Friday Randoms.

source: unknown

I really like the middle one. I'll try my best to respond to formspring and comments over the weekend!

Words.

source: unknown

Arms

source: eme's flickr, unknown, unknown

Arm.

source: unknown

Selected readings 11/28/10

Interesting reading and news items.

Please leave some comments that indicate which articles you find most interesting or that identify topics you would like to read about, and I will try to include more articles of a similar nature in the future

These items are also bookmarked at my Diigo account.

Bad seeds, bad science, and fairly black cats?

Geneticists have failed to remind the public what the word “genetic” actually means. Heritability implies that gene and environment work, or might be persuaded to work, together. Why, after all, are taxpayers spending money on the double helix if there is no hope of an environmental intervention—a drug, a change in lifestyle, or cancer surgery after the early diagnosis of a somatic mutation—to help those at risk from what they inherit? Everyone in the trade knows this although they fail to mention it except to their first-year undergraduate classes. Transcripts of their lectures should be sent out with every press release. [The Lancet, 10/23/10]

Cancer’s little helpers

No one would have predicted a decade ago that these microRNAs, as the hairpins are called, were involved in cancer, because no one even knew that they existed in people. Mere snippets of RNA — DNA’s underappreciated cousin — these micromolecules are about 22 chemical letters long. But their size belies their power. [Science News, 8/28/10]

Hogan’s holometer: Testing the hypothesis of a holographic universe

In 2008, Fermilab particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan made waves with a mind-boggling proposition: The 3D universe in which we appear to live is no more than a hologram. Now he is building the most precise clock of all time to directly measure whether our reality is an illusion. [Symmetry Breaking, 10/20/10]

The Brain That Changed Everything

When a surgeon cut into Henry Molaison's skull to treat him for epilepsy, he inadvertently created the most important brain-research subject of our time — a man who could no longer remember, who taught us everything we know about memory. Six decades later, another daring researcher is cutting into Henry's brain. Another revolution in brain science is about to begin. [Esquire, 10/25/10]

How Big is the Unobservable Universe?

Based on what we currently think about inflation, this means that the Universe is at least 10^(1030) times the size of our observable Universe! And good luck living long enough to even write that number down. ... All that we know, see, and observe is just one tiny region that slid down that hill fast enough to end inflation, but most of it just keeps on inflating forever and ever. [Starts with a Bang!, 10/27/10]

Revealing the galaxy’s dark side

“In our paper, we discussed a number of astrophysical possibilities for the origin of the signal, including a population of pulsars, cosmic ray interactions and emission from our galaxy's supermassive black hole,” notes Hooper. “And in the end, no combination of any astrophysical sources could give us the signal we’re seeing,” he adds. “Eventually we just got fed up and concluded there doesn’t seem to be a way to explain the signal except for one thing — we tried dark matter and it fit beautifully without any special bells or whistles.” [Science News, 11/20/10]

When Muons Collide

A new type of particle collider known as a muon collider considered a wild idea a decade ago is winning over skeptics as scientists find solutions to the machine's many technological challenges. [Symmetry, 10/1/10]

We all need (a little bit of) sex

Sex costs amazing amounts of time and energy. Just take birds of paradise touting their tails, stags jousting with their antlers or singles spending their weekends in loud and sweaty bars. Is sex really worth all the effort that we, sexual species, collectively put into it? [Scientific American, 11/2/10]

Glia: The new frontier in brain science

Glia, in contrast to neurons, are brain cells that do not generate electrical impulses, and there are a lot of them—85 percent of the cells in the brain. Yet, these cells have been largely neglected for 100 years. I call this new frontier of neuroscience "The Other Brain," because we are only now beginning to explore it. The new findings are expanding our concept of information processing in the brain. They are leading rapidly to new treatments for diseases ranging from spinal cord injury to brain cancer to chronic pain, and Alzheimer's disease. [Scientific American, 11/4/10]

Extra neutrino flavor could be bitter end to Standard Model

What seems to have caught everyone's attention is the suggestion that this might be evidence of what are called sterile neutrinos. Although regular neutrinos barely interact with matter, sterile neutrinos can only interact via gravity, which (if they exist) is what has allowed them to escape our detection to date. Since they'd also be heavier than the regular neutrinos, they would make good dark matter candidates. [Nobel Intent, 11/2/10]

The Neanderthal Romeo and Human Juliet hypothesis

Scientists have had trouble reconciling data from analyses of human mitochondrial DNA and the male Y chromosome. Analyses of human mitochondrial DNA indicate that we all share a common female ancestor 170,000 years ago. Analyses of the Y chromosome indicate that we share a common male ancestor 59,000 years ago. How can we account for the idea that our common grandmother is 111,000 years older than our common grandfather? [Neuroanthropology, 10/26/10]

An idle brain may be the self's workshop

As neuroscientists study the idle brain, some believe they are exploring a central mystery in human psychology: where and how our concept of "self" is created, maintained, altered and renewed. After all, though our minds may wander when in this mode, they rarely wander far from ourselves, as Mrazek's mealtime introspection makes plain. [Los Angeles Times, 8/30/10]

Determining 500th Alien Planet Will Be a Tricky Task

At NASA's last count, astronomers had confirmed the discovery of 494 planets around alien suns. There are signs of dozens more, if not hundreds, but it will take time to weed out which of the detections are actual worlds and which are merely false alarms. [Space.com, 11/11/10]

Tracking Viruses Back in Time

How long have viruses been around? No one knows. Scientists at Portland State University have begun taking the first steps toward answering this question. [Astrobiology, 9/6/10]

Can a 1960s Approach Unify Gravity with the Rest of Physics?

In July mathematicians and physicists met at the Banff International Research Station in Alberta, Canada, to discuss a return to the golden age of particle physics. They were harking back to the 1960s, when physicist Murray Gell-Mann realized that elementary particles could be grouped according to their masses, charges and other properties, falling into patterns that matched complex symmetrical mathematical structures known as Lie groups. [Scientific American, 9/7/10]

Neuroscience: Settling the great glia debate

The consequences of this 'gliotransmission' could be profound. The human brain contains roughly equal numbers of glia and neurons (about 85 billion of each), and any given astrocyte can make as many as 30,000 connections with cells around it. If glia are involved in signalling, processing in the brain turns out to be an order of magnitude more complex than previously expected, says Andrea Volterra, who studies astrocytes at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Neuroscientists, who have long focused on the neuron, he says, would have to revise everything. [Nature News, 11/10/10]

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors

Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” isn’t really about a cockroach. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. [New York Times, 11/14/10]

Tree or ring: the origin of complex cells

All complex life belongs to a single group called the eukaryotes, whose members, from humans to amoebas, share a common ancestry. Their cells are distinguished by having several internal compartments, including the nucleus, which shelters their precious DNA, and the mitochondria, which provide them with power. [Not Exactly Rocket Science, 9/12/10]

I am virus – animal genomes contain more fossil viruses than ever expected

Your closest fossils are inside you, scattered throughout your genome. They are the remains of ancient viruses, which shoved their genes among those of our ancestors. There they remained, turning into genetic fossils that still lurk in our genomes to this day. [Not Exactly Rocket Science, 11/18/10]

Effective Field Theory

"Effective field theory" is a technical term within quantum field theory, but it is associated with a more informal notion of extremely wide applicability. Namely: if we imagine dividing the world into "what happens at very short, microscopic distances" and "what happens at longer, macroscopic distances," then it is possible to consistently describe the macroscopic world without referring to (or even understanding) the microscopic world. [Cosmic Variance, 11/25/10]

Meet a superpartner at the LHC

Of the many ideas for new physics that can be tested at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), supersymmetry is one of the most promising. The theory proposes that each fundamental fermion particle has a heavier bosonic superpartner (and vice versa for each fundamental boson) and by doing so, offers an extension of the standard model of particle physics that fixes many of its problems. None of the known particles appear to be superpartners, however, which leads to the daunting conclusion that if supersymmetry is correct, there are more than twice as many fundamental particles as we thought, but we have only been left with the lightest partners; that is, supersymmetry is broken. [Physics, 11/22/10]

Mafia Wars

An increasing amount of data is showing that the cellular battle between pathogens and hosts needs much more than a simple military metaphor to describe it—think undercover infiltration, front organizations, and forced suicide. [The Scientist, 6/1/10]

RSS access:
Blog posts labeled "readings"
Items saved at Diigo

Finger Tattoo

source: unknown

Ribs.

source: unknown

Cole Mohr

source: unknown

Friday Randoms.

Chests.

source: unknown

Sunday Randoms.

source: unknown

Wednesday Randoms

source: unknown

Disturbing climate change headlines

Yesterday Tom Yulsman at CEJournal came across a story in Fog City Journal that led to a brief post, on which I commented there.

The topic is the fraught question of what's the best way for scientists to respond to global warming Know-Nothingism. My first comment was followed by a response from Tom, and I've responded with a longer note that seems worth sharing here. It turns out that there is a great deal that needs to be said.

What follows is my second response, more or less verbatim.

Tom, I've read the Revkin article and the Feinberg/Willer paper. [See the press release for quick summary.] Thanks for the references. However, I don't find them very persuasive. Apologies in advance for the length of this note.

The Feinberg/Willer paper is based on the social psychology circle of ideas known as "Just World Theory" (JWT). Curiously, the book of the "founder" of JWT, Melvin Lerner, is entitled The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. Unfortunately, I don't have ready access to that volume, but I note that there is no question mark in the title, so I don't know whether Lerner himself actually regarded the underlying "just world" belief as a delusion.

Although the underlying belief that JWT deals with seems philosophically controversial (at best), JWT itself simply asserts that "many people" have this belief, and that certain consequences follow. One thing that concerns me is whether substantial evidence has been developed that quantifies how many people hold the underlying belief in the world's justness. At most it seems like just one dimension in a multidimensional space of belief systems.

It's clear enough that many people have religious beliefs that are incompatible with the idea that a "just" deity would allow the kind of climate developments that science predicts, and so such people deny the science. But that's a pretty broad feature of religion in general – it denies many kinds of science that clash with religion. So what's science supposed to do – give up and say, "Oops. we aren't really predicting what the evidence strongly indicates"?

The Feinberg/Willer paper argues that certain sorts of positive messages increase subjects' acceptance of the ideas (1) that the scientific evidence for global warming is good and (2) that science can find solutions to the problem. In other words, these messages are pro-science in a feel-good, non-threatening way. So of course it's not too surprising that the subjects who heard these messages exhibited greater acceptance of scientific conclusions. This is basic marketing theory.

One problem is that the part of the message that says science can find a "solution" to the problem is likely to be false. It's probable that there is no largely scientific solution. Mitigation of climate change is probably much more of an economic and political issue, because significant behavioral change and economic adjustment are likely to be necessary. Of course, this assertion is also open to debate.

I think that the best science has actually discovered a lot that suggests the threat of climate change is even more dire than some cautious observers assume. There is, for example, this: summary of ten rather disturbing types of climate threat reported in the past year.

You [Tom] wrote, "30 years of unrelenting fear appeals on climate change have gotten us, well, where? I would argue pretty much nowhere. If ever there was a prima facie case that fear appeals on climate change don’t work, this is it."

I'm afraid that by the very same sort of argument, 30 years of attempts to patiently and rationally educate the public on the science of climate change have also failed.

The real problem is that what's actually true is that different approaches work best with different types of people, depending on their undelying personality types and value systems. For example see Skeptics discount science by casting doubts on scientist expertise or the paper it discusses – Cultural cognition of scientific consensus.

One of the individuals that Revkin quotes in his article, Dan Kahan at Yale [and a founder of the Yale Cultural Cognition Project], states the problem quite well:

I think it [Feinberg/Willer] is good research, and maybe captures something that is going on in the real world debate. But it doesn’t capture what’s most important: the source of individual differences. People disagree about climate change; it is one of a cluster of science & policy issues that polarize citizens along cultural/political lines. "Just world" theory posits a general psychological mechanism that affects everyone. Necessarily, then, it can’t explain why one and the same set of informational influences (e.g., stories reporting "scientific consensus" on climate change) provoke different reactions in identifiable subcommunities. The theory that we need is one that identifies what the identifying characteristics of these communities are and how they are implicated in cognition of risk. No theory that focuses of [sic] generic or population-wide aspects of the psychology of risk perception (so-called "main effects") can do that.

In other words, a lot more needs to be done to steer public attitudes in the right direction. It is not a matter of simply finding the most comforting feel-good way to "frame" the issue, if that just entails obscuring the hard scientific facts. That is a vain hope.

I don't have a solution of the problem, but I think a solution should include a careful evidence-based appraisal of the kinds of messages that work best with different groups, combined with a plan for how to deliver the messages through different channels appropriate for different groups.

It's a lot like any other tough political campaign. Sometimes "negative" campaigning works very well, sometimes it doesn't.

I can see what's going on here. There are obviously efforts being made by a broad range of social scientists, communication experts, and journalists to shape an effective messaging strategy. For example: ClimateEngage.org. This is probably good. What is not clear is whether the people most involved will be able to identify a near-optimal strategy.

Just to name names, Matthew Nisbet [also here, here] (whom Revkin also quotes) is one with whom I find a lot to disagree – such as the whole "post-partisan" shtick. The elephant in the room is that most opponents of the necessity of acting on climate change – to say nothing of those who deny it even exists and/or is anthropogenic – have no intentions of operating in a reasonable and responsible "post-partisan" fashion.

There really is a war going on here. Climate scientists who don't face up to this reality are going to get the crap beat out of them. Just ask Phil Jones or Michael Mann [more here], for example. Much like Lt. Colonel George Custer at the Little Big Horn.

Another Favourite.

source: Pernille F