The blogosphere is all lit up with views and commentary on the "Framing Science" article by Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney. Interesting discussion can be found at Sandwalk, A Blog Aroung The Clock (and links within), Pharyngula, as well as Matthew Nisbet's site. Essentially, the article argues that scientists are losing the battle of popular opinion because they don't frame science in a way that normal folk can relate to. People glaze over when someone start to talk science. Unless scientists and science writers get better at communicating with the public, so the argument goes, we will lose valuable mind-space to interests that are better "framers", such as Conservative politicians and the Intelligent Design movement. If only scientists could choose better words, use friendlier concepts, and be more inclusive, surely everyone would see things our way, and society would be ruled by the concepts of pure science and reason.

As far as I can tell (and I'm not the first to say it), "framing" is little more than a neo-term for rhetoric, a.k.a. "spin". Nisbet and Mooney have framed rhetoric in a new way to make it new and exciting for scientists again.

Escape!

Last night, while Tony and Bobby were beating the bejesus out of each other over a game of Monopoly gone very bad, we faced a situation also fraught with violence, or at least potential violence: the escape of a mouse from Mousefarm.

I say "potential violence" because, if we study man's relationship to mouse so far, it always ends in...bummersville for the mouse. Especially when man is surprised, or startled by mus's rapid, darting shots along the wallboard--the movements that so often evoke the sound known as "eek!" In fact, I will proposed here that the basic relationship between mouse and man can be summed up in three words: Dart, eek!, WHAM!

Planting and protecting trees—which trap and absorb carbon dioxide as they grow—can help to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But a new study suggests that, as a way to fight global warming, the effectiveness of this strategy depends heavily on where these trees are planted. In particular, tropical forests are very efficient at keeping the Earth at a happy, healthy temperature.

The researchers, including Ken Caldeira of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology and Govindasamy Bala at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, found that because tropical forests store large amounts of carbon and produce reflective clouds, they are especially good at cooling the planet.

The aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum depends on a bacterial symbiont, Buchnera aphidicola, for amino acids it can't get from plants. The aphid, in turn, provides the bacterium with energy and carbon as well as shelter inside specialized cells.

Such interdependent relationships are not unusual in the natural world.

Female stem cells derived from muscle have a greater ability to regenerate skeletal muscle tissue than male cells, according to a study at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC.

The study, which is being published in the April 9 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology, is the first ever to report a difference in regenerative capabilities of muscle stem cells based on sex.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Stony Brook University have received U.S. Patent Number 7,179,448 for developing chimeric, or "combination," proteins that may advance the development of vaccines and diagnostic tests for Lyme disease.

Does orange juice taste sweeter if it's a brighter orange? A new study in the March issue of the Journal of Consumer Research finds that the color of a drink can influence how we think it tastes. In fact, the researchers found that color was more of an influence on how taste was perceived than quality or price information.

"Perceptual discrimination is fundamental to rational choice in many product categories yet rarely examined in consumer research," write JoAndrea Hoegg (University of British Columbia) and Joseph W. Alba (University of Florida). "The present research investigates discrimination as it pertains to consumers' ability to identify difference—or the lack thereof—among gustatory stimuli."

The nonnative invasive grass Microstegium vimineum may hinder the regeneration of woody species in southern forests. Chris and Sonja Oswalt (Forest Service Southern Research Station) and Wayne Clatterbuck (University of Tennessee) set up experiments on a mixed-hardwood forest in southwest Tennessee to study the growth of the invasive grass under different levels of forest disturbance. Study results were published online in the journal Forest Ecology and Management on March 27, 2007.

A Florida State University anthropologist has new evidence that ancient farmers in Mexico were cultivating an early form of maize, the forerunner of modern corn, about 7,300 years ago - 1,200 years earlier than scholars previously thought.

Professor Mary Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, and concluded that people were planting crops in the "New World" of the Americas around 5,300 B.C. The analysis extends Pohl's previous work in this area and validates principles of microfossil data collection.

For the first time, scientists from the University of Washington School of Medicine, Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Cambridge have determined how a plant hormone -- auxin -- interacts with its hormone receptor, called TIR1. Their report, on the cover of this week's issue of Nature, also may have important implications for the treatment of human disease, because TIR1 is similar to human enzymes that are known to be involved in cancer.