On Wednesday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado reported that "Arctic sea ice cover likely melted to its minimum extent for the year on September 16," and that this "summer minimum" was "now...
Paul Raeburn's Tracker
On Wednesday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado reported that "Arctic sea ice cover likely melted to its minimum extent for the year on September 16," and that this "summer minimum" was "now the lowest summer minimum extent in the satellite record." The implications were frightening, the center's director said in a statement:
“We are now in uncharted territory,” said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze. “While we’ve long known that as the planet warms up, changes would be seen first and be most pronounced in the Arctic, few of us were prepared for how rapidly the changes would actually occur.”
The news did not get a lot of coverage. The Washignton Post published...
Laura Newman, author of the Patient POV blog, has written about the dangers of reading too much into prostate cancer screening tests, and I have taken note of that here and...
Laura Newman, author of the Patient POV blog, has written about the dangers of reading too much into prostate cancer screening tests, and I have taken note of that here and here. In a post this week, she does the same for breast cancer screening--in particular, the screening of women with dense breasts.
According to Newman, such women have posed a tricky diagnostic problem, because dense breasts are a risk factor for developing breast cancer, and mammograms don't do a very good job of peering through dense tissue.
Should such women undergo further screening? Should they be examined with a newly approved breast ultrasound imaging system?
Newman...
20Sep 2012
I've already done my thing here on Naomi Wolf's book, Vagina: A New Biography, and so have many other critics far more distinguished than I, in publications across the spectrum.
I...
I've already done my thing here on Naomi Wolf's book, Vagina: A New Biography, and so have many other critics far more distinguished than I, in publications across the spectrum.
I could not, however, resist touting a piece by my friend Lauren Sandler in The New York Times, in which she attempts and accomplishes the unthinkable: Unlike the rest of us, she actually talks to Wolf!
The results are insightful and hilarious. After interviewing a scientist on whom Wolf based much of her book, Sandler says he "seemed to care little if Ms. Wolf actually got the science right." And when Wolf says that women's "imperfect realization of their sexuality...
Weary of dopamine? Exhausted by oxytocin?
If, like most of America, you're tired of those once-fashionable neurotransmitters, tired of seeing their photoshopped portraits on magazine covers, do not despair. Today we announce the new new thing in neurotransmitters--the it girl, you might say, if it were a...
Weary of dopamine? Exhausted by oxytocin?
If, like most of America, you're tired of those once-fashionable neurotransmitters, tired of seeing their photoshopped portraits on magazine covers, do not despair. Today we announce the new new thing in neurotransmitters--the it girl, you might say, if it were a girl. This is the most exciting thing to hit neuroscience since Naomi Wolf declared that dopamine is the ultimate feminist chemical. (That was so last week.)
The biomedical postdoc who blogs as Scicurious has been following fashion trends in the scientific literature (who knew?) and she tells us in a post on The Scicurious Brain that something called orexin (photo) is the new black. Also called hypocretin, it...
Matt Peckham begins his article at Time.com with a scene from the movie Contact and quickly reminds us that faster-than-light travel--what Star Trek...
Matt Peckham begins his article at Time.com with a scene from the movie Contact and quickly reminds us that faster-than-light travel--what Star Trek called warp drive--is impossible. "Nothing can travel faster than light, right? To do so would violate the special theory of relativity, which stipulates that you’d need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a particle with mass to light speed."
As Peckham points out, that's almost true. Eighteen years ago, the physicist Miguel Alcubierre came up with the idea that a "warp bubble" could be created by bending spacetime, moving space around the spacecraft so that it actually gets where it's going at a speed faster than that of light. There was one tiny detail: You would need to convert all the mass of Jupiter to energy...
Two weeks ago, I posted on a Stanford study that found that organic food was no more nutritious or less risky than conventionally grown food. Not terribly...
Two weeks ago, I posted on a Stanford study that found that organic food was no more nutritious or less risky than conventionally grown food. Not terribly controversial, I wouldn't have thought; people who like organic food will likely continue to buy it. And those who disagree will look for research that supports their view; no single study provides a definitive answer to these kinds of questions.
I was wrong about all of that. According to Rosie Mestel at The Los Angeles Times, the study was followed by "days of heated reaction," and activists have now...
19Sep 2012
At the Well blog at The New York Times, Gretchen Reynolds has a post on a Danish study that found that men who...
At the Well blog at The New York Times, Gretchen Reynolds has a post on a Danish study that found that men who exercised 30 minutes a day lost more weight than those who exercised 60 minutes.
Before you decide not to do that Ironman, you might want to look at the considerable limitations of the study. The study lasted only 13 weeks, and although Reynolds doesn't say so, it involved only about 60 young men--about 20 each in the no-exercise, moderate-exercise, and high-exercise groups. And the men kept diaries of what they'd eaten--a way to track calories that is not entirely reliable.
Reynolds might have been more careful to note the study's small size and other limitations, but she concludes with a universal truth: the relationship between exercise and weight...
17Sep 2012
I have not read the book. And I don't plan to.
But I thought I should note that Vagina: A New Biography, by the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, has drawn scorn from science bloggers and literary critics alike. The book traffics heavily in neuroscience, we're told, and...
I have not read the book. And I don't plan to.
But I thought I should note that Vagina: A New Biography, by the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, has drawn scorn from science bloggers and literary critics alike. The book traffics heavily in neuroscience, we're told, and various parties suggest that Wolf got the neuroscience wrong. In a review in The New York Review of Books, the writer Zoë Heller notes the dangers for those who wade into neuroscience without a life vest:
Like many who have drunk shallow drafts from the fountains of evolutionary biology and neuroscience, Wolf is so excited at the idea of explaining complex, overdetermined features of human behavior with simple reference to the prehistoric savannah or the hypothalamus that she often ignores the promptings of...
Tabitha M. Powledge, the author of the weekly On Science Blogs published on the website of the National Association of Science Writers, proves herself far braver than I am as she wades into blog posts on metzitzah b’peh, "a Talmud-endorsed form of ritual...
Tabitha M. Powledge, the author of the weekly On Science Blogs published on the website of the National Association of Science Writers, proves herself far braver than I am as she wades into blog posts on metzitzah b’peh, "a Talmud-endorsed form of ritual circumcision practiced among the most orthodox of Orthodox Jews."
In this particular ritual, she writes, "the mohel, after slicing off the foreskin, takes the baby's penis into his mouth along with a sip of wine and sucks blood from the wound."
I'm going to stop right there. Read Powledge for links to blog posts on this subject--posts prompted by regulatory action taken by New York City last week, as Scott Hensley reported at the NPR health blog...
One-sixth of Florida is ranchland. And it ranks 11th in beef cows nationally.
Surprised? So was Jennifer Pinkowski when she joined activists on a trek through Florida's cowboy country for a...
One-sixth of Florida is ranchland. And it ranks 11th in beef cows nationally.
Surprised? So was Jennifer Pinkowski when she joined activists on a trek through Florida's cowboy country for a story at OnEarth.org. Most of Florida's ranchland, she reports, lies in the northern Everglades, stretching from Orlando south to Big Cypress National Preserve. The same area is also home to much of Florida's wildlife, including the Florida panther, the black bear, bald eagle, and others.
The activists made a 1,000-mile trek from the Everglades to the Georgia border. Pinkowski joined them for 15 miles on day 47, when, after battling 30-mile-per-hour winds on Lake Kissimmee, she had to be pulled ashore by a rescue skiff. Nevertheless, she stayed with the activists long enough to tell a story that offers us some hope that Florida's ranches and...
In a story from Los Angeles, The AP reports that a 9th case of hantavirus has been linked to Yosemite National Park. It's not an epidemic yet, and no cause for alarm, one might think. But there...
In a story from Los Angeles, The AP reports that a 9th case of hantavirus has been linked to Yosemite National Park. It's not an epidemic yet, and no cause for alarm, one might think. But there is a worrying observation tucked into the middle of the AP story.
The AP says the disease is rare--587 cases were diagnosed in the U.S. between 1993 and 2011. "But the cases at Yosemite are more unusual. Authorities said they had not heard of more than one case of the disease in the same location within a year."
What can that mean? To my mind, that demands follow-up. This is the first cluster of cases in one place ever? If so, it's a more important story than the coverage so far suggests. Katherine Harmon addresses this...
14Sep 2012
Jon Cohen, a contributing correspondent for Science magazine, has been awarded the 2012 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting for coverage of biomedicine--and...
Jon Cohen, a contributing correspondent for Science magazine, has been awarded the 2012 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting for coverage of biomedicine--and especially for his reporting on the global AIDS epidemic.
The judges cited, in particular, stories Cohen has written for many years in advance of each of the international AIDS meetings. The stories, taken together, make up a kind of world atlas of the AIDS epidemic. (Those with access to Science magazine's website can see the most recent example here, written before the August, 2012 AIDS meeting in Washington, D.C.)
The award, administered by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, will be presented in October at the ScienceWriters2012 conference in...
Somehow, Lee Alan Dugatkin persuaded Slate to run a long piece...
Somehow, Lee Alan Dugatkin persuaded Slate to run a long piece on Thomas Jefferson's minor obsession with the idea of Count George-Louis Leclerc Buffon, curator of the King’s Natural History Cabinet in France, that "because North America was a cold and wet clime, all species found there were weak, shriveled, and diminished—they were degenerate." It became known as Buffon's theory of new-world degeneracy.
Buffon, a scientist famous for his encyclopedia Histoire Naturelle, wrote
that North America was a land of swamps, where life putrefied and rotted. Try to raise domesticated species—cattle, pigs, sheep, goats,...
A 3,000 word story by Alok Jha in The Guardian is a stark examination of how seriously fraud and misconduct are threatening the scientific enterprise.
We've been...
A 3,000 word story by Alok Jha in The Guardian is a stark examination of how seriously fraud and misconduct are threatening the scientific enterprise.
We've been told that misconduct is on the rise, but when Jha starts with the laundry list of recent offenses, he shows us how common it is becoming. He leads with the retractions and fabrications of the Dutch researchers Dirk Smeesters and Diederik Stapel, two separate cases in the last year, which probably attracted more attention to Dutch research than any legitimate research that's been done there in recent years.
He also looks at measures of malfeasance, such as a study in which 1.97% of researchers admitted to having "fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once." In 2006, an analysis of images in the Journal of Cell Biology...
13Sep 2012
The issue of whether or not sources should be allowed to approve quotes before publication has arisen once again, this time in the White House.
Michael Lewis, the respected author of the best-selling "Moneyball" and other books, wrote a story on President Obama for Vanity...
The issue of whether or not sources should be allowed to approve quotes before publication has arisen once again, this time in the White House.
Michael Lewis, the respected author of the best-selling "Moneyball" and other books, wrote a story on President Obama for Vanity Fair, and he conceded this week that he had agreed to allow the White House to review and approve or nix quotes before they went into the story.
In a story by Jeremy W. Peters in The New York Times, Lewis, who wasn't quoted directly, seemed to justify the practice by saying that the White House objected to very little of what he wrote. That's nice to know, I suppose, but it sidesteps the issue of whether Lewis should have agreed to the review or not. Peters seems to suggest...
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