Redux: Scientists’ Slippage

By: | September 3, 2012

This post is a re-run from 7/15/2010.  The situation hasn’t improved.

I get this look a lot

I grew up noticing what a writer notices — stories and how things are said — and educated myself accordingly.  So I never learned much science and now, after I’ve unexpectedly turned into a science writer, my questions to scientists are generally English-major questions.

Me:  Why do a tennis ball and a bowling ball fall at the same speed?

Physicist:  Are all your questions like this?

My problem is made worse because I write about the physical sciences which, with the exception of gravity, are rarely part of an English major’s life experience.  Nevertheless, on the whole, scientists are tolerant of my questions.   Maybe they understand the unfathomable distances between their education and mine.  Maybe because they usually teach undergraduates, they are used to such questions.  Or maybe they don’t expect much from me in the first place:  like the dog walking on its hind legs, they think, the wonder is not that she does it well but that she does it at all.

As I ask my questions, I can see them trying to figure out how to answer, how to communicate with this creature from another world, how translate the equations in their heads into words, let alone words about relationships between abstracts.  They’re earnestly trying their best to communicate but sometimes they get tired and give up.

Me:  Can you explain to me the work you did in quantum field theory?

Physicist:  You asked me that the other day and you couldn’t understand what I told you then.  That would still be true. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | September 1, 2012

August 27 -31

This week, guest poster Anne Casselman reported on a fascinating group of new experiments that indicate that a real solution to climate change won’t come from engineering better biofuels as much as it will come from engineering better ways to exploit our own psychological trap doors.

After all, social pressure is our most fearsome weapon: Michelle found that it’s enough to make Chinese politicians drink themselves to death on a drink that tastes like socks with AIDS.

If you’re feeling pressure to procreate because of the recent study about old dads and autism, Ginny set us all straight this week about overinterpreting the findings.

Abstruse Goose brought back my favourite character of God-the-shortsighted-managerial-type (in this week’s episode: 640 k will totally be enough memory for all the laws of physics!).

And Heather remembered an unlikely patron saint of archaeology who marched to the beat of no one’s drum.

Happy weekend, everyone. Enjoy the last bit of summer!

The Oracle and the Monkey

By: | August 31, 2012

For nearly five decades, a scientific loner guarded a great labyrinth of lines on the desert floor near the small Peruvian town of Nazca. Day after day, until she was too elderly and too ill for such solitary work, Maria Reiche set out into the barren vastness with camera, compass, and papers, mapping thousands of straight lines and dozens of immense ground drawings inscribed on the desert floor more than 1500 years ago by the Nazca, masters of maize agriculture and irrigation.

Reiche had studied mathematics as a young university student in Weimar Germany. She thought that the Nazca Lines formed a vast celestial calendar, an early scientific masterpiece akin to the calendar that Maya astronomers created and preserved in bark-paper books known as codices. Reiche believed the desert was a Nazca codex, and she brooked no intruders, no vandals on the lines. She paid for guards herself, and by the strength of her convictions she persuaded the Peruvian government to protect the lines. After her death in 1998, Alberto Fujimori, then president of Peru, talked of renaming them the Reiche Lines.

I was reminded of all this, when I came across a Reuters news story from Lima last week.   Continue reading →

The Baijiu Bender

By: | August 30, 2012

During a recent reporting trip to central China, I went to a banquet honoring a group of visiting foreign scientists. I’d heard about these banquets: red tablecloths, elaborate dinnerware, a procession of courses long enough to turn eating into an athletic event. But what were these miniature wineglasses, filled so deftly with clear liquid? The woman next to me, an American energy expert with long experience in China, looked at the sparkling glasses with a mixture of amusement, disgust, and resignation. “Baijiu,” she sighed. “They never forget the baijiu.”

Baijiu, usually distilled from sorghum, has been part of Chinese life for hundreds if not thousands of years. The reaction of the first laowai to taste it is lost to history, but for well over a century foreigners have described baijiu with escalating horror. “One can hardly imagine what pleasure the Chinese find in imbibing these burning drinks, which are absolutely like liquid fire, and, moreover, very ill tasted,” the French Catholic missionary Évariste Régis Huc wrote in 1854. Dan Rather, reporting on Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, described Maotai, a famous variety of baijiu, as “liquid razor blades.” Others go further: “Socks with AIDS.” “Pure distilled evil in liquid form.”

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Guilt & Shame & Climate Change

By: | August 29, 2012

The six undergrads that trickle into the Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory at the University of British Columbia are unsure about what they’re in for. The room they enter is all black from the carpet to the walls and the ceiling. A conference table partitioned into six sections is illuminated in the middle. They each take a seat and anonymously play ten rounds of a computer game. Fifteen minutes later the players file out, different amounts of cash in hand. They glance at each other furtively: were you the defector that ruined the game for all of us, they wonder, or were you the irrational altruist?

In this experiment Jennifer Jacquet, an environmental economist, and Christoph Hauert, a mathematician at the University of British Columbia, have pitted  self-interest against collective gain in order to tease apart what induces and destroys cooperation on climate change.  We tend to think of climate change as a global issue that technology and science will solve. Think again. It’s just as much a question about human nature. Ergo, mitigating climate change may not lie in cutting edge biofuels. It may lie in our very nature. Just how to tease it out is what Jacquet is after:  “All the models will tell us cooperation is best but none of them tell us how to get there.”  Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: The Creation, part 3

By: | August 28, 2012

As you undoubtedly know, quantum theory — the most precisely accurate most fundamental theory about the universe’s most basic particles and forces — comes down to the uncertainty principle.  That is,  if you know where and how forcefully and how fast a particle is going (its momentum), you can’t at the same time know where it is (its position). And vice versa.  That the most precise and accurate explanation of the world ends in uncertainty seems — unsatisfying.  To say the least.  It’s another of Abstruse Goose’s arguments with God.  Here are the first and second ones.

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http://abstrusegoose.com/455

Top 3 Reasons to Stop Fretting About Being an Old Dad

By: | August 27, 2012

You probably heard about last week’s Nature study on older dads and autism; it got a lot of attention. The basic findings were fascinating but, in my opinion, far less sensational than what most of the news articles would have us believe.

The researchers, led by Kári Stefánsson of deCODE Genetics in Iceland, showed that the average 20-year-old man passes on about 25 new single-letter DNA mutations to his child. (These kinds of mutations happen spontaneously in sperm cells, so they don’t affect the DNA in the father’s other cells.) With each passing year of age, the man’s sperm acquires two more mutations. This makes sense, biologically. Sperm Primordial sperm cells divide over and over throughout a man’s life. To use an over-used metaphor: Each time the code gets copied, it creates an opportunity for a spelling mistake. Eggs Primordial eggs, in contrast, go through far fewer divisions. Women, no matter what their age, pass on about 14 mutations to each child, the study found.

The researchers also showed, using demographic data of Icelanders going back to 1650, that the average age of fathers has recently shot up, from 27.9 years in 1980 to 33 in 2011. Based on their calculations, that means the average number of mutations passed on to each kid (from mother and father combined) went from 59.7 to 69.9.

Here’s the sensational part. Stefánsson says, given that these mutations have been linked to autism, the increase in older fathers could partially explain why autism rates have risen over approximately the same time period. This is a plausible idea, sure, in theory. But there’s actually not much data to back it up (more on that later). And yet the assertion — reported in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and more than 250 other outlets (Slate’s XXfactor blog even ran a piece titled, “Dude, Bank Your Sperm. It’ll Get You Laid.”) — was enough to scare some potential fathers. As one of my friends Tweeted, “great, my 34yr-old gonads may be ticking neuro-disorder timebombs.”

It’s an unsettling feeling, I’m sure. I’ve felt a similar panic about being an older mother (though for different reasons). But honestly, men, of all the things to spend time worrying about, this study is not one of them. Here’s why.
Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 25, 2012

August 20 – 24

This week, Cassandra opened up a big, foamy can of whoop-ass all over the people who uncritically told you eggs were as bad for you as cigarettes.

Cameron told us why we may get more motion sick as we get older.

Ann presented an open and shut case for why you need to read Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist.

Michelle wondered what we mean when we say we want to conserve nature. What is nature at the dawn of the anthropocene?

And Christie sent us into the weekend with an analysis of the penis as earworm.