Search Content

Displaying results 9201 - 9250 of 87947

Attention Twilight girls

Hi girls! **waves excitedly** Its a big day, right? YAY! I know you all are totally pepped up, and I dont want to be a Debbie Downer again... but well... see, when I was your alls age, 12-ish, I was in love with a family of vampires too. The main dude wasnt Edward, though. His name was Lestat. Tall, blonde, violet eyes (or as Meyer would describe them, amethyst). He wasnt nice like Edward, but he was a badass, and I loved him for it (common, he was a rock star, who could resist??). There was this other vampire in his family, Louis? I loved him too. So angsty. He was so pre-emo emo.…

Possibly Stupid Question: Why All These Extra Particles?

I've reached a point in the book-in-progress where I find myself needing to talk a little about particle physics. As this is very much not my field, this quickly led to a situation where the dog asked a question I can't answer. But, hey, that's why I have a blog with lots of smart readers... The question is this: What are all these extra particles for? Or, to put it in slightly more physics-y terms: The Standard Model contains twelve material particles: six leptons (the electron, muon, and tau, plus associated neutrinos) and six quarks (up-down, strange-charm, top-bottom). The observable…

Links for 2010-02-09

BBC News - More cat owners 'have degrees' than dog-lovers My favorite bit is the note that "Cat and dog numbers were last estimated in a scientific peer-reviewed journal in 1989," because, of course, peer review is critical to the process... (tags: pets dog society education social-science) Bright Idea: The First Lasers -- A history of discoveries leading to the 1960 invention. An excellent step-by-step history of the development of the laser, including interviews with laser pioneers. (tags: lasers science history physics optics atoms molecules) The highs and lows of this year's Super…

No good climate science communicators out there?

Forget about framing for a second. What about the messengers? Speaking to the BBC's World Service, Jim Hansen bemoans the dearth of good science communicators. Given the context of the interview, I think he's referring specifically to climate science communicators. The entire interview is online, but here's the most interesting comment, which I have transcribed for your immediate edification: The interviewer,Carrie Gracie, refers to the long history of conflict between science and the political establishment, and asks Hansen: "Do you see yourself as being along a frontline that;s always been…

Professorship in Science Communication at Free University-Berlin

The Free University Berlin has an associate professor opening in Science Communication, as part of their Department of Political and Social Sciences and their Institute of Media and Communication Studies. I have posted the full description below the fold. Contact Markus Lehmkuhl at kuhle@zedat.fu-berlin.de for more information. Freie Universität Berlin Department of Political and Social Sciences Institute of Media and Communication Studies invites applications for a tenured Associate Professorship in Media and Communication Studies, with special emphasis on Science Communication / Science…

Self-Branding on the web as a path to book success

In an interesting essay at Slate's The Big Money, Jill Priluck argues that book authors must "transcend their words and become brands" if they're to sell books. Andrew Sullivan agrees : My own view is that the publishing industry deserves to die in its current state. It never made economic sense to me; there are no real editors of books any more; the distribution network is archaic; the technology of publishing pathetic; and the rewards to authors largely impenetrable. I still have no idea what my occasional royalty statements mean: they are designed to be incomprehensible, to keep the…

Next they'll tell me pigs can fly.

Last night I had this wonderful dream. It was a normal day in just about every way except I had this amazing ability. When I jumped, I was able to leap great distances and almost fly. No wings were involved - it was almost like I was able to levitate, and slowly drift between places. It was a very calm, serene feeling. Perhaps that's how the mice in Dr. Liu's lab felt. Advances in Space Research has published online today an accepted manuscript where researchers levitated mice. And, according to their observations, the mice took to the free-floating existence quite readily. The team first…

I love Walter ReMine

Some of you might be familiar with the work of Walter ReMine. He's been around the fringes of the online creation-evolution thing for quite a while now. His typical schtick involves the relentless self-promotion of his self-published book The Biotic Message, which he claims represents a revolutionary new origins theory of some sort. It's been a while since ReMine was last on my radar screen, but he's posted a couple of items over at Uncommon Descent recently. These are advertised as the first two parts of a multiple-part essay of unspecified length. He promises that this essay will…

June 16 Newsweek musings

Newsweek isn't really my mag - I'm more of a Ms, Mother Jones, Yes! magazine reader, or would be if I didn't have so much other stuff to read too - but I got a subscription as a gift, and it serves in lieu of conversation as my breakfast companion. Two articles of note this week: A great piece on why biology should be a general education requirement for everyone, by Sally Hoskins, a professor at the City College of New York. She writes, "Science isn't old information pressed like crumbling fall leaves between the pages of forgotten books. It's alive - growing and shifting and blossoming…

Optical buffering of light

Photons can carry enormous amount of information, but one of the problems in using them to encode information is that they are difficult to store for even short periods (they are moving at the speed of light after all!). University of Rochester scientists have taken a step in solving the practical problems of using photons to store information by creating an optical buffer for photons that slows them to more usable speeds: Researchers at the University of Rochester have demonstrated that optical pulses in an imaging system can be buffered in a slow-light medium, while preserving the…

U.S. must face huge death toll of Iraqi civilians

Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts have an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun: Not wanting to think about civilian deaths in Iraq has become almost universal. But ignorance of the Iraqi death toll is no longer an option. An Associated Press poll in February found that the average American believed about 9,900 Iraqis had been killed since the end of major combat operations in 2003. Recent evidence suggests that things in Iraq may be 100 times worse than Americans realize. News report tallies suggest that about 75,000 Iraqis have died since the U.S.-led invasion. But a study of 13 war-affected countries…

Multivitamins Don't Work!

This isn't really anything new, but Emily Anthes has a nice summary in Slate today of what we currently know about the effectiveness of nutritional supplements--namely that they don't consistently show any clear benefits except in a few very specific situations: Vitamins--with their promise to bridge the gap between the nutrients our bodies need and those they get--have always seemed reassuringly simple: Just pop a multivitamin and let your body soak in those extra nutrients. But not any longer. During the past few years, study after study has raised doubts about what, if any, good vitamins…

Not-so Silent Sites

As we all know, the genetic code is redundant. Within protein coding regions, substitutions at silent sites do not affect the amino acid sequence of the encoded protein. Because of this property, these synonymous substitutions (so-called because they result in the same amino acid) are often used to estimate the neutral rate of evolution -- they should not be under selection. But there is evidence for natural selection operating on silent sites. That's because, even though different codons encode the same amino acid, the tRNAs for the synonymous codons are found at different frequencies within…

Learning thresholds

Kim Goodsell was not a scientist, but she wanted to understand the baffling constellation of disease symptoms that were affecting her. The doctors delivered partial diagnoses, that accounted for some of her problems, but not all. So she plunged into the scientific literature herself. The point of the linked article is that there is a wealth of genetic information out there, and that we might someday get to the point of tapping into the contributions of citizen scientists. But I thought this was the most interesting part: She started by diving into PubMed—an online search engine for…

Study reveals how 'world's toughest bacterium' survives lethal radiation

Listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as "the world's toughest bacterium," Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand extreme temperatures and drought conditions, lack of nutrients and a thousand times more radiation than a human being. A new study by Cornell researchers reveals that nitric oxide -- a gas molecule used in many metabolic processes in animals and a pollutant in the atmosphere that leads to smog -- plays a key role in D. radiodurans' recovery when exposed to ultraviolet radiation (UV). The study, appearing online Oct. 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,…

And so it begins: Autism's False Prophets at The ScienceBlogs Book Club

Just a quick announcement here: The ScienceBlogs Book Club is back up and running, and this time the book under discussion is the latest by that Dark Lord of Vaccination himself, that Darth Vader to the antivaccinationist Luke Skywalker, otherwise known as Satan Incarnate to Jenny McCarthy, J.B. Handley, Andrew Wakefield, Dan Olmsted, and the crew of antivaccinationists spreading misinformation and endangering public health and promoting an amazing panoply of quackery to "cure" autism, Dr. Paul Offit. The book under discussion is Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the…

Wanna go to hell?

Trade your soul for a DVD! All you have to do is post a video of yourself to youtube, stating that you deny the holy spirit, and you'll get a copy of The God Who Wasn't There. Why those magic words? Whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit can never be forgiven. Mark 3:29 More details on The Blasphemy Challenge are available online, and they have a trailer, even: Some of the comments on that video are hilarious. You know what I hate? Fanatic Christians? Know what I hate just as much? Fanatic Atheists. This 'challenge' is disrespectful on a level I can't even verbalize. It's juvenile and…

Framing Science sparks a seismic blog debate

Our Policy Forum article at Science has generated a monster blog discussion, one that is almost too much to keep up with. I continue to try to keep a summary here with my quick responses, where appropriate. I have also posted several comments at other blogs. I will continue to update as more blog commentary develops. Reactions so far: -->Over at The Intersection, a very strong endorsement from Flock of Dodos director Randy Olson: Nisbet and Mooney are taking on the odious job of being the messengers of the new era for the world of science with their excellent essay in Science this week. I'…

Friday Fun: Night owls are psychopaths, the perils of cat ownership and more: The Ig Nobel Prizes 2014!

The Ig Nobel prizes were awarded last week and as usual they are hilarious. And this time around a Canadian was included! Yay Canada! What are the Ig Nobel prizes? For the uninitiated they are a mock set of awards given out at a lavish ceremony at Harvard every year for interesting and bizarre real research and other actual "accomplishments." But with a humourous twist, of course. Here's what they have to say: The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then makes them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people…

New Site Pushes Peer-Reviewed Science Over Misinformation

A few years ago, next to a small barn converted into a winery, I noticed a flyer asking voters to support Measure M, an initiative in Sonoma county that sought to " prohibit the raising, growing, propagation, cultivation, sale, or distribution of most genetically engineered organisms." It pictured the destruction in New Orleans wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the bewildered gaze of George W. Bush. The flyer proclaimed "Who do you trust with your family's health and safety? When FEMA failed, more than a million Americans suffered." That flyer was typical of the misinformation about GE crops,…

Preparing Our Students for Success

Guest Blog By Jerry Baker Executive Director of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society Imagine a world where every child, who dreams of becoming a scientist or engineer, is provided with the opportunity to fulfill that dream. Think of the possibilities and the discoveries that can help humanity or global sustainability. Think of the new solutions that all those minds might discover. I look forward to meeting some of those young people during the USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. on April 24-27, 2014. It is the largest celebration of science, engineering, technology…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Biologist Trying To Crack Communication Code Of Proteins: "Proteins interact; they 'talk' to each other," the associate professor says. "It's how they know what to do, and it's how most of the things that need to happen for living organisms get done." ---------snip-------------- "To begin understanding how proteins talk, we first made random mutations--we broke things and then asked what happened," Larsen says. "That strategy worked well and allowed us to identify the key 'words.' Now we want to know what the 'words' mean, and we are starting by asking what happens when we mix the 'dialects…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Big-brained Birds Survive Better In Nature: Birds with brains that are large in relation to their body size have a lower mortality rate than those with smaller brains, according to new research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The research provides the first evidence for what scientists describe as the 'cognitive buffer' hypothesis - the idea that having a large brain enables animals to have more flexible behaviours and survive environmental challenges. The Price Of Vanity: Mating With Showy Males May Reduce Offspring's Ability To Fight Off…

My picks from ScienceDaily

How Fish Species Suffer As A Result Of Warmer Waters: Ongoing global climate change causes changes in the species composition of marine ecosystems, especially in shallow coastal oceans. This applies also to fish populations. Previous studies demonstrating a link between global warming and declining fish stocks were based entirely on statistical data. However, in order to estimate future changes, it is essential to develop a deeper understanding of the effect of water temperature on the biology of organisms under question. How Trees Manage Water In Arid Environments: Water scarcity is slowly…

Time for computer science to grow up?

That's the question asked by Lance Fortnow in a recent Communications of the ACM Viewpoint article (free fulltext). Fortnow's article continues a discussion about scholarly communication patterns in computer science that's been going on for a while in the "pages" of the CACM. I've blogged about it a couple of times here and here. Fortnow's main idea is that CS needs to get past the youthful stage of using conferences as the main vehicle for disseminating new ideas and move to a journal-based model, like most of the rest of scientific disciplines. In the end, it's all about peer review:…

On my last scientific paper, I was both a stunt-man and the make-up artist.

This is a repost of an November 6, 2007 post (as always, click on the icon to see the original and its comments): Cannot. Resist. Funny. Titles. Sorry. But seriously now, the question of authorship on scientific papers is an important question. For centuries, every paper was a single-author paper. Moreover, each was thousands of pages long and leather-bound. But now, when science has become such a collaborative enterprise and single-author papers are becoming a rarity, when a 12-author paper turns no heads and 100-author papers are showing up more and more, it has become necessary to put…

Science publishing also suffers from its curmudgeons

I've been having fun lately watching this guy struggle with the 21st century realities of scientific publishing which has a lot of parallels with the struggle that journalistic curmudgeons have - too steeped in the 20th century model to have the courage to think in a new way: Socialism in science, or why Open Access may ultimately fail: OK. So here's the argument: Science needs to be made known through publishing. In order for science to be published, we need a team of people who will do the job of supervising the review process, editing, storing, and distributing bite-sized pieces of science…

Historical OA

More and more societies are compiling their 'classical' papers. Here is another one. And here I wrote, among else: "In discussions of Open Access, we always focus on brand new papers and how to make them freely available for readers around the world as well as for people who want to mine and reanalyse the data using robots. But we almost never discuss the need to make the old stuff available. Yet we often lament that nobody reads or cites anything older than five years. Spending several years reading everything published in the field in the 20th century up until about 1995 (as well as some…

On my last scientific paper, I was both a stunt-man and the make-up artist.

Cannot. Resist. Funny. Titles. Sorry. But seriously now, the question of authorship on scientific papers is an important question. For centuries, every paper was a single-author paper. Moreover, each was thousands of pages long and leather-bound. But now, when science has become such a collaborative enterprise and single-author papers are becoming a rarity, when a 12-author paper turns no heads and 100-author papers are showing up more and more, it has become necessary to put some order in the question of authorship. Different scientific areas have different traditions. In one discipline…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Evolution Of Animal Personalities: Animals differ strikingly in character and temperament. Yet only recently has it become evident that personalities are a widespread phenomenon in the animal kingdom. Animals as diverse as spiders, mice and squids appear to have personalities. Personality differences have been described in more than 60 species, including primates, rodents, birds, fish, insects and mollusks. Eavesdropping Comes Naturally To Young Song Sparrows: Long before the National Security Agency began eavesdropping on the phone calls of Americans, young song sparrows were listening to…

Spring Awakening

On Friday, the Bride of Coturnix, Coturnietta, a friend of hers and I went to DPAC to see 'Spring Awakening'. As you may already know, this is a rock adaptation of an old play located in late-19th century Germany, following the growth and maturation of a group of high school students surrounded by a disciplinarian and authoritarian adult world, in which sex is taboo (so they have to learn on their own, feel guilt about it, and suffer consequences) and strict, dogmatic religion trumps every attempt at independent thought or questioning. I have not seen the play before, though I have heard the…

Obama's regulatory czar should pay attention to the uncertainty he creates

"Regulation in an uncertain world," was the title of a speech that President Obama's regulatory czar Cass Sunstein delivered on June 20, 2012 at a National Academy of Science's government-university-industry research roundtable on "Decision Making under Risk and Uncertainty."  Mr. Sunstein's speech, as prepared for delivery, tried to make the case that under his leadership at the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) the Administration has instituted new procedures and practices that make the federal regulatory system more rigorous, evidence based, and transparent…

Not an “accident”: Jason Strycharz, 40, suffers fatal work-related injury in Middletown, CT

Jason Strycharz, 40 suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Monday, January 23, 2015 while working at Primary Steel, LLC in Middletown, CT. AP reports: The incident occurred around 9 am. The fire marshal Albert Santostefano says the worker was struck by a piece of steel as it was swinging on a crane inside the warehouse. NBC Connecticut quotes the fire marshal: "They were in the process of moving some steel around inside the warehouse part of the building, and somehow the steel got swinging. It was on a crane inside the warehouse and it struck one of the employees." Some news accounts report…

Who won last night's Democratic Primary debate in New Hampshire?

I watched the debate pretty closely, and in my opinion, both candidates did pretty well and it was mostly an even contest. (Note: I am not committed to one or the other candidate, I happen to like them both.) Sanders did very well in getting his message across, but he demonstrated weakness in foreign policy. Clinton did a good job at addressing the alleged Wall Street ties and addressing the email issue. But there is another way to answer the question. How much did each candidate strengthen their own support, and how much did each candidate do to convince undecided individuals to prefer…

Don't be pessimistic about changing gun laws

A handful of us in the science-skepticism-secularism blogosphere have been saying roughly the same things for a few years now about gun ownership, regulation, and safety. (Here's 67 posts of mine on this topic. Oh, and here's another 60 on a different blog.) While we were busy with this issue as well as other pet projects, the rest of the bloggers and writers were busy with their own important and interesting projects. But when the "Dark Knight" shooting in Colorado happened, I noticed a lot of other bloggers who had not touched on the gun issue before at all to my knowledge chimed in and…

I Am Becoming Museology

I've blogged before about becoming an archaeological dad, when new work built upon and superseded stuff I did in the 90s. Now stuff I did in the 00s has become, if not history, then at least museology, in the pages of Dr. Carl-Johan Svensson's PhD thesis in didactics (freely available on-line as a 2.4 MB PDF file). He presented his thesis yesterday at the School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University. Ten years ago I was involved a drawn-out and pretty violent public dispute about the policies of the then director of the Museum of Swedish History – which is misnamed because its…

SAT Challenge: They Sound Like... Bloggers

Visit the Official Blogger SAT Challenge site. After the grading was finished, a few of our volunteer graders made general comments about the essays they read. One thing that really jumped out at me about this was the way that the problems they described sounded like exactly the sort of thing you would expect from a bunch of bloggers: (Continued after the cut.) I'll leave the names off, to be polite, so here's Grader One: I was struck by the number of people who wrote essays without apparently thinking the directions applied to them. They made assumptions about the assignment, or decided…

Links for 2010-01-04

Remembering the giddy futurism of Omni magazine. - By Paul Collins - Slate Magazine "The magazine was a lushly airbrushed, sans-serif, and silver-paged vision dreamed up by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and his wife, Kathy Keeton. It split the difference between the consumerist Popular Science--which always seemed to cover hypersonic travel and AMC carburetors in the same page--and the lofty Scientific American, whose rigor was alluring but still impenetrable to me. But with equal parts sci-fi, feature reporting, and meaty interviews with Freeman Dyson and Edward O. Wilson, Omni's…

The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo

There has been a fair amount of discussion of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom-- Peter Woit reviewed it on his blog, the New York Times reviewed it a couple of Sundays ago, Barnes and Noble's online review did a piece on it, etc.. Nearly all of the press has been positive, and while it's taken me a while to work my way through the book, that's entirely a function of having a day job and a baby. The book itself is excellent, and kept me reading alter than I should've several times, which is not something I can say about a lot of biographies…

Quoted at USA Today, ClimateWire, and The Scientist

A round up of recent news coverage where I have provided analysis... 1. USA Today ran this profile of actor Ed Begley, focusing on his commitment to environmental issues and a green lifestyle. Here's what I said about the impact that citizens can have on their peers when they become advocates for a cause such as environmental conservation: Early adopters of such practices "definitely make a difference," says Matthew Nisbet, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., who studies public affairs. "Citizens who eagerly adopt environmentally friendly behaviors are what marketers call…

Are case reports useful?

A new journal for case reports only, The Journal of Medical Case Reports, has spawned an discussion at The Scientist about whether we should even have case reports in journals: Does the medical literature need more case studies? A new journal is betting it does, even as editors at other journals say the answer is no. Historically, case reports have proven extremely valuable to clinicians faced with diseases they knew little about. But in an age where countries spend more on research than ever before investigating both rare and common diseases, some experts argue that the obscure nature of…

Big Ideas: Understanding Versus Explaining

Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, Janet Stemwedel has written a fabulously complex post about ethics and population, which I highly recommend for your reading pleasure and contemplation. It was inspired by a post by Martin on the ethics of overpopulation, in which he offered a grand and simple three-point manifesto: It is unethical for anyone to produce more than two children. (Adoption of orphans, on the other hand, is highly commendable.) It is unethical to limit the availability of contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation and adoption. It is unethical to use public…

What You Need To Know About Community Colleges

So you're despairing of your future as an academic research scientist, and looking for "alternative" careers. When I was a grad student and postdoc I often heard my fellow students/postdocs say things like "well, I'll just get a teaching job" or "I'll just go teach at a community college". The implication was that any community college would be so incredibly grateful that such a fabulous research scientists had deigned to come teach at their lowly ranks, they would jump at the chance to hire them. Admittedly I was a graduate student a hundred years ago, and maybe this kind of attitude no…

The final decision on the biotechnology debate at the Economist

After the total votes were added up in the big GMO debate, the Economist scores it 62% against biotechnology, 38% for biotechnology. They also explain that there was a huge turnout and that there was a lot of active campaigning for particular views. The voting has shifted dramatically during this debate, starting out heavily in favour of the motion, swinging strongly in the other direction (seemingly in response to an organised campaign by anti-GM activists), and then swinging back towards the middle. But in the end the opponents of biotechnology—or, more precisely, the opponents of genetic…

Buying Books

So...it is not exactly easy to find history of science classics at your average--or even your well above average--bookstore. The class I'm officially taking here at Princeton, History 293, focuses heavily on a course packet and so doesn't have many officially assigned books. It does have a few; they are Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species--which I already own and have read, although right now they're somewhere in the middle of the country in transit--and Michael Adas's Machines As the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell Studies in…

Casual Fridays -- Special Saturday edition: Does Obama's mentor matter?

Things got a little crazy yesterday, with Greta headed off to VSS and the kids needing to be at three different places at once, so I'm presenting this week's Casual Friday results on Saturday. Last week we asked our readers who their most important mentors were. We didn't mention it at the time, but the survey was inspired by the headlines that week about Barack Obama's pastor's seemingly unpatriotic sermons, and how those sermons reflected on Obama. Do pastors really have a huge influence on people's lives? Can we actually evaluate a presidential candidate based on something his pastor says…

There are no "social" neurons!

Grrrr. Tell me if this article bugs you as much as it does me: Social Dementia' Decimates Special Neurons By Michael Balter Being human has its pluses and minuses. Our cognitive powers are superior to that of other animals, and we can act consciously to alter our destinies. On the other hand, our highly evolved brains are prone to serious malfunctions such as mental illness and dementia. Now a team of neuroscientists has found that some of these blessings and curses might be linked to the same specialized neural circuits. In 1999, researchers discovered that the brains of humans and great…

Media consumption inventory.

Over at BlogHer, Marianne Richmond has tagged everyone with a meme on personal media consumption. Given that I've already self-identified as a Luddite, I figured a little self-examination of my media habits might be worthwhile. Web: Until last week, I didn't use a feed-reader. I'd get my daily fix of the blogs by clicking around (or typing the start of my regular reads' URLs into the nav bar and letting Firefox complete them for me). Then, with the release of the spiffy new ScienceBlogs Select feed, I finally got around to setting up some subscriptions with Google Reader. I still click…

Earth Day 2010: change I can believe in.

First, let me refer you to Sharon Astyk's excellent post on what has become of Earth Day. If I had the time or energy to pay much attention to Earth Day as a particular day of observance, I think I'd share Sharon's grumpiness. After all, paying attention to our impacts on our shared environment just one day out of 365 is not likely to make much of a difference, and buying stuff as a strategy to deal with our over-consumption of resources (and the pollution that follows upon the manufacture and transport of that stuff) seems pretty perverse. That said, I'm going to take this Earth Day as an…

#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from "An Open History of Science".

Session description: We will be talking about how the history of science and the history of the open-access movement have intersected. Steven Johnson touches on this theme in his latest book, The Invention of Air, in that 18th century British polymath Joseph Priestley was a strong advocate of publishing scientific data widely in order to create a greater dialogue between scientists. While Johnson only mentions this briefly in the case of Priestley, this theme runs strongly through the history of science and is what makes the debate over the patenting of genes or the availability of open-…