The First, and Greatest, Reality Show: Evolutionary Biology

Posted on November 23, 2009June 10, 2020 by Lori Jia

Discover, November 23, 2009

Anne Gaskett, a Cornell University biologist, spends her days crouching quietly next to orchids in Australia. It may seem like an uneventful way to pass the time, but she is actually observing a marvelous act of sexual deception. The flowers are fooling wasps into making love to them.

Male wasps normally seek out females by sniffing for their pheromones, signaling chemicals that they produce. Each species makes a unique pheromone, which means that male wasps rarely end up with the wrong females.

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Scientists Find A Microbe Haven At Ocean’s Surface

Posted on July 27, 2009May 9, 2020 by Lori Jia

The New York Times, July 27, 2009

Link

The world’s oceans are like an alien world. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that 95 percent of them remain unexplored. But the mysteries do not start a mile below the surface of the sea. They start with the surface itself.

Scientists are now discovering that the top five-hundredth-inch of the ocean is somewhat like a sheet of jelly. And this odd habitat, thinner than a human hair, is home to an unusual menagerie of microbes. “It’s really a distinct ecosystem of its own,” said Oliver Wurl, of Canada’s Institute of Ocean Sciences.

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Ice, Ice Baby: When Fact-Checking Is Not Fact-Checking

Posted on February 28, 2009August 10, 2020 by Lori Jia

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been blogging about the problems newspaper opinion pages have with science. The example I’ve focused on is two columns on global warming by George Will in the Washington Post (and syndicated to 300 newspapers). Will claims that scientists who point to evidence that global warming is having an effect on the planet and reporters who describe their research are all hysterical doomsayers. To make his point, Will offers a range of evidence, from accounts in the 1970s about global cooling to statistics about the area of global ice cover recorded by satellites.

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Astrophilia [Tattoo]

Posted on February 28, 2009August 10, 2020 by Lori Jia

An anonymous reader writes, “The Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune in 1989 was one of the big events that really got me into science and astronomy. My dad and I went to our local planetarium, which was live-streaming the images from NASA as they came in. Even though I don’t really work in astronomy now, I wanted a tattoo to commemorate my continued love of astronomy and one of my dearest childhood memories. My tattoo is the Voyager 2 spacecraft with Neptune and Triton.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Unchecked Ice: A Saga in Five Chapters

Posted on February 27, 2009August 10, 2020 by Lori Jia

[Correction appended]

I guess I don’t understand editorial pages. The laws of physics must be different there.

Chapter 1: A Correction

On February 15, George Will wrote a column for the Washington Post, in which he scoffed at dire warnings about the effects of global warming. He claimed that environmental pessimists are always warning about catastrophes that never come. And he offered a series of claims about the climate that added up to a larger claim about the lack of evidence of global warming. For example:

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