Within a day or so of last week’s asteroid explosion over Chelyabinsk, there was a blast of press releases from various groups seeking money and/or public support for projects to monitor and study the asteroid “threat”.
The impact of the news was magnified by the weird coincidence that this...
Within a day or so of last week’s asteroid explosion over Chelyabinsk, there was a blast of press releases from various groups seeking money and/or public support for projects to monitor and study the asteroid “threat”.
The impact of the news was magnified by the weird coincidence that this meteor shattered windows and injured people in Russia the same day as a predicted flyby of a larger asteroid. Charlie Petit covered the next-day coverage for the Tracker here. Over the weekend, a nicely-written story appeared in the Washington Post, by Joel Achenbach, Brian Vastag and Will Englund. The lede shows the power of simple, clear language:
It was a day when the Earth was caught in a cosmic crossfire. The big rock came from the south, the...
After an experiment in which we opened comments to allow anyone to comment on Tracker posts, we have decided to require registration once again.
We found ourselves deluged with spam, despite the use of CAPTCHA schemes, and we didn't see a corresponding increase in legit comments. In fact, we were in...
After an experiment in which we opened comments to allow anyone to comment on Tracker posts, we have decided to require registration once again.
We found ourselves deluged with spam, despite the use of CAPTCHA schemes, and we didn't see a corresponding increase in legit comments. In fact, we were in danger of missing legit comments in our sweeps to clear out the spam.
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[Update: Thanks to Tom Avril who, in the comments, pointed me to a valuable defense of drones in Slate; I've worked a mention of it into the post.]
A law signed by President Obama in February, 2012 "directs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to throw American airspace wide open...
[Update: Thanks to Tom Avril who, in the comments, pointed me to a valuable defense of drones in Slate; I've worked a mention of it into the post.]
A law signed by President Obama in February, 2012 "directs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to throw American airspace wide open to drones by September 30, 2015," writes John Horgan in the March National Geographic. It's now only a matter of time, Horgan writes, until many police departments are flying drones--also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs--along with farms, weather forecasters, traffic control officials. And, yes, journalists.
The headquarters of what's becoming a boom in drone design and manufacture is not in Silicon Valley or Southern California or any other hub of military research, division, and manufacture. It's in Dayton,...
A story by Jason Bittel at Slate about how bears hibernate tries so hard to be funny and somehow "hip" that it winds up distracting readers from the interesting tale that Bittel is trying to tell.
Bittel's story reveals interesting...
A story by Jason Bittel at Slate about how bears hibernate tries so hard to be funny and somehow "hip" that it winds up distracting readers from the interesting tale that Bittel is trying to tell.
Bittel's story reveals interesting details about bear hibernation and how it is related to reproduction and the protection of cubs until they can take care of themselves. He begins by noting that "Even small children too young to attend to their own biological functions" know that bears hibernate. But bears are not true hibernators, Bittel reports.
And then he writes, "I know what you’re thinking: First Lance Armstrong, then Manti Te’o, and now this."
Some might enjoy ragging on Armstrong and Te'o in this context, but I think it's out of place, and I missed what Bittel wrote in the next two or three grafs because I was still cringing over a lighthearted...
From this week's reading:
--If you think of Canada as a place a lot like the United States but nicer, you might want to think again. The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans says Canadian scientists--and their U.S. collaborators on an Arctic research project--...
From this week's reading:
--If you think of Canada as a place a lot like the United States but nicer, you might want to think again. The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans says Canadian scientists--and their U.S. collaborators on an Arctic research project--may not discuss their work with anyone, including the media, without prior written authorization. "I'm not signing it," said Andreas Muenchow, of the University of Delaware...It's an affront to academic freedom and a "potential muzzle," said Muenchow, who has been collaborating with DFO scientists on the project in the Eastern Arctic since 2003. This is not the first time this has happened, and the Canadian Science Writers Association is fighting it.
...
Media are not sure if it is merely hundreds or at least 1000 people injured in western Siberia by sonic boom or maybe blast wave, but a meteor that blew apart in the sky early this morning sent a lot of people to the hospital. Most injuries are, reports say, due to broken glass with no fatalities yet noted.
...Media are not sure if it is merely hundreds or at least 1000 people injured in western Siberia by sonic boom or maybe blast wave, but a meteor that blew apart in the sky early this morning sent a lot of people to the hospital. Most injuries are, reports say, due to broken glass with no fatalities yet noted.
This would be news in any case. Videos are pretty spectacular. Some calculate this is the largest such event in at least 100 years, or at least that anybody noticed. That many people hurt by a bolide's destruction in the sky is a big story. Ditto for it being in Siberia where in 1908 a larger asteroid (more like an asteroidette, but pretty big) blew up as it flattened out from atmospheric drag and turned its kinetic energy into kaboom. That one, the Tunguska fireball, in turn flattened a huge stretch of forest in a nearly uninhabited wilderness. On top of all that, this one today came as...
The Knight Foundation on Wednesday said in an unbylined blog post that it "should not have put itself into a position tantamount to rewarding people who have violated the basic tenets...
The Knight Foundation on Wednesday said in an unbylined blog post that it "should not have put itself into a position tantamount to rewarding people who have violated the basic tenets of journalism. We regret our mistake" in inviting the disgraced journalist Jonah Lehrer to speak at a Knight conference, the post said.
The admission followed a day of blistering and widespread criticism of Knight and Lehrer on Twitter and elsewhere online.
On Tuesday, Knight paid Lehrer $20,000 to deliver a speech that, in the view of many critics, amounted to a rehearsed apology aimed at rehabilitating his journalism career. It was the first time Lehrer had spoken publicly about the scandal that broke last summer, when he was tripped up by reporters and admitted plagiarizing others, reusing his own material in new...
Standing beside a large screen displaying brutal comments on Twitter, the disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer today delivered a talk that seemed to be aimed primarily at rehabilitating his writing career, rather than offering any insights on his journalistic misdeeds.
...
Standing beside a large screen displaying brutal comments on Twitter, the disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer today delivered a talk that seemed to be aimed primarily at rehabilitating his writing career, rather than offering any insights on his journalistic misdeeds.
Lehrer was paid $20,000 for his talk by the Knight Foundation, according to Andrew Sherry, the foundation's spokesman. Lehrer spoke at a Knight Foundation journalism conference in Miami. (The Knight Fellowships at MIT were established by a grant from the Knight Foundation.)
In his first public remarks since resigning from The New Yorker last summer, Lehrer began by apologizing to his readers and his colleagues. "My mistakes have caused deep pain to those I care about...I am profoundly sorry," he said. "It is my hope that someday my...
The media blogger Jim Romenesko posted an alert yesterday announcing that Jonah Lehrer, the disgraced journalist accused of plagiarism and faulty reporting who was forced to resign from...
The media blogger Jim Romenesko posted an alert yesterday announcing that Jonah Lehrer, the disgraced journalist accused of plagiarism and faulty reporting who was forced to resign from The New Yorker, will be the speaker today at the closing luncheon of the Knight Foundation's Media Learning Seminar 2013 in Miami.
“Yes he is going to speak about decision-making — including the bad decision-making that caused him to wreck his journalism career,” Knight Foundation spokesman Andrew Sherry told Romenesko.
Romenesko also told Sherry that he was "surprised that there’s no mention of Lehrer’s serial plagiarism in the bio that Knight prepared for this three-day event." Sherry responded, "You’...
The Philadelphia Inquirer's science writer Tom Avril has out today a thoroughly enjoyable and well-written story on, of all things, calculus. We learn soon...
The Philadelphia Inquirer's science writer Tom Avril has out today a thoroughly enjoyable and well-written story on, of all things, calculus. We learn soon enough in this account that there is at least one good reason Avril is fully in his comfort level writing it. He is a former math teacher and, while he didn't teach calculus he did complete a course in it as an engineering student in his pre-journalism days.
The news is that a Univ. of Pennsylvania math professor has 48,000 students in 62 countries taking his online calculus course, and that it just recently received accreditation. So, it can count just like the courses that Penn undergrads take while sitting in a classroom on campus and while they, their parents, or a scholarship program pays a pretty tuition price.
One gets...
Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore--I wandered with one of my sons over to the Lower East Side, where we discovered a highly improbable production of one of...
Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore--I wandered with one of my sons over to the Lower East Side, where we discovered a highly improbable production of one of Shakespeare's history plays.
The stage was a parking lot, where drifters, extras, and other supernumeraries wandered idly hither and yon, a procession that continued even after the play started. The king's throne was mounted atop what I recall as being an old Chevy, but it could have been a Buick or a Studebaker for all I know. The car would occasionally move him downstage or up, whether under its own power or under the influence of stage crew hidden somewhere underneath, we could not tell.
So I was interested to read this week that the bones of a Shakespearean figure, Richard III,...
A most strange train of thought blew through my cranium this morning upon reading a tidy, sensible story in the San Francisco Chronicle by the singular Dave Perlman....
A most strange train of thought blew through my cranium this morning upon reading a tidy, sensible story in the San Francisco Chronicle by the singular Dave Perlman.
On its face the story concerns merely another small, melancholy step toward a planet neither we nor any of our known ancestors would recognize. It's a short account, well-reported and with several sources, of discovery by geologists that a well-known glacier in Yosemite National Park has stopped moving, appears to be thinning, may well be disappearing. It has that nice map, filched and above, on the page with it. Perlman has, as have many of the remaining newspaper science writers, little room in which to work and is under instruction to please keep it local. Yosemite is local. The theme is big: climate change. But there also is little room in it...
One might think the tale has been told and done to death on the famous, speculative paper asserting that microbes in Mono Lake, CA, have adapted to their low-phosphorus and high-arsenic environment by swapping the latter atoms into their DNA and other molecules of life for the former ones. But at USA Today...
One might think the tale has been told and done to death on the famous, speculative paper asserting that microbes in Mono Lake, CA, have adapted to their low-phosphorus and high-arsenic environment by swapping the latter atoms into their DNA and other molecules of life for the former ones. But at USA Today Dan Vergano this week published a story that adds a genuinely illuminating end note. It pertains to a great deal more than this one well-meant and earnestly presented (if almost certainly wrong in primary thrust) paper and its publication two-plus years ago in the illustrious magazine Science.
What his investigation does is to zero in on the opinions the journal's editors received from the outside experts they consulted. Vergano does not report how he got his hands on them. Such reviews are generally kept...
When I think of Darwin and birds, I think of finches, which were among the species the master used to derive the theory of evolution. Now, in an intriguing piece in today's ...
When I think of Darwin and birds, I think of finches, which were among the species the master used to derive the theory of evolution. Now, in an intriguing piece in today's Science Times, Carl Zimmer tells us that Darwin was astonished by the diversity of pigeon breeds, and that he wrote about them in his On the Origin of Species, "a work greatly informed by his experiments with the birds."
Zimmer's story is about Michael D. Shapiro, a biologist at the University of Utah who is part of an international team of scientists studying the pigeon genome, trying to find the mutations that give rise to different breeds. According to Zimmer, the work supports Darwin's claim that all pigeon breeds were descendants of the rock pigeon.
Zimmer walks us through a history of pigeon...
In this week's edition of On Science Blogs, Tabitha M. Powledge pursues the notorious case of the dead ferrets, a mystery worthy of 221B Baker St.
She begins with a nice...
In this week's edition of On Science Blogs, Tabitha M. Powledge pursues the notorious case of the dead ferrets, a mystery worthy of 221B Baker St.
She begins with a nice roundup of blogs addressing the announced resumption this week of research on H5N1 bird-flu viruses engineered to be transmissible between mammals. Until now, humans appear to have contracted the virus only through contact with birds, especially poultry. But it can't be passed from one human to another. The new research was aimed at making the virus transmissible among ferrets, which respond to the virus the way humans do--or close to it, as I discussed in a post here earlier this week. The researchers doing the work agreed to a moratorium a year ago and unilaterally ended it this...
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