Truth + Beauty

By: | January 27, 2017

A couple of Harvard astronomers just wrote an essay in a new journal called Nature Astronomy.  That’s not the most riveting opening sentence you’ve ever read; I apologize.

But the essay was odd, a kind of rumination-with-examples about how things in astronomy on vastly different scales nevertheless have similar structures.  That is, electrons orbit atomic nuclei in the same pattern that planets orbit the sun.  The astronomers say that aside from such patterns being  pretty, finding them might also “unravel fundamental truths that unifies their governing principles.”

I don’t know whether to think that’s confusing (finding a pattern that unravels fundamental truths unifying governing principles? what does that mean?) or obvious (planets orbit stars because that’s how masses behave in gravitational fields and electron orbit nuclei because that’s how charged particles behave in electromagnetic fields; and both behaviors obey the inverse square law) or who knows (I’m not an astronomer), maybe profound.

In any case, they give other examples.  The Milky Way has a disk of stars; the stars have disks of planets; and planets have disks of gas and rocks and dust.  Galaxies and the gas between them lie along vast filaments; the same filaments show up in gas when nearby stars blow up and in the cold dense clouds of gas as they condense into stars.  Galaxies are arranged in clusters, and within the galaxies are clusters of those same cold dense gas clouds that eventually form clusters of stars.  So: orbits, disks, filaments, clusters, all on different scales. Continue reading →

The Really Big, Astounding Experiment That Changed Everything But Kinda Happened By Accident

By: | January 26, 2017

If you read science magazines – and certainly if you read this blog – you know by now that lots of people are talking about placebos these days. They are real, they are scientifically important, they are distracting, they are good, they have something to do with chakras, they are bad, they are the next big thing, they are a bunch of BS.

In my recent book, Suggestible You, I spend a fair amount of time talking about them and meeting with the luminaries of an emerging field within psychology and neuroscience that focuses almost totally on placebos and the expectations that create them. And yes, they are all of those things and more.

Over the past five (oh, who am I kidding – ten) years working on this project, I’ve tried to draw together a number of themes that all the scientists studying placebos have in common – belief, expectation, pain relief, and the power of subconscious cues. But there’s one thing that ties almost all the modern furor over placebos that I totally missed: Fields and Levine.

Howard Fields and Jon Levine were a couple scientists who, back in the 1970s, showed that the placebo effect for pain was triggered by a flood of internal opioids, similar to the endorphins that give us a runners high, among many other pleasurable experiences.

Almost every scientist I talked to who studies placebos mentioned their seminal 1978 paper. They get mentioned so much in the small world of placebo research that I started to think of them as some kind of mythical creature – the Fieldsnlevine. Just a little smaller than the Watsonncrick. It never occurred to me that they might be real people who put their pants on every day and occasionally pick up phones. Continue reading →

Why Rachel Carson Still Matters

By: | January 25, 2017

On Monday, the Trump administration instructed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency staffers to freeze all of the agency’s grants and contracts—cutting off financial support for many state and tribal environmental protection programs. (Staffers were also told not to discuss the freeze with anyone outside the agency, but the news was quickly leaked to both ProPublica and the Huffington Post.)

So it’s especially appropriate, and poignant, that a terrific documentary about Rachel Carson is airing on PBS this week. Carson’s book Silent Spring, and the public outcry it caused, helped persuade President Nixon to create the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. The agency was charged with protecting human health by safeguarding the air, water, and land, and while the EPA is anything but perfect, it is safe to say that hundreds of thousands of Americans are alive today thanks to its regulation of carcinogenic pesticides, lead paint and leaded gasoline, asbestos, ozone-destroying CFCs, and any number of other poisonous, polluting, and life-shortening substances. Carson’s bureaucratic legacy is massive but, for many of us, largely invisible, and the documentary is a timely reminder that it still can’t be taken for granted.

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Guest Post: The Philosopher’s Table

By: | January 24, 2017

edge of oak table

In the summer of 1968, my thirty-something parents bought a 48-inch-diameter round oak pedestal table from an antique furniture dealer in Union, N.J. The moment the table assumed its new position in the kitchen of Solomon and Sylvia’s Victorian home in nearby South Orange, it asserted itself as the center of gravity of the house.

A half-century earlier, master artisans in Hastings, Michigan, built the table with four curvaceous, lion-pawed legs extending from its pedestal’s bottom. They quartersawed the wood to produce a tight “tiger oak” grain pattern and fumed it with ammonia to darken the finish. To Sol, my dad, oak was one of nature’s finest gifts to civilization. Adding to his adoration was the table’s lock-and-release mechanism for inserting and removing leaves. With every swivel of the mechanism’s handle, a reverberant metallic clack advertised a marriage of steel, wood, and good design.

My father’s mother died when he was four. His father, an émigré from the Aegean island of Rhodes, suffered from deafness and diabetes and was unable to care for his three sons. Sol grew up in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City and then under a series of foster parents. Solidity. Stability. Safety. All of these were absent for young Solomon, but they were all embodied in the table.

Continue reading →

Stop Underestimating Chickens

By: | January 23, 2017

One of my favorite things about my usual writing beat (living things) is that we humans never stop learning new things about animals. We’re even still discovering species that are new to science. (Check out the glorious ruby sea dragon, previously known only from beach corpses, and Hoolock tianxing, a gibbon just determined to be its own species that, sadly, comes into its own already labeled endangered.)

While “new” is good, I get most jazzed over discoveries about species we already know, or think we know. A few recent bits in the news: Dogs really do get the meaning of words, not just of the tone of voice that accompanies them (which is also cool). Macaques understand the limits of their own memory. Bats’ endless cave chatter is complex and full of bickering.

And sometimes the findings flip long-held assumptions on their heads. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 21, 2017

January 16-20, 2017

On Martin Luther King day we posted one of the civil right’s leader’s speeches, The other America, delivered at Stanford in 1967. Along with a song from Billie Holiday. “Racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.”

Helen’s life has been punctuated by experiences involving tea, the common thread in an otherwise nomadic and varied existence. Her take on the research: “If you’re a rat, I’m telling you, you should be drinking lots of tea.”

Liver is sickening, writes Cassie, and not just because it tastes disgusting. Polar bear livers, in particular, can give you an overdose of Vitamin A. “Three of them became ‘exceeding sicke,’ de Veer writes. ‘All their skins came of from the foote to the head.’”

Rose doesn’t want to hear you brag about New Year’s resolution you’ll probably break anyway. If you really want to make it public, how about announcing it at the end of the year when you’ve kept your resolution? “You don’t need a website or a hashtag. You can just do the thing. And I’m here to encourage you to do the thing, privately.”

The job of a science advisor is a subtle dance of humility and patience. In the post-truth world, that is especially the case. The Chief Science Advisor to New Zealand’s Prime Minister has some advice for the advisors. “Scientists are good at problem definition, but not generally as good at finding workable, scalable and meaningful solutions.”

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons here.

 

 

Sharing science in the halls of power

By: | January 20, 2017

Today’s ceremonies likely mark the beginning of a new level of discord between scientific evidence and American policy. I’ve written here about the dark days of Canada’s own war on science under Stephen Harper, which mercifully have ended, though the work that was damaged has by no means recovered. Now, under the Trudeau government we are establishing a new role of Chief Science Advisor and actively recruiting candidates.

Science advisors share some of their challenges with other science communicators like journalists and university public relations writers, in that they attempt to make technical and complex research accessible to non-scientists. But their role is subtly different because of their placement inside the policy-making circles.

A science advisor can do more than inject the scientific consensus into a policy discussion—as the broader academy can do from the outside at a single point in the process through deliberative reports. They also have the privilege of guarding the integrity of this input throughout the discussion, making sure the science doesn’t get distorted or misused, right until the moment a decision is made.

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In Defense of Private Projects

By: | January 19, 2017

It’s January, which means we’re still in the throes of people announcing and performing their resolutions. In a few weeks many of those resolutions will likely slip into guilty obscurity. By March people will mercifully stop asking you about that resolution. And by June you’ll be blissfully free of any memory of the resolution in the first place.

But in the past few years I’ve noticed my friends doing a thing with their resolutions. One friend started a newsletter to track her progress. Another made a website. Another created a Tumblr. A fourth made a Twitter account to keep tabs on her status. They turned their resolutions into projects. Projects with accountability and brands and logos.

It’s great that you want to read a book a week, or only read books written by women, or run a marathon. I hope you succeed, and grow, and learn something from it. But I’m here to tell you that you don’t actually have to turn every thing you might want to try into a public project. You don’t need a newsletter to keep your fans up on which book written by women of color you’re reading. You don’t need a website or a hashtag. You can just do the thing.

And I’m here to encourage you to do the thing, privately.

Continue reading →