Blogs / The Loom

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.

3 Quarks Daily has finished gathering nominations for its science blog prize, and you can now vote for your favorite. From the top 20 vote-getters, the editors of 3QD will then select six finalists, from which the winners will be chosen by Steven Pinker. The public voting closes at midnight, June 8 EST.

If you don’t already know about 3 Quarks Daily, check it out. It’s an elegant group blog that links to all sorts of interesting stuff on science, art, literature, politics, and philosophy. They also put “gossip” in the list of topics in their banner, but I don’t recall anything on Angelina Jolie or Mel Gibson. This morning, for example, they’ve posted stuff on the evolution of house cats and the leader of the defeated Tamil rebels on Sri Lanka.

Yesterday, the folks at 3QD made an announcement:

We have decided to start awarding four prizes every year in the respective areas of Science, Arts & Literature, Politics, and Philosophy for the best blog post in those fields.

First up is the prize for blogs on science. Readers are invited to nominate posts from May 24, 2008 to May 24, 2009, posting the url in the comment section of the announcement post. The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will winnow down the nominations, and then Harvard linguist Steven Pinker will select the first, second, and third prize winners. (The top prize comes with a $1000 award.) The deadline is June 1.

Now, if, on the outside chance, you wanted to nominate a blog post from the Loom, who am I to interfere with my wise readers? In fact, let me help you out a little. Here’s a list of posts from the past year that I’m particularly pleased with, in reverse chronological order.

Life On Earth: A Losing Game of Whack-A-Mole?

Darwinius: It delivers a pizza, and it lengthens, and it strengthens, and it finds that slipper that’s been at large under the chaise lounge for several weeks…

In The Prebiotic Kitchen

How To Be A Bat [Life in Motion]

Unchecked Ice: A Saga in Five Chapters

Live Blogging The Mars Methane Mystery: Aliens At Last?

The Island of Fossil Viruses

The Puppet Master’s Medicine Chest

The Evolution of the Face: A Letter to Some Readers in Tennessee

A Catastrophic Career

Going Green

You Want A Piece of This? (Please Please Please Don’t Take a Piece of This!)

The Clock That Breeds

Even Blood Flukes Get Divorced

The Allure of Big Antlers

The Bird That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Festooning The Tree Of Life

Missing The Wrist

Dawn of the Picasso Fish

A New Step In Evolution

What a week–I’m going to get this monkey off my back and enjoy a beautiful Memorial Day. As my holiday gift to all Loom readers everwhere, let me leave you with the sort of science show they just don’t make any more.

Please resume the conversation.

Somethings awry. I’ve sent out a cry for help. I’ll let you know when comments work again.

Should I take it as a compliment that somebody took the time to hack my online archive of articles? It’s still pretty irritating. Whatever the twisted motivations of the hacker, my web guardians and I are now figuring out how to repair the mess. My apologies to anyone seeking an article.

This Saturday I’ll be joining fellow Discover bloggers Chris Mooney and  Sheril Kirshenbaum, Discover editor-in-chief Corey Powell, along with luminaires like E.O. Wilson and Lawrence Krauss for “The Two Cultures In the 21st Century,” a daylong meeting at the New York Academy of Sciences (7 World Trade Center, 250 Greenwich St., 40th floor). Chris and Sheril say the meeting is close to sold out, so if you want to join us, please register now.

It’s a weird time to have a meeting about science in the public sphere–a week, for example, in which Jenny McCarthy, doyenne of vaccination misinformation, gets her own Oprah-backed talk show. But I have to say I’ll be in high spirits at the meeting, because this past Saturday I had a great time in New York at an award gala hosted by SUNY Downstate Medical Center. I got to meet fellow award-winners, virologist Anthony Fauci and cardiologist Jeffrey Borer. And I also got to meet some very interesting guests, including some of the actors from the best television show ever made, the Sopranos. I was not going to leave the ballroom without shamelessly begging for photos, but I was startled to find that these guys wanted to take pictures with us. Here’s a shot of Fauci and me with Steven Schirripa, who played Bobbie Baccalieri.

Later in the evening, John Ventimiglia, who was marvelously tragic as Artie Bucco, came up to me and told me how he loves to read about science and asked me (me?) if he could take a picture of us. I suppose I shouldn’t say that it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. But here we are.

And if you two-cultures-mindset is not completely demolished by now, let me show you a picture you may not have ever expected to see: Anthony Fauci mugging with Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico) and Johnny Sack (Vince Curatola). Now I can believe anything’s possible.

The folks at The Reef Tank interviewed me about my writing–in particular, about my writing on the creatures of the deep. Check it out.

It looks like the outbreak among the bonobos I blogged about last week is over. From an update from Vanessa Woods:

…the flu is over. Semendwa’s baby died, making it 7 bonobos that we’ve lost in the last month, 4 definitely from the flu, maybe 5.

I want to take the time to thank everyone who donated. we raised over $8,000 which will all go to bonobo food and medicine. We still have a $25,000 shortfall for bonobo food which we will try to make by the end of the year. I’ll make sure Sheryl thanks everyone individually, but they might come up on later posts. We haven’t forgotten you.

Everyone here is absolutely exhausted. but the staff have just worked so hard to save everyone, and they were saving bonobos left and right.

there will be more posts, some from the vet to talk about the exact nature of the illness, soem in response to people who think it’s some kind of ebola, it’s not, it’s a 24 hour bug that is harmless in humans, but apparently sometimes fatal to bonobos. and all the bonobos who will be released are in QUARANTINE and have been for six months so none of them was touched.

Vanessa is posting updates at the Friends of Bonobos site when she can get a good connection or when she can relay emails to people stateside. You can keep up with the news here.

Yesterday I passed on some grim news about a virus sweeping through bonobos. Some readers had questions, such as whether there was a quarantine and exactly what sort of virus is on the attack. Vanessa Woods kindly sent this email just now from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The most important thing at the moment for us is to protect the bonobos for the release project. these bonobos are in complete quarantine, and only select members of staff go in and out. so again NO RELEASED BONOBOS HAVE GOT THE FLU. they are in an entire separate part of the sanctuary with no contact with sick bonobos and they rarely see people. Claudine has had them in quarantine for 6 months with these procedures in place, not just for the flu, but for other dieases as well. there have been 5 health checks and ALL the bonobos in the sanctuary have been vaccinated for all diseases recommended by IUCN. obviously they need a flu vaccine and we are working on it.

for the rest, we only have two enclosures and a night building. at the first sign of a cough or a runny nose, we keep the bonobo isolated in the night building. both to keep an eye on the bonobo, and to protect the other bonobos. the problem is, the virus is just too fast. unlike a zoo, or a biomedical laboratory, the bonobos are free to range around a huge forest in the day time. they disappear at about 8 in the morning, and show up at 11 and 4pm to eat, then at 7pm to sleep.

the only time we can really separate them is first thing in the morning then when they come into sleep. and the virus is just too fast. a bonobo who is fine in the morning can be almost falling over by the afternoon. if we lock the bonobos inside all day, then it makes contamination that much faster. everyone disinfects their hands all the time, they change clothes and shower both in the morning when they arrive and before they leave in the afternoon. apart from this, with the short fall in the budget this year, there’s no money and no time to organise more equipment or another emergency enclosure. we’re all just fighting it as best we can with what we’ve got.

We’ve had some people freak out that this is a virus called H5N1 which is fatal to humans, but it’s not. it’’s not ebola or bird flu or any other disease lethal to humans. and we know that b/c the keepers have been getting sick from the bonobos, they get the flu and they are over it in 24 hours. It happens once every couple of years that a flu goign round kinshasa in jan/ feb hits the bonobos in march. bonobos, we think, have a much lower immune system than people, which is why the kinsahsa virus that lasted for 24 hours in humans, is so much more severe than bonobos. we think it is human respiratory syncytial virus , again non fatal to humans, but we’re not sure.  

I’ll relay more updates from Vanessa as they come.

Image courtesy of Vanessa Woods.

This is quite an honor, although the list of honorees is exactly backwards. If you’ve dedicated your career to fighting HIV or heart disease, let me step aside so you can head straight to the front of the line. I’ll just hang back and see if I can get an autograph from Bobby Baccalieri from the Sopranos.