Blogs / The Loom

Peter Wainwright and his colleagues at UC Davis study the weird ways in which fish eat. Two years ago I wrote about their creepy work on moray eels for the Times here. Now they’ve got a Youtube channel for their surreal films. Mick Jagger, meet the Red Bay Snook. And Mr. Mosquitofish, meet your doom. (h/t Jonathan Eisen)

I smell an anthology here: a collection of the all-time greatest take-downs, in which scientists expose lazy thinking. How about, The Best Pwnage of 2009?

My own latest nomination:

In the new book Superfreakonomics, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner make lots of provocative claims about global warming. For example, they say that solar panels would absorb so much heat they’d be useless for bringing the planet’s temperature down by cutting down carbon emissions.

Raymond Pierrehumbert, who, like Levitt, is a professor at the  University of Chicago, shows why that’s wrong–not with calculus or some other fancy-schmancy mathematics, but with some embarrassingly simple arithmetic.

Be sure to check out the map at the end. Ouch.

I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the Scientific Merit Award at the Imagine Science Film Festival, which just closed over the weekend. You may have seen the winner we picked, Magnetic Movie, which I’ve embedded below. There was a huge variety to choose from, some wonderfully beautiful, and some finding great emotional depth in just a few minutes. But Magnetic Movie, in the way it reveals the hidden weirdness that surrounds us, was tops.

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak, who just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this morning. They won for their discovery of telomeres, the caps on the ends of chromosomes that keep them from degrading and ward off aging. The Nobel site has posted some useful information about why this was such a profound discovery.

Just a technical note, with shades of exasperation: After my web site got hacked earlier a couple months back, I changed ISP’s and spent a lot of time bringing it up to date. Now I’ve discovered that it’s not working again, because of some mysterious error. I’m getting help with it, but it may take a few days for everything to get back in place.

I’ve posted the first two stories from students in my science writing class over at Science on Shoals. (plus an explanatory introduction). One piece is about the mysteries of bird migrations, and the other’s on a new technology for seeing skeletons in motion in 3-D. And there’s plenty more to come. Check it out.

Now these are good office hours. I’m sitting in front of a big tide pool on a hot day at Appledore Island. My children are playing some Byzantine  game involving princesses on the raft in the middle of the pool. A student of mine has just walked passed me, snorkel and goggles in hand. “I’ve just sent you an outline for my project, and I’m going to take a break,” she says. As she floats off to gaze at the algae and the crabs, I use the awesome wireless on this island to check my email The outline is in my inbox. So by the time she’s done snorkeling, we can discuss it.

I’m doing my best to counter this tranquility by editing these students nearly to the point of tears. But my impersonation of John Houseman in the Paper Chase just can’t measure up on a day like this.

We’re three days into the science writing class here at Shoals Marine Laboratory, and the exhaustion and enlightenment are neck and neck.

Monday we arrived on Appledore Island and settled in among the squawking herring gulls, which grudgingly walk out of our way as we walk by, as if to say, it’s our island. Tuesday morning we marched out to the northern edge of the island to learn about the intertidal zone, the place where the ocean meets land in necklace of pools and rocks battered by waves and coated in slimy algae.

A wicked lightning storm promptly drove us back to safety, and we spent the morning learning the intricacies of parasites that reign supreme in the intertidal zone, infesting snails, crabs, fish, and those squawking gulls. In the evening we were able to return to the intertidal zone in peace, to inspect cages where hapless crabs must wait to be infected by their parasite overlords. We were disturbed only by mosquitoes, which seem to be able to hammer nails into the skin. It turns out that these parasites (flatworms called trematodes) don’t just affect their host species, but can even influence how much algae grows there, because infected snails eat less than healthy ones. And the sheer mass of the parasites is astounding, with most of the snails in the higher parts of the zone merely puppets for trematodes. Knowing that, I feel even more at home here.

Tuesday we pursued the White Whale of vertebrate evolution, the hagfish. It’s a hit-or-miss affair, and in our case it was a miss. We traveled for an hour from Appledore Island to reach a Shoals hagfish trap, hoping to bring up some live ones. En route we saw astonishing gatherings of tuna leaping out of the water, along with fin whales lifting their stately backs. When we reached the trap buoy, the students learned how to haul a tub 400 feet up from the bottom of the sea. (Note the rope in hand and the reporter’s notebook stashed in the back: true hands-on journalism.)

Sadly, only mud and bait fish were inside.

Back at the lab, the director of Shoals, Willy Bemis, cut open some hagfish he caught earlier this year to show why it’s worth going so far for a fish. Hagfish are not-quite-vertebrates. They have a brain and a braincase like us, along with a few other vertebrate-like traits, but they fall profoundly short. They have no skeleton but just a rope of cartilage they can tie into knots. And they have evolved weird traits of their own, like a sideways set of jaws and the ability to spew slime.

The students are now pounding out stories late into the night, and there’s more in store: the history of New England recorded in shells and bones, the migration of birds from equator to Arctic, and the three-dimensional X-ray animation of bodies in motion. By Sunday, they’ll have written up their final stories, which they will be publishing here. And then we can enjoy the view from the classroom in peace.

I’ve been quiet on the blog front for the past week thanks to some cross-country traveling for work and a few deadlines I must wrap up before turning to a new kind of experience–the pedagogical sort.

Next week I’ll be teaching a science writing class at Shoals Marine Lab on the lovely Appledore Island (see here and here for my past trips to this exceptional place). I’m not sure the students realize how good they’ll have it. They’ll be learning to write about science by going on four field trips in a week–one to collect hagfish, one to the island’s intertidal pools, one to an archaeological site on a nearby island, and one to a bird banding station. Of course, if horrible weather sweeps in, as it sometimes does, we may stay inside and pore over a recent issue of Current Biology. In any case, I’ll blog some of our exploits.

After I return from the island, I’ll have a couple weeks’ respite before I turn green, explode in Hulk-like fashion, and transform into a lecturer at Yale.

I’ll be teaching a class called “Writing About Science and the Environment.” (My request for a crowd-sourced reading list arose as I was putting the class together.) The seminar is based in the Environmental Studies Department, but people outside the program (undergraduate and graduate) can apply. So if there are any Yale students getting ready to start shopping, check out EVST 215!

[Image: Painting by Laurentius de Voltolina via Wikimedia Commons]

I just loved this speech John Hodgman made at the Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner yesterday. Hodgman spoke for all us nerds, perhaps even including the president himself. And best of all, while talking about that fine nerd novel Dune, he showed the president a painting of a giant sand worm from Dune by John Schoenherr. (It shows up at 11:20.)

I grew up a couple miles from Schoenherr and spent much of my nerdy youth with his son Ian, hanging out in his fabulous old barn-slash-studio, filled with his classic science fiction art, new paintings of bears and geese, assorted Japanese swords, many cameras, a complete collection of National Geographic, and lots of bones and stuffed animal heads. I’m grateful to Hodgman for bringing back  those times, and for showing off the work of a wonderful artist. I return Hodgman the final words of his speech: I extend that most American of greetings–I have been and always shall be your friend. Live long and prosper.

I’m delighted to report that I’ve been appointed the first Visiting Scholar at the Science, Health, and Environment Reporting Program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. I’ve felt like an informal visiting scholar there for a while now, having given talks and spoken with classes of journalism students a number of times. But I was particularly impressed on a recent visit when I could see how they’re grappling head-on with the changing nature of journalism. Nobody gets out of there without knowing how to shoot and edit video, for example. So while I’ll be offering my thoughts on how to thrive (not just survive) in science journalism in years to come, I’m hoping to learn a few new tricks myself.

[Image: Wikipedia]

Florida Citizens for Science asked me and my fellow Discoverite Phil Plait to be among the judges for their “Stick Science Cartoon” contest, in which entrants used stick figure cartoons to explain a misunderstanding about science with humor and brevity. You can now see the winners here. Congratulations to all. Next time I’m bogged down with an explanation that’s just too long and too dull, I’ll bear you folks in mind and start cutting.