Environment/nature
ddobbs | June 23, 2010I'm 'posed to be writing, really writing (insert argument over what's really writing in comments), but hit so many juicy bits in my morning read today I wanted to share. Here's my eclectic mix for the day:
A great rompy scary post from @susanorlean on how her book bounced around many publishers and editors.
Keith Kloor at Collide-a-scape has a round-up of stories on the "credibility of climate experts" report
"memory performance boosted while walking"  Beautiful. Perhaps why walking oft solves writing probs.  via @mariapage:
"Theory Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" From @kerin at…
ddobbs | June 11, 2010Â
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Unbelieveble! Department, via SciencePunk: Â Giant mayfly swarm caught on radar
NYRB reviews what sounds like an especially moving memoir from Andre Agassi.
Whatever It Takes Department, via Ed Yong:Â Superstitions can improve performance by boosting confidence.
The climate-change doubt industry and its roots - http://bit.ly/an4cAr, via @stevesilberman
RitaRubin: Study: Have bad habits? U r more likely 2 blame health problms on your genes. 'Cause u can't do anything 2 change them http://bit.ly/ad6iRy. Damned interesting if true.
techreview: Genetic Testing Can Change Behavior http…
ddobbs | May 26, 2010Selling a work fiction is difficult; publishing in Nature is a long-shot; yet somehow writer and genomeboy Misha Angrist managed to publish fiction in Nature.
The only way I was ever going to get a first-author publication in Nature [Angrist explains] was if I just made it all up. So thatâs what I did. Hat tip to David Dobbs for providing the scientific inspiration.
The short story/fantasy Angrist publishes actually pulls little, it seems to me, from my story about the orchid/plasticity/differential susceptibility hypothesis, though it does work ground seeded by both genetics and…
ddobbs | May 14, 2010
A Times story this morning reports that, according to both documents and scientists in the US Minerals Management Service (MMS), the MMS routinely silenced safety and environmental warnings from staff in order to grant permits for even huge, high-risk drilling permits, including the BP rig that blew.
It's a good (and nauseating) story, and I'm tempted to say it's timely. Yet this story would have been a lot more timely before the rig blew, no? As I read it, I wondered why I had not read it weeks ago, when the Obama administration started proposing an expansion of drilling off US coasts.…
ddobbs | March 26, 2010
from a different Daily Dish -- 365 petri dishes, by Klari Reis
House of Wisdom, the splendid new blog on Arabic science from Mohammed Yahia, editor of Nature Middle East describes an effort to map the Red Sea's coral reefs with satellite, aerial, adn ship-based technologies. Nice project and a promising new blog.
Brain and Mind
Ritalin works by boosting dopamine levels, says a story in Technology Review, reporting on a paper in Nature Neuroscience. The effect is to enhance not just attention but the speed of learning.
As several tweeters and bloggers have noted, H-Madness is a new group blog…
ddobbs | March 19, 2010
Cordyceps in glass, by glass artist Wesley Fleming -- a strange depiction of a rather horrid business. For more, do go to the source, the lovely Myrmecos Blog, which is all about bugs.
Now, the best of the week's gleanings. I'm going to categorize them from here out, and at least try to keep them from being from completely all over everywhere about everything.
Mind, brain, and body (including those gene things)
While reading Wolpert's review of Greenberg's book about depression (he didn't much like it), I found that the Guardian has a particularly rich trove of writings and resources on…
ddobbs | March 18, 2010
The sky before Katrina struck, from Rense.com Correction: I been snookered. As alert reader Alex Witze pointed out, these photos were taken by stormchaser Mike Hollingshead in Nebraska and Kansas in 2002 and 2004, and have passed around the net in other guises ever since. For more amazing storm photos, go to Hollingshead's site, extremeinstability.com. He has some doozies.
You may be shocked but not surprised to hear that Insurance Company Dropped Customers With HIV.
We knew this, but The World Needs More Vegetarians.
Robert Kaplan ponders the challenge that is Man Versus Afghanistan.
I…
ddobbs | March 17, 2010I'll try doing this now and then, maybe regularly, to gather the more notable tweets I get in my twitter feed.
Darwin2009: Population-level traits that affect, and do not affect, invasion success http://ow.ly/1mMUp
jayrosen_nyu: "The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company." <--- Bill Keller http://jr.ly/2pfz
dhayton: âH-Madnessâ is a new blog on the history of psychiatry, madness, etc. For and by scholars: http://historypsychiatry.wordpress.com/
stevesilberman: The brains of psychopaths may be hypersensitive to dopamine rewards - http://bit.ly/daP9Go…
ddobbs | March 15, 2010
I've been following a new birding blog lately, "The Daily Wing," kept by Vermont bird guide, dragonfly follower, and writer Bryan Pfeiffer. It's a nice mix of
⢠birding how-to, with guidance both basic and intricate, such as his lovely entry on a bird-attraction technique he calls spishing (especially effective in winter):
The woods were otherwise silent. Vacant. But I suspected otherwise. So I stopped and spished.
"Spshsh-spshsh-spshsh-spshsh. Psssp-psssp-psssp-psssp-psssp. Spshsh-spshsh-spshsh-spshsh."
Two white-throated sparrows jumped into view from a tangle of catbrier. Then several…
ddobbs | November 6, 2009
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
The Maldives, featured in a Wired gallery of islands shot from space. A place crucial to the story I told in Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. It was in this unique archipelago that Alexander Agassiz found the evidence he felt proved beyond doubt that Darwin's theory of coral reef formation was wrong, dead wrong. It's also a singularly beautiful place, and particularly threatened by global warming.
ddobbs | October 16, 2009 Don't see this every day. From the excellent Dovdox, Alan Dove's scijo blog:
Awhile back, I commented on the finding that abandoned swimming pools at foreclosed houses are producing a boom in mosquito-borne infections. Now, it seems, some Floridians have found a way to deal with at least one aspect of the abandoned pool problem:
Debra Mitchell, a code enforcement officer in Wellington, said the town is using catfish to clean pools in homes foreclosed on amid the devastated housing market. Officials were previously spending nearly $7,000 a month of taxpayer funds on chemicals to keep the…
ddobbs | September 7, 2009Bloggingheads.tv just posted a conversation Greg Laden and I had about the second-biggest scientific controversy of Darwin's time, and of Darwin's life: the argument over how coral reefs form. The coral reef argument was fascinating in its own right, both scientifically and dramatically -- for here a very capable andn conscientious scientist, Alexander Agassiz, struggled to reconcile both two views of science and the legacies of the two scientific giants of the age, one of whom was his father.
His story -- and the tumultuous 19th-century struggle to define science and empiricism -- is the…
ddobbs | September 4, 2009
photo: U.S. Forest Service
Notables of the day:
John Hawks ponders the (bad) art of citing papers you've never read.
Clive Thompson ponders the new literacy spawned of engagement with many keyboards.
A poll on public education shows how much opinion depends on framing, context -- and who else thinks an idea is good. In this case, people liked the idea of merit pay more if told Obama likes it.
Mind Hacks works the placebo circuit.
And Effect Measure weighs in on the weird contrasts and (limited) parallels between swine flu and avian flu.
And for fun, fire lookout towers, from BLDGBLOG. You…
ddobbs | September 2, 2009
I was pleased to see my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral written up in a couple of venues recently. Over at The Primate Diaries, Eric Michael Johnson, who does on history and philosophy of science, looks at the "terrific argument" that the book follows -- an argument simultaneously about how coral reefs form, how to do science, and (a third layer out), creationism versus empiricism. A nice write-up -- you can't go wrong starting a piece about the creationism-empiricism debate (among other things) with an atomic blast.
The book is also mentioned…
ddobbs | July 4, 2009In case you missed them (or miss them, and want to read again ...)
The (Illusory) Rise and Fall of the "Depression Gene"
DIY circumcision with nail clippers Go figure.
Oliver Sacks meets Jon Stewart
Wheels come off psychiatric manual; APA blames road conditions
Alarming climate change chart of the day
Swine flu count in US hits 1 million; can't wait till flu season!
Will government involvement drive up health-care costs?
What if you could predict PTSD in combat troops? Oh, who cares...
ddobbs | July 1, 2009
Among the many treats in Carl Zimmer's new Times piece on fireflies and sex -- go, and be enchanted -- I particularly liked this quick peek at how a life and a career can take a sharp turn for the most unplanned of reasons:
It was on a night much like this one in 1980 when Dr. Lewis first came under the spell of fireflies. She was in graduate school at Duke University, studying coral reef fish. Waiting for a grant to come through for a trip to Belize, she did not have much else to do but sit in her backyard in North Carolina.
"Every evening there was this incredible display of fireflies…
ddobbs | June 29, 2009Paul Krugman tunes out the noise:
Temperature is a noisy time series, so if you pick and choose your dates over a short time span you can usually make whatever case you want. That's why you need to look at longer trends and do some statistical analysis. But I thought that it would be a good thing to look at the data myself.
So here's the average annual global temperature since 1880, shown as .01 degrees C deviation from the 1951-80 average.
What this tells me is that annual temperature is indeed noisy: there have been many large fluctuations, indeed much larger than the up-and-down in the…
ddobbs | June 25, 2009Much much much ado on the web this week, on the too-many fronts I try to visit. From my list of notables:
Carl Zimmer, who clearly doesn't sleep, writes up a nice post about a Nature paper announcing Limusaurus, a newly discovered fossil that is, Zimmer notes, is "not -- I repeat NOT -- the missing link between anything"-- but nevertheless sheds some light on how dinos may have turned into birds (more or less). Bonus: Great pictures of Carl holding up three fingers.
Ed Yong, who seems to be drinking the same strength coffee as Carl Zimmer lately, looks at an interesting correlation: Hidden…
ddobbs | June 23, 2009
Perhaps because I so enjoyed the time I spent at sea learning about fish, I particularly enjoyed this collection of Nick Cobbing's photos of ice, sea, and people who work them â scientists, fishermen, adventurers. Cobbing has a great eye for color and form, particularly those of the icy north and the sea; his study of the Greenland ice, fast fading, is particularly stunning, and I very much like his photo account of the voyage of the Nooderlicht, pictured above â a 100-year-old schooner restored and then sailed from Svalbard to Greenland. And don't miss "The Watch Keeper," which is about…