I’ve just spent part of this evening pondering a commentary in the new issue of the journal Science by fellow Sciencebloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet called “Framing Science.” (The paper is behind a firewall–yeck–but Matt has expounded on similar notes here.) They argue that scientists make a mistake of just trying to dump technical complexities on the public. They should be defining hot-button issues such as stem cells or global warming so as to resonate with “core values.”
Category: Blog
Reports are coming out this morning on a new study on one of the Loom’s favorite organisms: Toxoplasma gondii, the single-celled parasite that lives in roughly half of all people on Earth and has the ability to alter the behavior of its host. I reported on the research last June in the New York Times, when the Stanford researchers reported their results at a scientific conference. It’s nice to finally get the results on paper, though.
You may have read not long ago about birds that can plan for the future. The occasion was a paper that came out in the journal Nature detailing some experiments on scrub jays. I found the paper fascinating, not just for the results themselves, but for the many other studies on mental time travel that are going on these days dealing with other animals–rats, pigeons, monkeys, and us. Instead of simply reporting on one experiment, I took some extra time and took a survey of the past and future of mental time travel. It appears in tomorrow’s New York Times.
There’s nothing more grating for a science writer than see your work get cut and pasted to give people precisely the wrong impression. My latest irritation: “Ten Questions For Al Gore and the Global Warming Crowd”, which appeared Friday on the conservative web site Townhall.com.
The author is John Hawkins, who describes himself as a professional blogger who runs Right Wing News. Hawkins claims that he is skeptical that humans are causing global warming because, in his words, “‘the Earth-is-going-to-burn-us-alive’ crowd cannot answer the most basic questions about the theory that they haughtily insist is so beyond reproach that there should be no more need for debate.”
Before I head for Utah, let me direct your attention to two articles of mine in tomorrow’s New York Times. They don’t have a whole lot in common except they are examples of cool biology…
1. Virus traps. Here’s a case where ecology, evolution, and medicine all come together in an intriguing mix. You can think of any population of animals, plants, or other organisms as a leaky bucket under a running faucet. The population is boosted by sources of new individuals, and drained by sinks. Sources may include rapidly reproducing individuals, or immigrants from other populations. Sinks include the death of individuals in the population, or their failure to reproduce.
Continue reading “Tomorrow’s double feature: Virus traps and marmoset chimeras”