PETRONA

Write about science books for World Book Day

Via Scott Keir on Nature Network:
Today (Thursday 6 March 2008) is World Book Day in the UK. Elsewhere in the world, the day falls on 23 April, traditionally held to be the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and death -- but on this later date, the target audience of school students is usually on vacation in the UK.
Scott suggests that scientists with blogs, on Nature Network or elsewhere, write today about science books. And wearing his hat as manager for science book prizes at the Royal Society, Scott is offering to give a book to five people who write about science books on their blogs today. Henry Gee, on his Network blog End of the Pier Show, has followed suit by offering copies of his book Jacob's Ladder: The History of the Human Genome, to the first few people who drop him a comment.
Scott has started the process of writing about books with an entertaining story about science books that have changed his life on his Network blog Mixed miscellanies. And Brian Clegg, on his Network blog PopSci, writes about how SF stimulated his interest in science.

(Cross-posted at Nautilus.)

Science of survival, just in case....

Via my admirable colleague Li-Kim Lee, I learn of a new and possibly very useful exhibition at London's Science Museum, from 5 April to 2 November 2008. "This hands-on exhibition explores how the way we live will change over the next few decades in response to climate change. As visitors journey through The Science of Survival, they will be led by four characters who invite visitors to help them solve problems in a city in the year 2050. In five interactive areas – Drinking, Eating, Enjoying, Moving and Building – the exhibition looks at why the future will be different and what we can do about it today. Visitors explore current global issues and some possible technological responses. At the end of the experience visitors will see how well they survived and discover the choices made by other people."

Please see Li-Kim's Nature Network events listing for a map and more details. I like the various categories, particularly that we will still be able to enjoy life during any upcoming upheavals in global climate. I hope that means I get to keep my books.

The nature of peer-review

I don't know if any readers of Petrona have the least interest in the peer-review system, but if so, you might like to take a look at an article called Working double-blind, which was one of the editorials in Nature this week (7 Feb issue), reproduced on our Peer to Peer blog.  At time of writing, there are 40 comments to this article after a couple of days (actually 43, but 3 of them are mine). Many of the people commenting, who are scientists, feel that the 'single blind' peer-review system, in which the reviewer knows who wrote the paper but in which the author does not know the identity of the reviewer (unless the reviewer chooses to reveal it), is biased. They would prefer, variously, a 'double-blind' system, in which the reviewer does not know the authors' names, or an open system, in which everyone knows everyone's names - there are variants.

Well, this may all seem pretty arcane, but careers depend on getting one's paper published in a "high-impact" journal, so to a scientist it is a very important question.

Periodic table printmaking project

Via The Great Beyond:

This lovely montage is part of the 2007 periodic table of the elements printmaking project -- where science meets art. "Ninety-six printmakers of all experience levels, have joined together to produce 118 prints in any medium; woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, or any combination. The end result is a periodic table of elements intended to promote both science and the arts." I strongly  recommend a visit to see the display in all its glory: it really is gorgeous. Every element is displayed as a print, and you can click on any of the images on the site to read the artists’ statements. See here for the rules and guidelines given to the artists. The project also has a Flickr group.

Popular astronomy quiz

Cross-posted from Nautilus

Alex Witze (currently at AAS) passes on some questions for "sci/pop culture buffs":
In what popular movie does Daryl Hannah play an astronomer? (Answer.)
- What Japanese car company is named after a well-known star cluster? (Answer.)
- What science fiction story, written by an astronomer under a pseudonym, features a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stellar evolution? (Answer.)
- Can you recite the most famous neutrino poem, and name the poet? (Answer.)
And here's really geeky one I haven't a clue about - if you know, comment below please!
- What rock group had its members' names included in a reference in the Astrophysical Journal, unbeknownst to the editor? (Answer is provided here, with additional story by Oliver Morton).

Mars and world end, what next?

Well, 2008 has started explosively. Last week (2 Jan), we had an asteroid about to smash into Mars. Now, via the same source, The Great Beyond, I read a post Sunspot heralds end of the world!:

"A rather hysterical press release from the US warns us that a sunspot heralds a new solar cycle that could “bring down power grids, disrupt critical communications ... threaten astronauts with harmful radiation ... knock out commercial communications satellites and swamp Global Positioning System signals”. Run for the hills!"

When I read this kind of thing, I always wonder what the perpetrators think when they wake up the next morning and we (or the martians) are all still here. This particular example is the press office of the US Space Weather Prediction Center of the National Weather Service (part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). The Mars effort was NASA.

Changing your mind for science

The Edge Annual Question for 2008 is "What have you changed your mind about? Why?".

The Edge has asked 164 scientists and people in science-related professions to answer this question, and publishes their answers here. "When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy. When God changes your mind, that's faith. When facts change your mind, that's science. Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?" Some contributors:

Philip Campbell, Editor of Nature, has changed his mind about the use of enhancement drugs by healthy people.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has changed his mind about the irrelevance of probability.

J. Craig Venter has changed his mind about the importance of doing something now about the environment.

Esther Dyson has changed her mind about online privacy.

Frank Wilczek has changed his mind about "the science formerly known as religion".

Alison Gopnick has changed her mind about whether imagination is real.

Oliver Morton has changed his mind about human spaceflight.

These and other interesting answers, by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Chris Anderson, Alan Alda, Linda Stone, Steven Pinker, Martin Rees, Freeman Dyson and many others can be read at the Edge "word question center", together with many other ideas, book suggestions and more.

No life on Mars

The Great Beyond: Mars is going down!

Some breaking news from The Great Beyond blog post linked above:

"NASA experts say the risk of an asteroid smashing into Mars is higher than they previously thought. Last week the agency said the probability of asteroid 2007 WD5 hitting the red planet was 1.3%. After further number crunching it now says it is more like 3.9% (press release). Although this is an unusually high percentage, it is still most likely that WD5 will miss the planet."

The Great Beyond post links to various interviews and articles about this prospect, including a NASA animation.

Lesson in climate-change science

There are two very good letters in today's Times, in response to a rather poor one yesterday. Good on Chris Turney and Anthony Seaton, and no comment on Lord Leach (for reasons of length, Prof Seaton's and Lord Leach's letters are on the post continuation sheet).

Sir, Lord Leach of Fairford’s letter (“The false certainties of climate change theory”, Dec 20 and in the post continuation below) espouses a bizarre mixture of half-truths and misinformation. I find it entertaining that someone who in previous correspondence claims to be a non-scientist can so confidently list a series of “facts” that are wrong. The evidence for human-driven climate change is overwhelming: the world is warming up because of elevated greenhouse gases, the climate models can explain the cooling of the mid-20th century and if anything, projections for the future are conservative; reconstructions of the past imply the climate system is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than we might like to acknowledge.

No one is denying that scientists should be sceptical (that is our job), but to imply that those who deny climate change are somehow ahead of their time is wholly misleading. The greats who did so in the past put forward evidence that broke the consensus of the time and moved the science forward. Those who continue to deny climate change muddy the waters of action and delay the urgent measures we so desperately need. If Lord Leach still feels challenged by the science I suggest he reads some accessible blogs on climate change, such as www.celsias.com or www.realclimate.org. [Maxine adds: or Climate Feedback, the blog of Nature Reports Climate Change.] Once he has got up to speed on the science, Lord Leach might wake up to the considerable problems we face and make a more valuable contribution to the public debate: how to get ourselves out of the mess we’ve created.

Professor Chris Turney

University of Exeter

(Prof Seaton's and Lord Leach's letters are below.)

Coyne on Watson in the TLS

There is an excellent and, to my knowledge, fair and accurate, account of Jim Watson's life, attitudes and achievements in the latest TLS by the excellent scientist and writer Jerry Coyne --- wrapped up as a review of Watson's latest book. If you are at all interested in this topic, do read the TLS article. I reproduce two paragraphs below.

"It would be easy to condemn Watson as arrogant and opinionated – he is – but a more nuanced look at his past reveals an infinitely more complex individual than that typically portrayed in the media. When he took a job at Harvard University, some of his colleagues found him so abrasive and lacking in inter-personal skills that one of them remarked that he wouldn’t put Watson in charge of a lemonade stand. Yet with an intuitive flair for recognizing scientific talent, he founded a department at Harvard that became a world-beater. Although Watson can seem relentlessly self-centred, he flouted scientific convention by unselfishly refusing to put his name on his students’ publications. And despite repeated statements about women that can only be viewed as sexist, he has ardently supported the work and careers of his female students."

"The book’s epilogue, though bizarre, is its most illuminating part. Despite having left Harvard over thirty years ago, Watson takes it personally that biology is, as he sees it, in decline there. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard’s local rival, has come from behind to overtake the biology programme he lovingly and successfully tended during his years as a Harvard professor. Part of the problem is Harvard’s recently deposed president, Larry Summers, who, in Watson’s opinion, combined arrogance and ignorance of matters scientific with a determination to expand Harvard biology. The result, Watson notes, is over-expansion and science done on a “B+ level”. Summers, however, was not undone by his vision for Harvard science; rather, he was hounded from office after making public comments about the possibility that women are under-represented in science because of innate differences between the sexes. It is ironic that the final chapter’s account of a public figure laid low by unwise comments about genetic differences parallels in many ways what may be the final chapter of Watson's career."

Save that "scrap" paper

From Nature this week (13 Dec issue p. 932), it seems that it might well be worth hanging on to that thesis or early draft novel you wrote all those years ago:

"A formerly top-secret document produced by controversial rocket scientist Wernher von Braun for his PhD dissertation sold for US$33,000 at auction in New York last week.The 166-page thesis, Design, Theoretical and Experimental Contributions to the Problem of the Liquid-Fuel Rocket , was classified as 'top secret' by the Nazi government and, although written in 1934, was not published until 1960.

After working on rockets for the Nazis during the Second World War — his exact motivations are still debated — von Braun was spirited to the United States to work on missiles. He later became the first director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. After what the auction house Bonhams describes as “heated bidding”, the thesis sold for $3,000 more than its original estimate."

In a comment to the story, Austin B. Carter writes: "Werner Von Braun spent his first years in the U.S. in my home town giving lectures at various venues, which I eagerly attended. He explained his future plans to explore space utilizing an intermediary space station in earth orbit and/or on the moon. Explained Mach number. But his most interesting talking points were about how little energy it takes to influence first conditions that then go on to control vast natural phenomenon like Atlantic Hurricanes. My reward for being a fan was an invitation to witness the last V-2 Rocket blast off from the White Sands, NM Missle Range. Even at a distance of one mile, the roar was deafening." 

Grand challenges in diseases

In a free-access article in today's Nature, "Grand challenges in chronic non-communicable diseases" a group of the great and the good in medical and clinical sphere (the Grand Challenges Global Partnership) outline their top 20 policy and research priorities for conditions such as diabetes, stroke and heart disease, that account for about 60 per cent of deaths worldwide, and affect people of all ages, nationalities and social classes. The authors write that the challenges they describe are "intended to reduce the global epidemic of these diseases by making the case for worldwide debate, support and funding, and by guiding policy and research in an evidence-based manner" to galvanize the health, science and public-policy communities into action.

The 20 challenges themselves are outlined in this table, grouped into ways in which to raise public awareness; to strengthen legislation and policies; to modify risk factors; to engage businesses and communities; to reduce health impacts of poverty and urbanization; and to "reorientate" health systems.

Global warming warning

You've got to laugh. (Well, I did.) From The Great Beyond blog: "Earlier this week climate change sceptics were receiving an email from one Dr Mark Cox. In this email Dr Cox implored them to write about a tale of “treatment of some academic colleagues by what seems like a kind of ‘climate change mafia’”. Cox’s colleagues had discovered evidence that overthrew the idea of man-made global warming, the email said. Those who took this email at face value are now looking rather foolish. But why did “Dr Mark Cox” create a fictional journal, write a bogus paper, invent authors, reviewers and implore sceptics to write about the paper? Read on..."

Let's hear from one of the climate-sceptic blogs, Peer Review Florida: "I, along with a number of other bloggers, and even Rush Limbaugh, apparently, fell for what has turned out to be a complete hoax.  A made up abstract published at the website of a fake science journal purports to explain global warming by monitoring bacteria emissions.  As I stated in the post, I can't claim to understand the research which formed the basis of the argument in the paper, which is now obvious as it was totally made up."

After the story blew, the Great Beyond got the interview. "After attempting to get hold of the person behind the 'Journal of Geoclimatic Studies' we were contacted by “Dr Mark Cox”. Well, it’s someone who said they were Dr Cox, it could be someone spoofing the spoofer but you have to trust people at some point, even if they are claiming to be people who construct elaborate hoax[e]s." The text of the (spoof?) interview of the (spoof?) interviewee follows.

I'll leave the last word on this little story to a comment to the Peer Review Florida post above: "  "Global warming cultists"? You posted your whole-hearted support for a hoax, not because of sound science, but because it said what you wanted to hear. If the scientists that follow the evidence are "cultists", then what do you call people who cherry pick any data that supports their point of view, no matter how easily shown it is a hoax, and disregard the rest?"

If you want trustworthy information on climate science at an accessible level, try Nature Reports Climate Change, Editor, the estimable Olive Heffernan.

Fruit flies poised to take on world

Thursday 8 Nov 0847: It may be small, but the humble fruit fly is the undisputed king of the laboratory. You can listen to this edition of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme until next Wednesday, and hear my colleague Chris Gunter tell the world about an analysis of ten newly sequenced Drosophila (fruit fly) genomes published in Nature this week.

You can see a special Nature web focus here, in which Chris and her editor colleagues write that since its first use as a model organism 100 years ago, "Drosophila is one the most Internet-savvy laboratory organisms, with extensive databases devoted to genetics, genomics, taxonomy, breeding and mail ordering. Several Nobel Prizes have been based in part or in total on work in flies. Flies have even been sent on the space shuttle to study immune system function." To accompany publication of the new analysis, the web focus contains articles by scientists on "the past, present and future of Drosophila in many diverse areas of biology — from physiology and cell biology to neural circuits and gene expression. Size doesn't matter: these tiny fruit flies are once again poised to take on the world." From this web focus page, you can also listen to Nature's free podcast on the genome work, and access other scientific work, websites and resources.

Workshop on popular science books

Via Nature Network:

"We are looking for contributors for a one-day event on popular science books to be held at Imperial College, London on 22nd Feb 2008. Literary critics, historians, writers, illustrators, publishers, prize-givers, reviewers, readers, booksellers, teachers (and others) are all invited to take part. Contributors will be asked introduce a book, collection, theme, or popular science author, perhaps with a small extract, and use it to raise a topic for discussion in or about popular science."

"If you are interested in contributing, please send us an outline of your presentation (500 words maximum) and a short bio (approx 200 words). The outline should list the source(s) you want to discuss, and preview the discussion topic your session would raise. Email this to [email protected] by the 23rd November 2007." (See Nature Network link above for more details.)

See also The Science Project blog, whose authors "discuss things related to books, new media, children, and science and technology, in no particular order."

Science and Paris Hilton (not)

Brian Clegg, on his Nature Network blog PopSci, wrote a couple of weeks ago about the popularity of books by and about celebrities, compared with the relative unpopularity of books about science. Or, as he puts it, "I don’t see much science up the front of the bookstores on the “new and exciting things” shelves. I’m much more likely to find a cookbook or a celebrity biography." He therefore started a website called Popular Science:

Whisper it: science can be dull. But it doesn't have to be like that.

Celebrate the best that science writing has to offer on a site totally dedicated to popular science books and authors. This is primarily a book review site, but we also cover software, DVDs and gifts with a science flavour.

There's a lot there: mainly, I guess for most visitors, you can see lots of books and read reviews, author biographies and interviews. But there is a lot more: details of scientists who give talks about popular science at schools; about interactive CD-ROMs, DVDs and other software that make science come alive; news (e-newsletter or RSS available); gifts; recommendations of accessible science books by the great names of science; links to reliable science information, and much more. Take a minute, take a look -- it might even be as interesting as celebrity spotting ;-).

Jim Watson retires

"Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) today [25 October] announced that Dr. James D. Watson, 79, has retired after nearly 40 years of distinguished service to CSHL. He had stepped down as President of CSHL in 2003 and most recently served as Chancellor." No reason is given for this annoucement. Here is part of Nature's editorial this week (free access: see Nature 449, 948; 2007) published yesterday, before the CSHL announcement:

"So 'Honest Jim' Watson has finally fallen victim to his notorious propensity for making outrageous statements — forced to cancel a UK lecture tour and suspended from his leadership role at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York after being quoted in a British newspaper as claiming that black people are less intelligent and employable than whites...... Scientists with controversial arguments need to be able to withstand the heat, defending or retracting statements as the evidence indicates is required. Watson, however unpleasant his utterances, has always been willing to act in this spirit. The cancellations run the risk of playing into the hands of those who wish to suppress scientific inquiry. Many human geneticists are engaged in the sensitive task of unravelling differences between the world's population groups, all the while acknowledging that 'race' is an emotive and unscientific word. Others are investigating the equally sensitive genetics of 'desirable' traits, such as cognitive ability. Asking such questions has always been controversial, given the potential for abuse of the outcomes demonstrated by the history of eugenics. Scientists explore the world as it is, rather than as they would like it to be."

(See the Nature reference above for the full text of the editorial.)

Poverty and human development

Cross-posted at Nautilus:

The Council of Science Editors has organized journals around the globe to participate in its 2007 Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development. Hundreds of journals are publishing articles related to the scientific and medical issues that surround this theme. The Nature journals are pleased to contribute the content highlighted on this page, all of which is free. We have also created a supporting archive comprising previously published content from the Nature Publishing Group that is relevant to this theme.
See here for the nature.com Poverty and Human Development index page.

The Fortune Cookie Genome

Link: Public Rambling: The Fortune Cookie Genome.

This is an interesting little scenario about the genetic future from Pedro Belatro, a bioinformatician.

"Today is the day I get the sequencing results back. It is going be interesting to have finally a glimpse of my very own genome. At the same time I am afraid of the potential disease associations they might find in there. In any case I rather know it with time to do something about it. Thats it ... I exhale and open the main door to the building walking up the desk.

- Hi. I have an appointment with my genetic adviser.
- Oh yes, go up to the 3rd floor, they are expecting you.

I walk up a DNA shaped stairway and walk into the office of one of the attending specialists. He was the one convincing me of how useful it would be to purchase the GenomeSurvey(TM) package." .....

read on at the link.

Dr Watson isn't coming to town

Link: The Great Beyond: Inside the mind of 'Honest Jim' Watson.

Above is a round tour of links and a summary of the state of play in the Jim Watson story -- what he said, what he was reported as saying (not by any means necessarily the same thing), who has cancelled what, and his apology. You can also (at the link at the top of this post) find a link to Scientific American's list of Jim Watson's Greatest Hits (of faux pas, that is) -- it is not unheard of for Dr Watson to make unforced errors (which isn't to say that he did so on this occasion: glossy magazine interviews are not renowned as cornerstones of reliability).

I'm always fascinated by how these kinds of story (or any kind of story) gets reported initially. Here is the Great Beyond (Nature's news blog) first reporting the story; here is Matt Brown, Editor of Nature Network London, on the same story; but here is a far less measured take, on Nature Neuroscience's Action Potential blog, with the title "He said what??".

A Nobel postscript

I wasn't intending to post about Nobels for literature, economics or peace, but somebody I have heard of, and even read, has won the Nobel prize for literature. That's a good thing -- what's the point of literature if nobody reads it or has heard of who has written it? (I write "good thing" even though the winner isn't J. K. Rowling, but her turn should come).

And, as widely predicted, Al Gore takes the peace prize, but shares it with IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change). Or, as Piers Foster aptly puts it: "one man and his PowerPoint show has as much influence as the decades of dedicated work by so many scientists."

I posted on Peer to Peer about yesterday's ruling that the aforementioned ppt show is broadly correct, so can be shown in UK school science lessons so long as nine deviations from the scientific consensus (aka the aforementioned IPCC) are pointed out to the students. From that post, those interested in the truth amid the nasty world of climate change politics can follow links to find out more -- in particular this one at the Royal Society website.

Nothing to say on economics. (I don't know who won that or even if it has been announced yet.)

A hat-trick of Nobels

Link: The Sceptical Chymist: Eyes on the prize.

The third Nobel prize in the basic scientists is given for chemistry. This year's award is to a single recipient, Gerhard Ertl, according to Andy Mitchison of Sceptical Chymist blog and an associate editor at Nature (link above) "one of the fathers of the area, famous for his seminal work on hydrogen adsorption to metal surfaces, the mechanism of the Haber-Bosch process and the oxidation of carbon monoxide on platinum". Here is the Nobel foundation's summary of Ertl's work.

Andy goes on to ruminate: "I’ll be curious to see how much coverage the chemistry prize gets in the national press [tomorrow morning]. The prize for medicine certainly attracted a lot of attention in the UK (but of course, one of the prizewinners was a Brit). The physics prize seems to have had less coverage, despite being branded as “The Physics of the iPod”. This year’s chemistry prize has perhaps the most obvious real-world relevance of recent Nobel awards for the subject - but will that be enough to inspire the press?"

There is a bit more updated chat about the Nobels at The Great Beyond, the Nature news blog.

iPod wins Nobel prize?

'Predicted headline for tomorrow’s Sun: “iPod wins the Nobel Prize” . ' So writes Oliver Morton on Nature's Great Beyond blog, in describing this year's Nobel prize for physics, won by Albert Fert of the University of Paris-Sud and Peter Grünberg of the Jülich Research Centre for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance.

From the Nobel foundation's press release: "In 1988 the Frenchman Albert Fert and the German Peter Grünberg each independently discovered a totally new physical effect – Giant Magnetoresistance or GMR. Very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current. Soon researchers and engineers began work to enable use of the effect in read-out heads. In 1997 the first read-out head based on the GMR effect was launched and this soon became the standard technology. Even the most recent read-out techniques of today are further developments of GMR.

A hard disk stores information, such as music, in the form of microscopically small areas magnetized in different directions. The information is retrieved by a read-out head that scans the disk and registers the magnetic changes. The smaller and more compact the hard disk, the smaller and weaker the individual magnetic areas. More sensitive read-out heads are therefore required if information has to be packed more densely on a hard disk."

Nobel for physiology or medicine

The Niche: Nobel prize recipient needed embryonic stem cells to make knockout mice.

The Nobel prize has been awarded to three scientists who created the techniques for “knockout mice”, Sir Martin Evans at Cardiff University, Oliver Smithies, from the University of North Carolina, and Mario Capecchi, from the University of Utah for "principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells".

Here is the take from The Great Beyond, the recently relaunched Nature newsblog - with links to an essay by one of the recipients, on receiving the Laskar award for the same discovery back in 2001. And here is the Nobel press release.

Insufferable and unintelligible

Over at Nature Network, some of us editors have set up a forum in which we answer authors' and potential authors' questions about the science publication process.  Most of it is a pretty sober enterprise, until we were enlivened today by the irrepressible Henry Gee, who cheered me up, and I am sure participants, with his lovely anecdote on the subject of accessible writing of technical material, here: The Insufferable In Pursuit of the Unintelligible.

Henry writes: "Once upon a time, when the world was young, a callow Nature editor was phoned by a Wily Old Fox Of A Journalist who was writing a story about this very thing – accessibility. “Turn to page 123 of the latest issue of your rag,” asked the journalist, “and tell me if you can make head or tail of the paper displayed thereon – even just the title would do.”

So the Nature editor, eager to please (and flattered to be asked) turned to page 123 and read On the positively negative interaction between one abbreviation and another abbreviation, conditional on the negatively double-negative interaction between a third abbreviation and one or other of the first two abbreviations by Trellis et al.

“No,” he said to the Wily Old Fox Of A Journalist, “it doesn’t mean anything to me either”.

“Bingo!” thinks the WOFOAJ (no, you work it out. It’s an abbreviation, right?) and publishes the story, complete with names, in the next issue of The Daily Beast, finishing with a line which said, in effect, that even Professor Trellis’s own mother would get no joy from the paper concerned."

For further plot twists, read on, read on....

Visiting the Nature headquarters

It is always nice to meet someone in real life with whom one has been pleasantly interacting by email or phone. The other week I met scientist and blogger Attila Csordas when he dropped into our office on his way back to New Orleans after a conference in Cambridge. (Those familiar with London geography or indeed past posts on this blog featuring bus stops and exploding building sites will know that the Nature offices are alongside platform 1 of Kings Cross station, which is also the terminus for trains from Cambridge.) Attila has written up the first part of his visit to us in this photographic post: Visiting the Nature Headquarters, part 1: the internal Nurture blog « Pimm - Partial immortalization.

I like the way that not only did Attila uncover the "secret" of our internal blog, Nurture, but he persuaded its keeper to let him post on his blog (Partial Immortalization) its first-ever post. I was quite surprised to see which words were largest in Nurture's tag cloud, and which missing altogether (also on Partial Immortalization). There are more installments of Attila's visit to come....

Open House: science highlights

Here is a link to a lovely post by Matt Brown, Editor of the London branch of Nature Network:  Open House: science highlights - News Article on Nature Network London. Matt writes: "In September each year, hundreds of London’s buildings open to the public for just a few days. Open House weekend is an unmissable opportunity to poke around in all kinds of places that are usually off-limits. Of the 600 participating venues this year, around 25 have scientific or medical links." Matt follows with a great pictorial, linked essay about those scientific related venues. Even if you can't make it to London (UK) this weekend, his post is well worth reading for the beautiful scientific hidden jewels contained within.

While on the topic of London, although I am at this particular place every day, I missed this lovely example of humanity in a pressure-cooker world, namely the Kings Cross tube station. Thanks for doing the impossible, Annie Mole, and making me smile at a thought connected with that place of doom.

Rewards of education

Looking through my RSS reader at some of the increasing number of science-related blogs at Nature Publishing Group, I came across a link to a Nanotechnology Quiz (via Sceptical Chymist). Quite a few of the chemistry editors had a go, and the best score was 17/20. Do you fancy trying to beat them? But what do you think of a blog where the quality of the comments is as follows: "I think the "non-existent" nanobots running their website need to brush up on the difference between correct and incorrect. The grey goo question isn't the only one that doesn't register the correct answer. I'll cop to getting the ones that required actual calculations wrong (and isn't 2m a more reasonable approximation of one's height? and how many picograms in one stone?)" Whoever Barney is, he's is pretty knowledgeable, huh? Mind you, when my friend Bronwen from Nature Protocols had a go, the quiz told her: "Not bad - but there were a few that caught you out. You need to spend more time on Nanowerk!"

And who thought you couldn't get rich from academic pursuits? On Spoonful of Medicine, the Nature Medicine blog, you can read about how Harvard is now richer than a small west African country. Maybe the fact that "the company that manages the Harvard endowment apparently posted a 23% return on its investments" has something to do with it.

Cellular top trumps

It is extremely hard to remain unamazed by life. Today I found out that you can buy a card game called "cell trumps" , based on the Top Trumps game whose permutations (in this house alone) run through Harry Potters 1 to 5, Dr Who, Lord of the Rings 1 to 3, Simpsons, Narnia, Movie Stars, Pop Stars 1 and 2, etc.

If you don't want to pay £5 for a pack of cell trumps, you can win a set if you can tell Matt Brown how many other neurons a brain neuron typically connects to. As Matt says, the game is great, for example, before you discovered it, would you have known that the average adult makes 430 million gut-lining cells every minute?

Taking science too seriously

Real science can't compete at the movies with bad science. So writes my erstwhile colleague, the estimable Philip Ball, at news at nature.com.

" "I'm arresting you for breaking the laws of physics," says the policeman to the levitating man, in a cartoon that speaks volumes about the curiously legalistic terminology that science sometimes adopts. In this spirit, two physicists [Efthimiou and Llewellyn] at the University of Central Florida in Orlando seem intent on making a citizen's arrest of all of Hollywood. In a preprint, they examine some egregious physical errors in recent blockbusters."

In the article discussed by Phil, the authors explain (with equations) why the bus in Speed couldn't jump the gap, why the Green Goblin in Spiderman couldn't hold up the cable in the New York tramway, and so on. The words "point" and "missing" come to mind.

As Phil more eloquently puts it: "Should we endorse the violations of physics routinely perpetrated by Hollywood? Efthimiou and Llewellyn clearly think not. I would argue that you might as well complain about 'errors' in the Greek myths or fairy tales, or Warner Brothers cartoons."

 

Desirable scientific addresses

Matt  Brown at Nature Network's Editor's blog has listed the top ten most desirable addresses for London scientists. These are all genuine addresses listed in London's A to Z. Amazingly, I lived at the number 1 address on his list for eight years.

1. Agar Grove, NW1
2. Flask Walk, NW3
3. Bunsen Street, E3
4. Doctors Close, SE26
5. Ion Square, E2
6. Tweezers Alley, WC2
7. Scales Road, N17
8. Magnet Road, HA9
9. Electric Avenue, SW9
10. Conference Road, SE2

Do you have any scientific addresses in your own local area?

Musings on scientific celebrity

From "The Dark Ages" column in the Times, by Kate Muir:

"I saw this cartoon the other day: two kids in their school careers office standing before a rack of brochures for future jobs: Celebrity Chef, Celebrity Gardener, Celebrity Painter and Decorator, Celebrity Antiques Dealer…and Celebrity Rodent Exterminator. And it would be funny if a huge swathe of children didn’t think these options were true, for the telly has told them so.

For instance, there’s not a Celebrity Scientist on the list. Children don’t value science as much as they used to. “One of the things that makes people choose a particular career is the chance of becoming a celebrity,” claims Professor Edwin Southern of Oxford University. “Children are not seeing science as a place to go.”

Fame by association, or even transient celebrity, seems far more attractive than hard work, even for the most able children. A survey by Fame Junkies author Jake Halpern of US schoolchildren gave them about ten choices of future careers: 23 per cent wanted to be head of a great university, 13 per cent wanted to be a politician, 9 per cent wanted to be director of a huge company – and 43 per cent wanted to be a “celebrity personal assistant”...."  In another of Halpern's surveys, "650 schoolchildren [were asked to] to choose their perfect dinner companion from a list that included President Bush, Jesus, 50 Cent, Jennifer Lopez, Paris Hilton and Einstein. The kids selected J-Lo as their top choice, followed by Jesus – proof that celebrity is the new religion for teenagers. Paris beat Einstein, of course."

Professor Ed Southern, by the way, achieved fame for inventing the Southern Blot. I kid you not. His paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology describing how he made it is probably the most cited paper in biology, after one by a man called Laemmli, who discovered SDS-PAGE (sodium dodecyl sulphate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis). This is a tongue-twister and may sound boring, but the Wikipedia link I've provided in the previous sentence leads to a Hollywood-like "demystifying" video of life in the scientific fast lane (sorry about the pun). Laemmli's 1970 paper describing SDS-PAGE is far and away the highest cited Nature paper ever. Why this should be is another story for another day. But one thing is for sure, Profs Southern and Laemmli did the work first and got the celebrity later. As intimated by Ms Muir, though, scientific celebrity isn't the same as other types of celebrity: probably nobody outside science has ever heard of Profs Southern or Laemmli, and probably neither gentleman owns a Malibu beach house or a private jet. Yet modern biology depends on the techniques they invented.

P.S. If you are really interested, here's the abstract of Laemmli's paper, in its entirety: "Using an improved method of gel electrophoresis, many hitherto unknown proteins have been found in bacteriophage T4 and some of these have been identified with specific gene products. Four major components of the head are cleaved during the process of assembly, apparently after the precursor proteins have assembled into some large intermediate structure."

Get your telescopes out

In common with many other London businesses and buildings, including Canary Wharf and Buckingham Palace, Macmillan's London building will have all its lights turned off for one hour (9 pm to 10 pm GMT) tonight, the longest day of the year in these parts. "London's iconic skyline will darken between 9pm and 10pm on the longest day as buildings, restaurants, bridges and homes switch off to raise awareness about climate change", according to Lights out London. One positive side effect of this initiative is that we've received an email telling us to vacate the building by 8.45 pm for health and safety reasons. Great, we can go home early tonight. ;-)

Again from the Lights out London website: "Following on from the success of Sydney's Earth Hour, Capital 95.8's Lights out London is set to break all records, calling on three million Londoners to support the campaign, and save enough electricity in one hour to power 3000 TVs for one year! " Londoners are being urged to "make the most of the dark with candle-lit dinners or watch the lights go out from on high on Hampstead Heath or the Oxo Tower." Or, as the title says, get your telescope out of your garden shed and do a bit of stargazing. Make sure you don't get up to any unedifying activities under cover of darkness. (Does anyone remember what happened nine months after that big power cut in New York around 50 years ago, subject of the movie "Where were you when the lights went out"?)

Climate Feedback: Shaping the Kyoto successor

Link: Climate Feedback: Shaping the Kyoto successor.

Back to more serious, though welcomly accessible, science. One of Nature Publishing Group's new blogs is Climate Feedback (see link above), "to facilitate lively and informative discussion on the science and wider implications of global warming. The blog aims to be an informal forum for debate and commentary on climate science in our journals and others, in the news, and in the world at large." So if you want the unbiased, independent and accurate picture of what's what about climate science and policy, do subscribe. At the link above and at the blog's associated web publication Nature Reports Climate Change, is a report of the G8 summit: what was just agreed about carbon emissions policy and what it all means. Taken together, the blog and website are welcome additions to an area of science that could do with a lot more light and a lot less heat (pun sort of intended).

How manly do men feel?

Link: The malleability of men's gender self-concept - Self and Identity.

Reading through tables of contents and RSS feeds of scientific journals, news publications and blogs is usually a serious business, not least (in the case of journals) trying to decipher the language of specialism, so often designed to communicate to an obscure few rather than to enlighten the many, one feels. Every so often I come across an example that I want to share. The one at the link above is a case in point.

The malleability of men's gender self-concept. Authors: Cade McCall, University of California. Santa Barbara; Nilanjana Dasgupta, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

"The present study tested the influence of social status and gender salience on the malleability of men's gender self-concepts at an automatic versus controlled level. Male participants were placed in a superior or subordinate role relative to a male or female confederate for a joint task; subsequently their automatic and controlled beliefs about themselves were measured. We predicted first, that men placed in a subordinate role would protect against the threat to their self-concept by automatically self-stereotyping more than men placed in a superior role. As a secondary hypothesis, we predicted that the presence of a female interaction partner would increase the situational salience of gender, which in turn would evoke gender stereotypic self-descriptions. Results confirmed these hypotheses. These data suggest that men's gender self-concepts are malleable and that situational cues differentially affect self-conceptions at an automatic and controlled level."

Lovell and his telescopic vision

This will be my last post about the Saturday Times books supplement, mainly because Jenny wants to play Sims, for which she needs my computer as the DVD player doesn't work on hers. (Yes, I could use hers to continue posting, but I've got bored for the moment and want to go and read my book in a snatched Sunday moment of peace). So although there are a couple of other things I have to write, I'll content myself with one only, an excellent article by Giles Whittell about Sir Bernard Lovell, inventor (is that the word?) of the Jodrell Bank radiotelescope among many other achievements.

In 1957 the project was behind schedule and over budget. At that time, everyone was obsessed with Sputnik, which was thought might be able to carry an intercontinental ballistic missile. Hence came the famous call from Whitehall. "Lovell and his team worked nonstop for 48 hours turning their giant listening device into something that could also transmit. 'A few days after the launch we got this marvellous echo from the carrier rocket. In fact I think I have it here.' He [the 94-year old Lovell] pulls an old photograph from the pile on his desk -- a photograph of a man and a line across the screen. 'There's me pointing to the echo, which no man had yet seen. I had a camera photographing the cathode ray tube and this was shown to the press about an hour later. This was the ICBM moving over Cumbria at 17,000 mph. It was dramatic.'  "

Wonderful stuff. The article is in support of a new First Move literary festival , from 15 to 17 June, celebrating the first time the Lovell telescope (at Jodrell Bank) moved under power.

How to be a crank

denialism blog : Crank HOWTO.

"Who wants to know how to be an effective crank? Well, I've outlined what I think are the critical components of successful crankiness. Ideally, this will serve as a guide to those of you who want to come up with a stupid idea, and then defend it against all evidence to the contrary."

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"If you're very adventurous, try submitting a paper to a scientific journal. First try big, Science and Nature are ideal. If it's medicine try the New England Journal or JAMA - they are pretty good examples of the stodgy orthodoxy who will no doubt persecute you. When they reject your paper, remember, you're just like Galileo, or Einstein. They rejected your ideas because they're just not ready to accept them. Remember, you're a skeptic! You're one of those people keeping science honest by making them consider new ideas (except when they're very old ideas recycled). Don't let them brush you off easily, resend your manuscript multiple times. If they reject it claim victory! It means you're a true original. "

You can read more of this pertinent and familiar work at the link above.

Global health diagnostics

Improved Diagnostic Technologies for the Developing World

December 2006. Nature Publishing Group and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are proud to present this free-access custom publication which presents findings of the Global Health Diagnostics Forum, in partnership with the RAND Corporation, to determine global health diagnostics needs.

From the introductory article:

An essential component of evaluating and improving global health is access to appropriate diagnostic tools. Through this series of papers we hope to further the dissemination of current knowledge on global health diagnostic needs for the conditions that most severely affect those living in the developing world............The findings clearly articulate the acute need for new diagnostic tools, the potential impact of new diagnostics for people in developing countries and the specific performance requirements of these tools. We hope this information will encourage technology developers in the public and private sectors to do more to accelerate the development and delivery of new diagnostic solutions.

Digital jigsaw of Stasi files

A research team in Germany has developed a computer-software system to piece together some 45 million pages of secret police files ripped into 600 million pieces. The files were torn up nearly 18 years ago by panicking agents of communist East Germany's dreaded State Security Service (Stasi), writes Ned Stafford in Nature's online news service.

The pieces of torn documents are scanned on both sides, and the digital images are then analysed by a cluster of 16 computers for 25 features, including colour, shape, texture, handwriting and typeface. Just like a person doing a jigsaw, the computer then groups the images into clusters with similar features, and finally fits pieces in each cluster together.

The torn documents date from the autumn of 1989, when the communist government of East Germany collapsed and jubilant West Germans and East Germans broke down the hated Berlin Wall. But not all East Germans were dancing in the streets. Stasi agents in ensuing weeks were holed up in offices around East Germany desperately trying to destroy evidence before West German authorities gained access to the files.

The Stasi lacked enough paper-shredding machines to do the job right, and began tearing documents by hand and stuffing them into bags. The plan had been to transport bags bulging with documents by trucks to locations where they could be burned, but by January 1990 East German citizens had taken control of Stasi offices and the plan could not be carried out. West German authorities eventually seized still-intact Stasi documents and more than 16,000 bags of ripped documents.

Science communication

Wikipedia, says Thomas Goetz at Wired Science, isn't as clear as it might be when it comes to scientific definitions. The example given, "epigenetics" is a good one -- the "backgrounder" [sic] from Johns Hopkins is much clearer. Perhaps those people who write public information for sites such as the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and universities might hop on over to help Wikipedia to become more digestible. The entries are probably written by specialists, who can usually do with a bit of communication help when it comes to readers outside the discipline.

For a bit of in-person science education, there is a fascinating new exhibition at London's Science Museum: Penicillin.  Matt Brown's post on Nature Network ably summarises the Penicillin story and the challenges of telling it in a visually attractive way. The exhibition is on until September.

Another of Matt's excellent posts is here: "ever considered being a science journalist?"     Poor pay, virtually impossible to break into, but  the "satisfaction of reaching large audiences, interrogating Nobel laureates, the intellectual thrill of tackling Mars rovers one day and genetic breakthroughs the next – there’s nothing quite like the buzz of the fast-paced news world."

Female Science Professor isn't sure how to take being called a "poster child" for women in the scientific profession. I think I'd have the same trouble if someone tried to give me this moniker. "Poster child" seems to me to be a rather patronising phrase, whatever the context.