A friend I run into regularly says, “Hey, Ann. Do you know that guy from around here who won that Nobel whatever?” He means Adam Riess, and yes, I know Riess. I’ve interviewed him, I say hello, he says hello back. “I have a question for you,” says my friend. “Is your Nobel guy really, really smart?” Of course Riess is really, really smart. I think about that. “But I don’t know that he’s smarter than other astronomers,” I say. And now I have to figure out how I know that astronomers are smart, given that I understand only a storified version of what they do; and though I try hard I don’t quite know how they think; and no, I’m not going to define “smart.” Continue reading
Earlier this month, I gave an Ignite talk at the National Association of Science Writers meeting.
(I also organized a panel on covering scientific controversies–click here to listen to/download mp3s of my interviews with panelists Gary Taubes, Jennifer Kahn, Jeanne Lenzer and Brian Vastag.)
I’ve had numerous requests to share my Ignite talk, and so in an attempt to replicate the experience, I’ve put together a storyboard/slideshow.
Here it goes…
The death of Steve Jobs is unfolding as a morality play between mainstream and alternative medicine, with doctors and bloggers blaming Jobs’ untimely demise on his decision to delay surgery while he tried acupuncture and herbal remedies.
The reality is that Jobs’ story tells us as much about the limits of conventional science and medicine as it does about alternative therapies.
In a new book, Walter Isaacson reveals that Jobs had his cancer genome sequenced as part of an aggressive program of treatments that he eventually embraced. The news that Jobs had his cancer sequenced is surprising in perhaps only one way: it’s one of the few high-profile examples we have that underscores the sobering fact that genome sequencing does not always lead to a cure.
As a journalist, especially a science journalist, it’s my professional duty to ask stupid questions. I’m supposed to have, on your behalf, my share of what my fellow LWONer Cassie Willyard so aptly calls “Hubble moments.” I’m supposed to be a lifelong amateur, someone who can understand and explain science without losing sight of its everyday significance — someone who’s always willing to ask, “Yeah, but so what?”
But as science journalists move forward in our careers, we tend to speciate. Even freelancers, who can easily cross the boundaries of formal beats, develop expertise in certain fields, and expertise naturally narrows and deepens over time. A 500-word story about widgets leads to a longer one and then an even longer one, and before you know it Terry Gross is calling to interview you about the European widget crisis.
The second I close the hatch behind me, it occurs to me that I have watched far too many horror movies for this to end well. I’m in the basement of a building in South London where people shell out £45 to spend an hour in a sensory deprivation tank. The shiny white pod is about the size of a SmartCar, and its rounded edges remind me a bit of the futuristic, streamlined vehicles in Minority Report. Inside, the total-immersion bathtub is flooded with an unearthly blue light and a quietly swishing mass of water that’s been doped with enough magnesium salts to let me float handily on top, just a bit more than what’s in the Dead Sea.
There’s also a light switch, an intercom and a spray bottle of freshwater. I find out soon enough why that spray bottle is there. It takes me only about five seconds to get the super-saline water in my eyes, and the stinging is as horrible as it was predictable. I spend the first few minutes alternating between accidentally rubbing my eyes and frantic spritzing. So much for sensory deprivation.
But even after I figure out how to stop injuring myself, I can’t surrender to feeling nothing. Each time I turn off the light and succumb to the pitch black, a tentacled monster emerges from a far corner of my Hollywood-sullied imagination and I immediately need to flip the switch to convince myself that I’m not about to die an ignominious death worthy of another Final Destination sequel. I don’t know what all this says about my psyche, but I do know, as I reach for the light for the 15th time, that I have a very long hour ahead of me. Continue reading
Comedian Jessica Kirson, as captured by the inimitable Brian Friedman
My name is Ginny and I’m an adult pun-lover. When I hear a good one — Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic! — I don’t roll my eyes or smirk. I double over laughing, like a 7-year-old.
What is it exactly that makes a pun funny (at least to those of us who humbly accept the power of the pun)?
That’s the underlying question of a brain imaging study I came across last week. Its pretty pictures don’t answer the question, really, but they’re interesting all the same. And provocative: the data could have way-down-the-road relevance for communicating with people in vegetative states.
Continue reading
The opening scene paints a picture as bucolic as anything John Constable managed, albeit in broad, animated strokes. Green fields at morning, distant mountains, a small, loving farm family and the contented grunt of a well-cared-for pig set a tone of agrarian delight. But just 20 seconds into the short video and that porker is penned up. By the time Willie Nelson starts crooning a Coldplay tune at 0:33, we’re into the age of industrial agriculture, complete with a multi-tiered pork factory pumping out chemically enhanced cubes of pink piggie flesh.
Well before a determined little animated farmer starts kicking over the enclosures and letting the livestock roam free again, I knew that I’d use this tasty bit of sustainable agriculture eco-propaganda as a discussion piece in my environmental communication class at Stanford. The capsule history of agriculture’s struggle with sustainability was nicely handled, but what really grabbed me was the design. The round, eraser-pink pigs, rotund, PlaySkoolish people and model railway backdrops evoke not just a comforting, idealized view of country living, but the innocence of childhood play, turned first foul, and then pure again. The history of agricultural development had become a morality play, all spooled out in a 2-minute stop action film.
Which NGO or advocacy group had come up with the cash and marketing savvy to produce such a sophisticated little emotion-booster, I wondered?
Theorists really do think this, that maybe every fundamental particle has a so-far-invisible partner. The partners’ names are just the names of the regular particles only with an “s” in front: squarks, selectrons. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland is kicking up a lot of dust looking for them (and for another putative particle called the Higgs); and every now and then, the LHC announces it may or may not have found something or other that undermines the foundations of the entire physics enterprise but only somewhere around a 2-sigma level which may or may not indicate these partners exist. If they do, they’ll solve Richard’s dark matter problem.
Abstruse Goose’s little jokes: particles are attractive to other particles with the opposite charge; all particles have an assigned mass; quarks (which make up the likes of protons and neutrons) come in six flavors — up, down, top, bottom, strangeness, and charm. SUSY, the name of the theory proposing the partners, would unify the four forces of the universe; it’s pronounced soosie and stands for SUperSYmmetry. SOL, I feel sure you already know.
Meanwhile, you’d do well to keep your eye on the LHC.
