The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

Flakey

By: Cameron Walker | January 29, 2013

Unique,_snow_flake I love snow, but we don’t get much of it here. On the rare day that the highest peaks catch a few flakes, people pile into cars and drive up into our local mountains just to see a small patch of white.

Part of the allure is the wonderful way in which snow is described —in Inuit, Yupik, Sami, and even in our own language. Sierra cement. Champagne powder. Cascade concrete. Alaskan velvet. Spring corn.

At close range, it’s more beautiful still. An avalanche forecaster once pointed to a photo of faceted snow crystals on her wall when I asked her what her favorite kind was. These weren’t her favorite, exactly—she said they’re the ones she loved to hate–but the ones that fascinated her, the kind that formed weak layers in the snow. (Here’s a cool animation of how it forms, usually with the help of a wide range of temperatures within the snowpack.)

Maybe it’s this combination of strong and weak that gets me. Snow crystals look like delicate formations of oxygen and hydrogen. Together, they can both create winter wonderlands and decimate landscapes and lives. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Becoming a Statistician

By: Robin Mejia | January 28, 2013

As you know, we are now one month into the International Year of Statistics.

What, you didn’t know that?

Yeah, statisticians aren’t really all that great at promotion. Which is too bad, since they work on interesting problems in just about every field of science and engineering.

The first time I went to the Joint Statistics Meeting — a fairly huge annual conference organized by four statistics professional organization — I was surprised by the range of presentations. I was there for a panel on estimates of the Iraq war’s death toll, but that ran alongside talks on ways to improve clinical drug trials and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, how to better analyze international development data, and methodological improvements in modeling the circulation of waters in Lake Michigan. And there was almost no coverage. I met one local AP business reporter, but that was it. Granted, public relations is not the primary role of a scientific society, but it’s a useful one. I’ve been to many meetings where carefully orchestrated press outreach highlighted the policy-relevant talks. Heck, even computer engineers, not exactly an incredibly pr-savvy group, have their own Barbie. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Sally Adee | January 26, 2013

January 21 – 25

This week, Eric showed us why no one does death quite like Mexico;

Abstruse Goose does the math to tell us where in the universe our televised electromagnetic leaks have gotten to;

Cassie examined the complex relationships between scientific breakthroughs, miracle drugs, and the government programs that allow them to save real people;

Tom considers dinosaurs in the bathtub and ponders that “a few evolutionary contingencies one way or another, and you could have had a giant ground sloth for a pet.”

And Heather described how Jyoti Singh — bestowed with the name Damini, or lightning after her violent death — is changing India forever.

A Disease, A Miracle Drug, and a Tale of Uncertain Survival

By: Cassandra Willyard | January 25, 2013

Phoenix is scorching in the summer, and Pat Elliott had been standing for hours. So she wasn’t alarmed one August day in 2009 to find her feet swollen. “It must be the weather,” Elliott thought. But they also ached. The pain was horrendous. So she called her doctor, and he told her to come in. Reluctantly she went.

Several blood tests and a bone marrow biopsy later, Elliott learned she had a type of blood cancer called chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Her white cell count was sky high, her spleen was swollen, and her kidneys were failing. Continue reading →

Goodnight, Linnaeus: Bathtub Systematics and the Nature of Scientific Curiosity, Part I

By: Thomas Hayden | January 24, 2013

150 million years ago in what is now the North American West, mighty diplodocus thundered across the terrain, stripping leaves from branches with its peg-like teeth and lashing away pests and predators with the 80-some vertebrae of its whip-like tail. They were magnificent creatures, as long as three school buses each. And for nearly a year I thought I had one in my bathtub. That’s where the trouble began. Continue reading →

A Very Dark Corner of Indian Life

By: Heather Pringle | January 23, 2013

Young Indian feminists have begun calling her “Damini.” We don’t know her real name, but most of us have read about the terrible way she died. Damini was the 23-year-old woman attacked and gang-raped in New Delhi on December 16 while returning home at night on a bus with a male friend. She died 13 days later, and five men accused of these crimes are now about to stand trial in India.

Damini means “lightning” in Hindu, and her case has sparked major protests in India, shining a stark new light on a very dark corner in modern life there. I had little clear idea, until I began doing some background reading in the Indian forensic science literature, just how prevalent rape is in India. Continue reading →

Book Review: Several Ways to Die in Mexico

By: Erik Vance | January 22, 2013

I swear, I am not going to write exclusively about Mexico City. Really, I’m a science writer, not a travel writer. I swear it. But after my initial post, Christie sent me the book, Several Ways to Die in Mexico City, by Kurt Hollander and I just had to read it.

At first, I was actually very excited. Death, after all, is a fascinating topic here in Mexico. Perhaps due to a solid 100 years between 1820 and 1920 of near-constant upheaval, Mexico has developed some fascinating traditions around death – Day of the Dead being just one. A fresh, fun look at the various ways Mexican view death (plus a few Mary-Roach-style details) could be really interesting, if done right.

Sadly, it wasn’t. This book should have been titled “God, I Hate Mexico.” Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Electromagnetic Leak

By: Ann Finkbeiner | January 21, 2013

You understand this, right? that the radio-wave part of the electromagnetic spectrum travels, like all light, at one fixed speed. And since those same radio waves carry television programs, the programs broadcast earliest have traveled farthest. It’s not complicated but it is appalling: poor Arcturus, stuck with Happy Days.

________

Abstruse Goose took a little break and posted his classics. Meanwhile, he’s disappeared his archives. So his cartoon has no number; I know only that it first appeared July 2, 2009.