Learning from our myrmecological brethren

This morning, my thoughts turned to one of my earlier posts as I read the following passage in today's New York Times:

And scientists, if you wonder why the public doesn't like you, read one of your papers. Scientific language is necessary. But so is speaking plainly. And if you have something funny, or human, to tell, that won't undermine your work. But it may bring it to a wider audience.

The author, James Gorman, uses the article to rejoice in the lighthearted way myrmecologist Walter Tschinkel sprinkles personal and sometimes humorous asides through his recently publish book, The Fire Ants, bringing a more human touch to the world of research.

Having spent my share of time speciating mosquitoes and identifying microscopic crustaceans in my research days, I can relate to how mindnumbing the grunt work of science can sometimes be...but that's part of the personal side of science, along moments of lab humor/silliness, celebration of "Eureka!" moments, lamentations over experiments that just refuse to work, and personal interactions with other scientists that sometimes leave us all scratching our heads. And while I hope that Gorman is being a little flip with his call for scientific journals to include interludes or asides with their articles (there is a proper time and place after all), it is worth remembering that there are ways we science writers can build humanity into our stories without watering them down, filling them with mush, or resorting to sensationalism.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering what the heck myrmecology is...)

Sweet sixteen

On April 24, 1990, astronomy took a great leap forward with the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. Operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA, the telescope was named for Edwin Hubble, a pioneering astronomer and one of the first to realize the true vastness of the universe. His work led to the formulation of Hubble's Law, which states that the father away a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it is racing away...first evidence of the expansion of the universe.

(Incidentally, that last link will take you to the announcement of the most recent estimate of the age of the universe - about 13.7 billion years. Take that, Archbishop Ussher!)

The telescope has more than lived up to the exploratory spirit of its namesake. It has returned some of the most astonishing and fascinating pictures of stars, nebulae, galaxies, and other inhabitants of the universe. It has provided us with the first optical proof of the existence of black holes. It has helped unravel some of the diverse and complex processes that drive the birth and death of stars.

And it has peered farther than ever before, both into the distance and into time. For the Hubble Ultra Deep Field survey, the telescope photographed a set of structures more than 13 billion light-years away; because a light-year is the distance traveled by light in one year, these pictures give us a view of a small slice of the universe as it looked more than 13 billion years ago.

Happy 16th birthday, Hubble. Let's hope they can keep you going.

[Photo courtesy of NASA.]

In terms of quality...

...blogging while tired probably isn't as bad as blogging while drunk or stressed, and is probably less evident when it happens, too.

But it wouldn't even be an issue if my son hadn't decided to get up at 5:00 this morning.

A singular moment

I know I missed this, and probably a great many of you did as well. But if you were up in the wee hours last Wednesday (April 5) and looked at your clock, perhaps you saw this:

01:02:03 04/05/06

That would have been the time and date at two minutes and three seconds past one o'clock in the morning.

And to think, we all had 24 chances to experience this moment....

[Many thanks to my father-in-law for alerting me to this, and my apologies for not reading it until a week later.]

I love a researcher who can speak English

[Note to all the knee-jerk reactionaries out there - I am not referring to foreign scientists. Swallow your hypersensitive wrath and read on.]

I attended a seminar on stem cell research for reporters and writers a couple of days ago. Great talks, learned a great deal, and by the end of the day I could almost see stem cells floating in the air in front of me.

But what struck me the most was not the talk of nuclear cloning techniques or the ethics of therapeutic or research cloning. No, it was the speakers themselves and how they spoke to the audience. The best speakers were by far the oldest researchers, the ones who had been in the business for at least 20 years. They knew how to speak to the audience in plain language and as educated lay people.

The worst speaker of the day was the youngest. He was precise, direct, and brilliant, but got bogged down in the minutiae of his work. No one in the room needed to know about the structure of the transfection cassette he used to insert GFP into the ES cells harvested from his chimeric blastocysts. Nor did anyone understand it. Nor, frankly, did anyone care; such information was beyond the needs of that audience.

Now, this shouldn't be surprising, as with age comes understanding, experience, and an increased ability to read your audience. But it does raise an interesting idea. As I've said before, researchers need to be able to talk about what they do for it to mean anything to anyone. But why should it only be the most senior researchers that can do this?

Is it time for graduate and postgraduate programs to integrate media training/coaching into their curricula? Not for the benefit of reporters, really, but to equip students and postdocs to relate to the rest of us what makes their work important. After all we are paying for it. But more importantly, the public needs to be better informed to be able to debate the societal merits and pitfalls of scientific breakthroughs.

And how can we do that if scientists can't tell us in plain English what they do?

Off topic: When Gospel imitates art

Few of you know this, but when I'm not writing about science I dabble in biblical archeology and religious history - the last refuges of the lapsed Catholic. So I've been really excited reading about the discovery and translation of the lost Gospel of Judas. This gnostic work (a 3rd century Coptic translation of a 1st or 2nd century Greek text) recasts the relationship between Jesus and his biblical betrayer, Judas, portraying Judas as Jesus's closest confidant and willing participant in the events leading up to the Crucifixion.

What I find ironic here is that Martin Scorcese's controversial The Last Temptation of Christ portrayed Judas in just this way.

While most biblical scholars are either a) excited to get another view on the earliest history of Christianity and the various forms it took, or b) don't think it will have any effect on current thinking in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox churches, I have to ask: What does are the implications for the Papacy and the leadership structure of the Catholic Church, which draw their authority from the leadership of the apostle Peter, if Judas was the real successor to Jesus's teachings?

And now back to the regular theme of our forum....

[If you get the National Geographic Channel, check out the documentary on this new text.]

Is it food or fuel?

Bio-oil is one of many alternative fuels being developed to reduce our dependence on oil. But it didn't start out that way.

The stuff can be made from just about any organic material (also known as biomass) - wood chips, corn stalks, agricultural waste, etc. The US grows enough biomass to replace at least a third of its annual petroleum use. Starting with bio-oil instead of crude, fuel producers can make syngas (a synthetic alternative to crude oil) and, from there, further process it into automotive diesel.

Not bad when you consider that rapid thermal processing, the process used to convert biomass into bio-oil, was originally marketed as a way to make foods taste better. Reminds me of an old Saturday Night Live skit.

[For more, take a look at Wired.]

Copper never looked so good

You know all those pennies gathering dusk on your bedside table? Well, you may have a new use for them. Researchers in the UK have found that they may have some value in preventing the spread of the flu. When placed on surfaces made of pure copper, samples of type A influenza viruses (the type that includes the much hyped H5N1 "bird flu") dramatically decline and are 99.99% eliminated within 6 hours. In contrast, virus populations on stainless steel surfaces decline by only 50% in the same amount of time.

The point? Surface contamination can be a significant factor in the spread of disease. The use of copper on communal surfaces (e.g., counters, tables, door frames) could help reduce disease transmission.

Metals have long been used for the treatment or prevention of infectious disease. For many decades, both before and after the rise of antibiotics, syphilis was treated primarily with mercury. Colloidal silver (silver dissolved in water) supposedly has some antimicrobial properties. However, as one former Senate candidate found, long term use can turn your skin blue.

[Many thanks to ScienceDaily]