Popular science writing today can be hit and miss. It can be truly awful; such as Brian Greene’s immensely dull Elegant Universe, Stephen Jay Gould’s idiosyncratically waffley Rocks of Ages, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb's misguided and rushed Black Swan (in my humble opinion). But it can be utterly sublime, such as Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestors Tale (his magum opus, in my opinion), Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of time, and Carl Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection.
Good popular science books like these are engaging, unpretentious, and inspirational, but most of all, clever, witty, and humorous. You could argue with me on this one, but simply saying that the science will speak for itself is not good enough. I could just as well go read a nice thick textbook.
Cancer can be described as a cellular disease, which is thought to arise from misbehaving cells that divide uncontrollably in vivo. Our basic understanding of why this occurs is because these “cancer cells” have lost its ability to respond appropriately to endogenous stop signals that normally work to maintain the structural integrity of normal tissues. The resulting uncontrolled cell division results in the formation of a tumor.
The schedule 1 illicit drug known as ecstasy has been used by up to 12 million people in the United States and millions more worldwide.
Past research has suggested that ecstasy users perform worse than others on some tests of mental ability but there have been concerns that the methods used to conduct that research were flawed, and the experiments overstated the cognitive differences between ecstasy users and non-users.
There are varying levels of acceptance for various climate models, especially those that predict short-term escalation of warming due to man-made emissions.
Given that, no one is going to like new University of Washington claims that it's already too late. People who want curbs on emissions won't like news that it won't help and people who don't think emissions are the biggest problem in a worldwide recession won't bother to listen if it doesn't matter.
The Smithsonian has posted
cool videos of Clyde Roper talking about his passion for the giant squid,
Architeuthis. Two of the videos are short excerpts of an interview with Roper, and one is a ten-minute documentary with some very neat footage from Roper's squid-hunting expedition.
I'll tell you flat out, I love Public Information Officers - PIOs in journalism parlance. Without them, I would never get anywhere near the good stuff I get to write about. I would much, much rather deal with PIOs directly than through paid clearinghouses like AAAS Eurekalert, which seems to be run by sub-literate pygmies bent on keeping science from being written about. PIOs, on the other hand, love to get more coverage for their researchers without having to bribe AAAS.
A short while ago, SciFest 2010, the International Science Festival, was held in St. Louis. Making the trip was a group from Jersey Shore, PA and they were invited because a teacher, Slater Harrison, is really good at 'air surfing'.
If you have never seen the term air surfing, it was invented in the 1970s by Dr. Tyler MacCready, a fellow who studied philosophy at Yale and then geology at the University of Wyoming and Monash before becoming famous in amateur aerodynamics for the 'walkalong glider' - which looks like magic to many a young person's eyes, at least the way Harrison and his team of students do it. First, here is a diagram of a walkalong glider. MacCready no longer makes these so you'd have to find it on Ebay or make your own:
When you were young you may have heard something about a dog like, "Fido is 10 years old, that is 70 in people years" and wondered what that meant.
It's a rule of thumb but there is a science basis to it, yet current methods of comparing patterns of aging are limited because they confound two different elements of aging – pace and shape. And it can be confusing for non-biologists.
