Science Made Cool

Best-est TED Talk Ever

A decade ago, I had the very great pleasure of having Mary Roach follow me around for a day while I ran an experiment. (At the time, I was investigating the mechanical behavior of the mammalian baculum. She wrote about it later). Since then, she's become the author of three books: Stiff, Spook, and (most recently) Bonk. Here's a talk she gave at the 2009 TED conference based on stuff she learned for her new book. Just watch.

 

 

'Ida'-no (with head-shaking)

It’s been particularly interesting to watch the “Ida” story play out in the blogosphere over the past week, because I’ve been at the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop and “scientist-media relations” have been a frequent topic of discussion both in our lectures and around the dinner table.

If you’ve somehow missed the media circus surrounding the fossil, its story can pretty much be summed up by “gorgeous specimen introduced with excessive hype.” (You can get up to speed pretty quickly by looking at reactions from P.Z. Myers, Brian Switek, Henry Gee, and Carl Zimmer.) In this case – as reported by Elizabeth Cline in SEEDMAGAZINE.COM – when Jorn Hurum (University of Oslo) rediscovered the fossil (it had been in a private collection), he didn’t just describe it, he went looking for a filmmaker to build a media event around it. So when the description of Darwinius masillae appeared in PloS Science on May 19th, it was accompanied by a press conference, a TV documentary, a companion book and website, and a whole raft of misrepresentation about its scientific importance. It may be an effective way to get a lot of quick public attention, but it doesn’t help more run-of-the-mill relations between scientists and writers one bit.

Book Review: The Ghost Map

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson, is a really excellent book. It chronicles the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, and the medical detective work by Dr. John Snow and Rev. Henry Whitehead which ultimately led to the discovery of the cause. (Here's a nifty TED talk by Johnson about the book.)

Johnson's book weaves several threads together. The most obvious is the story of the epidemic, which he details practically minute by minute. Johnson can do that because of the obsessive street-level research done by Snow and Whitehead during and after the outbreak. In a very real sense, they beat cholera by sheer dogged persistence and inquiry.

A Cornucopia of Weirdness

Here at Science Made Cool we pride ourselves on being scientific. And yet . . . every now and then it's fun to go slumming with the crackpots. As a fiction writer and game designer I must admit that crazy people and con men can come up with  ideas every bit as good as the ones scientists have. They just aren't, you know, true. Anyway, here are some of my favorite sources for High Weirdness Online. Note that many of these sites are still skeptical or at least neutral toward the weirdness they chronicle. One must have some standards, after all.

Counterknowledge is a 'blog covering conspiracy theories, creationism, quackery, and pseudoscience from a very hard-nosed skeptical viewpoint. If you ever start wondering if any of this stuff might be true, this is a good site to get a refreshing blast of rationality.

The Weird Encyclopedia is an eclectic site with a vaguely "Discordian" tone to it -- call it "Stoner Forteanism" and you're pretty close to the mark. No, I don't know why there is a bimbo photo on the home page.

The Arcana Wiki is a Wikipedia-style site devoted to miscellaneous weirdness, specifically as it could be applied to roleplaying games and fiction.

Finally, Bill Beatty's Weird Science Web site is a forest of links to Forteana, fringe science, and crackpottery. He links to the sources -- which means at any given time about a quarter of them are dead links because crackpot scientists can't seem to maintain their Web sites very well.

And when you're done and need some mental floss to clean the gunk out of your brain, the Skeptic Blog.

Friday Parasite: Heads will Roll

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the life history of ant-decapitating phorid flies and how they might help control the fire ants that are invading the American South. This week, a wave of excitement has washed over the internet about the “zombie ants” these flies make, fueled by an announcement from Texas A&M University that they’ve released fire ants infected with a new South American species of phorid fly on a plot of land in east Texas. Despite the way it sounds, the fly isn’t ‘new’ in the sense of being “developed in a lab to take out ants;” it’s just ‘new’ to being part of these field experiments. In fact, evolution already did the job of turning these flies into fire ant scourges: the fly is a parasitoid from the ants’ original Argentinean home. Because the fly only parasitizes the imported fire ants it can’t run amok over our native ant species. And because this fly dive-bombs foraging ants  (some great photos of a related species of fly in action can be found over at Photo Synthesis), the hope is that they’ll disrupt the normal growth  of fire ant colonies – not just by killing workers in the course of making more flies, but by making the ants drop their food and run for their lives.

Photo by Sanford Porter (via USDA).

More on the project at:
The Texas Imported Fire Ant Research and Management Project
The University of Texas at Austin Fire Ant Project

How Valuable Is Education?

The Gene Expression 'blog has an interesting post tracking Google searches of academic topics. Unsurprisingly, interest in subjects covered in schools peaks during the academic year and drops off as soon as vacation begins. Which leads the GNXP 'blogger to ask the obvious question:  If they don't care about it after the exam, why are we teaching it to them? 

Of course, everyone does that, to some extent. I took a college course in Analysis in the Real Numbers as a requirement, and I literally don't remember anything from the course (I got a C and was glad to get it). I can still mimic the instructor's idiosyncratic lecture style, and I can still remember a guest instructor's horrible body odor, but the actual material of the class is no longer in my brain.

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.

Coupla Links

A pair of interesting essays about science and society. One, from the always-fascinating Gene Expression Web log, concerns science stories in the news -- analyzing them by content to see whether they focus on scientific personalities or scientific ideas.

Second, a piece from National Review Online about C.P. Snow's "two cultures" and how one of those cultures has pretty much vanished.

Crescent City Science

Tomorrow (May 7) marks the 291st birthday of the city of New Orleans. Since this 'blog is ostensibly about science, I sat down to write an entry about science in New Orleans. Then I found out something rather embarrassing:  there isn't much to write about.

For a 300-year-old city which was one of the leading commercial centers in the United States throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, there's a surprising lack of scientific enterprise in New Orleans. The place can boast some innovative doctors (particularly in the public health field), a few inventors, and that's about it, historically. Tulane University is a solid middleweight research university, but overall New Orleans pales by comparison with cities like Philadelphia or even Houston. Why is that? What makes some places centers of scientific inquiry? Money is an issue -- but New Orleans was fantastically prosperous in the 19th century, even after the Civil War.

Beyond Infinity

There's an interesting article at NewScientist about String Theory and how scientists are coming to accept the theory's implication that our universe is only one of a vast number of parallel universes, each with potentially different physical laws. This is a fascinating idea, and increases the scale of reality to an extent beyond what our minds can readily grasp. If you thought an infinitely large Universe was bad, what about a Universe which is merely one among 10⁵⁰⁰ others? That's beyond even cosmic in scope -- a Universe would be less important than an atom in your body. Once again Humanity's collective face is being rubbed in our insignificance.

This isn't as new an idea as the NewScientist article tries to suggest. The "Many-Worlds Interpretation" of Quantum Mechanics dates back to the 1950s, and in fiction the concept of alternate Universes is at least as old as H.G. Wells's novel Men Like Gods. Only now it may be true.

...there's a hell of a universe next door; let's go." -- e.e. cummings