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Learning to love science films

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Nature, November 3, 2010

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For two years now I’ve judged science films for the Imagine Science Film Festival, a week-long celebration of the genre that runs each October in New York City. It’s a peculiar job, I confess, because I’m often underwhelmed by science on the screen. But the more I watch, the more hopeful I feel.

My association with the festival came out of an argument with Alexis Gambis, then a graduate student at Rockefeller University in New York. Over a cup of coffee, Gambis explained that when he wasn’t slaving over fruitfly cells, he made movies. He also runs the Imagine Science Film Festival (of which Nature is a sponsor). Continue reading “Learning to love science films” →

“Ringing in the Ears” Actually Goes Much Deeper Than That

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Discover, October 26, 2010

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In some of the world’s oldest medical texts­­ — papyrus scrolls from ancient Egypt, clay tablets from Assyria — people complain about noise in their ears. Some of them call it a buzzing. Others describe it as whispering or even singing. Today we call such conditions tinnitus. In the distant past, doctors offered all sorts of strange cures for it. The Assyrians poured rose extract into the ear through a bronze tube. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder suggested that earthworms boiled in goose grease be put in the ear. Medieval Welsh physicians in the town of Myddfai recommended that their patients take a freshly baked loaf of bread out of the oven, cut it in two, “and apply to both ears as hot as can be borne, bind and thus produce perspiration, and by the help of god you will be cured.”

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The Places in the Brain Where Space Lives

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Discover, September 21, 2010

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The great philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that nothing matters more to our existence than space. Every experience we have—from the thoughts in our heads to the stars we see wheeling through the sky—makes sense only if we can assign it a location. “We never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the non­-existence of space,” he wrote in 1781.

The nonexistence of space may certainly be hard to imagine. But for some people it is part of everyday life. Strokes can rob us of space. So can brain injuries and tumors.

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Sizing Up Consciousness by Its Bits

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The New York Times, September 20, 2010

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One day in 2007, Dr. Giulio Tononi lay on a hospital stretcher as an anesthesiologist prepared him for surgery. For Dr. Tononi, it was a moment of intellectual exhilaration. He is a distinguished chair in consciousness science at the University of Wisconsin, and for much of his life he has been developing a theory of consciousness. Lying in the hospital, Dr. Tononi finally had a chance to become his own experiment.

The anesthesiologist was preparing to give Dr. Tononi one drug to render him unconscious, and another one to block muscle movements.

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Scientists Square Off on Evolutionary Value of Helping Relatives

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The New York Times, August 30, 2010

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Why are worker ants sterile? Why do birds sometimes help their parents raise more chicks, instead of having chicks of their own? Why do bacteria explode with toxins to kill rival colonies? In 1964, the British biologist William Hamilton published a landmark paper to answer these kinds of questions. Sometimes, he argued, helping your relatives can spread your genes faster than having children of your own.

For the past 46 years, biologists have used Dr. Hamilton’s theory to make sense of how animal societies evolve. They’ve even applied it to the evolution of our own species. But in the latest issue of the journal Nature, a team of prominent evolutionary biologists at Harvard try to demolish the theory.

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