100 days of science, Day 1

I love to write. And I love science. But so far, my attempt to combine these things in a style fitting for the modern age — by maintaining a blog — has been spotty. So I hereby challenge myself: 100 posts about science in 100 days, promoted as much as possible through other modern channels including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Digg. This may be clumsy. There will be days, especially at first, when nobody reads my posts, and my efforts will feel absurd. Maybe there will be times when I lose readers and don’t know why. But hopefully, I’ll learn a lot. I’ll learn whether my specific interests in science are esoteric or appealing. And I’ll learn a heck of a lot more about this lively Internet that is so handily usurping those beloved and beleaguered outlets — newspapers — that carried my first words to the world.

I wrote two stories this week for National Geographic News: Antarctica Heating Up, ‘Ignored’ Satellite Data Show and “Blue Straggler” Stars Cannibalize to Stay Young. The Antarctica story came across my Twitter feeds from all directions, as I knew it would when I heard all the other reporters who had joined Wednesday’s teleconference in London, where the results were unveiled. The bottom line is that Eric Steig, a glaciologist at the University of Washington, and his colleagues reformed a faulty system of estimating temperatures across the vast Antarctic. Previously, researchers were using weighted averages of temperatures from an inadequate supply of weather stations (most are on the coast, with just a couple inland). Based on those methods, it looked like Antarctica was actually cooling, which has been fueling the fire of global warming skepticism. But Steig et al. realized that while satellites aren’t adequate by themselves for nailing down temperatures, they’re really good at revealing how temperatures vary across Antarctica. Combined with the weather station data, they give a much more accurate picture of temperatures across the continent. So, score one for concerned environmentalists: the continent, on the whole, is warming. That means warming has been documented over all seven continents. And in at least one place where Antarctica was cooling — East Antarctica — the hole in the ozone was to blame. But that effect is likely to lessen as the layer heals, leading to still more warming, the study authors say.

The cannibalistic stars story is just fun. Except for the time frames – a few dogmatic Bible adherents insist that the universe, not just Earth, is just thousands of years old — that story is unlikely to be controversial. I’m curious to see how it does on Digg.

This weekend I’ll be writing up new findings that follow on the previous work of James Fowler, at the University of California at San Diego. He’s the researcher who has revealed in the past year that our social networks influence our emotional states, eating and smoking habits. What do you think he’s going to say about our friends next? Stay tuned — it’s fun, but it’s embargoed until Monday afternoon.