Science in the media
What better way to kick off this week’s summary of NPG’s blogs than with Khalil A. Cassimally’s post, Science Blogs Are Good For You. He reveals that due to the lack of science interest in the traditional media, science enthusiasts are starved of news relating to great research and new discoveries. Khalil asks what are the best ways for those interested in science, to connect to the achievements of the scientific world. He suggests blogging as an appropriate medium:
The interesting thing about the science blogosphere (the community of science blogs, science bloggers and readers) is that most science bloggers blog because they love science and they want to spread the word. They are committed to the cause of science communication and may well be an ideal community for the layperson to embrace.
Khalil highlights the positive points about science blogging, revealing that science has found a medium in the Internet where it is not rejected. Blogger Paige Brown supports Khalil’s opinion and in her latest post, We Want More Science, said the American Public, asks what we are doing to bring the voices of scientists to the public.
A poll of the Maryland public, released this May during a forum on science journalism hosted by Research!America, Pfizer Inc. and the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism:
The role of science in the media was also one of the focal points of last week’s The Next Generation of Science Media conference held in Cambridge. Attracting science journalists, book authors, bloggers, documentary makers and others interested in science media, the aim of the conference was to promote conversation about the future prospects of science journalism. It was a day dedicated to the discussion of science communication in the 21st century, including the opportunities and challenges it offers, as well as its impact on society. You can find a summary of the event, including a breakdown of the sessions and links to other blog posts in our report. If we’ve missed your blog post or you subsequently write one, do let us know and we can add it to our commentary and share it on Twitter too.
Religion and Science
The use of social media in propagating science can cause controversy, but now we move onto an even more controversial topic: religion and science. This week’s guest blogger is James Hannam, who has a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Genesis of Science. In his guest post, Science owes much to both Christianity and the Middle Ages he reveals that:
Science and religion are the two most powerful intellectual forces on the planet.
What do you think? An interesting debate has already been sparked in his comment thread; feel free to have your own say.
Lee Turnpenny continues the theme of religion in his post, CrISIS – Creationism In Schools Isn’t Science. Here he reveals that he is supporting the decision of the NSS (of which he is a member) to back the launch of the CrISIS Campaign. The campaign was started by Laura Horner, a parent of pupils at St Peter’s state secondary school in Exeter, after a creationist was introduced to the children as a scientist and allowed to “teach” for an hour and a half. He urges you to sign their petition:
We ought to remain vigilant against the creationist insidiousness that takes advantage of such wanton political confusion.
I’ll let you read for yourself here, and encourage you to sign the petition here.
Strange but ….
Now onto a weird personal discovery. Barbara Ferreira reports that a six-year-old Croatian child, Ivan Stoiljkovic has been coined the magnetic boy by the Guardian. You can watch a video clip of Ivan in her post, showing lots of different items sticking to him. Barbara offers an alternative explanation for this boy’s alleged magnetic powers:
So why can he attract objects to his body? Because he’s very sticky.
You can read Barbara’s theory in her post, Magnetic or Sticky?
Let’s look now at another strange phenomenon, which, unlike the magnetic boy, is supported by scientific evidence. The ability to dance to music comes naturally to most members of the human species, but to some it is just impossible, as David Johnson reveals in his post, The case of the man who couldn’t find the beat. David considers the rarity of rhythm deafness and what fMRI studies could reveal about this condition:
Lead author Jessica Phillips-Silver suggested that it might be as rare as tone deafness, which affects about 4 to 5% of the population. If that’s the case, it could be a real challenge locating enough participants to conduct an fMRI study, which would help reveal the neural regions implicated in the condition.
Stupid?
Meanwhile blogger Eric-Wubbo Lameijer has been dissecting another intriguing aspect of human nature – stupidity. In his post, A Putative Taxonomy of Stupidity he breaks his subject into different types and unravels the subsections which can define this attribute, such as emotional stupidity, stupidity caused by fear and other examples:
Stupidity caused by mental laziness. “If five bakers bake five cakes in five minutes, how long will it take 100 bakers to bake 100 cakes?” On this simple question over 33% of students (tested from a population including Harvard and Princeton) got the answer wrong. Were they stupid? No, they simply chose to not spend much time and effort since the right answer was ‘so obviously’ 100 minutes. Being clever therefore does not only entail the ability to think, it also involves being willing to spend the effort. Perhaps that is also the reason behind Einstein’s qote ’It’s not that I am so much smarter, I think about ideas longer.’
Jobs in Science communication
Rachel Bowden, our Nature Jobs blogger, reveals that Nature would like to welcome six new Careers columnists. After considering almost 300 applications Nature’s Careers editors have chosen six young scientists as winners of the 2011 Careers columnist competition:
The six scientists — three PhD students and three postdocs — will each write at least two columns for the Careers section of Nature over the next year. Their columns will also be published on naturejobs.com.
You can read more about the new columnists and their writing ambitions in the 2nd June issue of Nature_. Congratulations to all six! For anyone else thinking about research careers, specifically about how things work in biotech, you might be interested in the variety of guest posts we have on the Trade Secrets blog, run by the Nature Bioentrepreneur team. The blog consists of postssecrets/ from contributors all over the world with helpful reports on local situations. Do get in touch if you’d be interested in contributing.
London blogger, Joanna Scott, also provides career advice for those interested in working in science communication. She reveals that the BBC’s Factual department are looking for a Science Graduate to join their team as a Trainee Researcher. The role offers the opportunity to work with their science team, generating exciting ideas and translating these into ambitious and creative stories. The applicant must have a passion for television as well as science; no television experience is necessary as they will train you in TV production. Applications close on the June 1st and you can find out more details in Jo’s post.
The results are in….
The best way to communicate science was also of interest last week to blogger Eva Amsen who asked which medium you prefer for explaining science: a poster or talk? An interesting debate was ignited in her comment thread revealing the positives and negatives for both options. Finally the results are in – most people prefer talks over posters! In an ironic summary, Eva has clearly presented her results in a poster.
Animals
Nature Medicine’s blog, A Spoonful of Medicine, have been discussing how researchers have found genetic clues as they work to overcome African livestock disease. Each year, an estimated 30,000 people in Africa are diagnosed with the crippling muscle-wasting disease known as sleeping sickness. The problem, however, is far larger for the dairy and meat-producing cattle upon which their lives depend, as an estimated 5 billion cows die of Nagana, the animal form of the disease. Now, scientists hope to generate heartier, disease-resistant cattle – and the discovery of two new genes reported this week could help with that goal:
“The two genes discovered in this research could provide a way for cattle breeders to identify the animals that are best at resisting disease.”
You can find out more about this in their post.
In another area of animal concern, NPG’s News blog have been examining how poor nations turn to dolphin meat for food. Martin Robards and Randy Reeves have spent years gathering all the data they could on the hunting of marine mammals, from dolphins to dugongs. Their resulting map, presented at the Society for Conservation Biology’s International Marine Conservation Congress in Victoria on 15 May, showed it was a lot more common than expected:
Robards and Reeves found marine-mammal hunting hotspots in Peru, Venezuela, the Gulf of Guinea, Sri Lanka, the Solomon Islands, Taiwan, and northern Australia (where aborignial peoples hunt dugongs). In each of these nations, thousands of ‘marine bushmeat’ animals are taken each year. The researchers declined to come up with a global estimate for total marine mammal take because the data is still so patchy.
Find out more in the post, including the recommended solutions to help prevent future hunting of dolphins.
Calendars
For those of you following our London blogger Joanna Scott’s weekly updates of scientific events, you might be interested to follow her Google Calendar. The calendar will aim to feature all science-related events open to the public, including lectures, meet-ups, exhibition openings, quizzes and more. For those not in London, do not be disheartened, as we also have calendars for happenings in New York and in San Francisco. However, there are bound to be events we miss, so please do let us know if there’s something else you think we should be adding. It’s very much a work in progress.
Not forgetting those in the Boston area, blogger Tinker Ready continues to keep her readers up-to-date with the latest sciencey events. In her latest post, Microbiology, squid and sleep she encourages those near to attend a talk on, Why Are Chemotaxis Receptors Clustered but Other Receptors Aren’t? at Harvard Medical School, or to head to Cambridge Massachusetts for a talk on the diversity and speed of change in body patterning
Finally
GrrlScientist continues to link us to some of the most enthralling scientific videos out there. In her latest post she hosts a dramatic time-lapse video by photojournalist Mark Dolej. It features more than 2700 photographs captured during a 7-hour time period showing an individual 13-year periodical cicada nymph shedding its exoskeleton and transforming into the adult stage. You can find out more information about cicadas in her post.