Meandering Mississippi: An early journalism iBook is all wet

Posted on May 11, 2012 by admin

Meandering Mississippi, by Mary Delach Leonard & Robert Koenig. Published by The St. Louis Beacon. iPad (requires iBooks 2). $.99 iTunes

Reviewed by Seth Mnookin

A little after 10 pm on May 2, 2011, the Army Corps of Engineers detonated explosives along a two-mile stretch of the Bird's Point levee, just below the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The goal was to save the city of Cairo, Illinois, which was facing such severe flooding that all but 100 of Cairo's 2,831 residents had already been evacuated. It was a dramatic event; pictures of the explosions, like the one below, have a vaguely apocalyptic feel.

Since the initial explosions took place at night, reporters sequestered a half-mile away weren't able to see how fast the water from the swollen river was flowing. In all, officials estimated up to three trillion gallons of water — that's 3,000,000,000,000 gallons — poured onto the Bird's Point-New Madrid floodway, comprised of approximately 130,000 acres of farmland and 90 homes.

Continue reading “Meandering Mississippi: An early journalism iBook is all wet” →

A Lost Explorer Returns: Todd Balf’s “Farthest North”

Posted on May 9, 2012 by admin

Farthest North: America's First Arctic Hero and His Horrible, Wonderful Voyage to the Frozen Top of the World. Byliner Orignals. $1.99 Publisher site.

Reviewed by David Dobbs

When people today imagine scientists, they tend to picture a man in a white lab coat, glasses, and a scraggly beard. A century and a half ago, however, people imagining a scientist were more likely to conjure a man with a heavy fur coat, a telescope, and a beard twisted not by eccentricity but by the gales of distant places. It was the great age of exploration, when many scientists did their work afoot or at sea. The scientist was a person not just of thought but of action.

In America, no one typified this scientist-explorer image more thoroughly than Elisha Kane, an unlikely explorer who trained formally in neither science nor seamanship; who led one of the era's most extraordinary and influential polar journeys; who was ill much of his life but found extraordinary strength during his severest trials; and who convinced himself and others, for a time, that he had made one of the most important discoveries of his era, only to be largely forgotten. He vividly occupies Todd Balf's Farthest North: America's First Arctic Hero and His Horrible, Wonderful Voyage to the Frozen Top of the World.

This is great material, and Balf, a former editor at Outside, handles it deftly. He gets the scientific dilemmas spot-on while telling a gripping, overlooked tale. He also paints a wonderful picture of how a person's qualities, applied with energy and savvy, can find the doors of opportunity in an era and knock them open.

For the restless Kane, the exploration of the Arctic proved an irresistible draw. The voyage examined here was his second, but the first under his command. The prior journey, which he took as a naval officer, went so badly from an exploratory point of view that its leader happily left the traditional captain's author's account to Kane. Kane, with a romantic's heart and a novelist's touch for earthy detail, seduced the American public with an Arctic world they paid little heed to before; his treatment was half Twain, half Whitman, says Balf. Their mission had been to find and rescue the lost British explorer John Franklin, who had disappeared years before while seeking the Northwest passage. Kane's poignant description of the traces they found of Franklin's path — an abandoned camp with three sailors' graves, an armorer's forge, and a pair of officer's gloves washed and set out to dry — flamed enough interest in Franklin's fate to generate funding for a second rescue attempt, this one led by Kane.

So in May 1853 he set sail. He would search not just for Franklin, but for the "Open Polar Sea" — a coveted passage to the North, and ultimately the Pacific. Kane suspected Franklin may have found this sea but not lived to report or take credit for it. A British adventurer named Inglefield, thinking likewise, set sail from England at about the same time thatKane did, and on the same mission. Kane's trip was at once an attempt at rescue, a test of a hypothesis, a bid for fame, and a race.

As a scientific venture, his search for an Open Polar Sea posed all the seductions and dangers of any powerful idea. It tempted not only extremes of action but the perceptual warping we're all subject to — the tendency to see what one wants to see. The expedition's naturalist-surgeon, Isaac Hayes, encountering in the hills around Baffin Bay a "lush summer bloom," thought it presaged mild weather and open water ahead. Likewise, as they worked their way up through Baffin's ice flows that July of 1853, both Hayes and Kane found hope in seeing many animals moving northward, as if warmth lay there.

They soon found otherwise. Above Baffin they met cold gales that sent the ship careening among ice floes. The sea glazed over. Two weeks later, the ice seized them. They were further north than anyone had ever wintered and survived — 78 degrees, 44 minutes. And though it was only September, it soon became apparent that winter was coming early and hard. Over the next 18 months, locked in ice the whole time, the men suffered a near-continous stretch of arctic torments: weeks on end of darkness and subzero temperatures; scurvy that turned old wounds into open sores; frostbite that forced amputations. Kane's journal through those winters, writes Balf, "is a record of unbroken misery."

Kane's great feat is that he got 14 of his 17 men through an ordeal that should have killed them all. Through the second winter, Kane, who actually felt stronger then than in the winter before, relentlessly nursed and cajoled and supported his men, even as he himself sometimes bordered on delirium. It was a spectacular triumph of deadening, dumb, determined endurance. Finally, in the spring of 1855, they abandoned the ship. After weeks of dragging two lifeboats southward over300 miles of brutal terrain to reach open water, they sailed 1200 miles to Greenland and safety.

That October, Kane returned to the United States to a hero's welcome, his book-won fame spread explosively by news of his survival. But his health deteriorated. When he died in 1857 in Cuba, where he'd gone hoping to recuperate, it made all the front pages. His funeral procession from New Orleans back home to Philadelphia was watched by thousands — the biggest public mourning the young country had yet seen. It wouldn't be topped until Lincoln was shot. His status is suggested by a banner overhanging Fifth Avenue: "Science Weeps, Humanity Weeps, the World Weeps."

Now few know of Kane. He's rarely mentioned in short lists of great Arctic explorers. Balf's tale serves both as an historical corrective and a sort of fable of the fickleness of fame and the cruel risk of reaching for but failing to bring home a big idea. "Like the earliest, most ambitious pioneers to any new land, he got some things wrong," writes Balf. "He also got a lot right." He found new ways to survive cold and hunger. He returned "by a smart retreat and an unprecedented alliance with the native Inuit; he worked tirelessly to nurse his party back to strength."

This contrasts, Balf notes, with Franklin, who died early on and left his men to march to their deaths. Kane's program for surviving an Arctic winter "was brilliant … and duplicated by almost all future Arctic expeditions," including Shackleton's more famous escape. A notable exception is Scott's disastrous but romantic failure at the South Pole, which arose partly because he ignored some of Kane's lessons and innovations. Yet both Franklin and Scott remain far better known, probably because they did not return. And Shackleton's name far outshines Kane's, even though Kane accomplished something every bit as difficult and unlikely. They both did the impossible. Shackleton's impossible was just more obvious.

It didn't help that someone else largely solved the mystery of Franklin's party. Kane also had the back luck to get the science wrong.

In that spring of 1855 in which he finally took his men south and home, he first sent two of the strongest men north to take one more shot at finding the Open Polar Sea. They marched 200 punishing miles, all the way to 81N, 22', "shedding everything" to get that far. There they encountered a 500-foot bluff. Only one of the men, steward William Morton, had the strength to climb it. When he reached the top, he saw before him an "unfrozen sea" with "waves, … surging from the furthest north, breaking at my feet." A northerly gale blew in his face — but carried no ice toward him. The open water stretched north to the horizon.

From this tantalizing data point — a big, fat, seemingly infinite n of 1 — Kane drew an understandable conclusion: He had found the Open Polar Sea. Balf properly forgives Kane this error. And when he reveals the freakishly unique alignment of forces and events from which this false finding rose — an assembly that starts with Franklin and ends with an astonishing satellite photo taken in 2010 — it's hard not to join him. For the full, strange, richly told story, steer your browser to Farthest North.

David Dobbs, the author of The Atavist e-book bestseller My Mother's Lover, writes on science, culture, and sports for publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times Magzine, National Geographic, and Slate. He blogs at WIRED and is now writing his fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion.

Leonardo: The First Great Science Ebook

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy Touch Press Ipad. $13.99 Publisher site

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

There's no point in beating around the bush. Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy is simply the best ebook about science that I have ever encountered. To me, it is the exemplar of what ebooks can be.

Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy comes from Touch Press, whose lavish apps we've reviewed before at Download the Universe (Gems, The Solar System, The Elements). I've personally toyed around with all three of those apps, and while they each offered a number of pleasures, each one felt limited in one way or the other. Gems, for example, lets you twirl diamonds and rubies, but, as Virginia Hughes noted in her review, it doesn't tell you much about them or about their place in human history. The Solar System, reviewed by Jennifer Ouellette, has some very impressive features for navigating among the planets, but Jennifer noted that it lacks a clear story.

Given this track record, I launched Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy expecting a good-looking but flawed production. No shortcomings came to light, so I tried looking for them. I looked hard. And I couldn't find any. Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy has everything I could ask for in an ebook about one of the greatest stories in the history of science: a pioneering work on anatomy that was lost for over four hundred years.

Living during the Renaissance, Leonardo's initial understanding of the human body came from ancient scholars like Galen and Aristotle. He was taught that animal spirits traveled through giant holes in the head and then flowed into the nerves. He was taught that blood was produced in the liver and then flowed outward to the ends of the body. One reason that these obviously wrong ideas persisted for over a thousand years was that medieval scholars did not conduct their own autopsies or experiments. Galen and and company had figured out everything there was to know about anatomy, so the best thing they could do was read, not conduct research.

With the Renaissance, that obedience began to crumble. Leonardo was the quintessential do-it-yourself-er. He conceived of new kinds vehicles and weapons; he investigated optics and geology. Wikipedia has set aside a separate page for a startling long list of his accomplishments.

Leonardo also became obsessed with human anatomy, and did not hestitate to make up his own mind about it. He dissected human cadavers. To figure out how the heart worked, he created a glass model of it. To probe the brain, he injected hot wax into the head of a freshly slaughtered ox.

As I wrote in my book Soul Made Flesh, Leonardo had a hard time breaking free from the old notions of how the body worked. When he discovered that the head did not contain three linked chambers, he couldn't break free from the old theory of animal spirits. He could not accept that perhaps the brain itself was responsible for thought. Likewise, although Leonardo discovered a valve in the aorta, he did recognize that blood circulates around the body, pumped by the heart. Nevertheless, his drawings were the greatest anatomical works that existed in his time. Not only were they anatomically correct, but they displayed his artistic mastery.

Leonardo actually came close to publishing a textbook of anatomy while he was living in Milan, but battles in 1511 drove him from the city and he never quite managed to finish it before his death in 1519. Instead, his drawings remained hidden away until the twentieth century.

Today, the Royal Collection is unveiling the largest ever exhibition of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings at The Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace. They also teamed up with Touch Press to create an app based on the show. All the members of the team brought their A game to this undertaking. Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy contains a richly informative narrative about the artist's hidden career as an anatomist, written by Martin Clayton, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection. It is illustrated elegantly with Leonardo's drawings, as well as interactive images of human anatomy as we know it now. You can see for yourself just how good his drawings of the heart or uterus were. You can turn arms to see how well Leonardo appreciated the body's biomechanics.

These components are copious but never intruding. And they always answer the question raised in the reader's mind by the text. Videos from historians and scientists end each chapter–usually I hate these features, but in Leonardo, the talking heads actually have something to say.

The app also contains Leonardo's notebooks themselves. The interface for this part is nothing short of brilliant. You can search through the pages by organ or system. Each page is presented in its original state, scanned to exquisite resolution. Tap the screen, and the app instantly translates the inscrutable notes Leonardo scribbled by his drawings. Each page is also annotated with useful explanations of what Leonardo was contemplating with each image.

Three decades after Leonardo's death, Andreas Vesalius published Fabrica, which has long been considered the first modern work of anatomy. Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy demonstrates that Fabrica was not the only masterpiece of the body to come out of the Renaissance. Not many ebooks can claim such achievements.

Zimmer author photo square Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

A Time Machine for the Face of Earth

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Fragile Earth. Published by HarperCollins. iTunes, $3.95.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Infinity can be cruel. Tablet computers have become so powerful that it's practically impossible to reach the limits of what you can do while creating an ebook. You can embed videos, sprinkle music and voices here and there, let people post a book-inspired thought to Twitter, manipulate a simulated bat, incorporate an encyclopedia of information about chemistry, and on and on. Unfortunately, this virtual infinity of possibilities may leave ebook creators with a virtual infinity of work. Some science ebooks we've reviewed rise to that challenge. They sport a well-integrated collection of features. Other ebooks seem like wild acts of desperation. And others still are acts of wise self-restraint. Yes, you could make a science ebook that does many things poorly. Or you could make a science ebook that does one thing well. One such ebook is Fragile Earth.

Fragile Earth got its start in 2006 as a beautifully disturbing coffee table book published by Collins, filled with satellite images showing how humanity is reworking the planet. "Before" and "after" photographed were paired to show how deforestation, climate change, and other factors have changed the face of Earth. Now Collins has turned it into an app. The Youtube video below gives you a good run-through of its features. The most important one is that instead of putting images side by side, the app does what a book cannot: it lays them on top of each other. You can then use a screen button to slide one picture away to reveal the other one underneath. I'm not quite sure of the visual neuroscience behind this effect, but it works very well. Seeing the same landscape in Alaska covered by glaciers a few decades ago now turned to mostly bare Earth is a sobering experience.

Fragile Earth is not perfect, though. The book and the app alike are presented as a way to see how we're changing the planet. But the app is loaded with other images that show natural changes, such as the devastation caused by the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. Combining these images together makes no thematic sense; the only thing that joins them together is an elegant slider. There's no introduction where you might find an explanation for what a volcano and the deforested Amazon have in common. Instead, Fragile Earth has short caption that describe the specifics of each set of images but leave you wanting more.

That's too bad, because Fragile Earth illustrates on a profoundly important fact about our species. In 2005, Bruce Wilkinson, a University of Michigan geologist, published a paper called, "Humans as geologic agents: A deep-time perspective." [free pdf] "Humans are now an order of magnitude more important at moving sediment than the sum of all other natural processes operating on the surface of the planet," Wilkinson concluded. We're also having other huge effects on the planet–acidifying the oceans faster than at any time in the last 300 million years, for example. Humanity isn't just leaving a mark on the Earth you can see from space. It's a mark that will be preserved in the fossil record for millions of years to come.

Before and after pictures can go a long way to showing the magnitude of that change. But without context, they can also oversimplify it. If you were to select a before and after pair of pictures of glaciers in the Himalayas, for example, you would not see a frightening retreat over the past decade. In fact, you might not see any change at all. Such specific cases are ripe for cherry-picking by global warming denialists. The reason that this one case does not refute global warming because of the overwhelming evidence of changes caused by global warming on a planetary scale–such as the overall loss of ice from the entire Arctic Ocean.

Fragile Earth would thus be a better app if its pictures had more context and a more coherent point. But I'm also glad that its creators didn't try to grasp for infinity.

Zimmer author photo square Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

Artificial Epidemics: You’re Not Really Sick, You’re Overdiagnosed

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Artificial Epidemics: How Medical Activism Has Inflated the Diagnosis of Prostate Cancer and Depression, by Stewart Justman. Now and then Reader, 2012. Publisher's site, Kindle, iBooks, Kobo

Reviewed by SciCurious, guest reviewer

"In the mid-1990s I found myself on a committee charged with reviewing medical expenditures under my university's health plan. Like the rest of the country, the members of the plan had fallen in love with anti-depressants, which accounted for our largest single drug expense-several hundred thousand dollars annually, as I recall. When someone around the table commented that this was a lot of money to be laying out for mood-altering pills, a defender countered, "If they prevent one suicide, they're worth it!" Argument ceased. No one in the room, including myself, was aware that anti-depressants actually increase the risk of suicide, particularly in patients up to twenty-four years of age."

This opening scene from Stewart Justman's Artificial Epidemics sets the stage for a tangled, convoluted tale of two distinct diagnoses–prostate cancer and Major Depressive Disorder–and how intensive screening for these diseases has rendered us all overdiagnosed. Justman, a professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Montana, has made a long study of cancer, publishing several books including Do No Harm: How a Magic Bullet for Prostate Cancer Became a Medical Quandary and Seeds of Mortality: The Public and Private Worlds of Cancer. Artificial Epidemics, a slim, 22-page eBook appears to be an attempt to bring together his previous writing on cancer with another highly-diagnosed and talked about disease: Major Depressive Disorder.

"The campaign against depression and the campaign against prostate cancer both used inflamed arguments and appealed to fixed ideas," Justman writes. He lays the bulk of the blame for the resulting "artificial epidemic" on medical activists, who have taking screening for these diseases to large segments of the population. Justman also argues the screenings for prostate cancer and depression suffer from an “absence of appropriately discerning methods,” and thus help in the push toward the overdiagnosis of the American population.

His solution? Stop the screening, stop the treatment. We are not sick, we are overdiagnosed.

Justman’s concerns regarding prostate cancer are not particularly new. Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing has been controversial since the beginning. As Justman notes, “the same vial of blood divided in two may give different PSA readings.” Medical experts have also voiced criticism about the cut-off points for diagnosis for prostate cancer. Since the treatment for prostate cancer can be invasive, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force has proposed that when men score an initial PSA that only barely reaches the threshold for cancer, they should not immediately start treatment. Instead, they should undergo so-called "watchful waiting."

Justman sees the same problems with oversensitive analyses and overdiagnosis in Major Depressive Disorder. But his argument also goes beyond against current screening practices. He's against the diagnosis of depression itself.

"The possibility that much 'depression' might not be a disorder at all has been drowned out by medical activism,” Justman writes. He scoffs at the World Health Organization's prediction that depression is soon to become the second leading cause of disability across the globe as “hubristic.” He argues that it's far too easy to diagnose, given that the symtoms include things like feeling tired, overeating, or not finding pleasure in things. "According to this checklist, I would qualify for a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder if I simply had too little energy and had trouble staying asleep–as in fact I do…In point of fact, my symptoms are not diagnostic of anything."

What is Justman’s response to these two ‘artificial epidemics’ of prostate cancer and depression? Sit down, relax. "Much of what is called cancer is not destined to cause death-and so too, much of what is considered depression resolves itself without medical intervention." He wants the screenings to stop, and overdiagnosis to end. Justman proposes an appeal to prudence. "Prudence deems life without sadness a utopian fantasy, silent cancer a tolerable reality, and the medicalization of the human condition an aggressive expansion of professional authority."

Unfortunately, while Justman’s statements about prostate cancer diagnoses are well researched, his mockery of Major Depressive Disorder is both insulting and ill-conceived. What's more, his arguments for both prostate cancer and depression are made in complete incoherence. The narrative jumps from prostate cancer to depression in the same paragraph. Here he even makes the leap within the same sentence: "Setting a two-month period for allowable grief is like setting the threshold for an abnormal PSA at a figure that trades off a reduction of false negatives with an inflow of false positives."

Justman composes long, run-on sentences in an effort to show how prostate cancer and Major Depressive Disorder diagnoses are similar: "Both PSA testing, which appeals to evidence presumed to exist, and testing for depression, which appeals to diagnostic criteria conceded by the psychiatrist in charge of the composition of the third edition of the DSM to be seriously defective, reveal conflicted attitudes toward evidence-based medicine itself." The net result is an exhaustive and repetitive reading experience. In the end, I’m just confused and beginning to think my prostate has been experiencing depressed mood.

In this tangle of prostate cancer and depression, the focus of the title is lost. I have yet to read how, exactly, medical activism has influenced clinicians and insurance companies to collude with them in the overdiagnosis of the nation. Instead, the book impresses the idea of overdiagnosis, without offering any clear solution except to stop diagnosing.

Here Justman confuses the ideas of diagnosis and treatment. While it makes sense to delay invasive treatments and track the progress of an already diagnosed disease, stopping screening and diagnosis would merely ignore the problems. Prostate cancer is still the second leading cause of death in men. Additionally, Justman’s flippant attitude toward Major Depressive Disorder ignores the real suffering of patients, and adds to the stigma these patients experience. But Justman clearly believes depression is not a real problem and most prostate cancers as fine.Just put on a smile, stop wallowing in your emotions. That prostate enlargement probably doesn’t mean anything.

After spending so much time reading Justman’s incoherent arguments, dismissive delivery, and his final, confusing appeal to “prudence”, my only recommendation is that if you are concerned about issues with prostate cancer or Major Depressive Disorder diagnosis and treatment, go read something else. The writing is bound to be less confusing. After suffering through 22 long pages of this ebook to write this review, I’m afraid my prostate needs an antidepressant.

Scicurious is a PhD in Physiology, and is currently a postdoc in biomedical research. She loves the brain, and so should you. She writes for The Scicurious Brain at Scientific American Blogs and Neurotic Physiology on the Scientopia Network. Follow on Twitter @Scicurious.