Our discussion yesterday about bad science writing took a sharp turn, jumped the rails, and landed over at Language Log, where my brother Ben takes over. Suddenly I feel a new kinship with the Psalms Book of Proverbs….
Originally published January 14, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
At a recent meeting of biologists, a friend handed me a piece of paper that had been folded into eighths, with hand-drawn pictures and writing about biology. Why…it’s a zine, I thought. It came from the Small Science Collective, which has put together lots of foldable booklets about science that they encourage you to download for free and leave on your bus, at your favorite coffee shop, or anywhere else you might want to spread knowledge about bot flies (and about lots of other science almost as cool as bot flies). And if you want to join the collective, they want to hear from you.
Discover, January 14, 2009
Our minds are under attack. At least that’s what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?) Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. Last summer the cover of The Atlantic posed a question: “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Inside the magazine, author Nicholas Carr argued that the Internet is damaging our brains, robbing us of our memories and deep thoughts. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world,” he wrote, “it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”
Arwyn writes: “Even though psychology is a soft science. I present Sigmund Freud. The tattoo is part of a sleeve that I call ‘Freud’s Dream,’ hence the little thought bubbles.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published January 14, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Over at Science News, Janet Raloff has a report about Steven Chu’s appearance earlier today before the Senate for his nomination to be Secretary of Energy. It sounds like he really perked up when asked about biofuels from synthetic biology:
Chu explained that the two-year-old program is striving to develop fourth-generation biofuels. To date, researchers at the lab have “trained” bacteria and yeast to take simple sugars and produce “not ethanol, but gasoline-like substitutes, diesel-fuel substitutes and jet [fuel] substitutes.”