Science Made Cool

Hugo Awards!

Our Crack Team of schmoozers and partygoers attended the 56th annual Hugo Awards ceremony at the World Science Fiction convention in Montreal. The results:

Best Fan Writer:  the talented Cheryl Morgan
Best Fan Artist:  the amazingly enthusiastic Frank Wu
Best Fanzine:  the unanticipated Electric Velocipede
Best Semiprozine:  the venerable Weird Tales
Best Related Book:  the venomous Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008, by John Scalzi
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form):  the charming Wall-E
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form):  the melodic Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Best Editor (Long Form):  the impeccable David Hartwell
Best Editor (Short Form):  the irrepressible Ellen Datlow
Best Graphic Story:  the exciting Girl Genius!
Best Professional Artist:  the gentlemanly Donato Giancola
Best Short Story:  the inspired "Exhalation," by Ted Chiang
Best Novelette:  the Lovecraftian "Shoggoths in Bloom," by Elizabeth Bear
Best Novella:  the touching "The Erdmann Nexus," by Nancy Kress
Best Novel:  The inevitable The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

Congratulations to all the winners from Zygote Games!

Another Fiction Announcement

Got this week's copy of Nature? Flip to the back page. Today's Futures is by our own Jim Cambias.

Alas, subscribers only.

This Writes About Dinner

So you swear you hate chemistry. Do you like to cook? I hate to break it to you like this, but if you cook, you’re a chemist – you’re using controlled reactions to shift raw materials into new chemical forms. The new forms just happen to smell and taste good. Unless, of course, you burn them by mistake.

A few tasty chemical reactions are the focus of Hervé This’ new book, Building A Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism (Columbia University Press 2009, translated from the French by M. B. DeBevoise). This is a physical chemist and an early pioneer of molecular gastronomy. He’s written about food and chemistry before in the encyclopedic Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor (also from Columbia University Press), but Building A Meal is a more intimate introduction to the ideas behind molecular gastronomy. This book is certainly less likely to intimidate – instead of presenting a cascade of different reactions, it examines the chemistry underlying a simple, classic menu, from appetizer to dessert. And if the end of the book falls into a muddle of philosophy about cooking, its careful explanation of how to make a perfect hard boiled egg (the key is to pay attention to the temperatures at which white and yolk coagulate) more than makes up for it.

Now I’m off to the kitchen to try the book’s instructions for a whipped chocolate emulsion. Because everything – including chemistry – is better with chocolate.

You can see This in action on YouTube: no translation necessary.

Review: Mad Science

When it comes to science projects, I’m hardly a shrinking violet. Testing parabolic motion with ball bearings in high school was boring: why not roll a bowling ball out a second story window instead?  I was sequencing DNA in college before PCR and automation made it easy, and by grad school I’d graduated to designing and building my own experimental equipment. And since I’ve had kids, I’ve made maple syrup in my backyard (4 days to boil down; tasted like woodsmoke), soldered together robots and built a catapult (tho’ just a small one). But I’m not about to try most of the projects in Theodore Gray’s new book, Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do At Home, But Probably Shouldn’t (Black Dog and Leventhal).

Nitpicks: Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed

As a biologist, I have to take issue with three things in Mo Willems’ new picture book Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed.

(1) Naked mole rats are not “a little bit rat” and “a little bit mole.” They are members of the Bathyergidae, a family of burrowing rodents found only in Africa. It’s true that rats are rodents, but they’re in a different family (the Muridae). Moles, on the other hand, are part of an entirely different order of mammals: the Insectivora. Naked mole-rats are more closely related to porcupines and chinchillas than they are to rats.

(2) There is no wise and benevolent Grand-pah Mole-Rat making the decisions in a naked mole-rat colony. Naked mole-rats are eusocial: they live in large colonies led by one large breeding female – the queen. The queen keeps a few males around to mate with but suppresses reproduction in the other members of the colony. Most of the colony – workers, both male and female – guard the colony, collect food, and care for the queen and her pups.

(3) Naked mole-rats never wear clothing.

But the book is funny anyway.

The Importance of Being Visual

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but only because humans are acutely visual animals. Large portions of our brains are devoted to making sense of the information we pick up with our eyes, processing changes in light and shadow, movement, and finding faces in everything we look at. (For more on that, here’s an interesting video from the MIT Museum -- Nancy Kanwisher talking about her research on human visual processing.) Visuals become particularly important in the sciences, where a well-drawn figure can be the difference between clarity and a confusing morass of conflicting data.

Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery and Howtoons: The Possibilities are Endless! are two books that are all about the figures.

And in Other News...

Jim's new short story, "Balancing Accounts," appears in the
current (February '08) issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Actually, it's the cover story.

John Joseph Adams interviewed Jim about it, and it's been getting a good reception from readers. Check it out if you get the chance!

Which Ones Were the Animals, Again?

When I picked up Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide, I expected a book full of stories about African wildlife, kind of like Wild Kingdom or the National Geographic Channel in print. What I got was better: a light memoir by Peter Allison about the experience of being an African safari guide, warts and all. Although Allison shares plenty of stories about animals, the real f ocus is on the people he met while guiding, from the “bird nerds” who wanted to stop to look at every bird on the drive into camp, to the camera-toting Japanese guests annoyed by the animals’ inability to follow instructions. Sometimes poignant, sometimes outrageously funny, but always entertaining, this book is a quick and rewarding read.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide
Peter Allison
2007
Lyons Press

Wild about...

Some years ago, I had this idea for a children’s alphabet book about endangered animals. I researched it for a while, but I eventually abandoned the project because I couldn’t figure out how to make the book rigorous but not depressing. I’m glad to say that David McLimans manages to do both in Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet.

Friday Parasite #34: A Parasite Book By Dr. Zuk

As the Zygote Games Science Guru, it was my job to pore through piles of scientific papers and technical books looking for juicy details to incorporate into Parasites Unleashed. And most of the books and papers I read through were, to put it mildly, dry. So it was fun to pick up Marlene Zuk’s lively new book, Riddled With Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are (Harcourt, 2007).