The scientists argue for a safe operating space for the planet, which they propose should be bounded by limits on the carbon dioxide in the air and other factors. That way, we’ll stay away from dangerous thresholds and be able to pass on a healthy planet to our children.

I write about this concept today in Yale Environment 360. Nature, which is publishing the concept today, has posted it and a number of commentaries here.

Working on this story got me thinking (again) about the state of journalism. Because I’m teaching a class on writing and I’m a visiting scholar at NYU’s journalism school, I’m getting a bit meta . And there’s certainly plenty of food for metathought these days.

For example, last week a new site called Futurity was launched by a network of universities. The site publishes a selection of science-related press releases from the universities. As you can see, the site is well-organized and designed. As newspapers close science sections, you can’t help but look at Futurity and wonder if this is the future. And, in fact, Curtis Brainerd wondered just that in a piece he wrote last week for the Columbia Journalism Review.

Futurity justifies their existence as follows:

The way people share information is changing quickly and daily. Blogs and social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are just a taste of what’s to come. It will be easier than ever to share content instantly with people around the globe, allowing universities to reach new audiences and engage a new generation in discovery.

Equally significant has been the recent decline in science and research coverage by traditional news outlets. For decades, universities have partnered with journalists to communicate their work to the public, but that relationship is evolving. At the same time, research universities are among the most credible and trusted institutions in society, and now have the ability to deliver their news and information directly to readers without barriers or gatekeepers.

In an increasingly complex world, the public needs access to clear, reliable research news. Futurity does the work of gathering that news. Think of it as a snapshot of where the world is today and where it’s headed tomorrow. Discover the future. [Emphasis mine]

I don’t need to tell you that you should read everything I say about Futurity with the proviso that I am a reporter, and that I make my living in large part writing for magazines and newspapers. I do not write press releases. But, that being said, I would submit to you that for a university seeking to get out the message about its research, this argument about a decline of science coverage is not really an argument at all.

People who read pieces on Futurity will not come to it by watching television or by listening to the radio. They will come to it on the Internet, either as regular Futurity readers, as curious Googlers, or as readers of other sites following links. And on the web, arguments about declining coverage lose their traction because the same article that appears in a single publication can be read by millions and millions of people who do not actually subscribe to that publication.

What Futurity does do, however, is allow universities and research institutions to go straight to the reader. Originally, press information officers at these places wrote press releases, which, as the name implies, were things intended to get the attention of the press in the hopes that they’d cover something you’re doing. Futurity calls what it publishes “news,” but it’s still being written by employees of the organizations that are the subject of that news.

I have great respect for some public information officers; the stuff they write is, in some cases, wonderfully clear and informative. There’s good information to be had on Futurity. But I always treat press releases as a starting point. I do not, for example, assume that a piece of research is actually important just because a press release says it is. Imagine a press release with the headline, “Minor study published that is really not all it claims to be.” Such things just don’t exist.

As a result, press releases and university-penned news items have a serious shortcoming as “news.” Consider this story I just wrote. You can read the press release from the University of Minnesota (the home institution of a co-author) here. There are lots of quotes from people. All those people are co-authors. The press release quotes nobody who is not a co-author.

When I wrote my article, I interviewed several co-authors at length, and I also got in touch with a number of outside experts. Some liked it. Some didn’t. I mean, they really didn’t. They thought the whole idea of a safe operating space for civilization was meaningless from the start. Thus, my article was about a debate engendered by a new idea. These sorts of debates–with plenty of sharp elbows–are at the heart of the scientific process. But I don’t see how Futurity can reflect it.

I’m sure Futurity is here to stay, and so it will be up to readers to decide what kind of writing they want. Here, dear reader, is my sales pitch.

I deeply appreciate all the comments and emails people sent to ask me to reconsider my decision to part ways wit Bloggingheads. But it’s not as if I’ll be vanishing from sight. In fact, I plan to explore new ways to write and talk about science (details to come).

We writers don’t disappear so easily.

I loved the inventiveness of the format. I loved how a conversation could be embedded in any other site. I loved the way people would just talk for an hour rather than squeeze their points down to meaningless sound bites. And so even though it was just a volunteer gig, I dove in. It was took a while for me to get used to the medium–staring into the glass eye of a camera and pretending it was a human head just doesn’t come naturally to me. And crackly cell phone connections didn’t help. But on the best of occasions it was fun. It let me expand what I used to do only on the printed page. I had interesting talks with all sorts of interesting people, such as Craig Venter, Neil Shubin, and my brother.

But now my experiment’s over. This post is an explanation of why, and how this turn of events has gotten me thinking about the future of science in new media.

Last month Bloggingheads posted a talk between Paul Nelson, a creationist, and Ronald Numbers, a historian of science. They even put the talk on a Saturday, which they set aside for science. (Hence the name Science Saturday.)

In my job as a science writer, I try my best to convey an accurate picture of where science is at the moment. That means I do not write about just anything. I write about research and ideas that have held up under scrutiny. Sometimes that means writing about an important new development in a line of research that has emerged from peer review. Sometimes that means writing about a fierce debate between scientists who all have made a lot of important discoveries on the topic. It doesn’t mean writing about creationism–or medical quackery, or any other non-science–in a way that implies it really has scientific merit. I have sometimes blogged about creationists, but chiefly to explain why scientists do not take them seriously.

I brought these standards from my writing to my work at Bloggingheads. So I was not happy to find a creationist holding forth there (and never even being challenged about a 6,000-year-old Earth). Did this mean that the people who run Bloggingheads consider creationism real science worth discussing–with a creationist at that?

The answers I got were various and murky. It had been a failed experiment, I was told, although I couldn’t figure out what a success would have looked like. I was also told the whole thing didn’t really matter, since young Earth creationism is so far beyond the pale that it doesn’t pose a threat of being taken seriously. Of course, surveys show that actually a lot of Americans are young Earth creationists. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that it didn’t matter. I couldn’t figure out why Bloggingheads would bother with him, when the world of credible and interesting science is so wide.

I was assured that this would never happen again, so I decided to continue recording talks for Bloggingheads. And then it did happen again.

Last week the linguist John McWhorter spoke to Michael Behe. Behe, like Paul Nelson, is part of the Discovery Institute, your ultimate destination for Intelligent Design–a k a the progeny of creationism. So now Bloggingheads had two people from the Discovery Institute on in the space of a few weeks. Behe has written a couple books on intelligent design, in which he makes various claims about what evolution can’t do. He tells us it can’t produce complex biology; it can’t even account for drug resistance in the past few decades in malaria parasites. So the great Intelligent Designer who shall not speak his/her/its name must be responsible.

Behe has published his arguments in non-academic books–the sort I write. He does not have a trail of peer-reviewed papers to back it up. The closest he’s got is a single paper on a computer model he published  five years ago, which doesn’t even mention intelligent design. What’s more, it was promptly and effectively rebutted by the evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch for making all sorts of unwarranted assumptions about biology. The paper has been virtually uncited since. In other words, Behe has not opened up a new field in which other scientists have published lots of new research.

Instead, biologists point out basic errors in Behe’s description of evolution. Reviewing his latest book in Science, University of Wisconsin evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll wrote, “Behe relies on invalid assertions about how genes and proteins evolve and how proteins interact, and he completely ignores a huge amount of experimental data that directly contradicts his faulty premises.”

McWhorter, however, decided to have Behe on and tell him what an important book he had written.

I lodged another complaint, and got more various and murky answers. It was produced by someone else on a weekday rather than Saturday, so it didn’t count. McWhorter didn’t think the talk would go the way it did, I was told, and so he had it taken down.

I thought that was bad decision, too. But now the conversation has been put back up. You can read more about all this over at Cosmic Variance, home of Sean Carroll–the Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll, who also did Bloggingheads.

As you can see from Carroll’s post, he was not happy with things either. So he and I talked to Robert Wright and other Bloggingheads people today. I had expected that I’d get a clear sense of what had happened over the past month at Bloggingheads, and what sort of plan would be put in place to avoid it happening again. I imagined some kind of editorial oversight of the sort that exists at the places where I regularly write about science. I didn’t get it.

My standard for taking part in any forum about science is pretty simple. All the participants must rely on peer-reviewed science that has direct bearing on the subject at hand, not specious arguments that may sound fancy but are scientifically empty. I believe standards like this one are crucial if we are to have productive discussions about the state of science and its effects on our lives.

This is not Blogginghead’s standard, at least as I understand it now. And so here we must part ways.

I’ve written this post mainly just to put my decision in words. It may matter to very few people, and if most readers of the Loom have skipped this post to await some juicy science, I understand entirely. But the arc of this two-year experiment has got me thinking a bit about where the public discussion of science is going these days.

We have some wonderful new tools to tinker with, to build funky new devices. We can build communities in which lots of people can write, talk, read, and listen to discussions of science. And we can even expand those communities through linking and embedding and other kinds of mental infections.

These tools may look pretty and shiny, but they don’t really have any sort of new spirit built into them. We use them as we see fit. The problems that have made me part ways with Bloggingheads (and Carroll too) aren’t very different from the problems that science has long had in op-ed pages in newspapers. There have been some excellent essays about science in op-ed sections, but the fact is that they can also be very unhealthy for even the most basic facts in science.

A far more extreme example of old spirits and new tools is the Huffington Post. It has been celebrated as the future of journalism. But it’s a dumping ground for New Age quackery–the same quackery that Arianna Huffington was pushing long before she started her eponymous site.

I’m still going to play with the new tools that come my way. But I am going to think a lot more about the spirit in which those tools are being used.

Update: Robert Wright has left a comment, where he responds to my post. He claims that both I and Sean misrepresented our phone call with him. We didn’t. Note that in his comment he refers to a policy he laid out a year ago. He doesn’t say what that policy is. I’ll add a more detailed (some might say tedious) response to the end of his.

Along the way, we talked a lot about words. Time and again, as I reviewed the assignments from the students, I came across words would fit comfortably in a textbook or a scientific paper, but, like an invasive insect, wreaked havoc when they were introduced into a piece of writing intended for the wide world. This is a problem I’ve observed across the scientific board, from professors I’ve edited in magazines to the science majors who made up the majority of students in my class. If you talk to them face-to-face, they will never say, “I utilized my spear gun.” But somehow they can’t avoid using utilize when they are writing, when use will do just fine.

As the week unfolded, I built up a list of words I came across in assignments (and which I have seen many times before) on the classroom whiteboard. I declared them banned from the class. When I twittered about my decree, I got some groans of agreement from assorted writers and readers. But there were also some protests from scientists. I banned marine environment if ocean could take its place, for example, only to be informed that not all marine environments are oceans.

I still say that in the overwhelming majority of cases, there’s a solid word that can take the place of a scientific term. What’s most important about pushing people to use plain English is that they will have an easier time expressing the passion and poetry of the scientific life. You won’t find marine environment in one of the best books ever written about marine environments.

Here is a far-from-complete list of words to be banned…

Breakthrough (unless you are covering Principia Mathematica)

Captive observation

Community ecology (this ban does not extend to the subject of community ecology)

Context

Demographic leveling

Impact (verb)

Intermediate host

Interaction

Marine environment

Material properties

Missing link (don’t get me started…)

Molecular systematists

Morphology

Non-marine environment

Paradigm shift

Phylogenetics

Predator-Prey Relationship

Processes

Utilize

I’m sure some readers can add more to this list. Next summer I will probably write up a list and hand it out at the start of class.

Update, 6/18 11:20 am: Thanks for all the conversation, both in the comments and on Twitter. It’s made me realize that I should divide my banned words into a couple categories. Some of them, like utilize, are science words that should not be allowed to escape scientific journals. But others, like breakthrough, are words that both scientists and non-scientists alike may be tempted to use like steroids, to artificially boost their writing. These words often end up being just wrong, and in some cases–like referring to a preliminary experiment in mice as a miraculous cure–they can be cruel by raising hopes in the sick that may later be dashed.

In a nutshell, George Will wrote some columns starting in February in which he claimed that scientific evidence shows that all the heat-trapping carbon dioxide we’re putting in the atmosphere is having no effect on the planet. He claimed as proof that global ice levels had not changed in thirty years and that in fact there has been no global warming since 1998, just to name two.

The Loom and many other blogs pointed out why these claims were in error. Will ignores the fact that climate change is a noisy, long-term process. Today it is cooler at my house than it was yesterday. That does not mean that next week I will wake up to find snow on my doorstep. If you look at the annual mean temperature of the planet, you can cherry-pick one year, such as 1998, in order to make the false claim that there is no global warming. Of course, you could just as easily pick 1999, in which case the same logic would force you to conclude that there has been a staggering increase in temperature. But that’s not how climate scientists actually study global warming. They look at long term patterns, such as the red line in this graph from NASA, which represents the five-year mean since 1880. And when they do, they recognize a long-term trend of rising temperatures.

This somehow slipped through the multiple levels of fact-checking carried out by the editorial page staff at the Washington Post. Nor could they catch the other errors Will made on the science. So my fellow blogger Chris Mooney and the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization made it easy for them, by writing a column and a letter respectively, to set things straight. The Post even saw fit to run both.

They did not, however, issue any correction on Will’s claims. Ombudsman Andrew Alexander, who claimed that there had been fact-checking on multiple levels, did acknowledge things might have been handled a wee bit better, and then offered this sunny thought for the future:

On its news pages, it can recommit to reporting on climate change that is authoritative and deep. On the editorial pages, it can present a mix of respected and informed viewpoints. And online, it can encourage dialogue that is robust, even if it becomes bellicose.  [Emphasis mine]

As far as I can tell, Alexander’s wish is being ignored. Today Will has published a column about recent negotiations on controlling carbon emissions. He considers them a bunch of empty promises, which seems to be just fine with Will, because there is no global warming to control anyway. Here’s how Will closes his latest piece:

When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon “young Americans” to “get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon,” another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”

Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S. government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was dying.

In earlier days, Will liked to claim the World Meteorological Organization as an authority when he wrote that there has been no global warming since 1998. Now that the World Meteorological Organization has set things straight, he’s claiming a columnist at National Review as his authority. That’s quite an upgrade.

The most urgent question today’s column raises is not about Will, but about how media organizations decide how to present science to the public. If the Post’s editorial page editors really do believe in fact-checking and in “respected and informed viewpoints,” I can only conclude that they slept in very late this morning.

Update: A commenter below accuses me of intellectual dishonesty for not showing a graph with a longer time-scale, which, I guess, would show that there’s no link between between carbon and climate. Ummm…like this one? (CO2 levels as black curve, temperature grey. Source pdf.)

This morning I’m updating a few posts on the Loom to take into account a few interesting developments that happened last week:

1. The disappearing news remains disappeared.  On July 10, I described how a wretched article about sex seemingly vanished from a newspaper’s archives after blogger/columnist/gadfly Ben Goldacre showed just how wretched it was. Goldacre now tells us that on July 13 the Telegraph published a very odd correction:

Owing to an editing error, our report “Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists” (June 23) wrongly stated that research presented at the recent BPS conference by Sophia Shaw found that women who drink alcohol are more likely to be raped. In fact, the research found the opposite. We apologise for our error. 

Wow. Speaking from my own experience, I can say it’s bad enough to have a newspaper run a correction on an article of mine for a misspelled name or a figure with an extra zero tacked on the end. But turning around the result of a study to its precise opposite–that’s truly embarrassing.

It is good that the Telegraph posted a correction. It’s odd that it took three weeks for them to do so, though–especially since Goldacre nailed them in the Guardian back on July 4, interviewing Sophie Shaw to show how wrong the article was. I have to agree with Goldacre that the correction, as stark as it is, actually only scratches the surface of all that was wrong with the story. At least, I think it does. I can’t actually read the original article on the Telegraph web site. As I blogged pre-swan-ride, the Telegraph had yanked the story, although they hadn’t yanked the title from its search engine results. (Screen grab) Now you can’t even find the title. So now the newspaper has published a correction to a story that, on the Internet at least, no longer exists.

I think that newspapers should not follow this example if they want to thrive in the 21st century. Newspapers will have to find ways to distinguish themselves from other sources of information online. While they may have to set aside some of the traditional defining features (like ink), there are many things that will translate well into the future. One of them is a clear, reliable paper trail. But to preserve that trail, newspapers will have to resist the urge to hit the delete key.

2. Firefly Folk: Last month I wrote a piece about sex and death among fireflies in the New York Times. I got an email from the folksinger Christine Lavin, explaining how the article inspired her to write a song, “A Firefly’s Life,” which will appear on her next album. I’ve taken the liberty of reprinting a few lines from the song (she sent me a recording of the song, but I don’t know if it’s kosher for me to post that too…):

There’s 2,000 species of fireflies
That have been discovered so far
You can tell by the pattern of our blinky butts
Exactly what species we are
There’s Pyractomena Angulata
Photinus Ignatus
And my my gang Photinus Greeni
I’m a flirty Photi girl waiting for
that special flashy fun guy

Greeni and fun guy do indeed rhyme.

3. Synthetic Biology Meets Big Oil: In January I wrote an article for Yale Environment 360 about getting fuel from engineered microbes instead of the ground. Advocates for synthetic biology-derived fuel claim that it will be better for the environment than ordinary gasoline, although, as I reported, there’s very little research on that question and there are good reasons to be concerned (such as the impact of sugar farming on water). One of the people I interviewed was human genome pioneer Craig Venter, who was leading an effort to grow fuel-rich algae. Last week Venter’s Synthetic Genomics entered into a major deal with Exxon potentially worth $600 million to develop these sun-loving bugs.

This deal is, of course, no guarantee that synthbio fuels will scale up as hoped, or that they will have be an environmental panacea. And it’s worth bearing in mind that other petro-giants like Shell and British Petroleum also made a lot of noise about getting into the business of alternative energy, only to drop out in recent months. So the news is not a development in itself, but just another item to track.

4. Link Love For Science Tattoos: Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish took note of the science tattoo emporium while I was gone, which triggered a tsunami of email from scientists, grad students, and science afficianadoes aficionados, all showing off tattoos of their own. August 6 will be the two-year anniversary of my initial call for science tattoos, and there seems to be no sign of the response ending soon.

One big difference was over high school science education. I just can’t see any long-term solution that is superior to doing a better job of teaching high school kids about science and getting them to feel that it’s part of their lives. Part of this involves getting really good teachers out into all schools, not just the ones surrounded by McMansions. Part of this involves a program like the one I mentioned in the bloggingheads talk, called FIRST, which was developed by Dean Kamen as a kind of robot-building Superbowl. And guess what? Kamen actually fills football stadiums with kids, and those kids are more likely to do better in school, get into science and engineering, etc.

Frankly, I don’t buy the counter-argument that there are lots of people with advanced degrees who don’t believe in vaccines, etc., and so “just more science education” won’t matter much. Let’s really unpack what we mean by “advanced degrees,” really. I know plenty of people who went to top colleges, and then on to top law schools or got higher degrees in literature or such–and the last time they took a real science class was in high school. It’s not as if the science seeped through the walls of the chemistry or biology departments and infused them while they were listening to lectures about Derrida or modern politics.

Now–if I could just find that $50 billion I had set aside for improving high school science education…I know it’s around here somewhere…

Chris will be coming to my neck of the woods (New Haven) on Tuesday, July 21, to give a talk. I’ll be introducing him. Details here.

The sixth World Conference of Science Journalists is underway in London. I can’t say it’s going to change my life, as I missed out on the previous five, but I did notice that it has attracted the attention of a bunch of medics with strong views on the state of science journalism today.

“A few of us felt they were might [sic] not adequately address some of the key problems in their profession, which has deteriorated to the point where they present a serious danger to public health,” according to the Bad Science website of Dr Ben Goldacre, who is turning into the bête noir of science journalists. The medics met in a pub in London last night to explain why the “mainstream media’s science coverage is broken, misleading, dangerous, lazy, venal and silly”. All three speakers are gainfully employed by the public sector so they don’t actually have to worry too much about the sort of pressures and financial constraints the mainstream media are under. But they nevertheless condescended to offer some advice on the sort of “best practice guidelines” I should be following, for which I suppose I should be eternally grateful.

But their arrogance is not new. Medical doctors in particular have always had a lofty attitude to the media’s coverage of their profession, stemming no doubt from the God-like stance they take towards their patients. Although I wouldn’t go as far as to say their profession is broken, dangerous, lazy, venal and silly – not yet anyway.

Unfortunately, as Goldacre pointed out, Connor got the date wrong and didn’t bother to check to see if the other two speakers were medics. They’re not.

It’s certainly true that the mainstream media are under plenty of “pressures and financial constraints” these days. But that can’t be an excuse for lousy science reporting–ie, distorting new research, hyping findings way beyond what they support, or writing straight off of press releases. In fact, just the opposite: professional science writers should strive to be most excellent if they want people to continue to read them faithfully. And they have to toughen their hides enough to be able to handle criticism from scientists themselves. If those criticisms are wrong, show why. If they are on-target, science writers must swallow the bitter medicine.

This morning brought an example of how not to cope with these changes to the media landscape. On June 23 the Daily Telegraph’s science correspondent Richard Alleyne wrote an article with the headline, “Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists.”

Goldacre decided to call up the scientist who supposedly made this claim (I thought that’s what reporters do, not just bête noirs). She was furious at the distortion. Goldacre reports his conversation in a July 4 Bad Science post and in his column at the Guardian.

I decided to check out the original article. But I couldn’t find it. If you type in Alleyne and rape into the Telegraph’s search window, you get the story as the top results. Click on the story, and you are delivered to a url that looks promising:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/5603052/Women-who-dress-provocatively-more-likely-to-be-raped-claim-scientists.html

But once you get to that page, all you get to read is, “Sorry, we cannot find the page you are looking for.”

No correction. No clarification. No apology.

I then hunted around on some online news databases–the databases that future generations will turn to to research the news of our time. I can find Richard Alleyne’s stories at the Telegraph from both before and after the rape story. But not the rape story itself.

It has, as far as I can tell, been disappeared.

(I dropped a note to the Telegraph to ask what happened. I even found Richard Alleyne on Twitter and dropped him a note too. No response so far. I will post anything I receive.)

Clearly, the bête noirs are being listened to. And that is good. But pretending that the objects of their ire never existed? Mmm, not so good.

Update: Nepostistic hat tip to brother Ben, Internet archaeologist extraordinaire, who dredged up a copy of the full article on another blog, which compares it to the original press release. Not quite down the memory hole yet!

Update #2, July 22: Goldacre now tells us that on July 13 the Telegraph published a very odd correction:

Owing to an editing error, our report “Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists” (June 23) wrongly stated that research presented at the recent BPS conference by Sophia Shaw found that women who drink alcohol are more likely to be raped. In fact, the research found the opposite. We apologise for our error. 

Wow. Speaking from my own experience, I can say it’s bad enough to have a newspaper run a correction on an article of mine for a misspelled name or a figure with an extra zero tacked on the end. But turning around the result of a study to its precise opposite–that’s truly embarrassing.

It is good that the Telegraph posted a correction. It’s odd that it took three weeks for them to do so, though–especially since Goldacre nailed them in the Guardian back on July 4, interviewing Sophie Shaw to show how wrong the article was. I have to agree with Goldacre that the correction, as stark as it is, actually only scratches the surface of all that was wrong with the story. At least, I think it does. I can’t actually read the original article on the Telegraph web site. As I blogged pre-swan-ride, the Telegraph had yanked the story, although they hadn’t yanked the title from its search engine results. (Screen grab) Now you can’t even find the title. So now the newspaper has published a correction to a story that, on the Internet at least, no longer exists.

I think that newspapers should not follow this example if they want to thrive in the 21st century. Newspapers will have to find ways to distinguish themselves from other sources of information online. While they may have to set aside some of the traditional defining features (like ink), there are many things that will translate well into the future. One of them is a clear, reliable paper trail. But to preserve that trail, newspapers will have to resist the urge to hit the delete key.

[Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carbonnyc/ / CC BY 2.0]

What the nose knows: The science of scent in everyday life by Avery Gilbert

Bad science by Ben Goldacre

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science by Richard Holmes

Decoding the heavens: Solving the mystery of the world’s first computer by Jo Marchant

The drunkard’s walk: How randomness rules our lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Your inner fish: The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor by Neil Shubin

Also, as I mentioned earlier, Three Quarks Daily has established a prize for the best science blog post, judged by linguist Steven Pinker. Congratulations to the winners, including Discover’s own Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait.

[Image: Wikipedia]

Last month I scrambled to write a story about the evolution of swine flu for the New York Times. I talked to some of the top experts on the evolution of viruses who were, at that very moment, analyzing the genetic material in samples of the virus isolated around the world. One scientist, whom I reached at home, said, “Sure, I’ve got a little time. I’m just making some coffee while my computer crunches some swine flu. What’s up?”

All of the scientists were completely open with me. They didn’t wave me off because they had to wait until their results were published in a big journal. In fact, they were open with the whole world, posting all their results in real-time on a wiki. So everyone who wanted to peruse their analysis could see how it developed as more data emerged and as they used different methods to analyze it.

Now, a little over a month later, they’re publishing their results in the journal Nature. Normally we press folks would get a press release about the paper a week before publication, and it would be under strict embargo till it appeared in the journal. This morning, however, I got a press release pointing me to the published paper. And while Nature normally requires you to subscribe to read a paper, the flu paper is published under a Creative Commons license, which means anyone can get it and use it under the license’s terms.

While that’s all very exciting, the paper itself is an anxiety-triggering read. The new swine flu (which the authors now call S-IOV S-OIV) is only distantly related to other known swine flus, which means that there are a lot of flu viruses circulating around about which we know very little. And, as I mentioned in my article, it had already entered the human population several months before it came to light earlier this spring. Be sure to check out figure 1 (I’m inserting it below from the wiki–thanks, Creative Commons!), which shows how lots of bird, swine, and human season flu viruses mixed together to produce the new beast. The authors warn that the pattern of evolution they see is the sort of pattern the big flu pandemics followed when they emerged in the past.

With this sort of urgent situation at hand, the patient process of old-fashioned science publishing may have to be upgraded.

[Image: CDC]