Author: Lori Jia
A reader who asked to remain anonymous writes: “This is a Ramon y Cajal drawing of a human motor cortex pyramidal cell. I am a student of neuroscience and greatly admire Ramon y Cajal not only for his scientific contributions but for the artistic and beautiful quality of his images. This image reminds me of the vast and incredible power of the neocortex, and of the amazing capability of the human body.”
Originally published January 20, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
3quarkdaily just picked up my little rant about an awful piece of science writing. They accompanied their post with a picture of the scientist profiled in the article, Hina Chaudhry. That juxtaposition made me a bit queasy–let me just make clear that I was not criticizing Dr. Chaudhry, just the article about her. Dr. Chaudhry is doing what scientists should: running experiments and getting her results published in peer-reviewed journals. Here’s a free link to a 2007 paper of hers on regenerating heart tissue. It’s up to us science writers in turn to find a better way to describe a scientist than as a “a pretty lady.”
Continue reading “Hate the Science Writing, Not the Science”
Paul writes: “I’m finishing up my last year as an undergraduate in Chemical Physics. After paging through your collection of science tattoos I thought it would be cool to get one myself — both celebrating (soon) getting my degree and my love of science. My favorite thing from my undergrad classes has been learning about quantum mechanics. I’m still amazed by its mystery and its particular odd logic, how different the sub-atomic world is from our ‘classical’ universe.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published January 19, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait reveals some of the astonishingly bad coverage last week about methane on Mars, giving people the impression that we’ve got proof-positive of life on the Red Planet. But I think Carol Collins Petersen raises an important point: it’s the headlines that were truly noxious. If you stripped the headlines off of the articles Phil lambastes, they’d range from acceptable to mediocre. At least, that’s my non-scientific analysis. Unfortunately, headline writers are harder to track down than reporters (who don’t write headlines and rarely get to vet them).
Originally published January 19, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
For my third post celebrating the Year of Science, I wanted to write about the secrets of nature that sit right in front of us, in plain view. By coincidence, I happened to be looking at the newest issue of Science and came across a paper about microscopic casks that float by the thousands in our cells, known as vaults. I looked for them in a cell biology textbook. Not there. So I wandered the Tubes and found some papers on line as well an excellent web site about vaults at UCLA. I discovered that scientists haven’t yet figured out what they do.
There are, of course, lots of things about our cells that scientists have yet to figure out. But the blatant obviousness of vaults makes them a stark example of how hard answers are to come by in science. Check out my post.