan Gregory asks this important question: Who is a scientist? It's a followup to a post titled: "Graduate students are not professional scientists. Discuss," which â briefly â argued that grad students are scientists in training, not yet scientists-full-stop. In the later post, he explains: Here are the criteria I threw out off-handedly for the purpose of discussing the NYT story about science blogs [this one -Josh]: - Does scientific research for a living, - Publishes research in peer-reviewed journals, - Is funded by granting agencies to do it, - Does not just write about it, or…

Singularity Summit 2009

My thoughts on the talks at The Singularity Summit 2009 below the fold.... Shaping the Intelligence Explosion - Anna Salamon: A qualitative analysis of the implications of the emergence of artificial general intelligence. Having talked to Anna before, and knowing the general thrust of the work of the SIAI, not too surprising. AGI will come fast if it comes, it will be beyond our comprehension, etc. The main issue with Anna's talk was that it was hurried at the end, so perhaps we missed some points. Technical Roadmap for Whole Brain Emulation - Anders Sandberg: Interesting. Lots of pictures.…

Interracial sex or Mendelian segregation?

Over at The Root Keith Adkins has a post, Sandra Laing: Born Black with White Parents: I'm no geneticist or biologist, but it looks like Sandra is a product of an black South African and maybe a white Afrikaneer. I'm saying, it looks like somebody in her family was lying. The tests they used to prove her father's paternity could have been faulty. And what about proving her mother's maternity? Is it possible she was adopted? Is it possible Sandra's mother was "getting love" from a undeniably-black man on the side? I'm not trying to throw salt on Laing's game, I'm just not convinced…

Teaching Biology Lab - Week 2

This is by far the most popular of the four installments in this series because it contains the nifty puzzle exercise. Click on the spider-web-clock icon to see the comments on the original post. Just like last week, I have scheduled this post to appear at the time when I am actually teaching this very lab again. If there are any notable difference, I'll let you know in the afternoon. When teaching the lecture portion of the course, I naturally have to prepare the lectures in advance, and each lecture has to cover a particular topic. This makes biology somewhat fragmentary and I try to use…

Turning Pixels into Planets

By Dr. Jon Jenkins; Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs Dr. Jon Jenkins of the SETI Institute is the Analysis Lead for NASA's Kepler Mission. He heads up a group of about two-dozen scientists and programmers who designed and built the software that is the brains behind this dramatic search for other worlds. With a photometric precision of 20 parts per million, Kepler is able to discover planets that are the same size as the rocky, inner orbs of our own solar system. By making an inventory of such worlds, Kepler will answer one of the most…

My Conversation With Ira Flatow

There are inevitably plenty of typos, but after the jump I've pasted in the transcript of my Science Friday conversation with NPR's Ira Flatow about hurricanes and global warming. Callers raised several interesting questions. Enjoy. National Public Radio (NPR) August 24, 2007 Friday SHOW: Talk Of The nation: Science Friday 2:00 PM EST Is Hurricane Dean a Sign of Storms to Come? LENGTH: 3838 words IRA FLATOW, FLATOW: This is TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Presidents of Jamaica and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula are digging out this week after Hurricane Dean. Dean was the…