On Tuesday I’ll be in Hartford to participate in the Science on Screen series. It started in Boston last year, and now it’s spreading across the country. Each evening consists of a science-themed movie paired with a talk about some of the science involved. On Tuesday, Real Artways in Hartford will be screening the virus-zombie movie, 28 Days Later. And I’ll talk about what real viruses can do to their hosts. Details here.
Originally published October 7, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
It’s getting close to two years now since a NASA-funded team of scientists announced they had found a form of life that broke all the rules by using arsenic to build its DNA. It’s become something of an obsession for me. If you want to follow the saga, click here and start back at the earliest post. In July I live-blogged the announcement that other scientists had replicated the experiment and failed to find the same results. In some ways, that was the logical end to the story
My fascination with this story has been tempered from the start by a creepy feeling. As a science writer, I most enjoy reporting on advances in biology: the research that opens up the natural world a little bit wider to our minds. The “#arseniclife” affair was less about biology than about how science gets done and the ways it goes wrong: the serious questions it raised about peer review, replication, and science communication. That fierce debate did some collateral damage. The microbe in question, known as GFAJ-1, went from being the species that would force us to rewrite the biology textbooks to yet another bacterium that offered no serious challenge to the uniformity of life. It became boring.
Continue reading “Weirdly Unweird: A Better End to the #Arseniclife Affair”
Scientific American, October 1, 2012
Peter lake lies deep in a maple forest near the wisconsin-michigan border. One day in July 2008 a group of scientists and graduate students led by ecologist Stephen Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin–Madison arrived at the lake with some fish. One by one, they dropped 12 largemouth bass into the water. Then they headed for home, leaving behind sensors that could measure water clarity every five minutes, 24 hours a day.
This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
October 1, 2012
I was pleased to stumble across a site today that shares the spirit that gave rise to Download the Universe. New Books in Science, Technology, and Society is a series of interview podcasts conducted by Carla Nappi and Patrick Slaney of the University of British Columbia. It’s got a strong academic flavor, compared to, say, Fresh Air or Book TV, but the books cover some fascinating topics, ranging from Copernicus to the flu.
The New York Times, October 1, 2012
Last year the journal Nature reported an alarming increase in the number of retractions of scientific papers — a tenfold rise in the previous decade, to more than 300 a year across the scientific literature.
Other studies have suggested that most of these retractions resulted from honest errors. But a deeper analysis of retractions, being published this week, challenges that comforting assumption.
In the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, two scientists and a medical communications consultant analyzed 2,047 retracted papers in the biomedical and life sciences. They found that misconduct was the reason for three-quarters of the retractions for which they could determine the cause.
Continue reading “Misconduct Widespread in Retracted Science Papers, Study Finds”