Family Planning Made Entertaining

By: | October 31, 2011

Happy Halloween! I want to tell you a scary story. A decade ago, the planet had six billion people. Today, according to the United Nations, we have seven billion. The UN has chosen Halloween as the symbolic day when the seventh billion person will come screaming into existence. Not scared yet? Maybe these words from environmental researcher Jonathan Foley will do the trick:

Right now about one billion people suffer from chronic hunger. The world’s farmers grow enough food to feed them, but it is not properly distributed and, even if it were, many cannot afford it, because prices are escalating. But another challenge looms.

By 2050 the world’s population will increase by two billion or three billion, which will likely double the demand for food, according to several studies. Demand will also rise because many more people will have higher incomes, which means they will eat more, especially meat. Increasing use of cropland for biofuels will put additional demands on our farms. So even if we solve today’s problems of poverty and access—a daunting task—we will also have to produce twice as much to guarantee adequate supply worldwide. Continue reading →

Triassic Park

By: | October 28, 2011

I probably shouldn’t say this, but I love it when scientists occasionally throw all caution to the wind and clamber out on what seems a visibly shaky limb. Not of course, when they are offering up some new off-the-wall theory on autism or sudden infant death syndrome or flu vaccines—fields in which a little speculation could do a lot of harm. But in areas such as archaeology and palaeontology, a little derring-do on the far end of a branch can occasionally be a blessed relief—a reprieve, however short-lived, from a small mountain of papers that go on at numbing length on lithic use wear, say, or collared rim sherds, and neglect to inform the reader why these matter.

All this came to mind recently when I came across research that an American palaeontologist presented this month at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. To make a long story short, Mark McMenamin, a palaeontologist at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, thinks he’s found fossil evidence for a kraken—a massive, predatory, tentacled beast from the deep that took down carnivorous ichthyosaurs the size of school buses during the Triassic Period.

The kraken was a creature of Norse mythology, a monster said to wrap entire Viking longships and knarrs in its loving embrace and drag them down to its ocean-bottom lair for a leisurely munch. McMenamin believes that he has found the lair of a real kraken—and not,  I hasten to add,  a mere garden-variety giant squid—in what is known as the Luning Formation at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada. Continue reading →

Is That Guy Really, Really Smart?

By: | October 27, 2011

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 →

You’ve got mail, you idiot!

By: | October 26, 2011

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…

 

Continue reading →

Steve Jobs and the Limits of Sequencing

By: | October 25, 2011

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.

Continue reading →

The Speciation of Science Journalists

By: | October 24, 2011

 

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.

Continue reading →

Floater

By: | October 21, 2011

image credit: lo.re.n.zoThe 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 →

What Makes a Pun Funny?

By: | October 19, 2011

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 →