[Updates with link to Scientific American stories.]
As I write, it's less than 24 hours since two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the oldest marathon in the country and one of the nation's greatest amateur sporting events. Many reporters and others are reminding...
[Updates with link to Scientific American stories.]
As I write, it's less than 24 hours since two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the oldest marathon in the country and one of the nation's greatest amateur sporting events. Many reporters and others are reminding us that early reports in the aftermath of violence are often wrong. That was the case following the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings. Even such prestigious news outlets as The New York Times made mistakes in the first hours.
And the same thing seems to have happened here. Initial reports said investigators had found two unexploded bombs after the blasts. But that was later retracted, and...
Lately geeks are heroes along manifold axes of popular culture. NASA's crop of them are near the head of their line. But in the newest New Yorker is a feature and profile that blows out the stops. And it raises a question: is the magazine's staff writer and frequent science specialist...
Lately geeks are heroes along manifold axes of popular culture. NASA's crop of them are near the head of their line. But in the newest New Yorker is a feature and profile that blows out the stops. And it raises a question: is the magazine's staff writer and frequent science specialist Burkhard Bilger always this good?* His latest is about one of the principle (yikes and correction, principal, as old pal D. Perlman tells me by terse email) characters who made possible the stunningly complex and, so far, highly productive Curiosity Rover. That's the plutonium-propelled machine poking around in Mars's Gale Crater on the prowl for leftovers of once-cozy habitats for life. And no, Bilger's particular focus for his story is not Mohawk Guy, the media hero of the landing's broadcasts who was done to death. Oh, he...
I had never heard of Markus Persson when I ran across him in an online story at The New Yorker, but I had heard of his most famous creation--the video...
I had never heard of Markus Persson when I ran across him in an online story at The New Yorker, but I had heard of his most famous creation--the video game Minecraft. I haven't played Minecraft. I haven't actually seen it. All right; my six-year-old told me about it.
In a piece entitled "The Creator," Simon Parkin tells us the story of the creation of the game and of Persson, a 33-year-old Swedish programmer who thinks of himself as "only a workmanlike coder." The game has sold more than 20 million copies, Parkin tells us, and Persson has earned more than $100 million from the game and related merchandise. (LEGO is among the companies that have done merchandising deals with Persson and Minecraft.)
Minecraft has rudimentary graphics and sound effects. Its...
The Pulitzer Prizes won't be announced until Monday, but Investigative Reporters and Editors and the custodians of Syracuse University's...
The Pulitzer Prizes won't be announced until Monday, but Investigative Reporters and Editors and the custodians of Syracuse University's Mirror Awards for reporting on the media industry have announced their winners and finalists. (The Mirror Awards announced finalists only; the winners will be announced at a June 5 ceremony in New York.)
Several science, environment and technology stories are among the winners and finalists.
The Seattle Times was a finalist for an IRE award with a story on "the dark side of elephant captivity," and National Geographic made the finals with a piece called "Blood Ivory," about the ivory...
Journalism is built upon shortcuts. Not always, and not everywhere. Long stories can be deliberately--and effectively--discursive. But daily news items rely on shortcuts to get the job done in as little time as possible.
Take, for example,...
Journalism is built upon shortcuts. Not always, and not everywhere. Long stories can be deliberately--and effectively--discursive. But daily news items rely on shortcuts to get the job done in as little time as possible.
Take, for example, an obit today for Robert Edwards, one of the developers of in-vitro fertilization. The obit was written by AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng. It begins, "Robert Edwards, a Nobel prizewinner from Britain...died Wednesday at age 87."
"Nobel prizewinner" is a shortcut. It tells us in two words (I'd make it three) that Edwards likely did good and important research, and that he was probably well known. A couple of grafs later, the story says that Edwards and his late colleague, Patrick Steptoe, were "accused of playing...
Apparently the brain is not the only organ that’s somewhat larger in human beings than in other apes. I knew when I saw a press release from PNAS announcing a new study on penis size and female preference that this research would get some attention.
Speculation goes back at least to Jared...
Apparently the brain is not the only organ that’s somewhat larger in human beings than in other apes. I knew when I saw a press release from PNAS announcing a new study on penis size and female preference that this research would get some attention.
Speculation goes back at least to Jared Diamond’s early book, Why Sex is Fun, in which he ponders why the human member is bigger than necessary to do its job.
Biologist Brian Mautz decided it was finally time to investigate, suspecting that it had something to do with sexual selection driven by female preference. So he exposed Australian female subjects to computerized images of male figures, varying in height, body shape and penis size. They found bigger was more attractive, though there was a point of diminishing returns, and body shape was a more important factor.
Online stories appeared in...
In a little more than a week, two interesting things have turned up in the news regarding cable TV and the Internet. Yesterday, the FOX network said it would stop broadcasting its shows over the airwaves if it lost a court case involving the tech company Aereo...
In a little more than a week, two interesting things have turned up in the news regarding cable TV and the Internet. Yesterday, the FOX network said it would stop broadcasting its shows over the airwaves if it lost a court case involving the tech company Aereo. That was news because last week, a court sided with Aereo in the latest legal decision.
Now what court case was that, exactly?
In a nice, concise story by Joe Mullin yesterday, arstechnica reported that this case and other recent decisions are turning against the cable giants in favor of the upstarts. The story referred to last week's case as "the appeals court decision ruling that Aereo doesn't infringe copyright." The rest of the story said more about FOX's threat...
Sam Ting to the rescue of an intellectual legacy for ISS?
For years - since well before 1998 when the International Space Station finally started coming together in orbit thanks to heroic work by engineers and astronauts - many including yours truly have scoffed at it as a...
Sam Ting to the rescue of an intellectual legacy for ISS?
For years - since well before 1998 when the International Space Station finally started coming together in orbit thanks to heroic work by engineers and astronauts - many including yours truly have scoffed at it as a waste of money. Just to design and build it (marvelous USA Today graphic) cost around $100 billion. I can't lay hands on the operating budget, but it cannot be small. It's a waste, at least, if one scores it on scientific merit rather than as a display of mostly-US aerospace engineering prowess and dominance. Just maybe, the worm is turning. Not that this complex of solar panels, pressurized modules, and docking ports for space freighters devoted mostly to keeping a few people alive inside to run the place will go down as an entirely sensible investment. But even if automated...
Compared to dark energy or fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, dark matter is not quite so daunting to explain. It is indirectly detected through its gravitational pull on visible matter – stars and galaxies. There's a lot of it and we don't know what it's made of but scientists...
Compared to dark energy or fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, dark matter is not quite so daunting to explain. It is indirectly detected through its gravitational pull on visible matter – stars and galaxies. There's a lot of it and we don't know what it's made of but scientists have their theories. And so there was some fanfare made over the results of an experiment called AMS meant to detect positrons that would theoretically be emitted if antimatter takes a particular form, called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), and these said WIMPs collide.
The experiment is also interesting because it was conceived by particle physicist Sam Ting, and because it’s flying on the International Space Station. The results were not definitive, but there was enough to work with.
I was disappointed to see little if any explanation for why the experiment flew on ISS and not some unmanned craft. Or why it was so atronomically...
[Updates with observation that Time Warner owns CNN and that a Time reporter spoke about the cancer cover story on CNN.]
Time magazine's April 1 cover story entitled "How to Cure Cancer,...
[Updates with observation that Time Warner owns CNN and that a Time reporter spoke about the cancer cover story on CNN.]
Time magazine's April 1 cover story entitled "How to Cure Cancer," which I critiqued in an earlier post, praises the work of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Here are some of the things that reporters Bill Saporito and Alice Park had to say about it:
Dr. Ronald DePinho, president of MD Anderson Cancer Center, is adopting a similarly collaborative approach around what the world-renowned institute calls its Moon Shots program, assembling six multidisciplinary groups to mount comprehensive attacks on eight cancers: lung, prostate, melanoma, breast, ovarian and three types...
[Updates with addition of some authors' names, links, and mention of article in Outside magazine.]
National Geographic led the list of National...
[Updates with addition of some authors' names, links, and mention of article in Outside magazine.]
National Geographic led the list of National Magazine Award finalists with seven nominations, the American Society of Magazine Editors announced today. Wired received three nominations and Scientific American was awarded two.
That put science journalism in a leading position among the 62 finalists in 23 categories. (The language is a bit confusing. "Finalists" are the nominees among which a winner will be chosen in each category at a dinner in New York on May 2.)
National Geographic received its honors in the categories of general excellence in print and digital media, and...
The New York Times Magazine continues its unusual string of stories on medicine and psychology with another one yesterday on "prosocial motivation," otherwise known as "to give is better than to...
The New York Times Magazine continues its unusual string of stories on medicine and psychology with another one yesterday on "prosocial motivation," otherwise known as "to give is better than to receive."
The story, by Susan Dominus, a staff writer, deals with the life and work of Adam Grant, who, she writes, is "the youngest tenured and highest rated professor" at the Wharton business school. Grant is a leader in the study of what Dominus calls "prosocial motivation--the desire to help others, independent of easily foreseeable payback."
One of his most famous studies involved a call center at the University of Michigan, where student employees were calling alumni to ask for donations. The usual means of boosting productivity had failed--cash...
[Disclosure: I am on the board of the Science Friday Initiative, which produces Science Friday, and I am a guest on the program from time to time.]
NPR announced this morning on its blog that...
[Disclosure: I am on the board of the Science Friday Initiative, which produces Science Friday, and I am a guest on the program from time to time.]
NPR announced this morning on its blog that it is canceling its 21-year-old afternoon news program Talk of the Nation, effective July 1. But host Ira Flatow and Science Friday, which fills a Talk of the Nation time slot, will continue to broadcast at the usual time--from 2-4pm Eastern time on Fridays, according to a statement.
"We see this is a terrific opportunity for us," said Danielle M. Dana, executive director of the Science Friday Initiative, in an email to the organization's board members. "We’ve spent 22 years making excellent, award-...
Last week, an announcement went around about a new paper showing that women decline science/math jobs because we have more options. Right away I was eager to see how the press would cover it. As we learned from the Larry Summers incident a few years ago, discussing gender imbalances in certain technical professions...
Last week, an announcement went around about a new paper showing that women decline science/math jobs because we have more options. Right away I was eager to see how the press would cover it. As we learned from the Larry Summers incident a few years ago, discussing gender imbalances in certain technical professions can be politically explosive.
And the topic is close to home for me and probably many other readers of this site who turned away from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers in favor of journalism.
The study, published in Psychological Science, involved nearly 1500 college bound seniors who were first surveyed in high school and later at the age of 33. The researchers reportedly looked at SAT scores and surveyed their subjects about beliefs, values and occupations.
The conclusion: People of both sexes who...
A handful of pieces that ran last week describing the first proof of “reverse evolution” were so confusing and odd that I had to send them to some biologists I know for a reality check.
What I found weird was that the pieces described the loss of a previously adaptive trait as some sort of...
A handful of pieces that ran last week describing the first proof of “reverse evolution” were so confusing and odd that I had to send them to some biologists I know for a reality check.
What I found weird was that the pieces described the loss of a previously adaptive trait as some sort of shocker. In this latest case, scientists from the University of Michigan found that dust mites had gone from being parasitic to free-living, the change allegedly being surprising because the parasitic mites were thought to have evolved from a free-living ancestor.
The loss of a trait didn’t seems surprising to me, but maybe it was to biologists. It wasn't to the ones I consulted.
Scientists have understood since Darwin that evolution is not an ascent up a ladder – it’s a process of adaptation to local environments (and some random drift.) The notion of “devolution” doesn’t make much sense in light of our...
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