2011: The Science Quiz

By: | December 12, 2011

2011 is drawing to a close, and what a big year it was…for science! Many interesting and important scientific things occurred, and we hope you were paying attention, because here’s your chance to test your knowledge of the most notable scientific developments of 2011 with our super-scientific end-of-the-year quiz!

Did you know you can win actual prizes in our quiz? That’s right! You can be the proud owner of a stylish faux-styrofoam eco-cup  OR a one-of-a-kind t-shirt!

Here’s how:

Answer the questions below and email your answers to lwonquiz@gmail.com. We will choose a winner by random drawing among all the correct entries.

OR

Have you been a bad monkey?

Add your own quiz question and answer and put it in the comments! You must write a question AND add four answer choices. The best question wins a prize!

Tom will announce the correct answers and winners on Friday. All entries must be received by 11:59 PM on Wednesday, December 14.

Good luck!

Erika and Tom

1. Scientists sparred over a claim that what was incorporated into DNA? Continue reading →

Waiting for Dynamo

By: | December 9, 2011

In October, 2006, I wrote a story that began like this . .  .

“In a hangar-sized building at the University of Maryland, Dan Lathrop is playing God. He and his students are cobbling together a three-meter titanium ‘earth’ that—when spun—they hope will give birth to a magnetic field similar to that generated by the larger sphere beneath our feet.”

I was in graduate school for science writing then, and the story was an assignment for my news writing class. My professor, NPR’s David Kestenbaum, had arranged a field trip to see Lathrop’s sphere. My classmates and I spent a few hours nosing around his lab. We called an outside source or two, and wrote our best approximations of a news story. To the best of my knowledge, our stories were never published. I never even sent a pitch. I was too scared.

Even then, Lathrop’s sphere wasn’t exactly hot news. Naomi Lubick wrote a story for Geotimes magazine in 2004. “Dan Lathrop is building a planet in his lab. He custom-ordered a 3-meter-tall metal sphere, which will perch inside a metal box built in his brick-walled lab at the University of Maryland in College Park,” she begins. Continue reading →

Let’s stop pretending we give a damn about climate change.

By: | December 8, 2011

As I write this, 15,000 delegates from around the globe have congregated in Durban, South Africa to take part in a magisterial game of pretend. Officially called the 17th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this recurring charade provides an opportunity for scientists and citizens threatened by climate change to give impassioned speeches about the urgency of the climate problem while representatives from the world’s biggest emitters pretend (or not) to listen before refusing to agree upon any meaningful action.

COP17 continues through December 12, but no one expects it to yield any significant agreements. That’s not to say that it won’t have an effect on the climate. According to the Telegraph, COP17’s carbon footprint is estimated to reach 15,000 tons of CO2 equivalent, and that’s without considering what may be the meeting’s biggest carbon source — the flights attendees take to and from Durban. All told, the Telegraph estimates that COP17’s carbon footprint will reach something akin to “the annual footprint of a small African country.” Continue reading →

Guest Post: Two Malarias

By: | December 7, 2011

A few weeks ago I read the November 2011 newsletter of Roll Back Malaria – a partnership sponsored by the World Health Organization, the United Nations and the World Bank. It contained the following headline: “Nearly a third of all malaria affected countries on course for elimination over the next decade.” I’m not saying the glass is half empty, but it’s just not that simple.

In this short sentence RBM conjured images of great progress against the world’s millennia-old malaria pandemic. So it may sound like nit-picking to point out that RBM’s list includes mostly economically developing countries that should have eliminated malaria a long time ago (former Soviet Republics; Turkey; Sri Lanka; North Korea; sub-regions of Indonesia, Thailand, India, China and Bhutan; several Pacific Islands; countries of the Middle East and North Africa; and from the Western Hemisphere, Mexico, Argentina and Paraguay). Add that not making the list are the world’s most malaria-burdened countries, all in sub-Saharan Africa – where 85 percent of the world’s infections and 90 percent of all malaria-related deaths take place – and I think a case can be made that RBM perhaps missed the mark.

For me, the RBM report that inspired the headline really highlights that global health programs are fighting two malarias and making great progress against only one of them. Continue reading →

Synthetic biology and weapons of war

By: | December 5, 2011

A few years ago, Eric Klavins found himself starting at the ceiling of his room in the Athenaeum, a private lodging on the grounds of the California Institute of Technology, in the middle of the night. Unable to sleep, Klavins found himself pondering a question that had been posed to him earlier that day at a meeting.

Klavins, a robotics researcher, was funded by grants from the US Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on robot self-organization: making many simple robots work together to assemble themselves into a shape or structure. While working on the grants, Klavins would routinely be called into meetings to discuss his work with various defense officials, and it was at one of these meetings that a Defense Department researcher had posed his question.

“He said, ‘Do you think you could figure out how something that has been broken up into lots of little pieces could be reassembled so we could figure out what it was?’” Klavins recalls.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Why the Secret to Losing Weight and Staying Young Won’t be Found in a Pill

By: | December 2, 2011

In September, a rash of stories appeared about a study contradicting the claim that a class of proteins called sirtuins might be a possible anti-aging cure. “Longevity genes challenged,” Nature declared. “Longevity Gene Debate Opens Trans-Atlantic Rift,” wrote Nicholas Wade at The New York Times.  “New study debunks longevity link for GSK’s sexy sirtuins,” wrote John Carroll for Fierce Biotech, the online tabloid of the biotech industry. “Those sexy ‘fountain of youth’ studies on sirtuins …have failed to live up to the initial hype,” Carroll wrote.

Faced with the barrage of whiplash-inducing headlines, I could only ask, “Haven’t we been here before?”

Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Stop the Massacre

By: | December 1, 2011

Our boy, AG, is referring to a joke:  a dairy farmer asks a physicist how to estimate milk production.  The physicist begins the calculations with, “Assume a spherical cow,” and takes it from there.

Physicists are famous for this.  They call it simplifying the model.  Sometimes they have a problem that’s too complicated to be calculated from the bottom up — say, climate change.  So they make a model in which they simplify the parts — an average atmosphere, an average land, an average ocean.  Change one of these averaged parts — make the atmosphere more likely to trap heat — and see how the whole climate responds.

I think in the case that AG presents, the problem is not milk production but something like the distance a cow can be catapulted.  On the whole, simplifying the model is good for finding out roughly where the answer might be.  But it might be hard on the cow.

______

http://abstrusegoose.com/406

Pro Tip: Don’t Fall in the Thames

By: | November 30, 2011

Last week, I fell in the Thames. I only fell in up to my thighs, but the gaping, bleeding puncture on my shin, inside which I could see geologic-looking layers of anatomy — that was a bad sign.

So I found myself at the A&E (that’s ER to you, fellow ‘Mericans) at 4 in the morning in Hackney, where everyone was bored by my lack of gunshot wounds. Until, that is, I revealed that I’d taken a dip in the Thames. Then, even hardened nurses blanched and rushed off to confer with other medical professionals.

As the morning wore on and I kept seeing those expressions of pure horror every time I pointed at my leg and said the word “Thames,” I started to get pretty well creeped out. It culminated with the nice NHS doctor lady giving me my marching orders.

“If you see any red streaks, if you get any shooting pains in your leg, or anything feels wrong, come back immediately,” she advised, eyeing my bandage warily. “No one’s going to mind. Just tell them you’ve had your leg in the Thames.”

I started doing some Google-based investigation. Just what was so bad about inviting some Thames water into my gaping, bleeding flesh? My findings led me to conclude that my leg was either about to shrivel up and fall off, or spontaneously sprout 8 smaller legs. Or eyes.

Continue reading →