Next week is Social Media Week, during which time the American Museum of Natural History is hosting an exploration of science and social media. It will take place on Thursday, 2/16, at 6 pm, and after the official panel discussion there will be a beer and wine reception in the Museum’s Hall of Minerals and Gems.

The panelists for the evening include–

Ben Lillie, the physicist turned spoken-word impresario who has founded the delightful Story Collider

Matt Danzico, a BBC journalist who conducted a 365-day blog experiment called “The Time Hack” looking at how we perceive time

Ruth Cohen, Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning at the American Museum of Natural History, who will talk about how the museum uses apps to help kids learn about urban biodiversity

–and me. I’ll talk about how social media (primarily the Loom) turned me into a curator of science tattoos and then an author of a decidedly unusual coffee table book.

The discussion will be moderated by Jennifer Kingson, an editor in the Science Department at The New York Times.

The event is free, but you need to register on the event page.

Thousands of papers get published every week, but every now and then a truly strange one pops up. On December 23, a new journal called Life published a paper by Case Western Reserve University biochemist Eric Andrulis called “Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life.”

At Ars Technica, John Timmer unpacks this 105-page paper and delves into the weirdness, in a post called “How the craziest f#@!ing paper got published and promoted.”

The basic idea is that everything, from subatomic particles to living systems, is based on helical systems the author calls “gyres,” which transform matter, energy, and information. These transformations then determine the properties of various natural systems, living and otherwise. What are these gyres? It’s really hard to say; even Andrulis admits that they’re just “a straightforward and non-mathematical core model” (although he seems to think that’s a good thing). Just about everything can be derived from this core model; the author cites “major phenomena including, but not limited to, quantum gravity, phase transitions of water, why living systems are predominantly CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), homochirality of sugars and amino acids, homeoviscous adaptation, triplet code, and DNA mutations.”

He’s serious about the “not limited to” part; one of the sections describes how gyres could cause the Moon to form.

Is this a viable theory of everything? The word “boson,” the particle that carries forces, isn’t in the text at all. “Quark” appears once—in the title of one of the 800 references. The only subatomic particle Andrulis describes is the electron; he skips from there straight up to oxygen. Enormous gaps exist everywhere one looks.

The theory is supposed to be testable, but the word “test” only shows up in the text twice. In both cases, Andrulis simply claims his theory is testable in specific areas of study. He does not indicate what those tests might be, nor what results would be predicted based on his gyres.

I could easily go into more specifics (very easily—I’ve got lots of notes), but it’s clear that there’s nothing in the paper that much resembles science.

Timmer goes on to look at how the paper glided smoothly into the science media machine, first with a press release from Case Western , and then with reprints of said press release at outlets like Science Daily and Physorg, without anyone wondering if it deserved this sort of attention.

I wondered how the paper got published and checked out the editorial board of Life. One name popped out at me: Stephen Mojzsis, a University of Colorado geochemist. I met Mojzsis while working on a story about the age of the Earth for National Geographic, and I’ve stayed in touch on and off ever since.  I dropped him a note Sunday to ask about the paper. To which he replied,

“You saw it before me!  I am pretty unhappy about it.  Have just contacted the Editor in Chief.”

The more Mojzsis looked into it, the less he liked the situation. Yesterday he tendered his resignation from the board. Today his name is gone from the journal’s web site, along with a number of other editors.

I have to scramble today to get ready for a talk at the University of Maryland tomorrow, so I won’t be digging deep into this story. I’d suggest you keep up with Timmer, as well as Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch, to see how this drama unfolds.

In yesterday’s New York Times, I wrote about a new paper in which scientists report the evolution of single-celled yeast into multicellular snowflake-like “bodies.” Most (but not all) of the experts I contacted for the story had high praise for the study. (It also won an award when it was presented as a talk over the summer at the Society for the Study of Evolution.) Once the story appeared, however, some scientists took to Twitter to express their skepticism. As much as I like Twitter, this is one of the situations where it fails. You can’t have a conversation about genetics, lab strains versus wild types, etc., in 140 character chunks. At least not very satisfying ones.

So here’s what I decided to do last night. I used Storify to collect the comments of Leonid Kruglyak of Princeton and Michael Eisen of Berkeley, and then passed them on to Will Ratcliff, the lead author of the new study. He then responded. Below you’ll find the Storify tweets, and then Ratcliff’s response. Please continue the conversation in the comment thread. (And be sure to download the paper–it’s open access.)

Will Ratcliff responds:

Well, I don’t buy it that yeast are multicellular in nature. Certainly some yeast in nature form small clusters (like strain RM11), but as far as I know, these are the exception to the rule. Most strains isolated in nature are unicellular, or at most, flocculating (which I still count as unicellular but social). [CZ: "Flocculating" refers to the clumps that unrelated yeast cells form when they starve.]

Our yeast are not utilizing ‘latent’ multicellular genes and reverting back to their wild state. The initial evolution of snowflake yeast is the result of mutations that break the normal mitotic reproductive process, preventing daughter cells from being released as they normally would when division is complete. Again, we know from knockout libraries that this phenotype can be a consequence of many different mutations. This is a loss of function, not a gain of function. You could probably evolve a similar phenotype in nearly any microbe (other than bacteria, binary fission is a fundamentally different process). We find that it is actually much harder to go back to unicellularity once snowflake yeast have evolved, because there are many more ways to break something via mutation than fix it. The amazing thing we see is that we rapidly see adaptations to this adaptation. If we select for more rapid settling, snowflake yeast evolve to delay reproduction until the parent is larger, allowing it settle more quickly. We see the evolution of higher rates of apoptosis as a way to regulate the size and number of propagules produced. We show that the transition to multicellularity in yeast is surprisingly easy, and have no reason to suspect it would be any harder in other microbes with a reproductive process similar to yeast.

Today the Huffington Post is launching a new science “channel,” overseen by a full-time science editor. This should be interesting.

The Huffington Post is one of the most popular places for getting news and opinion, attracting well over 30 million views a month. It started out mainly as a blogging network, and then added on a lot of aggregation of news stories, supplemented by slide shows. More recently, they’ve been hiring full-time reporters and editors on subjects like politics and economics.

When it comes to science, this set-up has led to some…well, let’s call it checkered coverage. You could find your way to straight news stories about science from the Associated Press and other outlets, along with some lightly re-written syntheses of articles elsewhere. Some strong voices in the science world paid visits from time to time to share some thoughts. But the Huffington Post has also run some real stinkers in the past–the kind that send readers to the ER with foreheads fractured by particularly powerful desk-slams.

This morning, Arianna Huffington herself introduced the channel with a long post. Here’s its opening:

I’m delighted to announce the launch of our newest section, HuffPost Science, a one-stop shop for the latest scientific news and opinion. From the farthest reaches of space to the tiniest cells inside our bodies, HuffPost Science will report on the world’s greatest mysteries, most cutting-edge discoveries, and most thought-provoking ideas.

The section will also be home to a robust debate on issues great and small — from the Big Questions of our time (are we alone in the universe?), to quirky, fun ones (will they ever create a pill that will let me eat all the pistachio ice cream I want and not gain weight?) There’s no better time than now to launch a venue that explores these questions, given the explosion of truly medieval thinking in our world — and not just on the fringes. It’s a world in which we have senators and presidential candidates who don’t believe in evolution and who think that global warming is a myth. A world in which politicians don’t just have their own set of ideas but their own set of facts.

Science is a subject that has fascinated me for years. I remember, in the mid-70s, being taken by Bernard Levin to meet Arthur Koestler at his flat in London. I had just read his book, The Act of Creation, on the inspirations that propelled great scientists. Koestler, who described scientists as Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity, talked about scientific equations with the ease most of us discuss what we had for dinner (or, if you are a HuffPost regular, the Iowa results). I still remember his lyrical analysis of Einstein’s breakthrough equation, E=mc2. The equation’s assurance that nothing in the universe is unrelated to anything else had a real emotional impact on him — as it soon did on me. An emotional impact not usually associated with scientific equations.

It’s the sense of wonder we so often see in our children. I still recall lying on the grass with my then four and two-year-old daughters one night outside our home in Santa Barbara, and Christina looking out into the night sky and asking, “Mommy, what makes it go?” That sense of wonder will be at the core of HuffPost Science. We will explore timeless questions and we will allow our minds to be blown by what is mind-blowing and awe-inspiring.

You can also get a sense of what HuffPost Science will be like by inspecting this morning’s batch of blog posts. There’s some good stuff there, including a piece by Harvard physicist Lisa Randall. They even have a piece by science writer Seth Mnookin on the latest developments in the controversies over vaccines–which is quite something given all the real estate HuffPo has given in the past to people trying to make the false claim that vaccines cause autism.

I for one am ready to give the Huffington Post another look. If they can bring real science to their huge readership, that will be a great thing.

I’ve just written a profile of the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps the best-known scientific figure in America. Here’s how it opens:

On a hay-mown crest, dozens of people are crouching in the dark. The Earth has turned away from the sun, and the sky has flowed down a color chart, from light gray to orange to bluish-black. A sliver of a waxing moon has appeared briefly and then slipped below the western horizon, leaving the sky to blinking airplanes rising from La Guardia fifty miles to the south, to satellites gliding in low orbit, to Jupiter and its herd of moons and to the great river of the Milky Way beyond.

The crowd that sits in this chilly field in North Salem, New York, is surrounded by a ring of telescopes. There’s a Dobsonian, a giant barrel-shaped contraption that’s so tall you have to climb a stepladder to look through its eyepiece. Small, squat Newtonian cylinders sit on tripods, rigged to computers that give off a weak lamp-glow from their monitors. A few older men are fussing over the telescopes, but everyone else is huddled on the grass.

“Just get snuggly. There’s nothing wrong with that. Get snuggly.”

The voice is deep and loud–not loud from shouting, but from some strange acoustic property that gives it a conversational boom. It comes from a man who looms in the dark at the edge of the crowd.

“We still have the remnants of what we typically call the Summer Triangle,” he says. “And the Summer Triangle is three stars that are about equally bright. So, one is here–”

“Oh my God,” the crowd murmurs.

The looming figure is Neil Tyson, the director of the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. He has just put the crowd into a swoon by switching on a laser and pointing it towards the zenith of the sky. The green beam seems to reach up from the field and touch the star.

“And one is here, and here,” he says, sweeping the laser across the sky to mark a stellar triangle. The squatters gasp, swear again, and laugh at themselves. Tyson’s laser is creating an optical illusion: he seems to pull the sky down into a dome that floats close overhead, like an astronomical Sistine Chapel.

“Here we have Deneb,” he says. “Everyone say Deneb!”

“Deneb!”

“Good. And down here we have Altair.”

“Altair!”

“And up here we have Vega.”

“Vega!”

“One of the telescopes is actually trained on a star that’s in the middle of this triangle,” Tyson says, moving his laser to a faint dot, called Albireo. “It’s right there. It doesn’t look very interesting at first, but when you whip out a telescope, what you’ll find is that this star is not alone, as a solo star. It has a companion star. Albireo is in fact my favorite star of the night sky. If you look closely, one star is this brilliant, beautiful blue color and the other is gold. And we know from astrophysics what must be true if an object is glowing at one or the other of those colors. Unlike what an artist will tell you, something glowing red-hot is the coolest among all the hots. You get way hotter than red-hot. If you crank the temperature, it becomes white hot. Crank it some more, it then begins to glow blue.”

Tyson moves the laser to other regions of the sky, to the feeble North Star, to Cassiopeia, to Sagittarius. As he talks, the people huddling on the ground blast questions at him. Where is Venus? Is that a satellite? Is that a satellite? Is the Chinese calendar based on the lunar cycle? Tyson stops to answer each question. He twirls his laser in a tight circle midway down the handle of the Big Dipper.

“If you look really carefully at it, you should be able to see two stars there,” he says. “How good is your vision?”

“Awesome!” a boy says.

“I can see it!” says another.

“Okay, who cannot see two stars inside my little circle here?” Tyson asks.

“Me,” says a third.

“Okay, therefore you cannot be drafted into the Roman army,” says Tyson. “That was their eye test. So this pair of stars is called Mizar and Alcor. Mizar is the brighter of the two. Alcor is the dimmer of the two. This is a very loosely bound double-star system. If you take out a telescope and point it on Mizar, that’s a double star. Then if you take the telescope and point it on the brighter of the two stars that is the bright of these two stars, that’s a double star. So what you have here,” Tyson says, “is a double-double-double star system. All in mutual, harmonious orbit around their common center of gravity. Such is the lay-out of this cosmic ballet that we call the universe.”

For most of the people huddling on the ground, tonight is the first time they’ve spent such an extended period looking up at the sky. For three hours, Tyson keeps his audience staring so hard at the heavens he cramps their necks. He speaks of galaxies and the delusions of astrology, how to calculate latitude, the fate of the universe. It is not a lecture. He delivers something more akin to a solo concert. Although he is a card-carrying astrophysicist with a long list of scientific papers in publications like Astrophysical Journal, Tyson has turned himself into a rock-star scientist. He plays to sold-out houses. He appears on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, on the New York Times bestseller list, on Twitter (@neiltyson, with 242,400 followers as I write this). He is now shooting a remake of Carl Sagan’s classic Cosmos series, which will air on Fox in 2013.

Tyson spreads himself so wide for two reasons. One is that there’s so much in the sky to talk about. The other reason is down here on earth. For all the spectacular advances American science has made over the past century–not just in astrophysics but in biology, engineering, and other disciplines–the best days of American science may be behind us. And as American science declines, so does America. So here, in the dark, under the stars, Tyson is going to try to save the future, one neck cramp at a time.

The profile appears in the new issue of Playboy. It’s not online at their site, but I’ve posted the full story on carlzimmer.com. Check it out.

[Image: Photo by Greyhawk68, Flickr, via Creative Commons]

In 2011, the Loom reached its eighth birthday. Thanks to everyone who’s paid a visit or become a loyal reader in that time. With the year coming to a close, I spent a little time this week perusing the Loom’s archive, reflecting on the things that obsessed me during 2011.

More than many years, this one reminded me just how huge science is. Even if you limited yourself to the most important stories of this past year, there was just too much to keep up with. (Here’s Discover’s top 100 picks.) As a science writer, my focus is biology, but that didn’t ease my year-long case of head-spinning. The anchors that kept me from spinning away completely were the very small and the very complicated.

At the small end of the spectrum were, among other things, the bacteria that call us home. Like every year, 2011 saw outbreaks, such as the E. coli that sickened thousands in Germany. But now that we can read the genomes of these killers,  as I noted in Newsweek, we can see how chillingly fast new pathogens can evolve.

But the good germs also gained more recognition in 2011. The science of the microbiome is blooming at an astonishing pace, as you can see in the map I created for the September issue of Wired. As I got more familiar with the microbiome, it became clear to me that scientists won’t be able to handle its complexity without thinking like ecologists. I made that point in a talk this spring called “The Human Lake,” which I turned into a blog post in April. (I was delighted when it was selected as one of the best pieces of 2011 by The Browser and Longreads, and was picked to be including in the 2012 edition of Open Lab.)

The microbiome, I predict, is going to become very intimate in years to come. It’s a strangely thrilling experience to discover 53 species of bacteria living in one’s belly button, as I found out this year. In the future, doctors may check our bug types just as they check our blood types today. But all this new knowledge about the microbiome will bring us unexpected  ethical quandaries, some of which I discussed in December in the New York Times.

Bacteria may be small, but they’re positively plus-sized compared to viruses, the subject of my book A Planet of Viruses, which came out in May. (You can read excerpts in Audubon and i09.) Working on the book opened my eyes to just how abundant, diverse, and powerful viruses are–a point I tried to get across in the talks I gave in the spring. The two that I was happiest with were an interview on Science Friday on NPR, and a talk I gave at the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. As always happens when I write a book about a fast-moving field, the science of virology offered up lots of surprises after the book came out–such as the biggest virus ever, a possible ancestor of hepatitis C in dogs, and signs of a battle between viruses and bacteria in our mouths. When the movie Contagion came out in September, I took a look in Slate at how realistic its story of a new world-wide pandemic was. I found it real enough to be very scary. And in an eerie bit of timing, this fall scientists developed a strain of bird flu that some researchers worry could make the movie a reality.

At the other end of the spectrum from bacteria and viruses is the human brain, those 100 billion neurons that make the universe aware of itself. There seems to be no end of revelatory research coming out of neuroscience and psychology. At the World Science Festival, I talked with three scientists doing extraordinary work on the mystery of sleep (you can watch the video here). In my own stories, I explored genes for language, teen brains, music in the brain, the neuroscience of smiles, how our brains make us capable of both war and peace, and the minds of Neanderthals. A lot of the pieces I wrote first appeared in the New York Times or magazines, but some of them have gotten a new lease on life. I published a new ebook in December, More Brain Cuttings, and my feature on the possibility of uploading our brains to achieve immortality was selected for The Best of American Science Writing 2011.

In 2011, it wasn’t just new science that was in the news. The nature of science was, too. Over the course of 2011, some high-profile papers came under fierce criticism, including arsenic-based life and a link between viruses and chronic fatigue syndrome. These studies prompted a debate about how science gets done in the first place, and how some of it then gets “de-discovered.” I pondered the nature of de-discovery in the New York Times in July, and the emergence of a more transparent discussion of science in Slate.

A lot of that discussion happened on Twitter. Twitter was just one of many new media that became more widespread this year. And just as scientists were getting comfortable with these channels of communication, science writers were too. I spent a fair amount of time in 2011 experimenting with different formats. On Twitter, I went after some egregiously bad science with a hashtag: #Greenfieldism. When I wasn’t on Twitter, I was often on Facebook, Tumblr, and Google+. Each medium has different strengths, I’ve found, which only emerge after playing around with it for a while. Google+ has spurred some fascinating discussions; Twitter is a fast way to spread links. I spent some time working with the folks at Radiolab this year, including the newly minted Macarthur genius Jad Abumrad. It was fascinating to see them turn spoken words into symphonies, such as this episode entitled “Patient Zero.” Another form of storytelling can be found at Story Collider, where people tell tales live in front of an audience. An invitation to be a part of a Story Collider evening led me to talk about how a trip to a war zone made me realize just how deeply science speaks to me. And at the end of the year I published Science Ink, a book born out of a blog-based obsession with science tattoos.

It was a strange year indeed when a traditional book felt like a fresh new format. And it makes me eager for the surprises waiting for us in 2012.

[Image: Wikipedia]

In this week’s issue of Nature, I write about the revolution that technology is bringing to the world of books. It’s a subject that’s been on my mind a lot recently. I’ve been experimenting with e-books myself, and I’ve been giving some talks about them (I’ll be helping to lead a discussion at Science Online 2012 in January).

My essay is accompanied by this funny picture. The guy looks a lot like me, but, strictly speaking, it should be my wife sitting atop the pile of books, with seagulls for company:

In the summer of 2010, on a tiny island off the coast of Maine, I saw the future of books. I had been invited to teach a writing course at Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island, a beautiful bulge of rock covered in scrub and herring-gull nests. During a break at the beach with my family, my wife finished reading her book with typical supersonic speed. She craved another, so decided to experiment with her new iPhone.

She tapped the screen. In seconds, an e-book had streamed invisibly through the air into her hand. Swiping her thumb like a windshield wiper, she soon finished it. She tapped the screen for another. Out of the ether, another e-book appeared.

Now I see, I thought. Everything was in place for a revolution in how we read and write. And the pace of that revolution has surpassed my expectations. Since Apple launched its iBooks application in April 2010, some 180 million books have been downloaded. Analysts estimate that Amazon will have sold 314 million e-books for the Kindle in 2011 alone. The radical change extends far beyond sales volume: the e-book ecosystem allows writers to reach readers in ways that did not exist before.

You can read the rest here. (Sub. required.)

Eric Michael Johnson, an historian of science, is also the writer behind an excellent blog, “The Primate Diaries.” The other day he gave me a call to talk about science writing. He put together a two-part Q&A that he published today (part one and part two) that ranges from the science writing in Moby Dick to the microscopic virtues of Twitter. I was particularly flattered to get a portrait done by Nathaniel Gold. Check it out!

Recently I blogged about a new strain of potentially dangerous flu that evolved during experiments in the Netherlands and Wisconsin. There I tried to counter the misconception that scientists had intentionally concocted this particular strain. Because these new flus actually evolved pretty quickly in laboratories, we now know we should take seriously the possibility that this transformation may happen in the outside world someday.

But there’s a second issue at play with this new virus: should the world get to see its genome?

As Martin Enserink reported last month, both teams of scientists have submitted their papers for publication. Normally, such a paper might include the entire genome of the new viruses. This was a touchy subject, so the papers went under review by the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB).

Today, the editors at Science passed on the NSABB’s reccommendations. I’ll quote them here in full:

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) made the following
recommendations regarding the publication of two manuscripts on highly pathogenic avian
influenza A/H5N1:

1. Neither manuscript should be published with complete data and experimental details.

2. Conclusions of the manuscripts be published but without experimental details and
mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.

a) Text should be added describing: 1) the goals of the research, 2) the potential
benefits to public health (including informing surveillance efforts, pandemic
preparedness activities, and countermeasure development and stockpiling efforts), 3)
the risk assessments performed prior to research initiation, 4) the ongoing biosafety
oversight, containment, and occupational health measures, 5) biosecurity practices
and adherence to select agent regulation, and 6) that addressing biosafety, biosecurity,
and occupational health is part of the responsible conduct of all life sciences research.

b) The NSABB should develop a statement that explains their review process and
rationale for the recommendations. This statement will be provided to the journals to
consider for publication.

c) The USG should encourage the authors to submit a special
communication/commentary letter to the journals regarding the dual use research
issue.

In essence: “Delete the recipe and the mutations.”

The editors at Science released a statement of their own, which I’ll quote in part:

The resulting virus is sensitive to antivirals and to certain vaccine candidates and knowledge about it could well be essential for speeding the development of new treatments to combat this lethal form of influenza. The NSABB has emphasized the need to prevent the details of the research from falling into the wrong hands. We strongly support the work of the NSABB and the importance of its mission for advancing science to serve society. At the same time, however, Science has concerns about withholding potentially important public‐health information from responsible influenza researchers. Many scientists within the influenza community have a bona fide need to know the details of this research in order to protect the public, especially if they currently are working with related strains of the virus.

Science editors will be evaluating how best to proceed. Our response will be heavily dependent upon the further steps taken by the U.S. government to set forth a written, transparent plan to ensure that any information that is omitted from the publication will be provided to all those responsible scientists who request it, as part of their legitimate efforts to improve public health and safety.

Science supports the 2003 joint Statement on Scientific Publication and Security, published in Science, Nature and PNAS. The statement notes that “open publication brings benefits not only to public health but also to efforts to combat terrorism.” It further emphasizes the need to publish “manuscripts of high quality, in sufficient detail to permit reproducibility,” and it recognizes that there may be occasions when a paper “should be modified, or not be published.”

In essence, “We haven’t decided yet. It would be nice if you let us know how responsible scientists could get hold of the data.”

Vincent Racaniello, a virologist at Columbia University, thinks taking this path is a bad idea. Here’s how he put it to me when I sent him the statements:

It doesn’t make any sense to publish Fouchier’s paper without complete data and experimental details. The point of a science paper is to enable others to duplicate the findings. Are we going to set a new precedent, where security matters override the reason for publication? This is setting a very dangerous precedent for virology and biological sciences in general.

I disagree with the NSABB recommendations, because they have no scientific basis…one cannot conclude that the mutations selected by Fouchier [the head of the Dutch research team] will have effects on transmission of the virus among humans. I understand that if you publish the plans for a nuclear weapon, that may enable a terrorist to make one, but the Foucher finding doesn’t enable anything except more experiments. And that is why the paper should be published – to allow virologists to extend his findings and determine what controls transmission of H5N1 viruses. Often the best experiments are done by scientific unknowns who take an interest in a problem and apply a fresh view. If you restrict dissemination of this information, you are limiting our eventual understanding of the problem.

Update: Looks like Racaniello’s concerns have fallen upon deaf ears. Martin Enserink reports that the virus researchers have decided to redact the contested parts of the papers, which are being considered by Science and Nature.

Last year I decided to play in the ebook sandbox. I brought together some of my favorite pieces about the brain in an anthology I entitled Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind. I teamed up with the publishers George Scott and Charles Nix, and we produced an ebook.

Along the way, we learned a lot. I recounted some of the lessons in this piece for the Atlantic, and others in this conversation with the writer Steve Silberman. Suffice to say, publishing ebooks is by no means a frictionless utopia for writers. Nevertheless it remains strangely addictive. Perhaps we writers get the same jolt of dopamine that readers get when they tap a glass screen and are rewarded with a new book.

It just so happens I now have some new material to keep fueling my addition. I’ve continued to write about the brain, and recently I selected another crop of favorites. This new ebook has made it down the digital assembly line, and is now available for $7.99: More Brain Cuttings: Further Exporations of the Mind (Amazon, Barnes & Noble).

You’ll find a range of subjects here. How a 100 billion cells use 100 trillion connections to create a working brain. How the ringing in our ears may tell us important things about the nature of consciousness. How dancing cockatoos may reveal how we’re pre-adapted to love music.

I hope you enjoy the book. The brain unfolds like a flower; the more I have explored neuroscience, the more it has rewarded me with new stories. I expect there will be many more to come.

The news these days is grim for the science-minded. The governor of Texas, who’d also like to be your president, says that Texas schools teach creationism. (They don’t, although Perry–who appointed a creationist to chair the State Board of Education–may wish otherwise.) Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke passionately on HBO about the country’s retreat from dreams.

So I found some small comfort in an email I got from Patrick House, a Stanford graduate student, about my recent post on the cunning ways of the parasite Toxoplasma–Toxo to its friends and admirers.

I’m the first author on the new Toxo paper. I wanted to send you an email that hopefully cheers your day — I’m getting a Ph.D. now in Neuroscience at Stanford, working exclusively on Toxo — and I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.

I did my undergrad work in Philosophy (with some neuroscience thrown in) and was perpetually fascinated by Toxo ever since your Discover article on Parasites a decade ago led me tangentially to it and then — of course — Parasite Rex. I met with Robert, spoke to him about free will, mind control, and the dissolution of the boundaries between the two and voilà — welcome to Stanford.

My previous blog post was about the evolution of whales, focusing on the work of Erich Fitzgerald, an Australian paleontologist. The first time I wrote about Fitzgerald’s work, in 2006, he sprang a similar surprise on me.

It is a great honour to know that you have written such an informative and articulate commentary about my research. I first heard of your work via a lecture given on whale evolution while I was an undergraduate zoology student at the University of Melbourne, and the class lecturer cited your book “At the Water’s Edge”. The topic of whale evolution, fired my imagination and curiosity, and I rushed out the next day to buy “At the Water’s Edge”. I have now read it twice, and it is undoubtedly one of the finest popular accounts of what we now know about cetacean evolution. Your book is at least partly responsible for leading me into the fascinating world of whale evolutionary biology and played no small role in leading me to my current research on the origins and evolution of baleen whales.

So, to you science writers out there: I don’t know how much of a difference we can make to the country as a whole. But you nevertheless have great powers: you can plant seeds, and grow scientists.

[Image: sjg at Flickr via Creative Commons]

Over the past week or so, I’ve been playing around with Google+, Google’s answer to Facebook and Twitter. You can see my posts here.

Whenever a new social media system rolls out, I give it a test-drive. Sometimes I end up in a ditch. Here is my MySpace page, last updated three years ago and now lingering on like a time capsule.

Here is my abandoned Quora page.  I asked one question: why does Chewbacca used a crossbow instead of–you know–a laser or something more effective?After I got some answers, I lost all interest.

For the most part, though, I try to make social media part of my life. My rational explanation for this is that, as a writer, I ought to head for the virtual spaces where people congregate and look for things to read. Of course, I’m also lured by the addictive procrastination. It sometimes feels like channel-surfing on a social cable television. Whatever the true cause, I’ve ended up with an author web site (old school!), this blog, a Facebook profile, a Facebook author page, a Twitter account, a Tumblr thing-a-ma-bob, a LinkedIn account…and other things I’m sure I’m forgetting.

When Google+  rolled out, I had a bad feeling. Google Buzz was a total disaster–there was no point to it, it was confusing to use, and it pushed its way into your privacy in mysterious ways. So I didn’t think Google understood social networks.

So far, I have to say, Google+ has avoided most of the mistakes of Google Buzz, and it’s borrowed (or improved on) many of the nicest things in Twitter, Facebook, and even blogs. For example, one of my favorite things about this blog is getting comments from readers. The drawback is that there are several steps to entering, reading, and responding to those comments. Getting back to commenters ends up on my to-do list. Trust me, you don’t want to be on my to-do list. It’s a graveyard.

On Google+, commenting is astonishingly frictionless. It feels much more like having a conversation. Here’s one example: having read an interesting article in Wired on feedback loops, I riffed on it, discussing feedback loops among genes and proteins. Immediately, it sparked a fascinating discussion about the history of cybernetics and much more. Twitter has some of that spontaneity, but its 140-character limit can feel like a straightjacket.

I wonder if Google has some soul-killing plans for Google+ once they open it up to all comers. (You still need an invitation, but these aren’t hard to come by. Ask me.) For now, I’m just enjoying the experiment.