On science blogs this week: Universe

ONCE MORE, THE AAAS ANNUAL MEETING. THE 2012 conclave of the American Association for the Advancement of Science concluded this week, the first held outside the US (in Vancouver BC) in many years. At the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Charlie Petit rounded up news stories about meeting topics. There was considerable emphasis on dolphin rights and test-tube burgers. This here's a sample of blog posts.

The watery exoplanet. See below. Credit: David A. Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

AAAS President Nina Fedoroff, molecular biologist turned government policy adviser, made headlines by professing to be "scared to death" — her term — by the anti-science movement. At Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll (the physics one, Sean M., not the biology one, Sean B.) engaged in sympathetic hand-wringing, declaring

When researchers are attacked and their jobs threatened by politicians who disagree with their results, it's time to stand up for what science really means.

Without pausing to ask what Sean M. really means when he talks about what science really means, we move right along to the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, where Keith Kloor described the Fedoroff talk and declared

it's worth asking if people are, in fact, becoming more hostile to science today, or if it just seems that way because demagogues are louder and society hears far more about the campaigns waged by special interests?

He points out that anti-science sentiments have a long history, and they are not the exclusive province of one political party.

In short, there's plenty of irrational suspicion of science to go around. Whether it's becoming more prevalent, or just more noticeable, because of high profile issues such as climate change, is hard to tell.

Factors he doesn't mention directly seem pretty central too, not that the idea is original with me. The ubiquity of communication devices and the instantaneous nature of the world-spanning network have smoothed the way (and helped build an eager audience) for a good deal of contemporary clamor. True whether the topic is science or the Kardashians.

Students of science writing covered some of the sessions, courtesy of travel grants from NASW. Topics include climate change, energy use, peer review, food production, endangered languages, and astronomical observatories.

At Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle summarized sessions on the microbial world, including the Human Microbiome Project and the Earth Microbiome Project. Microbiologist Jonathan Eisen has posted his AAAS talk urging a project to put together a field guide to microbes at Tree of Life. Slides too.

Eisen points out that although there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of field guides to occupants of the other Kingdoms, it hasn't been possible to put one together for microbes simply because information about them was lacking. He also notes that the very notion of a microbe field guide is ludicrous — his word — because microbial diversity is so overwhelming that a traditional field guide — like the one that covers, for example, 8000 species of birds — is impossible. Still, Eisen has made a brave start, assembling an open Mendeley collection of dozens of papers about estimating the number of species of bacteria and archaea.

Back to Boyle, with a thoughtful consideration of (and fascinating videos related to) primatologist Frans de Waal's AAAS presentation on primate moral outrage over inequality. And not just primates. Also dogs and maybe elephants, and even a nonmammal species, crows.

such sensibilities were hard-wired into brains long before the rise of the human species. This is reflected in neuroscience as well, de Waal said. "Very ancient parts of the brain are involved in moral decision making," he observed.

KNEE DEEP IN THE HEARTLAND. Speaking of moral outrage, it was forecast here last week that much more was to come in the latest thievery of climate-change emails. You will recall that the new tale had overtones of payback, the emails having been nicked from the Heartland Institute, a major funder of climate-change denial and cheerleader in last year's attempt to find evidence of data-fiddling in stolen email exchanges among climate-change scientists. (All the emails were eventually declared guiltless.)

What I didn't forecast, what hardly anybody forecasted, was that this time the guilty party would turn out to be not some activist hacker but rather a high-profile climate and water scientist, Peter Gleick. At Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin relays the details, more in sorrow than in anger. And updates them here.

Of the many anguished and sometimes exculpatory comments from the climate-change folks, a couple of examples will suffice: See Bud Ward at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media and also Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy. For those who have been trying to convince policymakers to Do Something, this turn of events is horrifying.

Both sides have deployed the same software to analyze the authenticity of the strategy document that Gleick says was mailed to him and Heartland says is fake. (The authenticity of the documents that Gleick obtained directly from Heartland via masquerade are not in question.) JGAAP (Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program), is open source software described here. First up was Shawn Lawrence Otto, at the HuffPost, who tells us that the JGAAP says the most likely author of the strategy memo that Heartland claims is fake is Heartland's president, Joe Bast. Greg Laden ran the same analysis using somewhat different documents but got a similar result.

At Watts Up With That, Anthony Watts has posted a series of several Heartland commentaries and links to the commentaries of others. As is Watts's wont, all are friendly to denialist sentiments. His glee at this turn of events is apparent in every word. (Watts is a recipient of Heartland largesse. Rather a lot of it, according to the disputed documents.)

Watts would like to crowdsource a textual analysis of the disputed strategy document. Here is his long post urging readers to use JGAAP to analyze the document(s) and send their results to him. He promises to post them on the weekend.

Why do I think Watt's crowdsourced analysis is likely to come to quite a different conclusion from Otto's and Laden's? That it is likely to be the same conclusion arrived at by other climate-change critics using other means, such as deduction. Or maybe guessing. They say the document was forged by Peter Gleick.

Meantime, some bloggers are trying to shift the focus away from thievery story and the are-the-documents-authentic story back to Heartland and its plans for molding the climate debate — in particular the funding plans for rewriting the school science curriculum to cast more doubt on the idea that the Earth is warming and people are partly responsible. Leslie Kaufman goes into detail at the New York Times's Green blog. At the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Brad Plumer examines how Heartland might influence teachers outside the formal curriculum.

BRIEF LINKUPS 2012 WEEK 8

I confess I mention the discovery of the first exoplanet that seems to be made mostly of water largely for the sake of showing you the glorious image at the beginning of this post. But it's worthwhile also to bring you Knight Science Journalism Tracker Charlie Petit's account of how the media really screwed this one up.

FTL neutrinos? I don't think so.

Everybody's favorite photo of Einstein figured in this next choice too. Remember those maybe faster-than-light neutrinos from late last year? The ones that were going to prove Einstein wrong? Well, nyaah, nyaah, nyaah. Not so fast. It appears there was a miscalculation, and it was due to a common tech problem familiar far beyond the empyrean world of particle physics. A loose cable. Edwin Cartlidge reports at ScienceInsider. And so does John Timmer at Ars Technica, his angle being to point out the irony: the FTL neutrino findings were just much-touted at the AAAS meeting, but a mere couple days later comes this naysaying report in Science, .AAAS's journal, Nyaah, nyaah, nyaah.

DOWNLOAD THE UNIVERSE. Last, but far, far, far from least. A new Knight Science Journalism Tracker has joined the team: Deb Blum, much-lauded author (most recently) of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Pulitzer Prize winner in her former life as a newspaper reporter, and now a journalism prof at the University of Wisconsin.

Which is the perfect segue to what may be this week's most intriguing development for the future of science writing. Deb's was the first review published at Download the Universe, a brand-new site that will review ebooks about science.

Founded by Carl Zimmer, Download the Universe has a lineup of reviewers and editors whose names you know equally well — Jennifer Ouellette, Maia Szalovitz, Ed Yong, David Dobbs, Sean Carroll (the physics one here, too) and I will stop there because it's a long list, but it's chock full of the top people writing about science. Including Deb, who starts things off with a big bang, reviewing what is probably the showpiece of science ebooks to date, Theodore Gray's The Elements.

Here's Carl's explanation of what the site will be about. Of the huge impact technology is having on ebook development he says:

A tablet can display the text of a book, but that's only one of an infinite number of tasks it can carry out. It can illustrate a book with video instead of a static picture. Instead of Vesalius's two-dimensional masterpieces, an anatomy book can include a three-dimensional body that the reader can explore with flicks of fingers.

In examining The Elements, Deb's review examines puzzles about ebooks that have stumped me too, not least the fancy for calling them apps and selling them in the app store. She says:

So is it actually a book, you might ask, if it's not even sold in a book store, if it's available on a few limited devices? Isn't one of the great achievements of the print publishing era, the ability to share information universally rather than limit it to a select few?

It's a marketing strategy of course. There are many more potential buyers of apps than books. I guess I don't object — much — to finding a way to get people reading by fooling them into thinking they're really playing a game. And naturally I don't deny that these, um, apps, are a quantum leap (in the correct sense of that much-misused term) for extending the possibilities of books almost beyond imagining. But I don't own an iPad and expect I never will, having committed to the gorgeous but probably moribund HP Touchpad because I was a long-time Palm user and admire WebOS — and because the Touchpad was very, very cheap. So I will not likely ever have the glorious experience that is The Elements, and other glorious experiences, such as the Scientific American-Farrar, Straus joint venture, Journey to the Exoplanets.

Should that title be italicized? Or not?

February 24, 2012

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