Monthly Archives: April 2013

Can we raise woolly mammoths from their Pleistocene graves?

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This post has been cross-posted from the OUP blog.

SL bio picSharon Levy is a freelance science writer who specializes in making natural resource and conservation issues accessible for a broad audience. She is the author of Once and Future Giants, a book that introduces the idea that Ice Age megafauna extinctions hold important lessons for modern conservation. She lives in Humboldt County, California.

Thousands of years after the last woolly mammoth died, some bioengineers dream of resurrecting the species. When I first heard their arguments, these folks struck me as the modern, high-tech version of snake-oil salesmen. The product they’re promoting is not what they lead people to believe it is, and it won’t do what people like to imagine it will.

Mammoths and mastodons once roamed throughout the Americas, as well as much of Europe and Asia. There were several species, but the best-known is the woolly mammoth, a creature of the far north. Well-preserved carcasses have been discovered melting out of the permafrost in Siberia and the Yukon. There’s been a lot of talk of ‘cloning’ a mammoth by using DNA recovered from bodies preserved in permafrost. Continue reading →

How multidisciplinary work was made meaningful for me

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Gianni Lo Iacono

 Dr Gianni Lo Iacono is a mathematical modeller at the University of Cambridge working with the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium, an ESPA– funded research programme designed to deliver much-needed, cutting-edge science on the relationships between ecosystems, zoonoses, health and wellbeing with the objective of moving people out of poverty and promoting social justice. 

According to the law of aerodynamics it’s impossible for a bumblebee to fly;

but the bumblebee doesn’t know that, so it flies anyway …

[An old myth, which probably originated as a result of the crude assumptions made by the aerodynamicist who modelled the bumblebee as a static device with fixed wings. An entomologist would have pointed out that bumblebees flap their wings!]

Some time ago, I was looking at a funding body’s policies and came across the word ‘trans-disciplinary’. I am sure that I am not the only one amused by the proliferation of the prefixed-disciplinary family (multi-, inter-, intra-, cross- …). As a mathematical modeller I have worked at the interface between different disciplines for some time and a common question is: how do these whatever-disciplinary teams work?

No doubts there are challenges. Here are some: Continue reading →

What’s Your Science Maturity Level?

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Marc Kuchner is the author of Marketing for Scientists, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a country songwriter. He is the co-inventor of the band-limited coronagraph, a tool for finding planets around other stars that will be part of the James Webb Space Telescope. He is also known for his work on planets with exotic chemistries: ocean planets, helium planets, and carbon planets. Kuchner received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard and his Ph.D. in astronomy from Caltech. He was awarded the 2009 SPIE early career achievement award for his work on planet hunting. He has contributed to more than 100 research papers and published articles in journals including the Astrophysical Journal, Nature, and Astrobiology. He appears as an expert commentator in the Emmy nominated National Geographic television show “Alien Earths” and frequently writes articles in Astronomy Magazine. For more career tips for scientists, go to www.marketingforscientists.com. You can also follow Marc on Twitter @marckuchner.

I went to a scientific talk the other day that seemed to leave half the audience inspired and the other half frustrated. My frustrated colleagues insisted that the speaker did not present any true “results”. However, he did make some fascinating predictions about what would be discovered ten or twenty years from now, predictions that may be crucial for marketing exercises and expensive experiments.

Was this a good talk or a bad talk?  Science or marketing?

Maybe just it’s a matter of taste. Some of us will never be satisfied by a talk unless we see a hypothesis confidently confirmed or discarded. Others may find the realm of topics subject to such clear decisions too limiting and yearn for a glimpse into the more distant future. Continue reading →