A Moore’s Law Mystery

By: | October 30, 2015

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You know those things that people say as an aside? Things that aren’t their main point, but just kind of come out of their mouths. Fun facts, little anecdotes, steam of consciousness blips. I find that when I’m looking back at my notes from conferences, the things that pop out to me are, largely, those things. Not what the talk was about, but those little snippets and asides.

Recently I was at a conference about biology. And when I looked back at my notes one thing popped out at me. A scribbled note that said: “Moore’s Law marketing scam.” The line came as an aside in a talk by Rob Carlson, the Managing Director of a company called Bioeconomy Capital. Carlson is also the author of a book called Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life.

Carlson says he wouldn’t have used the word scam. He would have used the phrase “marketing head fake.” What he said went something like this: Moore’s Law was a marketing fake invented by Intel to slow down their competition. In reality, they were working much faster than that internally, but they invented Moore’s Law to get everybody else to slow down. This is a big claim to make.  Continue reading →

Like Groundhog Day: the Mammogram Story That Won’t Die

By: | October 29, 2015

breastcancerBefore I begin, a disclaimer: I’m sick of writing about mammography. It feels like groundhog day — I’ve been writing the same damn story, over and over and over again, for nearly 15 years. This is at least the fifth time I’ve written a LWON post about mammograms. (See also: Breast cancer’s false narrative, The real scandal: science denialism at Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, FAQs about breast cancer screening, and Breast cancer’s latest saga: misfearing and misplaced goalposts.)

So why I am I writing about mammograms again? Because even though I just published a story at FiveThirtyEight explaining why science won’t resolve the mammogram debate and a feature at Mother Jones asking how many women have mammograms hurt? (the answer is millions) the harms of mammography continue to be ignored or mischaracterized in the media. Every time this happens, I get letters from people asking me to please clarify this point again. Just this past week, a New York Times editorial penned by two breast radiologists and a breast surgeon declared, “Let’s stop overemphasizing the ‘harms’ related to mammogram callbacks and biopsies,” while an op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about breast cancer” claimed that, “the idea that anxiety is a major harm doesn’t have much scientific support.” (In fact, at least one study has found long-term consequences from a false alarm.)

What both of these opinion pieces miss and what too many women still don’t know is that while 61 percent of women who have annual mammograms will have a callback for something ultimately declared “not cancer,” this isn’t the most damaging problem. Such false alarms are more devastating than they might seem (I can’t think of another recommended medical test with such a high false positive rate), but most women would probably gladly accept this risk in exchange for a reasonable chance to prevent a cancer death.

Here’s the bigger problem: screening mammography has failed to reduce the incidence of metastatic disease and it’s created an epidemic of a precancer called DCIS. The premise of screening is that it can find cancers destined to metastasize when they’re at an early stage so that they can be treated before they turn deadly. If this were the case, then finding and treating cancers at an early stage should reduce the rate at which cancers present at a later, metastatic stage. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s happened. Continue reading →

An extraterrestrial social experiment

By: | October 28, 2015

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When I put on the metallic silver unitard and homemade alien mask that rainy morning, I had no idea that I was about to embark on one of the most stressful weekends of my life.

How could I? I love wearing costumes. One Halloween, I dressed as a vulture-like Skeksis from Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, and stalked through the local grocery sniffing packages of meat. Another, I made 30 little men out of fabric and baling wire, gluegunned toothpick spears into their tiny mitts, and sewed them all over my clothes. When my friends asked what I was, I screamed that I was “BEING ATTACKED BY TINY PEOPLE!”

A mask gives you freedom to reinterpret yourself. Sort of like the way being drunk cleanses you of all your inhibitions: Maybe you dance “15,000 times better in costume than out,” as one of my friends puts it, or maybe you finally have an excuse to talk to that cute stranger dressed as a box of wine. To wear a costume is to take on a sort of power.

But the difference with my alien getup was that it wasn’t Halloween. It was an ordinary March day. As a newcomer to Portland, Oregon, I had decided to take on the role of the ultimate foreign visitor for a travel story that I was writing – a sort of cross between performance art and social experiment where I would spend 48 hours seeing the city’s sights through black, ovoid eyes. There was a tenuous journalistic angle, in that Oregon had the highest per capita rate of UFO sightings in 2014, and Portland was a hotspot. But it was personal, too: Moving from a town of 1,500 to a city of 600,000, I felt invisible. I yearned, with tinges of existential dread, to set myself apart from the faceless masses. To be a special snowflake. A special alien snowflake.

Continue reading →

New Person of LWON: Sarah Gilman

By: | October 27, 2015

Sarah Gilman 2Sarah Gilman enters the stage tomorrow as a New Person of LWON. I’m pleased to usher her onto the page after having been on the same team trekking across an Alaskan icefield, jammed in a tent during a white out. We survived without going at each other with ice axes. That’s a good thing.

Gilman double majored in studio art and biology. The former still has her doodling, watercoloring, weaving and sewing in her spare time. The latter involved studying parasite-mediated sexual selection among white crowned sparrows at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in central Colorado. She toted a giant microphone into the woods by mountain bike everyday at 4 or 5 a.m. This is where she learned how much she loves fieldwork and how much she hates what she calls “the scientific publishing ratrace and the obtuse, unreadable format of scientific papers.” After eight years working as a journalist and editor for High Country News in Colorado, she’s landed in Portland, OR. Welcome her into the fold. Wonderful things to come.

So Hard Core

By: | October 27, 2015

shutterstock_187066352Many years ago, before I was a science writer, but after I tried being a scientist, I spent some time in the outdoor industry. It’s a weird phrase, I know, but it covers anything related to activities like skiing, backpacking, kayaking and generally avoiding getting a real job.

We did a lot of guiding and working at summer camps while selling outdoor gear to make rent. And all the while, planning our next adventure into the wilderness and parts unknown. Occasionally, very rarely, one of us would be sponsored to have a truly epic adventure in Antarctica or an African rainforest. But those were only the seriously hardcore.

If you work in this field long enough, you find there is a certain kind of bravado that goes along with the outdoor industry – a sort of one-upmanship about who is the most outdoorsy.

Hardman one: “Yeah, so last year when I was trekking in Nepal with a community of Sherpas, I just couldn’t handle all the tourists.”

Hardman two: “Oh yeah, when I was walking the Inca trail with nothing but my sandals and leatherman tool I had the same problem.”

Hardwoman: “Oh, I never have that problem. Because where I go, there aren’t any tourists.”

Continue reading →

The dark crystal

By: | October 26, 2015

blackphThe electronics of the future could be made of a material you leave in your toilet.

If you’re up on your electronics of the future, you’ll recall that they were supposed to be made of graphene. Remember graphene? It was supposed to be better than silicon, because it lets electrons go really fast. That’s great, but researchers are still scratching their heads looking for a way to make those fast electrons stop (arguably the more important mechanism in our electronics). But then, last year, researchers discovered that black phosphorous – shaved into a 2-dimensional layer called phosphorene – has both zippy highways and stop lights. Researchers have gotten very excited about this material. It’s been under two years since phosphorene was discovered, but already this paper has been cited in the literature over 400 times. Things are moving fast. Early this year, one of the material’s big remaining problems – the difficulty of making it in bulk – was solved. This wonder material is making fast advances into the real world.

Phosphorus, you say? Isn’t that the stuff that’s in agricultural fertilizer? Why yes, astute reader. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 24, 2015

shutterstock_89634064October 19-23, 2015

Doctors think in narratives, not computerized drop down menus, says Ann. Let them be truly present in the examination room.

On Helen’s morning walking commute, all kinds of stories are possible – growth, recovery, even a shared moment between a gourd and an ape.

Craig’s quest for a portal to the Pleistocene takes him to Oregon, where ancient human feces provides an archaeological lynchpin.

Christie is a counter. So are a surprising number of other people. The post is a redux, but she’s still collecting comments. Are you one of her people?

Guest poster Robin Marantz Henig eagerly plays her role as a raiser of life prospects in the Grandmother Hypothesis.

 

Image: Shutterstock

Guest Post: the Grandmother Hypothesis

By: | October 23, 2015

robin with grandparentsRecently I’ve started seeing examples of those much-mocked New York Times trend stories that are not about Millennials, the way the trendiest trend stories usually are. In the articles I’ve been noticing, the trend-setters are Baby Boomers — who are, according to the Times, relocating to New York City to help raise the grandkids.

Now that’s a trend I could get my own 62-year-old head around.

The most recent of these pieces appeared just last weekend, a story about a young woman on the Upper East Side who was about to have a baby, and was delighted that her parents wanted to find a place to live in her neighborhood so they could help out with child care. There were a few hitches; the parents, for one thing, lived in Minneapolis, so they would have to be willing to relocate to Manhattan. (Willing they were; they were both physicians, but they were both retired.) Another hitch struck me as an even bigger obstacle: they were divorced, and they were talking about renting a one-bedroom apartment together. But good feelings for their daughter predominated, as did enthusiasm about becoming grandparents for the first time, and in the end, the Minnesotans found an apartment they liked just a mile away from their daughter and her new baby Tessa. They are taking turns living in it.

This story followed by just a few weeks another Times piece, which revealed itself as a trend story right away, with the telltale phrase “a growing number” right in the lede. (Other clues to “bogus trend stories,” according to media watcher Jack Shafer, include overuse of “weasel words” like “some,” “few,” and “seems.”) The Times piece began:

Instead of spending their golden years baking in the sun, a growing number of grandparents are choosing a grittier spot to play out their third act . . . they come for the children but stay for the city.

Cue the Monocle Meter.

Biologists have an explanation for why this trend, if it really exists, would be good for the grandkids: they call it the Grandmother Hypothesis. Continue reading →