Evolution of Flight: Did Early Birds Run and Flap Before They Flew? | 80beats

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flight
Flapping while running up a ramp takes far
less energy than flight at the same angle.

What’s the News: How did birds get their wings? And how did they start using them to fly? These questions have bedeviled evolutionary biologists for more than a century, and with flight’s origins long buried, a lot of careful measurements of how modern birds work combined with clever guesswork has resulted in several fiercely differing theories. The two major camps have proto-birds either dropping from trees or running along the ground before finally taking to the air.

A new study lends credence to the idea that flapping wings while running could have been involved by showing that it requires much less energy than flying while still helping birds get over obstacles. This suggests that it could have been an easy way for proto-birds to start going through the motions.

How the Heck:

The researchers had noticed that young birds running up ramps and other obstacles flap their wings strongly, gaining speed and balance. The team wondered how much energy the process took: as the behavior gets birds over obstacles as effectively as actual flight, if it took less investment of energy, ...


Why Does More Scientific Literacy Seem to Make Liberals More Accepting of Nuclear Power? | The Intersection

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In my last post about the Kahan et al paper, I gave you the headline finding–scientific literacy and numeracy, if anything, seems to worsen climate denial, especially among those already opposed to climate action (hierarchical-individualists/conservatives).

But there’s another intriguing finding in the study. In fact, I would go so far as to call it an anomaly in need of explanation.

You see, it turns out that the pattern on nuclear power is different than the pattern on climate change in the study (see Figure 4). On nuclear power, the egalitarian-communitarians (liberals) generally start out thinking it’s more risky, and the hierarchical-individualists (conservatives) generally start out thinking it’s more safe–when you ask them the question posed in the study anyway (“How much risk do you believe nuclear power poses to human health, safety, or prosperity?”).

The starting positions are just what you would expect: egalitarian-communitarians (liberals) are suspicious of unregulated industry and worried about harm to, basically, everybody, especially the weakest in society. So when they hear about corporations doing risky things (like, say, nuclear power) they get their buttons pushed. The hierarchical-individualists (conservatives) are the opposite–individualists in particular celebrate private industry and the free market, so you would expect them to support nuclear power.

However, unlike in the case of conservatives and climate change, with increasing scientific literacy and numeracy, egalitarian-communitarians (liberals) *do not* move further in the direction where you would presume their initial biases would take them–i.e., towards perceiving more risk. Instead, with more education and numeracy, both groups grow less convinced that nuclear power is risky.

The end result is that they still end up becoming more polarized, because the hierarchical-individualists (conservatives) move farther in the direction of their initial convictions, while the egalitarian-communitarians (liberals) move less far in the direction that is counter to their initial convictions. Still, directionally, the movement is the opposite of the movement you see on climate change.

Now, I have my theories to explain this…but I want to hear what others think is going on, behind the data. Go to the study and check out Figure 4.

I will add that this is not the first time Kahan et al have found something like this. In their prior study “Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus,” they found similar polarization over climate change across the two cultural groups. But when they tested whether the groups agreed that according to “most” scientific experts, the deep geological sequestration of nuclear waste was safe (e.g., the Yucca Mountain issue), they found considerably less cultural polarization than over climate change:

Being simultaneously hierarchical and individualistic predicts a 12.6 percentage-point increase (± 9.2) in the likelihood of perceiving “most expert scientists agree” that “[r]adioactive wastes from nuclear power can be safely disposed of in deep underground storage facilities,” and a 14.8 percentage-point decrease (± 9.2) in the likelihood of perceiving that “most disagree.” The difference in the predicted likelihood of perceiving that scientists are “divided” is not statistically (or practically) significant. Although clearly less dramatic in magnitude than the differences observed for perceptions of scientific opinion on climate change and concealed carry laws, the effects of cultural out-looks on perceptions of scientific opinion for nuclear waste disposal evidence a practically meaningful level of disagreement and conform to the hypothesized impact of holding either hierarchic and individua-listic or egalitarian and communitarian worldviews.

So either the nuclear issue is different somehow, or the groups are different somehow…or both.


Do Scientific Literacy and Numeracy Worsen Climate Denial? | The Intersection

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Once again, Dan Kahan and his colleagues at Yale are out with a paper that dramatically challenges–using scientific data–much of what we would like to believe about the relationship between knowing more about science, and accepting science on contested issues. The paper is entitled “The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Cultural Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change.”

The brilliant maneuver in this study is to do a survey that not only measures whether people accept climate science, but correlates that with their scores on standard scientific literacy questions and tests of numeracy–the ability to think mathematically. Here’s the abstract:

The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this account. On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones. More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased. We suggest that this evidence reflects a conflict between two levels of rationality: the individual level, which is characterized by citizens’ effective use of their knowledge and reasoning capacities to form risk perceptions that express their cultural commitments; and the collective level, which is characterized by citizens’ failure to converge on the best available scientific evidence on how to promote their common welfare. Dispelling this “tragedy of the risk-perception commons,” we argue, should be understood as the central aim of the science of science communication.

I plan to blog about several aspects of this paper, as its findings are so central to everything I’m trying to get across these days. For now, I’m just flagging it. I think it is an absolute must read.


Miss USA Contestants on Teaching Evolution | Cosmic Variance

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Now that Twitter and Facebook have been invented, I don’t usually put up blog posts that simply link to someone else’s posts. (Although I wonder if that policy is a mistake.) But this morning I put up a link to a post at Jerry Coyne’s blog, and it was almost immediately deleted from Facebook. (The Twitter entry was fine, of course.) I wouldn’t even have known, except that someone commented that it had been “flagged as inappropriate by Facebook users.”

Of course, Facebook being Facebook, I have no idea whether this is a nefarious conspiracy or simple incompetence. Probably both. In any event, you should go check out the post, which comments on this YouTube video.

It’s a compilation of the answers given by contestants in the Miss USA contest to a simple question: “Should evolution be taught in schools?” Miss California, Alyssa Campanella, who eventually won the contest, gave a strong pro-science answer that will bring a smile to your face. At least, if you are finished crying and throwing objects at your computer monitor after seeing some of the other answers. Due to the vagaries of alphabetical order, Miss Alabama comes first, and it’s not pretty.

For the most part, the contestants are interested in being good politicians and keeping everybody happy, not in staking out courageous stances in the science/religion debates. But that’s exactly what’s so depressing: here we are, in the most advanced country in the world (albeit in its waning years), and it’s considered controversial whether we should teach science to our children. The question wasn’t even “should we teach creationism,” which is actually a harder issue (although still very easy). It was just whether we should teach straightforward science at all. Very sad indeed.


Opening the lid on Pandora’s Cluster | Bad Astronomy

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The largest structures in the Universe are superclusters: not just clusters of galaxies, but clusters of clusters. They can stretch for millions of light years and be composed of thousands of galaxies.

Abell 2744, at a distance from Earth of about 3.5 billion light years, is one such megastructure (if you want to sound fancy, astronomers call it "large-scale structure"). Astronomers have been studying Abell 2744 with an arsenal of telescopes, and have discovered that it’s actually the result of the ongoing collision of four galaxies clusters. If you’ve ever wondered what 400 trillion solar masses of material slamming into each other looks like, well, it’s more than a bit of a mess:

[Click to enclusternate.]

Yeah, like I said, it’s a mess.

First off, this picture is a combination of observations from Hubble (in visible light, colored blue, green, and red), the Very Large Telescope (also blue, green, and red), and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (X-rays, colored pinkish). In visible light you can see literally hundreds of galaxies, probably more, dotting the supercluster. The pink glow is from very hot gas between galaxies; it started its life ...


A Bit of Spit Could Reveal Your Biological Age—or Your Criminal Activity | 80beats

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What’s the News: While you may be able to hide your age with makeup and plastic surgery, don’t think that your deception is foolproof. Researchers have now developed a technique to ascertain your age to within five years using only your saliva. The new method, published in the journal PLoS One, could someday be used by forensic experts to pinpoint the age of crime suspects.

How the Heck:

The researchers began by taking saliva samples from 34 pairs of identical, male twins between the ages of 21 and 55 years old. Eric Vilain, the lead researcher and director of the Center for Society and Genetics at UCLA, was originally interested in studying sexual orientation differences in identical twins. He wanted to see if environmental influences?diet, stress, exposure to toxins, etc.?caused any epigenetic changes that could contribute to the twins’ sexuality differences.
Vilain and his team focused their attention on methylation, a ...


Liberalism and Enlightenment History | The Intersection

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In preparing for my recent Point of Inquiry podcast with Rick Perlstein, I knew my guest would debunk right wing historical narratives of the sort that we’ve recently heard so much of, and do so with gusto. I screen guests at least that well.

But I didn’t know he was going to offer a thesis so in line with the one that I’ve been pushing myself lately–that when it comes to history, liberals are wedded to an Enlightenment tradition that creates its own biases and myopias. Here’s Perlstein:

Liberalism is rooted in this notion of the Enlightenment, the idea that we can use our reason, and we can use empiricism, and we can sort out facts, and using something like the scientific method—although history is not like nuclear physics—to arrive at consensus views of the truth that have a much more solid standing, epistemologically, than what the right wing view of the truth is: which is much more mythic, which is much more based on tribal identification, which is much more based on intuition and tradition. And there’s always been history writing in that mode too. But within the academy, and within the canons of expertise, and within the canons of professionalism, that kind of history has been superseded by a much more empirical, Enlightenment-based history.

As I’m no historian, I’m not exactly sure what the key turning points were–I mean, you could argue that mythic and triumphalist history goes all the way back to Homer. I’m sure much has been written on this, and I bet there’s a canonical work of historiography on this very topic.

In any case, as Perlstein goes on to argue, Enlightenment history has the virtue of being rigorous and accurate–like science does–but all the rigor, and all the details, can get in the way of telling an inspiring and motivating story. Therefore, you sort of have to grudgingly admire the effectiveness of conservative history–at least conservatives know that part of history is about telling a good story, mythic or otherwise.

For more on Perlstein’s thoughts, listen here.


Around the Web – June 24th, 2011 | Gene Expression

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There have been some good posts at Gene Expression Classic you might want to check out. In particular:

Synaesthesia and savantism and Where do morals come from?. The second is a review of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality by Kevin Mitchell

Natural selection and the collapse of economic growth and Natural selection and economic growth by Jason Collins.

Earliest Art in the Americas: Ice Age Image of Mammoth or Mastodon Found in Florida. Claims that the a rendering of a elephant-like creature in Florida is at least ~13,000 years old because “this is the date for the last appearance of these animals in eastern North America.” If this is based on fossils probably you can fudge that a little lower, since first and last fossils tend to be a subset of the real interval of time.

The Michael Hecht-Rationally Speaking affair. Jennifer Michael Hecht is making accusations of plagiarism against Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef. One can’t render final judgment on this sort of thinking without digging deeper, but my personal experience is that most perceptions of plagiarism and copying have to do with the fact that the web ...

Chemical in Predator Pee Scares the Pee Out of Rodents | 80beats

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What’s the News: In the animal kingdom, prey species must follow one rule above all others: keep away from predators. To do this, some animals take chemical cues from the urine they stumble upon. Now, new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has identified a single molecule in the urine of many mammalian carnivores that causes rodents to scurry in fear. This chemical could eventually help scientists understand instinctual behavior in animals.

How the Heck:

A research team at the Harvard Medical School analyzed a group of olfactory receptors called trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs). They concentrated on one in particular, TAAR4, which is strongly activated by bobcat urine (sometimes used by gardeners to repel small pests). They found that one specific molecule, called 2-phenylethylamine, is responsible for the TAAR4 reaction.
To see if 2-phenylethylamine is bobcat specific, the team tested urine samples from 38 mammalian species, ...


Friday Fluff – June 24th, 2011 | Gene Expression

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FF3

1) Post from the past: The wisdom of Seinfeld. How far in the past? When I wrote this it was closer to the series finale of Seinfeld than to now!

2) Weird search query of the week: “economics of having children marketplace.” I think I might have mentioned some of Murray Rothbard’s strange ideas on this at some point….

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Cave of Forgotten Dreams, see it, but tune the narration out”:

Razib,
You are not the first person to misspell his first name “Werner” in that manner, many do it with purpose to undercut the man and discredit his films (though I assume you would argue a minor overlook and/or simple mistake). His films continue to command viewing decades after their making and his legend grows with that.

Is it a perfect film? -No.
Is it an essential film? – Absolutely.
Was the scientific element that you vented about present? -Yes
If there was more scientific informations would we have missed out on the humanity of it? -Yes

“Humaness” as it was put in the film has much a place in the culture of man as ...

NRC Report Highlights Need for a Modern Day “Smokey” the Bear Campaign on Global Warming | The Intersection

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This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., a research scientist and aspiring policy wonk, who recently moved to D.C. to get a taste of the action

I remember the “Smokey” the bear commercials very well. They usually appeared during my Saturday morning cartoons, back when kids actually sat and watched cartoons each morning while slurping a bowl of Honeycombs. The commercials often involved some terrible scenario in which an absent-minded person committed a stupid act that destroyed an entire forest. In the end, “Smokey” would appear, sometimes with a tear in his eye, to say, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” The message was clear and powerful. Even as a child, I felt responsible for protecting the forests. I dared not leave a hot fire pit after a night of camping. It was an effective campaign the likes of which we could use today.

I believe a recent report from the National Research Council makes a compelling case for the need to create a modern day “Smokey” the bear campaign. Only this time, Smokey will encourage us to reduce our carbon footprint.

The report makes recommendations for the best “Policy Options to Reduce Petroleum Use and GHG Emissions in the U.S. Transportation Sector.” Much of the report covers the issues with which we are all very familiar, improving fuel economy standards, increasing investments in public transportation and infrastructure and even increased fuel taxes.

One section of the report that jumped out at me was entitled “Measures to Curb Private Vehicle Travel.” According to the report, there are more than 225 million private automobiles in the U.S. that account for about 40% of all CO2 emitted from transportation.

The authors state:

“…any serious effort to reduce energy use and emission from transportation must cut the amount of energy used and GHGs emitted from private vehicles, especially those in metropolitan areas.”

The focus on metropolitan areas is important because three-quarters of private vehicles are located in cities and their surrounding areas. Also, more than half of the U.S. population lives in suburbs. These areas tend to be less dense and feature more separation of land uses. This leads to more parking and road capacity and higher levels of motor vehicle ownership and use. Therefore, these parts of the country offer the greatest opportunity for reducing automobile travel by investing in alternative modes of transportation such as walking, biking and public transit.

The report makes three policy recommendations designed to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT):

1) create more compact patterns of land development

2) expand the array of transportation options available to residents of these areas

3) increase the price of road use and parking

Sure, these policies will have some impact. But, the problem with each of these recommendations is that they are passive ways of motivating behavior changes. A more effective way to change behavior may be to convince the residents that it’s in their interest to do so. This is why I believe a campaign that focuses on the people will enhance the impact of the policies.

In addition to implementing the recommended policies, a “Smokey”-like campaign will remove some of the sting. If people understand and appreciate the reasons why these policies are being implemented, they will be more likely to accept them and perhaps even contribute to their implementation. I realize that adults who are jaded by the current political climate will be difficult to reach, but we can instill in the next generation the need for a change.

I can tell you from experience that the younger generation is aware of climate change. Despite the beliefs of their parents, they are receiving the message that global warming is a threat. Like my generation feared the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, I believe this generation recognizes there is a problem and they can effect the change that we need. A campaign that encourages them to do their part could go far toward this goal.

So who’s going to make it happen?

Follow Jamie Vernon on Twitter or read his occasional posts at his personal blog, “American SciCo.”


NCBI ROFL: Traumatic brain injuries in illustrated literature: experience from a series of over 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books. | Discoblog

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“The goal of the present study was to analyze the epidemiology and specific risk factors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the Asterix illustrated comic books. Among the illustrated literature, TBI is a predominating injury pattern. A retrospective analysis of TBI in all 34 Asterix comic books was performed by examining the initial neurological status and signs of TBI. Clinical data were correlated to information regarding the trauma mechanism, the sociocultural background of victims and offenders, and the circumstances of the traumata, to identify specific risk factors. RESULTS: Seven hundred and four TBIs were identified. The majority of persons involved were adult and male. The major cause of trauma was assault (98.8%). Traumata were classified to be severe in over 50% (GCS 3-8). Different neurological deficits and signs of basal skull fractures were identified. Although over half of head-injury victims had a severe initial impairment of consciousness, no case of death or permanent neurological deficit was found. The largest group of head-injured characters was constituted by Romans (63.9%), while Gauls caused nearly 90% of the TBIs. A helmet had been worn by 70.5% of victims but had been lost ...


Celts to Anglo-Saxons, in light of updated assumptions | Gene Expression

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Over the past week there have been three posts which I’ve put up which are related. Two of them have a straightforward relation, Britons, English, Germans, and collective action and Britons, English, and Dutch. But the third might not seem related to the other two, We stand on the shoulders of cultural giants, but it is. When we talk about things such as the spread of language through “elite emulation” or “population replacement” they’re rather vague catchall terms. We don’t decompose them mechanistically into their components to explore whether they can explain what they purport to explain. Rather, we take these phenomena for granted in a very simplistic black box fashion. We know what they’re describing on the face of it. “We” here means people without a background in sociolinguistics, obviously.

To give an example of the pitfall of this method, in much of Rodney Stark’s work on sociology of religion (the production before his recent quasi-apologetic material) his thinking was crisp and logical, but the psychological models were intuitive and naive and tended to get little input from the latest findings in cognitive science. In One True God he actually offers an explanation for why ...

Alps lapse | Bad Astronomy

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I’ve had a turbulent couple of days, so watching this time lapse of laminar flow of clouds over the Swiss Alps was just what I needed:

Very pretty! There’s some astronomy in there as well; in several of the clips as the Milky Way passes by you can also spot the Andromeda galaxy; Orion can be seen in others as well. I think my favorite part was seeing airplane contrails pop into existence and then stream away with the clouds. The video is by Patryk Kizny, who also did the time lapse video of the star party in Poland.

And yeah, there’s turbulent flow there as well. But from a distance, that’s pretty too.

Tip o’ the mug o’ cocoa to Patryk Kizny.

Related posts:

- Time lapse video: from North Carolina to the galactic center
- Gorgeous Milky Way Time Lapse
- Very Large Telescope, Very Stunning Time Lapse Video
- Incredibly, impossibly beautiful time lapse video
- Dust, from the desert below to the galaxy above
- Stunning winter sky timelapse video: Sub Zero
- OK, because I like y’all: bonus aurora timelapse ...


Switching on genes with a burst of blue light | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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People with type 2 diabetes don’t respond properly to insulin, a hormone that controls the levels of sugar in their blood. Many of them have to take tablets to keep their sugar levels down, while others rely on insulin injections. But in a Swiss laboratory, there are diabetic mice with a more convenient solution. If they need more insulin, all they need is to bathe under a blue light.

The mice are the work of Haifeng Ye from ETH Zurich, who has developed a way of turning on individual genes with bursts of light. Blue light in particular sets of a chemical chain reaction in the rodents’ bodies that eventually switches on a gene called GLP-1. It tells the pancreas to make more insulin, makes our cells more sensitive to this hormone, and makes us feel full.

Ye’s work is a fusion of two of the most exciting methods in biology: optogenetics, the ability to control events in a cell using bursts of light; and synthetic biology, the building of new biological circuits that don’t exist in nature. In a related editorial, Brian Chow and Ed Boyden (one of the ...

Yeast Can Evolve into Multicellular Organisms in a Few Short Months | 80beats

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yeast

What’s the News: We walking, talking agglomerations of cells have always thought of multicellular life as a profound jump in evolution. The first organisms were just single cells, but at some point, they began to work together for the good of the whole, divvying up tasks like nutrient transport and cellular messaging. Eventually, these colonies became the complex multicellular life that we know and love.

But maybe being multicellular isn’t as difficult to achieve as we thought. Scientists presenting at the Society for the Study of Evolution conference have, over just a couple months, gotten single-celled yeast to grow into colonies that function as multicellular organisms.

How the Heck:

First, to get populations of yeast that would be naturally inclined to stick together, the biologists made it hard for lone cells to survive. They suspended cells in tubes of liquid and then spun them in centrifuges, which caused clumped cells to sink to the bottom, while lighter, singleton cells stayed afloat. While floating cells were discarded, the sticky cells ...


Al Gore and the Enlightenment Ethic | The Intersection

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Everybody is talking, and rightly so, about the big Al Gore piece in Rolling Stone on science, reason, and the climate crisis. And it is, indeed, quite a tour de force. Gore is not only a charismatic leader (now that he’s not running for president), he’s a great writer.

Nevertheless, I’m afraid to say that Gore is operating, big time, in liberal Enlightenment mode–precisely what I critiqued in The American Prospect. Let’s give some examples of Gore’s Enlightenment rhetoric:

Admittedly, the contest over global warming is a challenge for the referee because it’s a tag-team match, a real free-for-all. In one corner of the ring are Science and Reason. In the other corner: Poisonous Polluters and Right-wing Ideologues.

And:

We haven’t gone nuts — but the “conversation of democracy” has become so deeply dysfunctional that our ability to make intelligent collective decisions has been seriously impaired. Throughout American history, we relied on the vibrancy of our public square — and the quality of our democratic discourse — to make better decisions than most nations in the history of the world. But we are now routinely making really bad decisions that completely ignore the best available evidence of what is true and what is false. When the distinction between truth and falsehood is systematically attacked without shame or consequence — when a great nation makes crucially important decisions on the basis of completely false information that is no longer adequately filtered through the fact-checking function of a healthy and honest public discussion — the public interest is severely damaged.

I agree with one part of Gore’s message whole heartedly. We really have lost our grip on reality and this really is endangering our politics and our civilization. Without facts, we’re screwed. We’re dysfunctional.

But I don’t agree with Gore’s account of why this happened. He blames the “powerful.” He blames the “Polluters.” He blames the media. But most of all, for him it’s special interests–money in politics, money in the fossil fuel industry, is blocking our progress and sowing misinformation.

Gore seems to assume that if these pernicious effects were vanquished–or controlled by better policy–then the “public interest” would triumph again and we would all rally around it–just as we would all embrace the same facts again. But that just isn’t true.

The truth is that we are psychologically programmed not to accept the facts; and moreover, we don’t all want the same things–liberals and conservatives, in particular, have different value systems and psychological needs. And liberals, in particular, need to think that society can be rational, and that science can fix our problems–and that if it isn’t working out that way, it must be due to some kind of wrongdoing or nefariousness.

But alas, while our state of dysfunction is very real, the cause is not some evil Machiavellian group of special interests (an argument that works less and less well, by the way, as more and more fossil fuel companies become supporters of climate action). No: the cause lies within ourselves, and our brains.


When Biologists Wear (Faux) Fur, It’s With the Babies in Mind | Discoblog

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Don’t worry, this is for science.

It’s not easy being a parent. There are the constant feedings, the sleepless nights—and of course, the time-consuming task of shimmying into that unwieldy animal suit.

When the offspring of endangered species are orphaned or abandoned, scientists and vets fill the pawprints of the missing parents. But animals raised by humans can develop all sorts of issues; they’re not prepared to fend for themselves in the wild, they don’t play well with others, and they have an unhealthy interest in humans, cozying up to hikers and hunters.

So while humans are busily looking for Mommy’s nose in Junior’s face, these scientists take things in the opposite direction. Here’s how they make themselves over to look, act, and even smell like the animals they raise:

Scientists at the Hetaoping Research and Conservation Center for the Giant Panda, part of China’s Wolong Nature Reserve, donned full-body plush panda suits to raise a four-month-old cub. The result is both adorable and more than a little absurd: Look, it’s a panda! Walking on two legs. And weilding a measuring tape. Uh, what happened to its head?
At the Wildlife Education and Rehabilitation Center in California, vets ...


Am I a Science Journalist? | The Intersection

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It’s quite the question these days, for all of us. And it’s the subject of a panel I have organized for the World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, which begins in just a few days now:

Am I a Science Journalist?

In the evolving world of science communication, how do we define a science journalist? This panel will discuss whether the venerable word “journalist” can or should be applied to some, all, or none of the new generation of science bloggers and educators who are remaking the field.

Producer/moderator

Chris Mooney, Discover; Point of Inquiry (USA)

Panelists

Ed Yong, Not Exactly Rocket Science (UK)
Moheb Costandi, Neurophilosophy (UK)
Homayoun Kheyri, freelance; BBC World Service (Australia/Iran)
Cristine Russell, Council for the Advancement of Science Writing; Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (USA)

The panelists have to figure out the “answer” to the question more than I do, but it is certainly a conundrum, when almost nobody has a staff job at a publication any longer. Do all science bloggers count as science journalists? The thought gives me pause–I don’t think all of them practice the norms of journalism, though some clearly do.

I know and practice the norms, meanwhile, but many things that I do professionally–like science communication work and training–clearly aren’t journalism. Everybody is piecing it together in different ways. Maybe the problem is that the concept of “journalism” partly bears the stamp of an era that’s behind us.


Give a buck for autism research | Bad Astronomy

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A few months ago I posted about the Autism Science Foundation: an organization that funds real research into autism. We don’t know what causes autism, but ongoing research is making progress, and ASF is helping support that.

For today only, they are featured on the Philanthroper home page. Philanthroper is a group that helps raise money one dollar at a time. I like this idea. Giving a dollar isn’t all that hard for a lot of people, and the process is pretty painless: if you have a buck and a Paypal account, it takes less than a minute.

A lot of time, money, and effort is being wasted looking into a connection between vaccines and autism when we know no such connection exists. I’m glad there are groups out there trying to find the real causes, and that’s why I already donated to ASF.

So. Got a minute and a buck?