Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 38
October 22, 2012
Flea-Ridden Page Turners, The Forensics of Vengeance, and More: Catching Up with Download the Universe
Download the Universe, the science ebook review I started up with some colleagues nine months ago, continues to grow. Here’s the latest batch of reviews:
The Most Ingenious Book: How to Rediscover Micrographia My survey of the digital experiences of Robert Hooke’s 1665 masterpiece.
NASA’s 30 years of Shuttle Missions Is Both Dull and Compelling John Timmer explores NASA’s online history
The Long Quest to Catch a Poisoner Deborah Blum finds the science in a true-crime thriller.
A Medieval Bestiary: When a Book Breaks Your Heart Maggie Koerth-Baker has great hopes for an ebook from the British Library. Hopes are dashed.
Did You Like My Ebook? Don’t Lie! Maia Szalavitz reviews Sam Harris’s ebook on lying.
The Beautiful Planet Meets The Immortal Cassini I take a look at an elegant collection of NASA’s images of Saturn.
Death and Other Options: How To Think (Hopefully!) About Global Health Tom Levenson reviews a TED book on the medical future of our species
Deep Water: A Pretty Good TED Ebook (Really!) About Climate Change John Dupuis considers the strengths and weaknesses of an ebook on climate change.
Interplanetary Cuisine What do people eat in space? Veronique Greenwood tucks in.
October 13, 2012
Being Human: A New Site About Our Species (With An Essay From Me On Brains in Vats)
I was recently invited to write an essay for a promising new web site that launches today, called Being Human. It’s all about what it means to be Homo sapiens, and I chose to focus on our brain, which is so fundamental to our unique place in the natural world. In fact, we like to think of ourselves as our brains. You could, after all, imagine yourself as just a brain in a vat. It might be hard to manage, but if someone could figure out the right liquids to put in the tank and the right wires to stick into it, it “ought” to work. Hence, The Matrix.
This is actually a new notion, and in my essay, I take a look at our ideas about the brain over the past couple thousand years. Check it out.
October 10, 2012
That GMO-cancer study? It gets worse.
Last month I blogged about the unsavory practices of French scientists who unveiled a study purporting to show that genetically modified corn and herbicide cause cancer in rats. Not only was the study weak, but the scientists required reporters to sign an oath of secrecy to see it in advance. As I explained to the NPR show On the Media, this strategy raised the odds that all those pesky questions about statistical significance from meddling outsiders would be absent from the first wave of reporting.
In Nature today, Declan Butler continues his great reporting on the affair, unearthing additional disturbing parts of the story. My favorite was this passage from the agreement that some reporters–incredibly–agreed to sign:
“A refund of the cost of the study of several million euros would be considered damages if the premature disclosure questioned the release of the study.”
Who knew that doing basic science reporting could land you catastrophically in debt? Well, aside from Simon Singh…
[Update: Link to Nature fixed]
October 7, 2012
Tuesday in Hartford: Viruses in the Movies!
On Tuesday I’ll be in Hartford to participate in the Science on Screen series. It started in Boston last year, and now it’s spreading across the country. Each evening consists of a science-themed movie paired with a talk about some of the science involved. On Tuesday, Real Artways in Hartford will be screening the virus-zombie movie, 28 Days Later. And I’ll talk about what real viruses can do to their hosts. Details here.
October 3, 2012
Weirdly Unweird: A Better End to the #Arseniclife Affair
It’s getting close to two years now since a NASA-funded team of scientists announced they had found a form of life that broke all the rules by using arsenic to build its DNA. It’s become something of an obsession for me. If you want to follow the saga, click here and start back at the earliest post. In July I live-blogged the announcement that other scientists had replicated the experiment and failed to find the same results. In some ways, that was the logical end to the story
My fascination with this story has been tempered from the start by a creepy feeling. As a science writer, I most enjoy reporting on advances in biology: the research that opens up the natural world a little bit wider to our minds. The “#arseniclife” affair was less about biology than about how science gets done and the ways it goes wrong: the serious questions it raised about peer review, replication, and science communication. That fierce debate did some collateral damage. The microbe in question, known as GFAJ-1, went from being the species that would force us to rewrite the biology textbooks to yet another ...
October 1, 2012
Fraud: My story in tomorrow’s New York Times
A new look at retracted papers since 1975 paints a picture that’s none too pretty. Retraction rates are zooming up, and most of those retractions, a new study finds, are due to misconduct such as fraud and plagiarism. I write about the study in tomorrow’s New York Times. Check it out.
The Infected Air (NSFH [Not Safe For Hypochondriacs])
As I was putting together a talk today about our microbial world, I just came across this interesting paper in the August issue of The Journal of Virology.
A team of Korean scientists set up some traps to catch viruses and bacteria floating in the air. They set up their traps in Seoul, in an industrial complex in western Korea, and in a forest. Based on their collection, they came up with the following estimates…
**In each cubic meter of air, there are between 1.6 million and 40 million viruses.
**In each cubic meter of air, there are between 860,000 and 11 million bacteria.
Given that we breathe roughly .01 cubic meters of air each minute, a simple calculation based on these results suggests we breathe in a few hundred thousand viruses every minute.
Half of the viruses the scientists trapped didn’t match any known virus species. But most belong to groups that infect plants or mammals.
A note to hypochondriacs: holding your breathe may keep viruses from coming into your body, but as a lifestyle choice, it has some drawbacks.
September 30, 2012
Ben Goldacre on more bad data: this time from drug companies
This morning I was accused of writing “corporate sponsored blogs whoring themselves out to all and sundry.” Actually, I was arguing that science writers have a duty to call out weak science and press manipulation rather than cave into it. That applies to any kind of research. I happened to be talking about research on genetically modified foods and their health risks. But it applies just as well to pharmaceutical corporations that deep-six drug trials that don’t support their drugs. The most eloquent critic of this bad behavior is Ben Goldacre. You can watch this video of a TED talk he recently gave on the subject, read this essay in the Guardian, or pre-order his new book, Big Pharma.
If highlighting Goldacre’s vital work means I have to return my gold-plated corporate-whore Corvette, so be it.
September 28, 2012
Walk Away! My Interview on “On the Media”
September 27, 2012
A Paddleboat for Lakes of Gasoline
Saturn’s moon Titan is speckled with lakes of liquid hydrocarbons that might just the sort of places you’d want to visit in order to look for weird forms of life.
A Spanish engineering firm has designed a probe that could explore the lakes of Titan: a paddleboat. All it needs now is a seat, and I’ll be ready to take a spin on it…
