Penguin Study Sparks a Tiff (of sorts)

By: | January 20, 2011

As a journalist, I live in constant terror of making mistakes. This anxiety typically simmers just below the surface of my consciousness, occasionally bubbling up to grab me in a full choke hold. But errors are more or less inevitable in this business. And last week, I made one.

A new Nature study showed that the metal bands scientists put on penguins’ flippers to track them are bad for the birds. The authors reported that banded birds had 39% fewer chicks and a 16% lower survival rate than unbanded birds over ten years. (Why would  this be? The bands seem to create drag when the penguins swim, which means they must work harder to go the same distance as their unbanded counterparts.)

When I covered the research for ScienceNOW, I used those figures. Here’s the problem: If you glance at the table where the study’s authors report overall survival, you’ll find that the survival for unbanded penguins was 0.36 and survival for banded penguins was 0.20 (that is, the number of birds present at the end of the study divided by the number of birds present at the beginning). That’s actually a drop of 44 percent, or 16 percentage points. (Don’t understand the difference? Join the club. There’s a nice explanation here and here.) Continue reading →

Lady Crickets Can Be Cougars, Too

By: | January 19, 2011

The term ‘cougar’ — referring to an older woman who pounces on a younger man — used to be an insult. Remember the most famous cougar of the ’90s? Mary Kay Letourneau, the 34-year-old teacher who slept with her 12-year-old student. She went to prison for seven years. (Ok, so Mary was more of a pedophile than a cougar, but you get my point.)

It’s different now. Cougars are everywhere, and not only accepted, but chic (Samantha Jones, Demi & Ashton, Cougar Town). They’re independent, sassy and smart. And this month, they’re finally getting some recognition from the scientific world. Female field crickets, it turns out, prefer the serenades of younger males.
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Unknown Unknowns

By: | January 18, 2011

On June 6, 2002, during a press conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recounted a particularly difficult episode in gathering intelligence during wartime. “Now what is the message there?” he said. “The message is that there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns.” The snickering started then, in that briefing room, and it hasn’t stopped since.

In my previous LWON post, “The Beginning of the End of Science,” I discussed the dangerous, even tragic legacy of George W. Bush’s unfamiliarity with scientific logic. A friend wrote to me that the nonsensical ramblings of Bush resembled Rumsfeld’s own plunge down the rabbit hole. Not so, I wrote back. Rumsfeld (pause; wince; sigh) got it right.

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Eulogy for Jim’s Camera

By: | January 17, 2011


This picture is what the sky really looks like.  Click on it.  It’s the biggest digital color picture of  the sky, the part called the Northern Galactic Cap, and it’s taken years to produce; it’s a trillion pixels, a terapixel and — says the press release from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey — to see it at full resolution, you’d need 500,000 high-def TVs.  In it are millions of asteroids, stars, quasars, and galaxies and they’re all free, go download them.  It holds, says an astronomer who worked on it, “one of the biggest bounties in the history of science.”  The camera that made the picture possible, a faithful and delicate and nearly perfect instrument, is now old news; it’s  gathering dust, is out to pasture. Continue reading →

Tempest in a Garbage Patch

By: | January 14, 2011

For decades, the oceans were an overlooked domain when it came to environmental awareness. Extinction, it seemed, was something that happened on land and pollution, primarily anyway, was a fate for air, lakes and rivers. That was observation bias, of course: we spend most of our time on land, breathing air and drinking fresh water, so naturally we noticed those befoulments first.

No longer. Tales of oceanic woe wash ashore with great regularity now, but few can match the media splash made by plastic pollution, most famously in the form of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Imagine: A floating, Texas-sized island of wildlife-choking trash bobbing menacingly smack in the middle of the North Pacific.

The garbage patch media event has already contributed to plastic bag bans in San Francisco and elsewhere, and has both led to and been reflected in the improbable spectacle of at least two different awareness-raising voyages in vessels constructed of cast-off plastic water bottles, complete with a clownish battle over rights to the ship’s name “Plastiki.” Even Oprah Winfrey joined in, calling the Great Pacific Garbage Patch “the most shocking thing I have seen.”

Does it matter then that it isn’t the size of Texas, and isn’t a floating island of trash or even, really, a patch?

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Vikings, Lightning and Bad Portents

By: | January 13, 2011

In the late spring of A.D. 793, British peasants experienced their first taste of Viking warfare, a clash so terrifying that it seemed to be of supernatural origin. “Terrible portents appeared over Northumbria and miserably frightened the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky,” noted one scribe. “A little after that, in the same year on 8 June, the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.”

The Vikings,  it seems,  didn’t play by British rules of engagement. Continue reading →

Evidence-based Medicine?

By: | January 12, 2011

Scientists know a lot about infectious diseases. But a new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that the treatment guidelines created by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) are based on imperfect evidence. Only one in seven treatment recommendations relied on evidence from a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard in medicine.

In a randomized trial, participants are randomly assigned to one of two groups—the “treatment” group or the control group. The control group receives the standard of care, say ibuprofen for a headache. The treatment group receives whatever new-fangled drug or intervention the researchers want to test, say meditation or Valium.

At first blush, this apparent lack of high-quality evidence may seem like cause for outrage. But ask any medical researcher, and they will tell you that clinical trials are crazy expensive. In some cases, they aren’t even possible. And in other cases, they’re just plain stupid: We don’t need a clinical trial, the authors point out, to tell us that staying far away from ticks cuts our risk of contracting Lyme disease, nor do we need a clinical trial to tell us that nurses and doctors should wash their hands to prevent the spread of infections. Continue reading →

Science Metaphors (cont.): Mantle Drag

By: | January 11, 2011

The older I get, the more people I know who have lost what they could not afford to lose.  I’ll repeat:  lost means gone, unrecoverable, not coming back; and what these people lost, they still need and want.  The problem is nearly universal and has no obvious solution, or rather, the solution is idiosyncratic and not necessarily found by looking.  Somehow it just, more or less, sorts itself out.  Meanwhile, daily life must be slogged through as gracefully as possible, looking as normal as possible, staying on the surface.  Otherwise you won’t get invited to dinner parties.  Geophysicists have an inelegant phrase, “mantle drag.” Continue reading →