Science Feeds

In mid-March, I attended a debate held at the Royal Institution, on how journalists and scientists can better work together in order to avoid erroneous reporting on scientific issues. One of the take-home messages of the debate was a call for scientists to more rigorously watch their own neighbourhood, and highlight problem articles. A number of news media outlets have picked up on a story today from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child health annual conference in Glasgow, with headlines ranging from the relatively moderate “Childhood ‘screen time’: Warning over TV and computers” through to the sensationalist and insulting “Mobile addict parents guilty of child ‘neglect’ warns psychologist”. The story comes from Dr Aric Sigman, who is giving a guest lecture entitled “Alcohol and electronic media: units of consumption”. In the various press reports on the lecture, a number of worries have been raised about electronic media use. I address two of these below. In doing so, I have tried to include relevant links to research, where appropriate. I would also like to add the caveat that this post is based on press releases in the media, and not Dr Sigman’s presentation, which, at the time of writing this, has not yet been given. As a result, if any of these points are erroneous, I would encourage Dr Sigman to report them to the relevant press outlets along with clarifications, and I will update this post accordingly.1) From the Telegraph and Daily Mail articles: “A generation of young people is growing up with a virtual addiction to computers, televisions and smartphones with striking similarities to alcoholism” and “He will tell a group of Britain’s leading doctors today that the growing addiction could leave a generation suffering damage to the body as well as the brain.”The question of whether or not one can become addicted to technology is a contentious one. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders, which contains standard criteria for classifying mental disorders, does not currently contain any sort of classification for internet, technology or video game addiction. While that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, it does mean there is no standardised way to assess it. In turn, that means that it is difficult to compare and amalgamate the research that has been conducted; if two papers show findings for and against the existence of such an addiction, and they use different measures of technology use and addiction, we can’t be sure whether an inappropriate measure in one study is the cause of their results. However, the general consensus in recent years is that it is no longer appropriate to model technology addiction in the same way you would model alcohol or drug addiction; to do so simplifies the issue in a way that does not adequately capture the variability in the population of problematic users (see Shapira et al., 2003). A meta-analysis of research into internet addiction looked at 39 studies between 1996-2006, and noted numerous problems in data collection and analysis that in part boil down to inconsistent criteria being used to define addictive behaviour (see Byun et al., 2009). As a result, it is unclear where Dr Sigman is drawing his conclusions from – they do not appear to be based on recent research in the area. Certainly, as far as I am aware, there is absolutely no evidence anywhere that technology and new media use causes brain damage.2) From the Daily Mail article: “The latest statistics show that 12 to 15-year-olds spend an average of more than six hours a day slumped in front of screens. Dr Aric Sigman wants TV banned for toddlers and severely rationed for other youngsters and will warn that parents who use technology as a ‘babysitter’ could be setting up their children for a lifetime of ill health. His work and studies by other researchers link time spent in front of screens with health problems including obesity, high cholesterol and blood pressure, inattentiveness and declines in maths and reading, as well as sleep disorders and autism.”I can’t seem to find the source of these statistics, and would be grateful for further information.* However, I did find a report from Childwise, dated January 2012 (here). This survey notes that the number of children with their own TV set is currently declining, as is time spent watching TV (a reported 2.5 hours per day, on average). The report also notes that children ‘spend an average of 2.4 hours per week playing sport at school, unchanged since 2008’, but that ‘time spent playing sport out of school has fallen this year, to an average of 2.9 hours per week, down from 3.1 hours last year’.There is evidence to suggest that average hours of TV viewing are correlated with negative health outcomes, such as excess weight (Hancox & Poulton, 2006), decreased hip bone mineral density in girls (Janz et al., 2001), as well as being a predictor of weight gain in adulthood (Ekelund et al., 2006). Based on these findings and others, recommendations have already been made in the scientific literature about limiting television time for preschool children (see de Decker et al., 2012). Moreover, it’s worth noting that relatively little research has been conducted in the era of the Nintendo Wii, and recent studies (Graf et al., 2009) have shown that playing active video games actually increases energy expenditure in children – coupled with the apparent decreases that Childwise report in TV viewing, the sensationalist nature of the way Dr Sigman’s opinions are being reported seem unnecessary and unhelpful – particularly in regards to the link with autism. As Professor Dorothy Bishop has eloquently outlined before now, mentioning ‘links’ in this way implies a causal direction – that TV use, or internet use, somehow causes autism – and this has the potential to mislead the public and causes unnecessary anguish.I have tried to highlight relevant articles above, but I must emphasise that the research literature on these issues is huge – a PubMed search for terms including “television use”, “social media”, “cognition”, “psychology” and “psychiatry” pulls up over 3,000 hits. Obviously not all of these are relevant, but they point to the complexities inherent in understanding how technology in its various forms affects us. New media is exactly that; new. Researchers are doing their best to figure out the effects of both short- and long-term use, but in the grand scheme of things we’ve really only just started. And while I think it is good to have a debate about this that engages the public, it is not fair to selectively pick research that highlights only one side of the discussion – as Dr Ben Goldacre notes, ‘cherry-picking’ sends (incorrect) messages out that there is consensus in the scientific community, or that there is overwhelming evidence for one side of the story. Dr Sigman himself has admitted to doing this before now, and today’s press releases seem to be in the same vein. To accuse parents of child neglect, as it appears Dr Sigman is doing in the media today, strikes me as scaremongering, and scientifically irresponsible. If you have a genuine concern about something that may have serious health risks, you have a duty as a scientist to outline those concerns objectively in a peer-reviewed academic research paper. Searches using PubMed and Web of Knowledge (academic article search engines) yield no results for any research by A Sigman on any of these issues; if anyone could point me to research that Dr Sigman has actually done in this area, I would be grateful. *edit: Vaughan Bell’s piece mentions the source of the statistics: Childwise, and it can be yours for £1800.

SUMMARY: This morning, we learn how to count like the ancient Babylonians (oh, and we learn about the number 60, too)!I’ve often wondered why there are sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour when really, we can define these units of time in any way we wish. So why don’t we instead have 100 seconds in a minute and 100 minutes in an hour? That certainly seems more metric.

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Cathy’s eyes opened. She became aware of an unrelenting sound in the background, ‘Woosh, hiss, woosh, hiss, ….’ A plastic tube emerged from her body and disappeared into the machine making the noise. She couldn’t move.

Cathy remembered feeling sick. She remembered her son helping her up the stairs. She had been healthy. She wasn’t a smoker. What happened?

After passing out that day, Cathy had a brain-stem stroke. She barely survived. Now she was awake. She was aware. She was able to sense everything but was locked inside a body that wouldn’t move.

WHY ARE THERE BRAINS?The real reason for brains, according to Daniel Wolpert, is to control movement — the contraction of muscles.“We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements.” – Daniel WolpertWolpert calls this answer “blindingly obvious,” and he calls himself a “movement-chauvinist.” Movement, is the only way we have for affecting the world around us. The clinching evidence he offers is the Sea Squirt. In its juvenile form it swims around in the ocean. At some point in its maturation it settles on a rock where it will spend the rest of its life. The first thing it does upon settlement is to digest its own brain for food.

Once you don’t need to control muscles, you don’t need a brain. What if you have a brain, but you can’t control your muscles?

SHOCK THE MONKEYFor years now, scientists have been mucking about inside monkey brains. They put electrodes in there to learn about simian muscle control. More recently researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Motorlab gave a monkey the ability to control a disembodied robotic arm.

A monkey was restrained in a chair (arms stuck in tubes). A set of electrodes had been surgically implanted into the part of its brain that controls arm and hand movement. The monkey was able to control the robot arm with sufficient dexterity to feed himself marshmallows. Even more surprising was when the monkey licked the robot fingers [MORE].

Researchers at Duke were also able to teach one of their rhesus monkeys to control a robot arm. One day this monkey had an epiphany. Its two biological arms went totally limp. It learned to control the robot arm purely by thought. It became the first vertebrate with exactly three separate arms [MORE].

2016 will be the year of the fire monkey, but 2011 was the year of the cyborg monkey. These Duke researchers were able to complete the Brain-Machine-Brain interface. This monkey could control a robot arm and feel with a virtual hand. Motor control and sensory input. This is huge. The implications for helping human quadriplegics cannot be overstated.

HUMAN CYBORG RELATIONSThe future is within our grasp. The holy grail of human-computer interaction is just around the corner. When am I gonna get my Matrix Port? For whom should this technology be used?

In 2005 Cathy got a call. A friend had heard about a research group called BrainGate which was looking for quadriplegics for a study. They wanted to implant an electrode in her brain. Surgeons installed the implant later that year.

Cathy sat in front of a battery of screens. The output of her implant splayed copiously across those screens. They were just observing — trying to make sense of it all. Then they took the output of her implant and connected it to the mouse control. It moved. Cathy moved the mouse across the screen using only her mind.

Seven years later it was time to make it real. They connected Cathy’s implant to a robotic arm. The robotic hand had a thermos in its grasp. They turned control of the arm over to Cathy. By pure thought she caused the arm to bring the thermos up to her lips. She took a sip. For the first time in years, Cathy gave herself a drink.

SCIENCE FICTIONCathy and a select few other quadriplegics have had the chance to move a robotic arm with pure thought. Tim Hemmes recently gave his girlfriend a high-five. His first in years [MORE]. This technology works. It really works. We can do this. We can cure paralysis. It’s just a matter of time.

It’s going to take significant time, of course, but not as much as I once thought. Decades. A few years ago I started working on a sci-fi novel. It includes some passages about neural implants which don’t seem so amazing anymore. I’ll have to try a little harder to imagine the future.

What is in our future? What else does your brain do? What can you imagine but are unable to do? Would you like to write some checks your body could never cash? The rhesus monkey was able to move the arm as if it were a third and totally separate arm. If you could control a video game by pure thought, would you do better? If you could download documents directly to your brain, would you read faster? Forget words and pictures. What if you could download fully formed concepts and experiences? We might find that the richness of brain-to-brain communication (Strange-Days-style) is much richer than anything we can experience through the eyes and ears. We might just lock ourselves into The Matrix willingly.


LINKS:

Teenager Develops EEG-controlled Robotic Arm for Science Fair

BrainGate Wikipedia entry

Brain-machine-brain interface

Monkeys’ brain waves offer quadriplegics hope

Paralyzed woman controls robotic arm with her mind

The Woman Who Controlled a Robotic Arm With Her BrainParalyzed patients move robots with minds

Stroke Victims Think, Robotic Arm Acts

Peter Gleick has been cleared of faking a key memo. Who is Peter Gleick, and what is this memo of which we speak? Here is a refresher of events over the last 3 1/2 months:

You will recall that last February 14th, we were all given an interesting Valentine's Day present: A cache of documents had been acquired from the Heartland Institute, and these documents revealed important details about Heartland's effort to interfere with science education and otherwise agitate and lobby to promote climate science denialism. The documents were released to the public by an as then unknown activist, and then redistributed by numerous bloggers including this one.

Heartland is the organization that made itself famous by working for the tobacco lobby in their effort to prove that smoking cigarettes was not really harmful. Over recent years, Heartland has received funds from a wide range of organizations and individuals to support climate denialism. Most recently, Heartland gained considerable notoriety (the bad kind) with their noxious and ill-conceived billboard campaign that equated "believing in global warming" with being a deranged serial killer (Tool Time: Heartland, Ted Kaczynski, and Education).

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup

I felt compelled to write this after learning about the death of Professor Anne Warner last Wednesday. I came to know her over the last few months as we were working on a project together. There are some people who make an impression upon you even before you’ve met them. When we first started discussing our project, Professor Warner was concerned about her own disability, and whether it would be a hindrance. Her question at the time made me think about why she felt the need to ask such a question. I sensed vulnerability in her question and this touched me, it also made me reflect upon the state of our society and world. These thoughts led to a myriad of thoughts about all the injustices, pain and suffering we see all around the world today. For me, they are all part of the same web, interconnected and pervasive. Her vulnerability about her condition moved me, and when I met her, I sensed the pain of someone who’s been through great trials in their life. I felt a connection with her, and when I read what a friend and colleague had written about her, it further reaffirmed my picture of her, and I imagined what she must have been like when she was younger, brilliant, beautiful and vivacious. bq. She belonged to a generation of women scientists who had to make sacrifices for their careers. Like many of her generation she could be characterised as ‘formidable’ because she would not be ignored. Throughout her career Anne expected to be treated as an equal and worked to achieve it. She never tried to be a role model, she was not that self-conscious, but she was, nevertheless.Professor Warner provokes deep questions in me, and in her death I reflect upon what humanity values, and what it celebrates. We live in a world of distracting abnormal noise, which veils many of us from the reality of life and the certainty of death. When someone of great intellectual stature dies, the world should know it has lost a great mind, and reflect upon this loss, and our own mortality. I feel privileged to have met her, she left a deep impression upon me, and I hope I can complete the project in her honour.

My picture of the solar eclipse tonight, from my perch atop a levee overlooking the Mississippi river in Baton Rouge, Louisiana! Yes, Baton Rouge only saw a partial solar eclipse (the moon covering a portion of the Sun’s surface) right before sunset… but the sight was still amazingly cool!TweetAnd the progression!!

Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern, they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial… – Saffron O’Neill and Sophie Nicholson-Cole, 2009According to Daniel Gardner, author of book The Science of Fear, good science, with all its proper caveats and degrees of uncertainty, does not lend itself to scary headlines and shocking one-line summaries. But fear and stories of conflict often ‘make it’ in journalistic news. So do scientists need to radically change the way they talk about the science of climate change to make it ‘scary’? TweetDo scientists and climate communicators really need the ‘scary’ headlines and alarming facts to get media coverage? Maybe so…But do scary headlines and alarming facts really increase public awareness and concern about climate change? The answer to this second question is not so clear…According to a study by researchers at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in the UK, fear-inducing messages on climate change are widely used in the public domain. But, the researchers claim, some literature suggests that using fearful representations of climate change may actually be counterproductive. This 2009 study found that fear is not a useful tool for motivating genuine personal engagement with climate change and action.Newell and Pitman (2010) provide the following tip to climate change communicators: bq. Use vivid images of global warming, like shrinking glaciers and melting ice sheets, to engage emotional processing, but do so judiciously to avoid emotional numbing or a ‘despair’ response.Global climate change is occurring as more energy is entering our planet’s atmosphere than is leaving, setting up a net energy imbalance that can produce negative consequences for the climate system and delicate ecosystems.Imagine you hear that the total energy imbalance of the Earth is now 6/10ths of a Watt per square meter. Not so bad right? But what if you hear the following:400,000 Hiroshima atomic bomb explosions per day, 365 days per year – that is how much extra energy Earth is now gaining each day due to human-emitted greenhouse gasses. Sound a bit scarier? Renowned climate scientist James Hansen used this analogy in his recent 2010 Ted Talkclimatechange.html ‘Why I must speak out about climate change’. Although I personally applaud Hansen’s communication efforts, fearful images of atomic bombs may not be the best way to engage the public…Are fear-based messaging tactics doing anything to increase public concern about and engagement in climate change? Climate communicators have defined engagement as a state of connection comprising cognition, emotion, and behavior. There is much that individuals can do to mitigate climate change, when around 1/3rd of greenhouse gas emissions are the result of energy use in the home and personal travel. Avoiding the more severe impacts of climate change requires action on many levels, including the personal level. But to make public engagement happen, we need a concerned and aware public. To get a concerned and aware public, we need appropriate communications on the part of scientists, politicians, and the media alike.Fear-inducing phrases, messages, and images of climate change are rampant in today’s media environment:bq. “It is a terrible, immense, and apocalyptic problem, beyond human control.”According to researchers at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, the well-known IPCC Working Group I report on climate change did not include words like catastrophic, shocking, terrifying, or devastating – all words that appeared in the media in relation to the IPCC report.This type of language is reflective of fear appeal: a persuasive communication attempt designed to arouse fear in order to promote precautionary motivation and self-protective action. (Ruiter, Abraham, & Kok, 2001)Global climate change isn’t an issue that the public can sink their teeth into – it is distant and abstract. So how can scientists and science communicators elicit public concern and engagement without using strong language and even fear appeals?For starters, researchers of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research study found that many individuals already have a baseline fear about climate change. Participants in their study said things like:bq. It just seems all kind of out of control. The whole world does. I mean, if you think about it too much, it’s rather scary. How’s it all going to end up? I don’t know if I’ll want to be around.Instead of using fear, many climate change communications studies suggest that making climate change personally relevant and salient to everyday life would do more for public concern and engagement than strict efforts at fear appeals (M. Nisbet). If people don’t understand how climate change is going to affect them, they are not going act. But here we have another problem, because when it comes to specific local impacts, there is still much scientific uncertainty. We can be 99% sure that global climate change is occurring due to human activities, and that it will have local impacts, but as of yet science can’t tell local residents exactly what the impacts will look like. But regardless, efforts at engaging publics with personally and community relevant messaging on climate change, and communications efforts that promote concern without fear, may perhaps be effective.People also must feel that they can DO something about climate change… they must feel empowered… and fear doesn’t seem to give an impression of empowerment for action.O’Neil and Nicholson-Cole, Researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, concluded in their 2009 study:bq. Fearful representations of climate change appear to be memorable and may initially attract individuals’ attention. However, they can also act to distance and disempower individuals in terms of their sense of personal engagement with the issue.The disengagement outcome of fear appeals is especially worrying for an issue such as climate change, which requires individual and well as collective and policy action if mitigation is to be effective. It looks like fear isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when it comes to global warming. Scientists and communicators would do better to emphasize personal relevance, public frames of reference on the issue, everyday issues, and personal efficacy. What can you do about climate change? If you trust the science… a lot.“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings, as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, Stanford climatologist, in interview with Discover magazine. In The Science of Fear by Daniel Gardner_Climate change and fear appeals… putting the ‘fear’ into children:_References:O’Neill, S., & Nicholson-Cole, S. (2009). “Fear Won’t Do It” Promoting Positive Engagement With Climate Change Through Visual and Iconic Representations. Science Communication, 30(3), 355-379. Nisbet, M. Study Finds That Fear Won’t Don’t Do It: Why Most Efforts at Climate Change Communication Might Actually Backfire. Big Think http://bigthink.com/ideas/24991.

Image: Researcher Hans Roy opening a core sample, photo by Bo Barker Jørgensen, © Science / AAAS

I was amazed to find out that there are bacteria in the ocean floor that have metabolisms roughly 10,000 times slower than those living at the surface of the seabed. This extremely slow lifestyle allows them to live for thousands of years. In fact, these microbes were found in a core sample of clay collected up to 20 meters beneath the seafloor of the North Pacific Gyre, just north of Hawaii. This depth means that the microbes settled on the ocean floor about 86 million years ago! While these as yet unidentified microbes rely on oxygen for survival, very little nutrients are available due to the large ocean currents in this area. Therefore, researchers have suggested they are still persisting off of food that arrived during the time of the dinosaurs.

Sources:
Scientific American

Roy H, Kallmeyer J, Adhikari RR, Pockalny R, Jorgensen BB, D'Hondt S. Aerobic Microbial Respiration in 86-Million-Year-Old Deep-Sea Red Clay. Science 18 May 2012:
Vol. 336 no. 6083 pp. 922-925.

Many of the climate change denialist sites have been up in arms by comparisons of climate change denial to holocaust denial. In particular Marc Morano at climate depot has had multiple articles attacking and expressing hysterical outrage at these comparisons.

We know they don't like the comparison, but the question is, is it apt?

"The Earth destroys its fools, but the intelligent destroy the Earth."
-Khalid ibn al-Walid Usually, when we talk about terraforming, we think about taking a presently uninhabitable planet and making it suitable for terrestrial life. This means taking a world without an oxygen-rich atmosphere, with watery oceans, and without the means to sustain them, and to transform it into an Earth-like world.

The obvious choice, when it comes to our Solar System, is Mars.

(Image credit: Daein Ballard.)

The red planet, after all, is not a total stranger to these conditions. On the contrary, for the first billion-and-a-half years of our Solar System, give or take, Mars was perhaps not so dissimilar to Earth. With evidence that there was once liquid water on the surface, a thicker atmosphere, and possibly even life, there's no doubt that the right type of geo-engineering could bring those conditions back.

But there's also no doubt that we couldn't, if we were sufficiently motivated, turn the Earth from this...

(Image credit: NASA / GSFC / NOAA / USGS.)

into a world where the atmosphere and the oceans were stripped away. Into a dry, nearly airless world, much like Mars.

(Image credit: Jack Cook / WHOI, Howard Perlman / USGS.)

Inspired by a recent Astronomy Picture of the Day, above, it's now time to tell you how I would, scientifically, remove the oceans from the planet. It's a process I like to call reverse terraforming, whereby you turn a world the Earth into a world like Mars.

At present, this is difficult for a number of reasons, but here's the biggest one.

(Image credit: Natalie Krivova.)

The Earth's magnetosphere! The same reason that your compass needle points towards the magnetic poles of Earth is the only thing keeping our oceans here on our world! The Sun is constantly shooting out a stream of high-energy ions, known as the solar wind, at speeds of about 1,000,000 miles-per-hour (1,600,000 km/hr).

(Image credit: NASA / GSFC; the Ace satellite.)

As the solar wind runs into a world, these ions collide with particles in a planet's atmosphere, giving those molecules enough kinetic energy to escape from the planet's gravitational field.

Of course, we have a powerful magnetic shield from the solar wind thanks to our hot, dense and (partially) molten core. Our planet's magnetic field successfully bends away practically all of the solar wind particles that would be in danger of colliding with us, with the occasional exception of the polar regions, where the ions -- and hence sometimes aurorae -- get through.

(Image credit: NASA, retrieved from Cloudetal.)

Right now, our atmosphere is pretty thick: it consists of some 5,300,000,000,000,000 tonnes of material, creating the atmospheric pressure that we feel down here at the surface. There's so much pressure, in fact, that our Earth can sustain liquid water on the surface.

(Image credit: David Mogk, Montana State University.)

The ability to have liquid water is relatively rare: we need the proper temperatures and the proper pressures! That means we need at least at atmosphere of a certain thickness, a characteristic that Mars, Mercury, and the Moon totally lack. But we've got it, and hence we can have liquid water on our surface.

And do we ever! There's much more water than there is atmosphere. About 250 times as much, by mass, is the amount that the oceans outweigh the atmosphere, meaning that the oceans comprise about 0.023% of the Earth's total mass!

But we could get rid of all that liquid water, eventually, by letting the solar wind in.

(Image credit: NASA / Themis mission.)

When the Earth and Sun's magnetic field align, something like 20 times as many particles as normal make it through. Charged particles are bent by magnetic fields in very predictable ways, and if we could control those fields, we could control how much of the solar wind made it through.

In other words, if we could create a large enough magnetic field on Earth, we could poke a hole in the magnetosphere and allow the solar wind to strip our atmosphere away!

(Image credit: NASA, retrieved from futurity.org.)

Something similar happened to Mars about 3 billion years ago, when its core stopped producing that powerful magnetosphere shield, and its atmosphere got stripped away. When the pressure at the surface dropped below a certain level, the liquid oceans there could only exist as frozen ice or boiled off as water vapor. (And once they're water vapor, they become part of the atmosphere, where it, too, can be stripped away by the solar wind!)

It may not be fast enough for the most supervillainous among you, but one thing's for sure.

(Image credit: flickr user Ole C. Salomonsen.)

If we do poke a hole in the magnetosphere and allow the solar wind in, I'll definitely be enjoying the auroral show!

I mentioned at the start of the year that I was doing CodeYear. You may be wondering how that is going. Still going strong! After about 5 weeks I cobbled together a little DNA-translator; a few weeks later I finished the entire JavaScript section. We’re now in html/css lessons, but I already know most of that, so I’m not learning much right now. (I did learn one important new thing, though. I found out why so many websites look the same these days. Twitter Bootstrap! Aha! Oh Twitter, how far your influence stretches…) So, it’s still fun, and I’m still learning things. I actually tried to teach myself some coding (Python) a few years ago, but had to admit defeat – something I don’t easily do. I bought books and everything. I thought I’d be okay because I did take some classes at university. But even with the beginner books I was stuck. Why? I didn’t know what to use to actually type the code in, compile, run – all that stuff. I could write code in a text editor…and then…what? I had nothing to work in. CodeYear is web-based, so you type in the browser, and now I can finally play around with things. When I made the DNA translator, however, I still had to google a bit to find out how to actually put javascript code into an html file so that I could display it on my own site. (I’m guessing they will teach this at some point, but we hadn’t covered it yet in week 5.)I mention this to emphasize the difference between Learning to Code for Fun (which I’m doing) and Learning to Code for Serious (which involves knowing exactly what platforms to run your code on before you even start to learn the language, and not typing in browsers).It’s rather like the difference between learning science from watching a lot of science documentaries and visiting the science museum, versus learning science in actual labs at actual universities. If you want to work in science, you do the latter. If you’re just interested and want to know more, you do the former. If there were no documentaries and science museums, someone interested in science (but not professionally) would have to get their hands on university textbooks or journal papers and just jump in the deep end. That’s how I felt when I tried to learn to code a few years ago and didn’t even know what program to write the code in. So as a geek-of-all-trades who likes learning more about everything, I’m happy that there is a site that lets me play around and learn things, just like I can learn more about geology by visiting a museum or watching documentaries or looking at rock formations while on vacation. And if I don’t want to code or don’t want to learn about geology, I don’t have to do those things. Nobody is forcing me. Nobody is forced to learn anything about science after the age of about 15, and yet there are lots of people visiting science museums and watching science programming to learn more about cell biology or physics or geology. Wouldn’t it be weird if geologists got upset that random people wanted to learn more about geology? If they wanted geologists to be the only people to study rocks? That is apparently how some programmers feel about coding outreach projects. I read this blog post yesterday, and even commented, but it’s still bothering me. Today I realized why: I should be allowed to learn ANYTHING I WANT. EVERYONE should be allowed to learn ANYTHING THEY WANT. I love when people do science experiments on their own, and I have never met a scientist who was opposed to the concept of amateur scientists. We don’t always take them seriously, but surely anyone can do science if they want to! What is this ridiculous elitist attitude of stating that non-programmers shouldn’t code?You’re only making me want LEARN HARDER.

SUMMARY: This video captures the time and effort it took to mount a birdcam on a light tower overlooking Cornell University’s athletic fieldScreengrab: Adult female red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis, “Big Red” puts the finishes touches on her nest.One of the many things that I love about all this newly affordable miniaturised technology is the astonishing number of birdcams that are sprouting up all around the world. These birdcams are providing the general public with an unprecedented “bird’s eye view” of a growing number of animal species for the first time in the history of mankind. This can only be good for animals and for conservation. This video provides a behind-the-scenes look at the expertise and effort that went in to mounting the red-tailed hawk cams on the light tower that is nearly 80 feet (24.4 metres) above Cornell University’s athletic field.

“I believe we want a world that is pro-poor, pro-development, and pro-environment.”So said Bina Agarwal, Director and Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth at Delhi University, India, at the Planet Under Pressure 2012 conference in London – an international conference focusing on solutions to the global sustainability challenge. At the conference, Bina expressed her concern for food security and forest protection in light of global climatic changes, calling for “participation at all levels, at both the global and the local, between countries and within communities…” This quote by Bina from Planet Under Pressure 2012 says it all: “Even without climate change, we will need extraordinary efforts to feed 9 billion [people] by 2050. With climate change, the task is mammoth.”TweetBina has written extensively on environmental action and agriculture issues from a gender perspective, writing about gender differences and why they matter when it comes to conserving the environment and organizing sustainable collective action initiatives. For example, women in many developing countries have a large stake in local forests, and would benefit from community forest management. Forest decline is currently undermining biodiversity and aggravating our planet’s ability to cope with global warming. Forest decline also critically affects nutrition supplements for the poor in developing countries, leading to Bina’s call for ‘collectivity’ – collective economic and community-driven initiatives to manage forests and promote sustainable technologies – lead by women in developing countries.Why does Bina emphasize women’s role in collective environmental action? Rural women tend to be more resource constrained, dependent on social networks, and compelled to resolve conflicts. These tendencies, along with the fact that rural women stand to gain tremendously from joint economic ventures, make women potential key players in collective sustainable action.In response to a question posed by Bina to village woman about conflict resolution due to women’s interdependence, one village woman told Bina:bq. Women reflect more. They say: even if I am fighting with her now, I have to go together with her for weeding or water, or if I don’t have flour in the house, I will have to borrow from her. This is always at the back of our minds. (Agarwal, 2010, p. 74)Intrigued by Bina’s talk at Planet Under Pressure 2012, I e-mailed her to ask a few questions of my own:What stakes do women have in forest management? Women in developing countries, especially in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa depend on forests for many items of daily use, particularly firewood. This constitutes the single most important source of cooking fuel in rural regions of developing countries. In 2001, an estimated 65-75% of rural households in India and over 90% of rural households in Nepal depended on firewood for a part or most of their domestic energy. Almost all of this is gathered (and not purchased) and the gathering is done mainly by women and children. Globally in 2005, 2.4 billion households were using conventional biofuels, especially firewood, for cooking and heating. In addition, depending on availability, women collect fodder, wild vegetables, fruits, nuts, herbs and many other items from local forests. We tend to forget how important locally gathered food items are as dietary supplements and hence food security, especially for the poor. Women’s dependence on forests is thus daily, while men’s subsistence use of forests is occasional since they mainly use them for timber, agricultural tools, home repair, etc. Hence, women have a strong stake in forest management, both because they need the forest to improve and regenerate and because they would enjoy rules that allow them to extract firewood and other items when the forest does regenerate. Why does including women in forest governance improve protection and increase the ecological knowledge pool?When women are included in forest governance, information about forest protection rules is more likely to reach other women, since communication channels tend to be gendered. Women who are part of forest governance are also more motivated to follow the rules themselves and induct other women into informal patrolling groups and keeping a lookout for intruders. Including women thus vastly increases the number of people committed to protection. Including landless women can make even more of a difference, since they have the highest stake in forest conservation outcomes, but are also most likely to resent forest closure if they are not included in forest management.Moreover, women bring to forest governance additional knowledge about the local ecology. This knowledge tends to be gendered since men and women use different components of the ecosystem. Women tend to know a great deal about the products they extract and how to extract them without causing harm to forest regeneration. They also make many useful suggestions on what to plant and where. All this can enhance biodiversity in community managed forests. – Bina**What role do women play in sustainability and climate change mitigation?Women’s role in community forest management can enhance the sustainability of local resources in many ways. I found in my research on community forest management in India and Nepal that groups that had a higher proportion of women (say 25-33% or more) were substantially more likely to have positive conservation outcomes. In Nepal, all women groups were 51% more likely than other groups to show improved forest canopy in the forest plots they were protecting, even though they were given more degraded and younger forests to manage (see Gender and Green Governance, OUP, 2010). Since forests serve as carbon sinks, this gender impact has positive implications for climate change mitigation. – BinaWhat types of local and community “collective action” innovation do you believe could significantly help the future of food security and climate change mitigation/adaptation?**In many parts of the world women play a very important role in food security as farmers and food producers. They are also the main food managers in the home. Increasingly too, as more men than women move to non-farm jobs, women are a growing proportion of the farmers in Asia and Africa. However, most women face serious constraints in their access to land, credit, inputs and markets. A potential institutional innovation would be for them to cooperate by forming what I term a “collectivity”. T_hey could pool their limited funds to lease land, buy inputs, plan crops and undertake soil conservation measures._ In addition, as a group they would have greater bargaining power with governments and in markets to obtain what they need for increasing their productivity. They would also be able to invest in local irrigation systems, crop insurance, and other measures needed to help them adapt to climate change.Look for me to cover more of Bina’s work on agricultural production collectives and sustainable action scenarios in the future!id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Conceptualizing+Environmental+Collective+Action%3A+Why+Gender+Matters&rft.issn=&rft.date=2000&rft.volume=&rft.issue=&rft.spage=&rft.epage=&rft.artnum=&rft.au=Bina+Agarwal&rfedat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Medicine%2CBiomedical+Engineering%2C+Cell+Biology%2C+Synthetic+Biology%2C+Materials%2C+Nanoscience%2C+Biological+Chemistry%2C+Chemical+Engineering%2C+Science+Communication%2C+Education%2C+Career%2C+Genetics%2C+Stem+Cells">Bina Agarwal (2000). Conceptualizing Environmental Collective Action: Why Gender Matters Cambridge Journal of Economics

I’ve just returned from the British Science Association‘s Science Communication Conference, a 2 day event in London for everyone from researchers like me who communicate alongside their ’day job’ to press officers to funding bodies. It was my first time attending, and it really was an excellent event.I went up to London on Sunday evening for Science Showoff, the recommended pre conference entertainment. It didn’t disappoint, and has me excited for Science Showoff Bristol (featuring a set by me) in July!On to the conference proper. The plenary session was an inspirational talk by Lisa Jardine. The theme of the conference was ‘Impact’, and Lisa really gave us all food for thought, discussing her father’s experiences with his series ‘The Ascent of Man’, and what’s changed in terms of science communication since then. It was somewhat TV-centric, yet her discussion of the shifts in the public’s trust in experts and ability to be armchair internet researchers is something science communicators in all fields can consider.The networking sessions were in my view particularly successful. A random piece of paper each and a nifty algorithm meant that in the space of eight 5-minute sessions I met 34 other delegates, and got a one-minute snapshot of their work and interests. I was particularly lucky and met no-one I already knew. A few email addresses were exchanged and names jotted down, very useful.Breakout sessions followed after lunch, and I plumped for ‘Positively Uncertain’. As an Epidemiologist, explaining risk and uncertainty is a part of everyday work I do, so I was intrigued to see how others did it. The panel included Peter Gibbs, a weatherman from the Met Office and Amanda Burls, who teaches post-grad evidence-based healthcare at Oxford. It was great to see completely different types of uncertainty being tackled. Gibbs was fascinating, but Burls’ comments were more relevant to me. It made me appreciate the quality of teaching we have at University of Bristol on such matters! The scariest slide Burls presented showed graphically the percentage value healthcare professionals put on words like ‘rarely’, ‘sometimes’ and ‘often’. Let’s just say the range was ENORMOUS. As I said on twitter, the meaning of uncertain is…uncertain. Although, as Bertrand Russell said, some things are much more nearly certain than others! Glad that’s cleared that up!Tuesday began with a debate about events like the Olympics and their relationship with science. While some in the audience wondered whether science had been ‘tacked on’ to the Cultural Olympiad (there’s no mention of the word ‘science’ anywhere in the Olympiad brochure), the consensus was that events like the Olympics provide a great opportunity. We were encouraged to be proactive if we felt we had something that could be linked to such events. Collaborations benefit everyone involved.The session I found the most eye opening was about Youth Voice. I learnt about Crest, an organisation set up by BSA to give young people a voice in science. It looks like a great scheme and you can learn more here. The FutureMorph website is another fantastic resource; science careers advice for teenagers. I was already aware of the website as I wrote an article for them last year, but it was really interesting to hear how youth-led they were. The final speaker presented a wonderful investigation where primary school children were asked for their views about how they were taught science, and then themselves helped to interpret the findings. A brilliantly designed and implemented piece of research, with a really important conclusion that I worry may get forgotten sometimes: giving children a voice means you must act on what they say, not just listen. My only criticism of this session was that there wasn’t someone from I’m a Scientist on the panel, that event is Youth Voice to a tee. The kids are in charge throughout from deciding which scientists take part to quizzing them to voting them off!I’m running out of space but other highlights included the Soapbox session. I particularly loved the idea of Lab 13; I’ll be investigating that further. Not to mention ‘immersive science communication’, perhaps too graphically demonstrated by a speaker getting up onstage and having a very convincing heart attack in front of a room of people. I think it might be irresponsible; I’m surprised ambulances weren’t called. People were running onstage to try and help. That said, I certainly talked about it afterwards. Lisa Jardine said ’you’ve got to make your subject matter to the audience’, and this man collapsing feet from my seat certainly mattered to me.To conclude I’d say it’s a fantastic conference, and as a researcher, I would recommend that anyone who finds conference mingling a bit daunting should go to this one. Everyone’s so friendly and chatty it’s easy to go and talk to someone. My confidence in my ability to engage with strangers has grown hugely, I hope it transfers to my next conference!

There was a time, in the (embarrassingly) not-too-distant past, when being called a geek was a slur. If you were a geek, you were socially inept. You spent all your time doing technology-, science-, or maths-based hobbies. You might have been shy and retiring. You were not cool.Not any more. No longer is it synonymous with a drive to do science and science alone. It’s a way of thinking objectively about things, about taking a step back, assessing the evidence, and coming to informed conclusions about things. Now, ‘geek’ is increasingly becoming a badge of honour.Why am I pontificating about this? Well, Mark Henderson’s ‘The Geek Manifesto’ was published this week, and is a rallying cry for geeks everywhere to stand up and make themselves heard. Not just in science, but in politics, healthcare, the media, the justice system, the educational system, and anywhere where rational, evidence-based approaches can lead to sound and sensible policies. It’s a superb book, and if you haven’t already devoured it you really should. Better people than I have already written glowing reviews, but I wanted to provide my own thoughts and experiences, on the media section in particular. We’ve already seen lots about how scientists might engage more effectively with the media in getting research of interest out into the public in an honest but digestible way. When this sort of collaboration breaks down, it doesn’t help anyone; research gets misrepresented and misinterpreted, and it promotes scientists as self-interested sensationalists. Sometimes it’s the fault of the journalist, sometimes (and more than some would care to admit), the fault lies with the scientist. It’s up to the geeks, whichever walk of life they might come from, to provide a barrier against this sort of problem. I started this blog because I felt like I was one of those geeks, and I was getting tired of seeing science improperly reported in the media. But since Counterbalanced started, I’ve found a whole wealth of unexpected benefits about blogging.I’ve had lots of brilliant opportunities to get insight into how scientists communicate with the media, and vice-versa. Obviously there’s still tons for me to learn, but one thing that I hadn’t anticipated is that it’s really helped me gain perspective on why I wanted to become a researcher in the first place. I’ve thought long and hard about the research that I do, and how I might communicate it to the world. Because doing cool new research is great, but it’s infinitely more fun when you can share that new stuff with other people in a way that gets them excited about it too. This comic from xkcd sums it up nicely:Furthermore, being critical about research in the media has made me much more critical of my own work, and hopefully that will make it better and better in the long run. If it doesn’t, then I really hope that someone picks me up on it, maybe in a blog like this one.Reading The Geek Manifesto reaffirmed my belief that as many people as possible who are involved in front-line scientific research should be blogging. It helps to get new findings out to more diverse audiences, and it acts as a great neighbourhood watch scheme for picking up on dodgy science claims, wherever they might be. At the very least, it helps you improve your writing skills. More geeks need to be blogging.And so, with the greatest respect, I have to disagree with Prof. Alice Roberts’ view back in January that it’s not ‘great to be geek’. Much to the contrary, I think now, more than ever, being geeky is pretty damn awesome.

by Ned Rozell The scar from the Anaktuvuk River fire of 2007, which scorched an area as large as Cape Cod.NASA MODIS image.Four summers ago, Syndonia Bret-Harte stood outside at Toolik Lake, watching a wall of smoke creep toward the research station on Alaska’s North Slope. Soon after, smoke oozed over the cluster of buildings.“It was a dense, choking fog,” Bret-Harte said.The smoke looked, smelled and tasted like what Bret-Harte has experienced at her home in Fairbanks, but the far-north version was composed of vaporized tundra plants instead of black spruce and birch. The 2007 Anaktuvuk River fire, which burned an area the size of Cape Cod, is the largest fire ever recorded in tundra. It was the first wildfire in the area since slaves were shoving blocks in place to create the pyramids in Egypt (about 5,000 years ago).Bret-Harte and others working at the research station knew they were witnessing something unusual — or maybe seeing the future. They found funding to study the burn, and time in their schedules to get their feet on the black ground. The group of scientists, led by Michelle Mack of the University of Florida, collaborated on a study published recently in the journal Nature.Bret-Harte, a plant specialist, just returned from a helicopter trip to the site of the big fire. Her close-up images show a green, lush landscape as the tundra recovers nicely after four summers.“It’s not back to what it was before — the shrubs are small,” Bret-Harte said. “But in 10 years it will look pretty similar over much of the area.”The new vegetation is photosynthesizing with such vigor that it is taking up as much carbon dioxide from the air as nearby tundra that did not burn in 2007, Bret-Harte said. This is quite a change compared to the staggering amount of carbon the fire added to the atmosphere four summers ago. The researchers calculated that the smoke from the 2007 fire spewed about half as much carbon dioxide as all arctic vegetation in the world sucked in during an average year.If the tundra burned like that every year, in a flash the Arctic could turn from a place where carbon dioxide is pulled from the atmosphere and locked away, to a carbon dioxide generator that would further warm the world. The great Anaktuvuk River tundra fire of 2007.Photo by Michelle Mack.“The carbon that was lost in this fire represented about 30 to 50 years of accumulation in the soil,” Bret-Harte said. “But if you burned it again now, you’re getting into the deeper, older carbon. You’d be burning away this bank of carbon stored in the soil over thousands of years. That would be huge.”Was the 2007 Anaktuvuk River fire a freakish, one-time event, or a sign of things to come? Bret-Harte said she doesn’t know, but she does know the conditions that led to the 2007 event. A lightning strike ignited the tundra in mid-July. Wet soils and vegetation snuff most tundra fires, but this one endured because of an exceptionally dry summer. The fire smoldered for a few months until dry Chinook winds curled over the Brooks Range in September, fanning the fire to life.“It burned most of the area in five or six days,” Bret-Harte said.Though the giant tundra fire of 2007 happened due to a combination of rare conditions, at least one of those factors is becoming more common. According to sensors maintained by workers for the Bureau of Land Management, lightning has struck Alaska’s North Slope much more frequently lately. From a steady hit rate of a few thousand lightning strikes from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s, lightning strikes have jumped to about 20,000 each year in the last decade. More lightning strikes and warmer summers might change what people know as a smoke-free northern Alaska.Bret-Harte wonders, “Is this like a tipping point, moving us to a new regime on the North Slope?”.Climate Change Watch at FrontierScientistsOriginally published in the Alaska Science Forum September 5, 2011 Article #2080 Recovery after world’s largest tundra fire raises questions by Ned Rozell http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF20/2080.html"This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute."

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup

Do you ever wonder, like I do, that blogging here is becoming (has become) akin to pissing in the wind? I guess that depends on why you do it … genuine desire to advance/promote/dis(seminate) some standpoint/information/opinion/argument; a vehicle for CV-enhancing self-promotion; an echo chamber for the attention-seeker?As I’m no longer a working scientist, I do ask myself this. But then I’m encouraged by Nicoli Nattrass’s recent piece in NewScientist in my belief that doing this is a worthwhile endeavour – even though, nay, because I’m (technically) no longer a practitioner of the caliginous art. And, what with the Twitter-dissing Blue Spectre – who is supposedly much busier than I – considering quizzical frown-inducing texts a worthwhile use of his time (although I personally wish he’d devote more of it to samurai-ing virtual fruit rather than the livelihoods of the un-rich), I don’t see why I should beat myself up about doing it unpaid.And even though my recent scoffing at this year’s Templeton Foundation’s prize award might now be argued as unwarranted on account of its recipient’s subsequent philanthropy, I maintain that this award is simply an apologetics marketing ruse. (Wonder whether the DL will send the BS a message expressing his sadness and condolence s now that the latter’s text buddy is in the dock). So, allow me to alert you to another instance of the need to be on our guard against the march of pseudoscience’s educational infiltration. We can’t all get our views into national newspapers; some of us are even prevented by our local ones, lest we offend one or two types too sensitive to withstand free and warranted criticism of their respective comfort blankets. So… keep on spreading the word…

SUMMARY: What happens when a numberphile plays with prime numbers? Today’s video answers that vital question that I know has been burning in the back of your mind: What happens when two numberphiles play with prime numbers?