elerner | August 26, 2010When we last left Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology, he was analyzing a famous crytpozoological photograph, purported to be an undiscovered species of big cat, or perhaps the last surviving member of a Tasmanian cat-like marsupial. Of course, Naish generally prefers to write about strange and superlative animals that actually exist (or did at one point). In that vein, Naish has added to his series on the matamata, a river turtle with a shovel-shaped head, long, thick neck and a snorkel for a nose. Previous editions of the series focused on the matamata's evolutionary history and unusual…
elerner | August 24, 2010Do you like volcanoes? Italian volcanoes? If so, it's not hard to guess the one you're thinking of: the largest volcano in Europe and one of the most active in the world, Mount Etna. And if you have any questions about this famous fulminator, head over to Eruptions, where guest blogger Dr. Boris Behncke of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology examines Etna over the course of three extremely detailed posts. Starting with the volcano's geological anatomy, Dr. Behncke moves on to its cycles of eruptions, and finally, the impact these common eruptions and lava flows have…
elerner | August 20, 2010"Photographic evidence" is sometimes taken as shorthand for cold, hard proof. Seeing, after all, is believing, and if we have a permanent record of an image that anyone can examine, what more verification can be necessary? Of course, we can't really trust our eyes or memories, something that has been exacerbated by how trivial manipulating photographs have become. But even before Photoshop, photographs fooled people. Beyond crude hoaxes, there remains the fact that such images are not simple slices of reality. Intentionally or unintentionally, photographers determine what information from a…
elerner | August 19, 2010Letters and numbers are often mentally grouped together; they're both simple sets of symbols that are the building blocks for much more complex concepts, and mastering their relationships is a cornerstone of early education. But while illiteracy becomes a major social stigma almost immediately after a young person is introduced to letters, most people can proudly declare their innumeracy (aside from basics, like telling time or counting change) throughout their lives. This is doubly strange, as our ability to think about and compare sets of items of differing amounts precedes our verbal…
elerner | August 18, 2010The science song is a strange beast; people have surely converted information to rhythms or rhymes as a mnemonic device for millennia, though the idea of "educational music" as a genre has only recently crystallized. Its target audience has oscillated since then; while Tom Lehrer was playing for adults in the 50s and 60s, a renaissance of children's television in the 70s, from Sesame Street to Schoolhouse Rock!, marked the style as child's play. Those children are now grown up and making music of their own. Frank Swain of SciencePunk provides two video examples: Amoeba to Zebra's "Shake your…
elerner | August 17, 2010While the superstar of the particle physics world, the Large Hadron Collider, gets all of the attention (and the glamor shots), there's plenty of interesting science that can be done on the atomic level within an otherwise ordinary laboratory on the campus of an update New York university. Consider, for instance,the lab of Uncertain Principles' Chad Orzel, who has recently taken his readers on a four-part tour of his scientific specialty: making atoms extra cold. While the LHC sends protons whizzing through miles of underground beam pipes in order to more spectacularly crash them together,…
ably | August 16, 2010From the New York Times
The key to the Alzheimer's project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.
No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.
elerner | August 13, 2010From "quantum teleportation" to "Superconducting Super collider", there's nothing like an unusual word or intriguing turn of phrase to draw someone into a science story. Yesterday, the New York Times' lead tech writer Nick Bilton took a shine to "charismatic megafauna," after reading a post on The Thoughtful Animal about social cognition in polar bears. For those still scratching their heads, the post's author Jason Goldman translates: "in other words, 'really cool animals.'" These are the kinds of creatures you might see anthropomorphized in a cartoon, or starring forlornly from a wildlife…
elerner | August 12, 2010Every August, the Earth passes through a patch of space that's a tad grittier than usual; the planet's orbit intersects with that of the comet Swift-Tuttle, the latter being filled with the cast-off from the slowly melting ice-ball. When this detritus hits Earth's atmospheres, the massive energy of the collision is enough to produce a light-show we colloqually call "shooting stars." While this explanation of the Perseid Meteor Shower's origin might be enough for some; Ethan Siegel stays true to his blog's name and Starts with a Bang!. Tracing the comet's origin to the Kuiper Belt, the Kuiper…
ably | July 20, 2010Stephen Schneider, a friend of Seed's and a giant of climate science, passed away yesterday. He was 65.
Stephen participated in a Seed Salon a few years ago with Laurie David. I just re-read it and found this quote: "My students are always asking, 'Aren't you frustrated to death? Nothing you do makes any immediate difference.' What I keep trying to tell them is, the truth matters, but it's on a generational time frame."
Did anyone have Stephen as a professor or advisor at Stanford?
From the obituary in the New York Times:
Dr. Schneider wrote books on the effects of climate change on areas as…
ably | July 16, 2010It's summer and Seed's running a few classic articles online. This weekend, read about "So"...
The language of science, with its specialized vocabulary and clipped rhythm, has a distinctive architecture.
The functional elegance of this rarefied speak is uniquely captured in one of its most inconspicuous words: "so." This isn't "so" the intensifier ("so expensive"); it's not the "so" that joins two clauses. This is the "so" that introduces a sentence, as in "So as we can see, modified Newtonian dynamics cannot account for the rotation of any of the three observed galaxies."
This "so" is key to…
ably | July 14, 2010I just read that MIT's ground-breaking OpenCourseWare initiative passed the 2,000-course mark this month. That's a lot of free lectures, course notes, and videos from some of the best scientific minds of the planet...
First announced in 2001, MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is an ambitious effort to share MIT's education resources freely and openly on the web to improve formal and informal learning worldwide. ... Since the site was launched in 2002, OCW materials have been visited on the MIT site or partner translation sites 98 million times by an estimated 70 million visitors from around the world.
ably | July 14, 2010I just received a box of "Science is Culture" galleys from HarperCollins -- it's pretty exciting... Here's a sneak peek.
ably | July 13, 2010From The Atlantic's Niraj Chokshi: "Seed magazine explores the idea that humans are eradicating cultural, language and species differences. Rates of species extinction have grown by as much as 10,000 because of us and half of the world's languages are expected to vanish by the end of the century. A worthwhile read."
Even before we've been able to take stock of the enormous diversity that today existsâ--âfrom undescribed microbes to undocumented tonguesâ--âthis epidemic carries away an entire human language every two weeks, destroys a domesticated food-crop variety every six hours, and kills…
ably | July 13, 2010Kim Bottomly, Wellesley College's 13th President, discusses the importance of making science a core skill in various professional fields, and how to engage more women in this effort.
(via Atlantic Ideas Festival)
ably | July 12, 2010I've had this quote up on my wall since the very beginning.
"We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies."
-- Walt Disney
I think it probably also rings true for many scientists.
We ran a department in Seed for a couple of years called "Why I Do Science" edited by Josh Roebke and Lee Billings with personal essays written by scientists (one of my favorite departments). Here's one by Brazilian neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro. I'll find some more and post them.
Why do you do science?
ably | July 9, 2010Steve Shapin, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, and author of the excellent book, A Scientific Life, wrote an essay for Seed in 2008 on the state of the scientist that has new relevance.
In one sense, the enfolding of science in structures that produce wealth and project power is just a sign of its practitioners' immense success over the course of the past century.
As we enter the 21st century, new institutional configurations for doing science emerge, together with new scientific agendas and new conceptions of what it is to be a scientist. Some participants and observers of…
ably | July 9, 2010Here's David Brooks in today's New York Times
Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.
It's better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.
Perhaps that will change. Already, more "old-fashioned" outposts are opening up across the Web. It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to…
ably | July 8, 2010After hosting blogs for four years, it's about time I started my own. So, welcome!
Let me begin with a bit about me and what I believe.
I believe that science has the unique potential to improve the state of the world. I think this potential is being hindered today by a lack of science literacy around the world and by the largely closed and restricted nature of the world's scientific information. Two connected topics (ie. Science Literacy and Open Science) that I care passionately about and will delve deep into on this blog. I also believe that science can be more than a subject; it can be a…
ably | July 8, 2010We have removed Food Frontiers from SB.
We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way.
How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead science-minded positive change within their organizations? How can a large and diverse online community made up of scientists and the science-minded public help? How do companies who seek genuine dialogue with this community engage? We'll open…