The Last Word On Nothing

The Last Word

By: Sally Adee | April 13, 2013

8 – 12 April

This week, Richard marveled at the quantum carnival that rages in the decimal points.

You might have heard that birds and wind power don’t mix. Erik brings home the heartbreaking reality — and shows that there might be a solution.

Erika explains why you don’t want any austerity cuts in the emergency stockpile.

Michelle considers how iPads will change art.

And Jessa got my hackles all in a twist with her report on Bruce Sterling’s closing talk at SXSW. In the era of Google Glass, he said, science fiction is no longer a relevant way to envision the future. HOW DARE YOU, SIR.

What happens when we can’t afford to be prepared?

By: Erika Check Hayden | April 11, 2013

The emergence of the H7N9 bird flu virus has rekindled memories of our last flu pandemic – just as the United States is debating whether it can afford to prepare for the next one.

Remember the H1N1 flu scare of 2009? I always will, because pregnant women were vulnerable to becoming severely ill or dying from the H1N1 virus, and I was gestating our first kid that year. I felt like a sitting duck as scientists took six long months to develop a vaccine against it.

We weren’t totally defenseless, though. The H1N1 virus was treatable with antiviral drugs that the United States had stored in a national resource called the Strategic National Stockpile. Less than one month after the first U.S. H1N1 cases were detected, the stockpile had shipped 12 million courses of the drugs around the country.

But public health officials are now pondering whether the stockpile can afford to repeat that performance in an age of austerity. The stockpile is like the nation’s all-purpose emergency kit; it stores a huge array of supplies to deal with all kinds of disasters, from bioterror attacks to floods and earthquakes. But the stockpile’s budget will fall increasingly short of its projected costs beginning this year. Officials, who must make cuts, are trying to decide what emergency supplies the nation can live without, and there are no good choices.

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Girl Swiping Finger on Screen

By: Michelle Nijhuis | April 10, 2013

One of the annoying things about parenting is that experience is always ahead of science: Those of us raising kids today are dealing with circumstances, and dilemmas, that researchers will need years to understand.

Maybe that’s why parents fortunate enough to afford iPads are fretting so much about how and how much our kids use them. Researchers are just starting to understand how television affects kids (not surprisingly, the effects depend on the age of the kid and the content of the program, among many other factors). Tablet computers, with their multitude of child-friendly apps, raise a host of new questions, and today’s kids are the research subjects.

While groups such as the National Association for the Education of Young Children and books such as Into the Minds of Babes offer some useful educated suggestions, definite answers will be a long time coming. As Hanna Rosin points out in her recent Atlantic article, “The Touch-Screen Generation,” we affluent and sorta-affluent parents are reacting to this uncertainty with a muddle of unexamined biases, handwringing, and judginess.

Is all this angst really necessary?

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Correction

By: Richard Panek | April 9, 2013

Correction: An article yesterday about a tiny force in quantum mechanics that could be used in future microscopic devices referred incorrectly in some copies to the size of the force measured when two metal plates were placed within one 40-thousandth of an inch of each other. It was one 300-millionth of an ounce, not one 300-thousandth. —New York Times, February 10, 2001

Screen shot 2013-02-08 at 10.33.54 AM I clipped this correction the day it appeared in the Times and pinned it to my cork bulletin board. This was a long time ago, so I can’t be sure what I was thinking. Most likely I found this assemblage of absurdly small numbers to be comical: the fastidious precision of science meeting its match in the finicky precision of the Paper of Record. What I do know for sure is that at the time I didn’t fully appreciate just how fastidious quantum mechanics is. Continue reading →

Birds in a Blender

By: Erik Vance | April 8, 2013

Imagine for a second that the country of Mexico was a long funnel, with the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts as the sides of the funnel. And imagine you were to roll a marble down the Pacific side, all the way from San Diego, down Sonora, passed Mazatlan, Jalisco (though it takes a little hop over Puerta Vallarta), and down past Acapulco. The place where the marble would stop – that little indent at the very bottom – that is the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Once upon a time, this was the most important region in Mexico for Americans. Before the Panama Canal was built, the Tehuantepec Route was the primary way to get stuff from one coast to the other. In fact, the Ithsmo, as it is known, was an earlier candidate for the canal. The New York Times even had a regular column updating people about its comings and goings (for hilarious examples of this, click here and here). The region has a rich culture and cuisine – like traditional transvestites (accepted as the “third gender“) and the wearing of iguanas on one’s head before one eats them. Seriously. Click the stupid link if you don’t believe me.

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The Last Word

By: Sally Adee | April 6, 2013

April 1 – 5

On April Fools day, Jennie Dushek teased the internet with the obituary of a great dad.

I wondered whether science has anything interesting to say about stupidity.

Cassie examined the evidence from the anti-vax side of the aisle and found it wanting.

Guest poster Michael Balter told us about the dinosaurs at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum.

And Christie finally got the goods on a story you might remember about the woman who died after being refused CPR. Proving that maybe the Aschwanden rule should be that the real story is always far more complicated — and interesting — than you think it is.

Vaccines, Viruses, and the Anti-Vax Movement

By: Cassandra Willyard | April 5, 2013

On a chilly February evening, I found myself stepping across the threshold of one of Midtown Manhattan’s many brick high rises. I took the elevator to the sixteenth floor, home of the Meta Center, which describes itself as Manhattan’s “number one destination for Consciousness Raising, Cutting Edge Spiritual & Metaphysical Education, Healing and the Creative Arts.” A sign at the entrance to the conference room asked me to remove my shoes before entering sacred space. So I shucked my boots, tried to hide the hole in my left sock, and picked my way to the back of the room in search of an empty folding chair.

I had come to hear a lecture on vaccines. As a science writer and public health advocate, I’m a big proponent of vaccination. Study after study has shown that the benefits far outweigh the risks. The proof is incontrovertible. But I wanted to hear the alternative argument. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Sun, Sea, & Sauropods

By: Michael Balter | April 4, 2013

I grew up in L.A., but 25 years ago I sold my car and moved to Paris. I’ve had few regrets since, although I do return every year to see my old friends. Each visit reminds me that Angelenos don’t have much to be proud of, especially when they have to sit in traffic for hours to get to those places that still are worthwhile (like the excellent restaurants.) True, transportation officials are currently widening the San Diego Freeway at a cost of 1 billion dollars, but the project seems to promise little more than an increase in drivers’ choices of what lanes they want to be stuck in.

So it was a great pleasure to find something an old Angeleno really can get chuffed up about: The new 14,000 square foot Dinosaur Hall at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. As a paleo writer for Science, I was treated to a tour of this terrific new exhibition by the museum’s head dino guy and director of its Dinosaur Institute, Luis Chiappe, who is also one of the world’s leading experts in the evolution of the first birds. (I think every town should have a Dinosaur Institute, don’t you?) Continue reading →