I had only planned to do one talk at this year’s Science Online London 2010 conference, but the second day had some “unconference” slots where people could suggest their own talks. John Timmer from Ars Technica wanted to run a session about how bloggers with a decent readership deal with comments, and I agreed. We wrangled in Alok Jha from the Guardian, a paper whose website is no stranger to fiery commentary, and the organisers melded our session with a suggestion by Julia Heathcote Anderson, who wanted to talk about how we can fix the reputation of scientists online.
So here’s our impromptu panel discussion, which I’m quite pleased with given that we had got together around 10 minutes before to plan our talks. As you might imagine, given the slight artificial melding of topics, the Q&A covers all sorts of ground, but there should be something here for everyone.
This week’s must-read piece is an interview by Steve Silberman – the first post of his new blog no less – with Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and excellent writer in his own right. Learn about the incredible hallucinations that followed Sacks’ bout with cancer in his eye. This is what happens when a journalist who does their research gets the best out of an interviewee who’s a consummate storyteller.
“She stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.” A brilliant NYT piece on how language shapes the way we think, which scores extra points for the beautiful writing.
Last week, Harvard researchers published a paper in Nature that slammed the value of helping relatives in explaining the evolution of selfless behaviour. Carl Zimmer has the best take on the study yet. Meanwhile, scientists are falling over themselves to criticise the paper. Jerry Coyne accuses them of wilful ignorance. And over at Wired, biologists compete to see who can get the pithiest smackdown in. William Hughes wins with, “Previously I always had a nagging concern that maybe Wilson had thought of something that everyone else had missed… Having read this paper, I’m now quite confident that’s not the case.”
Here’s a video of the panel I spoke on today. The occasion: ScienceOnline London 2010. The topic: rebooting science journalism in the age of the web, a sequel to a similar panel that I chaired at ScienceOnline 2010. The people on either side of me: super-bloggers David Dobbs, Alice Bell and Martin Robbins, from left to right. The accent: British, which apparently comes as a massive shock to anyone who hasn’t previously met me and isn’t from the UK.
I liked this session. Fewer journalists in the audience that at ScienceOnline 2010 so the Q&A had a different flavour to it, and there’s no duck sex. But I think the four of us worked well off each other and everyone makes excellent points. For my part, I decided to talk about (a) the opportunities that the web (and blogs in particular) provide for experimenting with science journalism, and (b) the pitfalls that we must recognise if we’re not to make the same old mistakes all over again.
And be sure to join me in ScienceOnline 2019 for Science Journalism: Are You Sure She’s Plugged Into the Mains?, then in ScienceOnline 2024 for Taking the Cover Off Science Journalism and Rubbing the Batteries Up and Down; and finally in ScienceOnline 2048 for Science Journalism Ain’t Movin’ Ma, Is She Sleepin’?
It’s a classic David and Goliath story, except there are 90,000 Davids and they all have stings. On the African plains, the whistling-thorn acacia tree protects itself against the mightiest of savannah animals – elephants – by recruiting some of the tiniest – ants.
Elephants are strong enough to bulldoze entire trees and you might think that there can be no defence against such brute strength. But an elephant’s large size and tough hide afford little protection from a mass attack by tiny ants. These defenders can bite and sting the thinnest layers of skin, the eyes, and even the inside of the sensitive trunk. Jacob Goheen and Todd Palmer from Kenya’s Mpala Research Centre have found that ants are such a potent deterrent that their presence on a tree is enough to put off an elephant.
Humans are capable of great charity, taking hits to their bank accounts and bodies to benefit their peers. But such acts of altruism aren’t limited to us; they can be found in the simple colonies of bacteria too.
Bacteria are famed for their ability to adapt to our toughest antibiotics. But resistance doesn’t spring up evenly across an entire colony. A new study suggests that a small cadre of hero bacteria are responsible for saving their peers. By shouldering the burden of resistance at a personal cost, these charitable cells ensure that the entire colony survives.
You can’t go for a month without seeing a claim that some newdiscoveryhasrewrittenevolutionaryhistory. If headlines are to be believed, phylogeny – the business of drawing family trees between different species – is an etch-a-sketch science. No sooner are family trees drawn before they’re rearranged. It’s easy to rile against these seemingly sensationalist claims, but James Tarver from the University of Bristol has found that the reality is more complex.
Tarver focused on two popular groups of animals – dinosaurs and catarrhines, a group of primates that includes humans, apes and all monkeys from Asia and Africa. Together with Phil Donoghue and Mike Benton, Tarver looked at how the evolutionary trees for these two groups have changed over the last 200 years. They found that the catarrhine tree is far more stable than that of the dinosaurs. For the latter group, claims about new fossils that rewrite evolutionary history (while still arguably hyperbolic) have the ring of truth about them.
Most human men would be appalled at the idea of their mothers helping them to get laid. But then again, we’re hardly as sexually carefree as bonobos. While these apes live in female-led societies, the males also have a strict pecking order. For those at the bottom, mum’s assistance may be the only thing that allows them to father the next generation.
Some of the largest bird eggs in history were surprisingly also some of the most fragile. That’s the conclusion from Leon Huynen from Brisbane University, who has been studying the eggs of an extinct group of flightless birds called moas. These giants roamed New Zealand until the 14th century when they were wiped out by humans. Today, all that remains are bones and eggs but some of the broken shells have preserved traces of the moas’ DNA. Earlier this year, Australian scientists sequenced the genes of moas for the first time. Now, Huynen has used the same techniques to work out how these birds cared for their young.
In 8 May 1980, the World Health Organisation declared that “the world and its peoples have won freedom from smallpox.” Through decades of intense vaccination, this once fatal disease had been wiped out. It was a singular victory and having won it, countries around the world discontinued the vaccination programmes. After all, why protect against a disease that no longer exists (save in a few isolated stocks)?
Unfortunately, this is not a rhetorical question. The smallpox vaccine did more than protect against smallpox. It also reduced the risk of contracting a related illness called monkeypox, which produces the same combination of scabby bumps and fever. It’s milder than smallpox but it’s still a serious affliction. In Africa, where monkeypox originates from, it kills anywhere from 1-10% of those who are infected. And more and more people are becoming infected.
Ed Yong is an award-winning British science writer. Not Exactly Rocket Science is his attempt to talk about the awe-inspiring, beautiful and quirky world of science to as many people as possible. He finds talking about himself in the third person strange and unsettling.
