On my way to becoming a science writer, I earned a master’s degree in biology. My thesis was a genetics project, and I conducted my experiments among a group of dedicated future geneticists led by an already accomplished — indeed, famous — one. Each week, we would gather for lab meetings, where we gave reports on the progress of our projects. I was not a scientist at heart; I was just doing extended research for the science stories I would write one day. I wanted to learn the language. At most of those lab meetings, I felt like a fraud.
Usually, my fellow lab rats were gracious about my presence, even welcoming. But once, in a lab meeting, someone made an off-handed comment that every single thing about anything alive was determined by its genes. The speaker didn’t expect an argument; he assumed everyone there would agree.
“No …” I interjected. “I don’t think genes can explain everything.”
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Global warming has the potential to dramatically expand the oceans’ so-called dead zones, oxygen-poor areas that fish avoid and where less mobile organisms like clams and crabs can’t survive.
Most dead zones are located where rivers empty into the ocean, dumping agricultural fertilizers and other pollutants. A new study by a team of Danish researchers, released yesterday in Nature Geoscience, predicts that such zones could grow by a factor of 10 or more in a scenario of unchecked global warming.
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School bullies eating your lunch? Science may have found a solution.
A team of researchers from the US and London has been testing a school-wide intervention that focuses on bystanders — including teachers — as much as the bullies or victims. And the method is showing early promise. The study was released this evening by the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
Lead study author Peter Fonagy, a psychologist at the University College London, says bullying indicates a school-wide culture of disrespect where the bystanders are actually the glue. Dissolve that role, and the system breaks down. The key, Fonagy and his co-authors say, is called “mentalizing.” (I think a yogi might call “awareness.”)
“The most striking aspect of ‘by-standing’ to me is the lack of thought about what is happening,” Fonagy wrote in an email. And while some thoughts may be secondary — such as I am in danger, This is not my problem, or He had it coming to him — “the underlying mental state is one of a kind of blankness adopted defensively by all (often adults as well as children).”
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“Researchers Try to Cure Racism” caught my attention after it was released by Wired Science and generated controversy on the Digg network, within days of President Obama’s inauguration. Brown University’s Michael Tarr led the study, which invited participants to view pictures of similar-looking black faces and record their immediate, spoken responses. The responses were characterized with respect to racial bias, and then those same subjects were exposed to 10 hours of “training,” where they became familiar with the faces and were asked to speculate about the habits of the pictured people — for instance, what they liked to eat. By the end of the training, the subjects’ biases had been diminished. Somewhere around 200 comments below the story ranged from supportive to derogatory. Some complained that the researchers themselves were the most biased of all, and defensively accused them of attempted brainwashing, “social engineering” to weed out racism. Some said racism with respect to black people is justified, given black representation in crime statistics. A few said such research is a waste of time.
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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.
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