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Rosy cheeks a sign of good health

Women have been wearing makeup since at least 3500 BC. The ancient Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks are all known to have worn makeup, often made from deadly chemicals like mercury and lead. Even today, humans worldwide spend around $20 billion on make up every year, and much of it still isn't good for your skin. What drives humanity's obsession with cosmetics? Why have we literally painted ourselves with poison for over 5000 years? Ironically enough, it might be to look healthier. A new study, published in PLoS ONE, found that the redness of facial skin can affect how healthy a person looks.…

Science and society from the former president of the US National Academy of Sciences

Dr Bruce Alberts, recently departed president of the US National Academy of Sciences and Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF, just spoke this morning at a symposium celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Duke University School of Medicine. The overall program is incredible, with four Nobel laureates in three days, plus a number of Lasker Award winners including one of this year's (Linda Grieder). I'm compelled to put up this quick post on Dr Alberts' talk because of his ambitious plan for improving scientific literacy of the US and the scientific prospects for grad students and…

A smaller NIH budget means fewer scientists and 'too safe' projects

Interesting to see the Wall Street Journal this morning with an article carrying this title (here, but subscription req'd - hence, I will quote heavily). Everyone knows that US NIH funding cuts have made it difficult for all academics who depend on the nation's health agency for research support. When 27% of proposals were funded, it wasn't that hard to separate the top quarter, says molecular biologist Keith Yamamoto of the University of California, San Francisco. "There was a natural cutoff," he says. But at 10% "the ability to distinguish a grant that deserves funding from one that does…

Two weeks

Everyone remembers something different about him. I remember his beautiful long hair. He was a good ol' boy. A man's man. The goodest of the good ol' boys. His was the pickup you wanted to see if you were broke down beside the road. He could fix any damn thing. But he also had beautiful long hair. I remember this because sometime around last Christmas or New Year's, we each had a drastic change in hair styles. His above the collar for probably the first time in a decade. Several people thought I shaved my head out of empathy or in honor of a cancer patient. I hadn't. But perhaps I…

ACORN, Attainder, and our Craven Congress

Thursday morning, a Federal lawsuit was filed on behalf of the community group ACORN and two of its affiliated organizations. The groups are, unsurprisingly enough, claiming that a recently passed provision in an appropriations bill barring federal funds from going to either ACORN or "any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations" violates several of their Constitutionally guaranteed rights. They're asking for a restraining order, temporary, and permanent injunction barring enforcement of the section. Although the specific law in question is not the same as the bill that we…

Travis The Chimp, Humanity versus Chimpanzity, Evolution, and Responsibility

Denyse O'Leary is nattering on over at Uncommon Descent - and several other places - about some sort of connection between "Darwinists" or perhaps "Darwinism" and the recent and tragic case where a pet chimpanzee attacked and mutilated one of the owner's neighbors. A large portion of the various posts seems to revolve around Denyse's love of the tautology "only people are people." The rest seems to consist of an attempt to find some way to blame the attack on the scientific community as a whole, or at least on "Darwinists." Frankly, I'm having an even harder time understanding O'Leary than…

If I shouldn't say they're anti-science, what should I call it?

Matt "Framing Science" Nisbet has some more advice for scientists on things we shouldn't be saying: Another frame to avoid is the same type of "war on science" and "restoring science to its rightful place" rhetoric that was used on the campaign trail and in the early days of Obama's administration. While during the Bush era this public accountability frame justifiably mobilized liberals and many scientists, now that Obama is in office the same message likely alienates Republican segments of the public that the president desperately needs to rally around climate action. The frame provides…

Quality Education Wins Again in the California Creationist Case

The initial phase of the California Creationist Lawsuit is over, and quality education is the decisive winner. Kevin Vicklund has Judge Otero's decision, as well as a very nice analysis of the ruling up over at his blog. If you've been following the case closely, you can probably jump right over there for the details. If you haven't been tracking the events closely, or want a quick review of the case, keep reading. I'm going to go over the history first, then I'll talk a bit about what Friday's decision means, and what is likely to happen with the case in the future. The lawsuit (ACSI v.…

Why I Do Blog

After my last post, Magetoo asks why do I blog? Poor Alison does not understand why I blog at all, being as I am so very bitter and angry, which I suppose we can classify under #8 in my newly numbered list of reasons why I shouldn't blog, with a dollop of #7 and #9. Anyway, why not talk about why I do blog? I will say first and foremost that I blame it all on my good friend Cindy, who nagged me incessantly until I finally agreed to begin blogging just about three years ago. (July 13 is the actual anniversary of the first "hello" post on the old site.) At the time, my friend had…

Catherine T. Hunt's Quote To Live By

Every week in the Currents section of the Sunday paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer runs a feature called "Influences: What Shapes The Minds That Make The News". It's basically a "twenty questions" type of thing, with the same questions each week, and each week some interesting local bigwig answers it. This week's bigwig is Catherine T. Hunt, who is president of the American Chemical Society, and is also described as a "leader in technology partnerships, Rohm & Haas Co., in Spring House". Let me just note here that she is also an alumna of Smith College; women's colleges send a…

A Wallaby Kind of Day

A couple of years ago, when I was just starting on my graduate career, I decided to investigate the possibility of studying a feral population of rock wallabies that lives in one of the valleys above Honolulu. I (finally) wound up deciding that these animals weren't the best group to use to study the questions I was interested in, but along the way I had a hell of a lot of fun hiking in this valley, picking up wallaby droppings for use in genetic work (John Wilkins took some fairly incriminating pictures of me as a result). Like many things that are involved in actually doing science, the…

Solomon obit

I hope the Austin American-Statesman doesn't mind me reproducing this obituary to one of the University of Texas' favourite sons... Obituary Robert C. Solomon Sept. 14, 1942 - January 2, 2007 Renowned UT philosophy professor dies suddenly in Zurich AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Friday, January 05, 2007 Once a month or so, Robert Solomon and his friend James Pennebaker would meet for beer and conversation at a Guadalupe Street watering hole, the Dog & Duck. Most of the time, Solomon, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas, and Pennebaker, a UT psychology professor, would talk…

The evolution crackpot index

Adapted sort of with permission from The Crackpot Index by John Baez, with contributions from the talk.origins howlers. A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to biology. 1. A -5 point starting credit. 2. 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false. 3. 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous. 4. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent. 5. 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction. 6. 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts…

Both musicians and non-musicians can perceive bitonality

Take a listen to this brief audio clip of "Unforgettable." Aside from the fact that it's a computer-generated MIDI performance, do you hear anything unusual? If you're a non-musician like me, you might not have noticed anything. It sounds basically like the familiar song, even though the synthesized sax isn't nearly as pleasing as the familiar Nat King Cole version of the song. But most trained musicians can't listen to a song like this without cringing. Why? Because the music has been made "bitonal" by moving the accompanying piano part up two semitones (a semitone is the difference between…

Casual Fridays: What does an emoticon do?

Last week we asked readers to rate a set of statements they might see on Twitter. The premise of our study was that sometimes it's difficult to decide whether someone is insulting you or complimenting you. But we were actually examining a slightly different question: what effect does an emoticon have on a statement? Can you make a negative comment seem "nice" just by adding a smiley or a wink afterwards? Everyone saw the same 13 statements, presented in random order: That's the most incisive comment I've ever seen You are just so *interesting* Yawn You're as brilliant as you are attractive…

Musicians have better memory -- not just for music, but words and pictures too

Last night in the U.S. many televisions were tuned to one of the biggest spectacles of the year: the American Idol finale, where America would learn which singer had been chosen as "America's favorite" (or, more cynically, who inspired the most teenagers to repeatedly dial toll-free numbers until all hours of the night). Greta and I are suckers for this sort of thing, so we watched along with the rest of the nation. What impressed me about the show wasn't so much the prodigious vocal talents of the two finalists, but how everything was put together so hastily: there had been only six days…

Vonnegut Week Continues at The World's Fair

Ode to "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" (1950). The "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" was Vonnegut's first published story, appearing in Collier's. That was while he was working at GE in public relations, and after he was a chemistry major, an anthropology grad, a Dresden fire-bombing survivor, and a Cat's Cradle writer (though not publisher, yet). Now, about the Barnhouse story. I first read it in the very best short story collection I've ever had, First Fiction, which is an "anthology of the first published stories by famous writers." (Apparently you can get it for a dollar at ABE.…

Calvinball no more!

Uh-oh. Jerry Coyne is calling me out and reopening our old argument about whether there could be evidence supporting a god. I said no, for a number of reasons, but I haven't convinced Coyne. The statements by P.Z. and Zara seem to me more akin to prejudices than to fully reasoned positions. They are also, of course, bad for atheists, since they make us look close-minded, but I would never argue that we should hide what we really think because it makes it harder to persuade our opponents. On the positive side, a discussion like this one is really good for sharpening the mind. He's also gone…

Floyd Landis is Busted

As some of you may have noticed, I have been keeping up with the science of Floyd Landis's failed drug test in a rather long post here. In the post, I mentioned that there is another test besides the Testosterone to Epitestosterone ratio (the test he already failed) that they can use to check whether the testosterone is synthetic or not. This test exploits the difference in the carbon isotopes in synthetic as opposed to natural testosterone (there is an explanation of that in the earlier post). Anyway, it turns out my man Floyd is busted -- he failed the isotope test: Tests performed on…

One year of Terra Sigillata

I specifically launched Terra Sigillata on my sister's birthday last year so that my aging brain wouldn't have to remember (or forget) yet another important date. The original post and ad hoc mission statement holds up pretty well after a year. I've also moved my second post, "Why Terra Sigillata?," over here so that folks can appreciate why a name most commonly encountered by ceramics craftspersons is a perfect metaphor for medicines from the Earth. For those who don't know my background or never read the About section, I'm a displaced pharmacy and pharmacology professor working in an odd…

Is it "cheating" to take brain-enhancing drugs?

Last year, a friend of Greta's died tragically young. He was a pillar of the community, and Greta was honored to learn that he wanted her to play the oboe at his memorial service, which would be attended by hundreds of people. Greta has performed in countless concerts, with audiences just as large, but the thought of flubbing up at a ceremony honoring the life of a great man was absolutely nerve-wracking. The problem was compounded by the fact that Greta herself was in mourning for her friend. In the end, she was able to summon up the courage to play beautifully, and received dozens of…

How much do we lose in black and white?

This is a guest post by Suzie Eckl, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007 Forget color television. Before we had color, we had black and white. Before we had movies, we had photographs. And before photographs we had... Engravings? Prior to August 19, 1839, the date Daguerre and Niepce revealed that they had created the world's first photograph, artists had all the control in reproducing the world as they saw it. Many artists chose not painting or sculpture but engraving. They carved their images into wood or burned them into metal. In a fascinating analysis, Danielle Zavagno…

Eight Days to Go: More on Jonathan Wells

One of the things I have tried to do, as a journalist who's been cast in the role of a defender of science ever since the publication of The Republican War on Science, is to take on some of the attackers. That's why I agreed to debate Jonathan Wells this coming Tuesday night, and it's why I have debated a number of other folks as well, like Tom Bethell. I feel like it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. Moreover, I can't fairly criticize the scientific community for failing to engage, as I have done repeatedly, if I myself am not engaging. So I want to thank everyone who posted comments…

How to ask a blogger for homework help

Every so often on Cognitive Daily, someone will post a comment asking for help on a paper they're writing for school. It's pretty clear where these people come from: they've done a Google search on video games or whatever it is that interests them, and our post is the first thing they've found that seems like it might be remotely relevant to the topic. Often, I'm not especially happy to answer the question they've asked, because usually it's not a very good question. Examples of bad questions are: Questions that are readily answered by simply reading the post where the commenter has posted…

Evidence building for a controversial scientific debate

I'm sure most Cognitive Daily readers are aware of the massive debate permeating the scientific world these days. No, not evolution versus creationism; I'm talking about object- versus space-based attention. Haven't heard of this raging debate? Well, then, let me refer you to a fascinating pair of experiments conducted by Massimo Turatto, Veronica Mazza, and Carlo Umiltà. The issue comes down to this: a critical problem for psychologists is the issue of attention. How does the perceptual system decide where to focus our attention when literally millions of bits of information are available to…

Some guesses as to how the Mozart effect might work

One of my best friends in college played music incessantly—whether he was studying, writing papers, completing organic chemistry problem sets, or swilling down cheap beer, whatever he did was accompanied by a nonstop 1980s synth-pop beat. This apparently did him no harm, because after graduating at the top of his class, he went on to get a PhD and a law degree, with full scholarships paying for both. I could never study with him because the music always broke my concentration. I preferred to study to the gentle background noise of the campus coffee shop. There was one exception to this rule:…

Disorders provide a key to understanding language development

Language researchers have long relied on participants suffering from language disorders as a means to better understand how language develops in healthy people. A new special issue of Applied Psycholinguistics covers the study of mental disorders that affect language development. Cognitive Daily will report on a couple of these articles in the coming weeks, so we thought it would be useful to first provide a general overview of some of these disorders, as Mabel L. Rice, Stephen F. Warren, and Stacy K. Betz of the University of Kansas do in their article "Language Symptoms of Developmental…

Sizzling in LA

[From Sizzle: No caption needed.] On Saturday night, along with Molly and two friends, I attended the opening of Sizzle at the Fairfax theater here in Los Angeles. The movie was airing at Outfest, a gay and lesbian film festival, and the woman introducing the film remarked on its pioneering attempt to find shared ground between the environmental and gay communities--to, in short, bring concern about global warming to a broader audience. There were some 200 people in attendance, along with the entire cast and a few personages from the film--Dr. Naomi Oreskes of the University of California-…

Much ado about Darwin

There has been an awful lot of hand-wringing going on over Charles Darwin lately. Some have picked up a long-running meme and proclaim "One hundred fifty years without Darwin is too long!" while others declare that we should kill every Darwin we meet. Just as every American president must "Get right with Lincoln" every biologist must "Get right with Darwin" in one way or another. (Thus far, I think Ed is the only one who has really got it right.) What I find particularly amusing, however, is that those who assert that we must sweep Darwin under the rug to save biology do little to produce the…

How wrong is it to use a kitten for personal sexual pleasure? Depends on whether you've washed your hands

Imagine the following scenario: Matthew is playing with his new kitten late one night. He is wearing only his boxer shorts, and the kitten sometimes walks over his genitals. Eventually, this arouses him, and he begins to rub his bare genitals along the kitten's body. The kitten purrs, and seems to enjoy the contact. How wrong is it for Matthew to be rubbing himself against the kitten? Or how about this one: You find a wallet with several hundred dollars in cash, along with credit cards including an American Express Gold Card and ID locating the owner's home in the richest neighborhood in town…

What is a visual expert?

Last week, we presented research by Miranda Scolari's team about visual expertise and visual short-term memory. Their conclusion: "experts" don't have a larger visual memory capacity than non-experts, they just have the ability to process more details. Scolari's team was working under the assumption that all humans (or at least all the students in their experiment) are face-recognition experts. It's true: we're amazingly good at recognizing faces we've seen before. Think how much easier it is to remember a face you've seen than it is to remember the name that goes with the face. But surely we…

Tasting words: A study of one of the rarest forms of synesthesia

Can you hear colors? Can you see sounds? Do words have colors or images associated with them? It may sound impossible, but there are many documented cases of people who experience all these things. We've discussed it before on Cognitive Daily, and even found some limited evidence of similar phenomena among the general population. Collectively, these experiences are called synesthesia. Perceptions have many modalities corresponding to different ways of experiencing the world. The most well-known modalities are the five senses, but "words" or "numbers," or "colors" may also be considered…

Even music played before or after a film character is shown affects our perception of their emotion

It's now taken as a given that the musical score of a movie can have huge influence on our perception of the movie. From the pulsating terror achieved in films like Psycho and Jaws, to the triumphant victories in Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean, it's hard to think about a great film without also being influenced by that film's score. Music is such an important aspect of film that when a group of students was asked to rate the emotions evoked by music in six film excerpts, only a third of them noticed that all the film clips had no music. This was on a multiple choice test, where the…

Joint Attention and Social Compentence, or what a baby pointing at a toy says about well-behaved toddlers

One of the key components of "normal" child development is social competence. We expect kids to become gradually better at behaving respectfully towards peers, to comply with requests made by others, to understand the thoughts of others, to play together with kids and adults, to sustain attention, and to be motivated to learn. But what makes the difference between a child who becomes socially competent and one who doesn't? Obviously there are some risk factors, such as whether they have autism, whether both parents are present in the household, and the education and poverty level of the…

Police (usually) are able to curb racial bias in shooting suspects

In 2005, E. Ashby Plant and B. Michelle Peruche tested 48 Florida police officers and found that they were initially more likely to shoot unarmed Black "suspects" in a crime-fighting simulation than White people holding similar objects. Interestingly, however, as the test went on, the officers improved, and by the end of the session, any bias had been removed. But in the real world, officers don't get a second chance, and accidental shootings do occur. In many communities, racial tensions are already running high, and an interracial shooting by a police officer can bring those tensions to the…

What backpack-wearing toddlers can tell us about how kids learn to walk

Jim was an early, confident walker. Greta likes to say that he didn't learn to walk, he went straight to running. By the time he was about 16 months old, he could already outrun his already-pregnant mother. Nora, on the other hand, was a late, tentative walker. She took her first steps at around 12 months, and still wasn't very confident as a walker at 18 months. In this photo, at 17 months, she still clings to their toy kitchen set for balance. But I've just finished reading a fascinating study suggesting that at 14 months, when both of them were walking -- Jim with confidence, and…

Things That Affect YOU: PDUFA and AERS, Part 2

This is a continuation of the first post, href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a.php">Things That Affect YOU: PDUFA and AERS.  PDUFA is the Prescription Drug User Fee Act.  AERS is the href="http://www.fda.gov/cder/aers/default.htm">Adverse Event Reporting System.  The PDUFA is up for review soon, as it expires in September.  If it expires, 40% of the funding for premarketing drug approval will disappear.   This has been covered only minimally by the mainstream media.  There is an article on Bloomberg.com ( href="http://www.bloomberg.…

Martin Waldseemuller and the Phantom Ocean

World Map (detail) Martin Waldseemuller, 1507 Last week I had to visit the Library of Congress, so I dropped in on the 1507 map by Martin Waldseemuller. The map, which was acquired by the Library in 2003, is tucked in behind an exhibit of mesoamerican artifacts, which seemed arranged specifically to baffle visitors. Both 1507 and 1516 maps by Waldseemuller are kept in large vertical cases at the back of the exhibit hall, invisible from the entrance; during my visit, only tourists shepherded by docents found their way around the other exhibit's margins and into the quiet, dim map room. This…

The Gygax Bestiary

Gary Gygax, who died today at age 69, has a special place in my heart - but not for the obvious reason. I was never a disciple of his famous creation, Dungeons & Dragons. I grew up in a rural, conservative area, and while I'm sure there were a few gaming groups around, they were neither very popular nor co-ed. Perhaps as a result, the gaming bug never bit me - I've never played Magic, Myst, WoW, or any other fantasy game more complex than Castle Risk. But circa 1983, one of those obscure local fantasy geeks upgraded to the D&D Monster Manual II, abandoning his well-worn Monster…

Liveblogging the 2009 State of Innovation Summit

I'm here in DC at the Newseum for the State of Innovation Summit, a collaboration between SEED and the Council on Competitiveness. The crowd is pretty awesome - right now Adam Bly, SEED's CEO, is sitting a few rows from me with E.O. Wilson. Earlier, Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, talked about a conversation he'd had recently with Steven Chu about using the Smithsonian's resources to enhance public understanding of climate change. As he spoke, the intense sunshine of a summer day in DC played across the Smithsonian castle turrets directly behind him (the seventh floor…

I am so pissed off right now

NPS Photo/Dan Stahler This fall, Montana opened a sport hunting season - on wolves. Yeah - the same wolves that wildlife biologists have been working so hard (and spending lots of federal money) to successfully reintroduce to restore the Yellowstone ecosystem. So what happened? It really isn't that surprising: hunters have already killed nine wolves in the wilderness area near Yellowstone's northern border - including both the radio-collared alpha and beta females of Yellowstone Park's Cottonwood wolf pack. Uh. . . oops. And what do Montana authorities have to say about this? "Members of…

Basic Concepts: Prions

We've all heard of Mad Cow disease (bovine spongiform encephaly) in the media. A few years back it was as big a sensation as bird flu and twice as scary. The colloquial understanding of the disease was poor: what it was, how humans (or cows) could get it, what should be done to curb its spread, and whether or not there was any treatment. This disinformation led to small-scale hysteria when it came to beef, with some countries (eg Japan) completely banning all beef from nations that were even suspected of having a "mad cow." The beef industry as a whole took a hit, as pubic perception held…

Two Points on Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" (Point One)

There are two discussions which are going on in the ScienceBlog-osphere about Al Gore, brought to the table by my esteemed co-bloggers Framing Science and Stoat. The first is whether or not Gore's opus "An Inconvenient Truth" belongs in a science class (Framing Science argues compellingly that it doesn't). The second is whether, as Stoat argues, Al Gore is a hypocrite for 'jet-setting' across the world to preach his message of global warming, thereby increasing the pollution through air-travel which, in turn, actually exacerbates the causes of global warming. While both bloggers have made…

Tepid Water Thrown on a Hot Product: DHEA

One of the most hotly marketed supplements in the Complimentary/Alternative Medicine arena is href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHEA" rel="tag">DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone).  Just as a quick index, a Yahoo search for DHEA turns up over three million hits, and an impressive array of advertisements.   Many of the sites that promote the sale of DHEA state or imply that it is a "life-extension" product.   It sure would be nice if someone would do a definitive study to show whether or not it really can extend the life of humans.   However, such a study would be very costly to do.  The…

Science and the Public

There have been some interesting posts about the relationship between scientists and the public. Here's a little snap shot: Jake at Pure Pedantry advocates that scientists should refrain from making subjective assessments of the general population's lifestyle based on their scientific findings. Scientists should stick to the facts and descriptions of the natural world. Larry Moran discusses Bruce Alberts' commentary in a recent issue of Science Alberts' writes that the biggest challenge for science education is to teach citizens how to think scientifically. Dan at BitesizeBio adds his two…

Who's conscious?

A recent meeting of neuroscientists tried to define a set of criteria for that murky phenomenon called "consciousness". I don't know how successful they were; they've come out with a declaration on consciousness that isn't exactly crystal clear. It seems to involve the existence of neural circuitry that exhibits specific states that modulate behavior. The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures. In fact, subcortical neural networks aroused during affective states in humans are also critically important for generating emotional behaviors in animals.…

Why does Thanksgiving dinner *really* make you sleepy?

For years, you've heard the tremendous fatigue experienced after an American Thanksgiving dinner laid at the feet of the turkey -- or more precisely, at the tryptophan in that turkey. Trytophan, apparently, is the go-to amino acid for those who want to get sleepy. But according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, the real story may be more complicated than that: Turkey does contain a large amino acid called tryptophan. So eating turkey puts some tryptophan into your bloodstream. But there are lots of other large amino acids riding around in there too. For the tryptophan in turkey to do…

Excuses for discounting people.

In a comment on another post, Alex gently reminds me that what counts as a leak from the science/technology/engineering/math pipeline depends on your point of view: I don't think of you as a "leak." But I'm in an undergraduate physics department, so unlike the people in the Ph.D.-granting departments where I trained I'm not in the business of training people to go for science faculty jobs. I'm in the business of teaching people some science so they can go out and use their training to pursue whatever opportunities interest them. You study ethical and philosophical issues in science and…

Friday Sprog Blogging: Elements with Style.

At long last, we review a book to which we have alluded in at least two previous posts. The book: The Periodic Table: Elements with Style, written by Adrian Dingle, illustrated by Simon Basher. (Boston: Kingfisher, 2007) The format: The book introduces several representative elements from the periodic table. For each element, there's a listing of crucial information like the element's symbol, atomic number, atomic weight, color, standard state, density, melting point, boiling point, and data of discovery. But the real story is the first person introduction to each element's character,…

Citizen scientists help track bee populations.

Stories about the honeybee crisis and colony collapse disorder (CCD) keep turning up in the news (at least here in California, where we grow so many big cash crops like almonds that rely on honeybees to pollinate them). But it turns out that getting to the bottom of CCD is made more difficult by the the gaps in biologists' knowledge about the wild bee populations. (A lot of the bees pollinating food crops are commercially kept rather than wild.) But, as reported in an article in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist [1], the Great Sunflower Project is enlisting the efforts…