In February I wrote an article in Popular Science about a project to implant electrodes in a monkey’s brain allowing the monkey to control a robot arm with its mind. The goal of this work is to let paralyzed people operate prosthetic limbs by thought alone. Now the research team has announcedanother big step in that direction: their first work on humans.
Attention Virginian readers of the Loom: I’ll be heading to warmer climes later this week to speak in Charlottesville at the Virginia Festival of the Book.On Thursday at 4 I’ll be speaking on a panel about science and society. On Friday at 4 I’ll be speaking again on scientific discoveries and how they change us. I’m looking forward to listening to my fellow panelists, who include Robin Marantz Henig and James Shreeve. See you there.
I’ve posted a new batch of reviews for Soul Made Flesh on my web site. The newest is from Ross King, the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling. His review in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times is a rare sort–he likes the book (which he calls “thrilling”) for what the book really is, rather than as a projection of some phantom in his own mind.
Last week I wrote about an important new study showing that three very different groups of species–plants, butterflies, and birds–have all been declining at the same alarming rate for over 40 years in Great Britain. The authors concluded that if the pattern is global, it may mean that we are entering one of the biggest bouts of mass extinctions in the past 500 million years.
When I ask scientists what’s the biggest misunderstanding people have about their work, they often talk about how they know what they know. People tend to think that a scientist’s job is to gather every single datum about something in nature–a mountain, a species of jellyfish, a neutron star–and then, simply by looking at all that information, see the absolute truth about it in an instant. If science departments were filled with angels, that might be the case. But they’re staffed by humans with finite brains, with tight research budgets, and with only so many years left before retirement or death. In order to tackle vast questions about the fate of the universe, the history of this planet, and the tangled bank of life on Earth, they have to live with uncertainty. To understand something, they can only gather a smattering of information about it, look for patterns within the data and use well-supported theories to come up with hypotheses about them. They can then gather more information in order to test the hypotheses again, and, if need be, alter their explanations to accord with the evidence. Their conclusions can only be tentative, but they can also be powerful. We were not around when the Earth formed, and we can only look at indirect clues in certain rocks and meteorites. And yet scientists have a good idea of when the Earth formed, how quickly the iron core settled to the center of the planet, when oceans began to appear, and so on.