Even though I no longer plan to be a biologist… (science music part I)

By: | January 31, 2012

Science education amounts to a Great Winnowing — from millions of school kids fascinated by science down to orders of magnitude fewer actually making a living, or a life, doing it decades later. Whatever the reasons so many flee or are pushed out of science — and there are many, both personal and institutional — I’ve always had a fondness for the dropouts.

Over the years, I’ve taught a lot of science students who fall into that category — the ones who are thinking of getting out apparently have a knack for finding me. While cleaning up some old, old files recently, I happened to find evidence of one of the first. I was a PhD student teaching intro biology. In a quiz, I asked about the Michaelis Menten relationship. One student answered with, “I have no clue … Continue reading →

Humanity Under Attack: The Story of Morgellons

By: | January 30, 2012

In 2001, Mary Leitao noticed something odd: a fiber poking out of an irritated patch of skin on her two-year-old son’s lip. In the weeks to come, more fibers emerged. Leitao examined them under the light of her RadioShack microscope, but she couldn’t figure out what they were. So she turned to the internet. There she found a community of people who seemed to be suffering from a similar condition. Leitao was worried. But she couldn’t convince physicians to take her seriously. So she took matters into her own hands. Leitao created a new disease and dubbed it Morgellons. She launched the Morgellons Research Foundation. Then, in 2006, she organized a media campaign.

Morgellons disease received so much attention that, in 2008, the CDC agreed to conduct an investigation into the “unexplained skin condition, commonly referred to as Morgellons.” On January 25, the journal PLoS One published the results. The researchers found no link to any infectious or environmental agent. “Most sores appeared to result from chronic scratching and picking, without an underlying cause,” the authors write. The fibers? Likely cotton from the patients’ clothing or sheets.

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A Reason to Stay

By: | January 27, 2012

There’s nothing like a stagnating job search to make you question your calling in life. I’ve been staring at the title “science journalist” for a couple of months now, and every time the words look more alien to me. The fact is, though I have a passionate interest in making science accessible to the public – who pay for much of it, after all, and should reap the benefits in understanding – I have to face mounting evidence that science itself is of limited interest to me.

Sacrilege! Who dedicates themselves to a poorly-compensated career in a field they aren’t at least mildly obsessed with? And why, if I’m supposed to be specializing in science am I so jazzed about writing a book on mixed martial arts concurrently with another one on financial psychology? Am I cursed with generalitis?

A rowdy debate down the pub with my dearly beloved cousin Jonathan answered my question in the negative this evening. As with so many interests, mine does not fall in the categorized subject fields of academic departments but rather on a plane cross-sectioning them all at a certain angle. Do bear in mind that I just got back from the pub.

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When is it time to revise our story?

By: | January 26, 2012

Today’s post began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote:

At what point does a “drought” become an “arid climate?”

Paolo posed his question months ago, and at first glance, it seemed like nothing more than a jab at Texan politicians like Rick Perry, who deny climate change even as evidence for it accumulates in their own backyards.

But my mind has circled back to Paolo’s question because it touches on so much more than just rainfall in the Southwest. It’s also about the scientific process, the line between data and interpretation and the role of story in science. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: The Sliver of Perception

By: | January 25, 2012

That vertical axis — the electromagnetic spectrum which is science-talk for light — actually goes from something like 3 x 102 to something like 3 x 1024 (in the same units), which is from radio waves, through microwaves, to infrared, to the visible (that tiny rainbow window there), to the ultraviolet, to xrays, to gamma rays.

The horizontal axis — sound — I know less about, except that for some reason we don’t divide sound up into wavebands the way we do light.  No matter.  Animals can hear and see both above and below the waveband ranges that are allotted to us hapless humans.

So what’s out there, way beyond the visible and audible?  Would we be surprised? would we be delighted? would we be frightened?

 

Six Million and Counting

By: | January 24, 2012

Last year, I wrote a story for Smithsonian about white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease that’s killing cave-dwelling bats in the eastern United States. Researchers told me about watching sick, confused bats flutter out of caves in the middle of winter; about entering caves literally carpeted with bat carcasses; about picking bat bones, as slender as pine needles, out of their boot treads.

When I reported the story, scientists and wildlife managers estimated that a million bats had died since the epidemic began in early 2007. Baseline data were scarce, and the number was acknowledged to be little better than a guess. Now, after a long process of soliciting expert opinion and extrapolating from existing data, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced a new estimate: between 5.7 and 6.7 million bats have died from white-nose syndrome — some 85 percent of all cave-dwelling bats in infected areas.

Agency director Dan Ashe called the roughly sixfold increase “startling new information.” But for most of us, it’s not. A million is a big number, and six million is a bigger number, but our minds aren’t very good at grasping either of them. Like the gazillion-dollar federal debt, the bat death toll is just big. And that makes it very easy to ignore.

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Dry Spells

By: | January 23, 2012

In the spring of the year 73, thousands of Roman soldiers raided Masada, a fortress on top of a cliff in the Judean Desert. For seven years, the Jews had tried, unsuccessfully, to split from the Roman empire, and Masada was the last holdout. According to the ancient historian Josephus, when the Romans breached Masada’s walls, they found 960 dead bodies of Jewish extremists, called Sicarii, who had killed themselves to avoid the inevitable enslavement. Because of Masada’s remote location and harsh, dry climate, nothing much happened to the site for the next 2,000 years, until archaeologists started digging it up in 1963. They found attack ramps and siege towers (some of the best examples we have, apparently, of Roman war technologies), palaces, cisterns, swimming pools, 27 human skeletons and, deep under the rubble, a handful of seeds.
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The Problem with Patient Zero

By: | January 19, 2012

On a hot and humid day in October, a man wandered through the city of Mirebalais, Haiti. He was naked, but his neighbors didn’t pay much attention. The man had always been crazy. In fact, townspeople called him “moun fou” — lunatic or fool. He headed toward the bank of the Latem River, where he was often seen drinking water and bathing. Soon after, he came down with a nasty case of diarrhea. Less than a day after his diarrhea began, he died. A report in this month’s American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene suggests that this 28-year-old mentally ill man may have been the first Haitian to contract cholera during the recent outbreak, which began in 2010 and has killed roughly 7,000 people and sickened 500,000.

Of course, the researchers can’t be sure. By the time public health officials recognized that a cholera epidemic was underway, the man had been dead for a week. No one took any samples. The team writes, “We believe he is the first or among the first cases of cholera in Haiti during the current epidemic.” (The italics are mine).

In the press, however, this man became patient zero. The New York Times article, titled “Cholera Epidemic’s First Victim Identified as River Bather Who Forsook Clean Water,” begins like this: “The first Haitian to get cholera at the onset of the 2010 epidemic was almost undoubtedly a 28-year-old mentally disturbed man from the town of Mirebalais.” Perhaps the researchers expressed more certainty when the reporter interviewed them. Or perhaps the reporter just told the narrative we all want to hear. Everyone loves the story of patient zero, especially when it involves a mentally ill Haitian who likes to walk around naked and drink dirty river water. Continue reading →