Another year, and a new Open Lab

The hardworking crew behind the Open Lab collection of online science writing haven't quite finished production of the 2010 edition yet, but they're already taking submissions for the 2011 collection. Submit your online science articles published after 1 December, 2010 using the handy online form. Self-nomination is not only okay, it's encouraged. And hey, it worked for me.

Writerly scientist derided scientist-writer?

Following up on the recent discovery that novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov correctly supposed that Polyommatus blue butterflies colonized the New World in stages, Jessica Palmer points out that none other than Stephen Jay Gould dismissed Nabokov's scientific work as not up to the same standards of genius exhibited in his novels. She suggests that Nabokov's work may have been dismissed by his contemporaries because his scientific papers were a little too colorfully written.

Roger Vila, one of Pierce's co-authors, suggests that Nabokov's prose style (Wellsian time machine!) did his hypothesis no favors:

The literary quality of his scientific writing, Vila says, may have led to his ideas being overlooked. "The way he explained it, using such poetry -- I think this is the reason that it was not taken seriously by scientists," Vila says. "They thought it was not 'hard science,' let's say. I think this is the reason that this hypothesis has been waiting for such a long time for somebody to vindicate it."

That's a little harsh toward scientists, but it seems plausible: creativity in scientific writing is rarely rewarded.

Hyperlink to quoted source sic.

Palmer's analysis is thoughtful and thorough, and you should read all of it. But she misses what (to me) seems like the best wrinkle in the whole business: Gould, alone of all the scientists, should have been sympathetic to the dangers of writing "too well" in a scientific context.

Carnival of Evolution—just four days left to submit!

Photo by zen.

The 32nd edition of the Carnival of Evolution will be hosted right here at Denim and Tweed on the first of February! So send me your evolutionary posts by midnight Monday—use the CoE blog carnival form, or e-mail links to denimandtweed AT gmail DOT com.

(Thanks to everyone who's submitted so far. Looks like it'll be a good carnival—so all the more reason to submit if you haven't yet!)

Science online, caught on tape edition

Photo by gorditojaramillo.

• "... dinosaurs using their feathers to fly." Carl Zimmer digs into the evolutionary origins of feathers.
• This is your brain wanting to be on drugs. When smokers see movies of other people smoking, their brains light up.
• Also, raptors are from the Cretaceous. Jeez. Turns out that "Jurassic Park" screwed up dinosaur taxonomy.
• Biofilm-coated cookware, anyone? Bacterial biofilms are more water-resistant than Teflon.
• She's done more than embarrass NASA. A lot more. Dilara Ally interviews Rosie Redfield.
• My guess: magical rings that made them invisible. Robert Krulwich considers how the "hobbit" people of Flores might have coexisted with six-foot carnivorous storks.
• Adaptation for a period of extremely short tempers during the Upper Cretaceous. Paleontologists discover a dinosaur with only one finger per forelimb.
• Hey, nitrogen is nitrogen. A tropical bat species nests exclusively inside giant carnivorous pitcher plants, providing the the plants with an, um, alternative fertilizer.
• "I want no other fame." Population genetic data has confirmed a hypothesis about butterflies colonizing the Americas from Asia that was first proposed by Vladimir Nabokov. Yes, that Vladimir Nabokov.
• When Caenorhabditis elegans catches a cold, scientists celebrate. A species of nematode widely used as an experimental organism has contracted a virus. Let the experiments in coevolution commence!

Video this week: actual, real-time, microscopic video of a malaria parasite invading a human blood cell, via New Scientist TV. The parasite, a smallish blob on the right, attaches to the outside of the big, round, red blood cell and disappears inside it—and then the red blood cell shrivels away.

We need to hear what we'd rather not

The issues faced by women in the blogosphere—higher expectations, less recognition, and casual sexism—have officially emerged as the most important discussion topic in the wake of ScienceOnline 2011.

Kate Clancy kicked things off with her recap of the conference panel "Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name." Christie Wilcox followed up by calling out the flagrant sexism of many of her male readers, which made David Dobbs righteously angry—and, seriously, who actually believes that any sentence containing the word "tits" is complimentary in any context? Emily Willingham noted that her voice is unique in ways beyond her gender. And now Clancy is rounding up the rapidly propagating conversation.

The conversation's ongoing in the comments on all these posts, and (barring a handful of amazingly clueless folks) mostly great reading. My major thought on the subject remains what I said in first tweeting about the post that started it all: the most valuable parts of this conversation are the things that men are probably not all that happy to hear. When I read

• We are all very, very tired of making a point on a blog, on twitter, or in a meeting, being ignored, having a man make the same point, then having that man get all the credit. Very tired.

my first thought was defensive: I've never done that! My second was, Oh, crap. Have I done that?

I've long believed that the value of a sermon is proportionate to how uncomfortable it makes its audience. No one needs to be told they're doing just fine as they are. But if we're not doing fine, we need to hear about it. So to the women science bloggers leading this conversation, I want to say: keep calling out male thoughtlessness, in specifics as well as in general. If I miss that you said something first because I'm not reading your blog, drop a link in the comments. If I write something stupid, e-mail me and complain. I may not be thrilled to be corrected, but that probably means I needed it.

Finding the middle road: Flowers evolve to work with multiple pollinators

"I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life: boxer, mascot, astronaut, baby proofer, imitation Krusty, truck driver, hippie, plow driver, food critic, conceptual artist, grease salesman, carny, mayor, grifter, body guard for the mayor, country western manager, garbage commissioner, mountain climber, farmer, inventor, Smithers, Poochie, celebrity assistant, power plant worker, fortune cookie writer, beer baron, Kwik-E-Mart clerk, homophobe, and missionary, but protecting people, that gives me the best feeling of all."
—Homer Simpson

In twenty-two seasons of The Simpsons, the eponymous family's bumbling father Homer has tried his hand at dozens of different jobs, and failed hilariously at most of them. Homer is a one-man illustration of "Jack of all trades, master of none," the idea that it's hard to do many different things well. This principle applies more broadly than the curriculum vitae; in biology, it means that living things face trade-offs between different ways of making a living.

A wild radish (Raphanus raphaistrum) flower. Photo by Valter Jacinto.

For instance, a plant whose pollen is carried from flower to flower by just one pollinating animal only needs to match that one pollinator very well. But most plants' flowers are visited by many different potential pollinators, and matching all of them probably means finding a middle ground among the best ways to match each individual pollinator. A study of one such "generalist" flower, the wild radish, has found exactly this: working with multiple partners takes evolutionary compromise [$a].

Abortion ≠ slavery

Ta-Nehisi Coates explains why equating the ongoing campaign against legal abortion with the abolition movement—a favorite analogy of anti-abortion folks—is not just historically silly, but actually rather racist:

The analogy necessarily holds that the enslaved were the equivalent of embryos--helpless, voiceless beings in need of saviors. In this view of American history, the saviors, much like the pro-life movement, are white. In fact, African-Americans, unlike, say, zygotes, were always quite outspoken on their fitness for self-determination. Indeed, from the Cimaroons to Equiano to Nat Turner to Harriet Tubman to the 54th regiment, slaves were quite vociferous on the matter of their enslavement. It is simply impossible to imagine the end of slavery without the action of slaves themselves.

Coates is eye-opening as always: equating abortion with slavery turns out to be another facet of U.S. conservatives' bizarre notion that civil rights are bestowed by majority vote, not (in the words of certain historical documents they may have forgotten to read) inalienable. I recommend reading the whole thing.

Carnival of Evolution—one week left to submit!

Photo by k.tommy.

The 32nd edition of the Carnival of Evolution will be hosted right here at Denim and Tweed on the first of February! So you have until midnight, 31 January to send me your posts about evolution and all the grandeur in the evolutionary view of life. Use the CoE blog carnival form, or e-mail links to denimandtweed AT gmail DOT com.

Science online, #SciO11 hangover edition

The Deep Sea News crew knows how to party. Photo by hanjeanwat.

The science blogosphere was abuzz with ScienceOnline 2011 recaps, post mortems, and soul-seeking. The Columbia Journalism Review gave the conference a nice write-up. Dave Munger meditated on the line between jazzing up science and dumbing it down. Chris Rowan pointed out that no matter how well science blogging shapes its outreach, the broader media often fixes the game. Ed Yong worried that science blogging was "stuck in an echo chamber," and Ryan Somma mapped it. Christie Wilcox tried out what she'd learned about online writing by murdering a darling. And Minority Postdoc started an inventory of diversity in the science blogosphere.

Meanwhile, in non-meta online science news:

• Watch out for the photo of a "cutaneous abscess." All the antibiotics we're feeding to livestock are leading to higher rates of antibiotic-resistant infection in farm workers.
• No word on whether the amoeba is now applying for government farm subsidies. The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum carries its favorite bacterial prey with it, and (inadvertently) cultivates it as a food source. (See also NY Times, original paper in Nature [$a])
• We like taxonomists, really! We just don't want to pay them. Biology needs taxonomy, but these days no one wants to be a taxonomist.
• Flock immunity. Genetically modified chickens can catch avian flu without spreading it to others.

And finally, here's long-awaited video of Robert Krulwich's inspiring ScienceOnline keynote address. Part two, and more, is at A Blog Around the Clock.

Evolution's Rainbow, from sparrows' stripes to lizard lesbianism

Evolutionary biology is not just the study of how living things change over time, but the study of how the diversity of living things changes over time. Diversity is the raw material sculpted by natural selection, carved into more-or-less discrete chunks by speciation, and lost forever in extinction.

Joan Roughgarden is even more preoccupied with diversity than most evolutionary biologists. Some of her earliest published studies examine the evolution of optimum niche width, the range of resources a species uses, using mathematical modeling [$a] and empirical studies of resource and habitat use in Anolis lizards [$a]. Roughgarden didn't treat a species as a uniform group, but a collection of individuals all making a living in slightly different ways. Among other subjects, her work informed thinking about ecological release, the changes that reshape populations freed from predators or competitors.

White-throated sparrows are just one species with more than two gender roles. Photo by hjhipster.

This interest in the evolutionary context of diversity would eventually become much more personal. In 1998, she came out as transgendered, taking the name Joan after decades spent establishing her scientific reputation under the name she was given at birth, Jonathan. In addition to the challenges inherent to gender transition, Roughgarden's expertise intersects with her identity in one awkward question: in a biological world shaped by natural selection, how can we explain the evolution of lesbians, gay men, and transgendered people—individuals who are not interested in sexual activity that passes on their genes?

#scio11 aftermath, and an idea for #scio12

At ScienceOnline, even the coffee break is nerdy. Photo by Ryan Somma.

So now I'm back in Moscow, mostly recovered from ScienceOnline 2011. I've almost finished the copy of Holly Tucker's cracking good book Blood Work that came in my swag bag. (Cross-country flights are great for reading.) I'm breaking in my new "How to Explain Your Research at a Party" t-shirt from AAAS, and I've finished a conference weekend's worth of laundry. I even got to resume my workout schedule with an outdoor run, because all of a sudden northern Idaho is as balmy as North Carolina. And I'm able to think about the conference a little more reflectively than I did in my previous posts.

Carnival of Evolution—two weeks left to submit!

Photo by mrjojo.

The 32nd edition of the Carnival of Evolution will be hosted right here at Denim and Tweed on the first of February! So you have until midnight, 31 January to submit your posts about evolutionary biology and all its myriad cultural, political, and historical ramifications on the CoE blog carnival form, or e-mail links to denimandtweed AT gmail DOT com.

The remains of #scio11: Openness to #drunksci

In session at ScienceOnline 2011. More photos are in the ScienceOnline 2011 Flickr group. Photo by cephalopodcast.

Saturday at ScienceOnline 2011 was the meat of the conference, a full day of moderated discussion sessions at the Sigma Xi building. Video of many sessions was webcast live, and will later be archived online, courtesy of the National Association of Science Writers. Highlights from the ones I attended:

#scio11 day one: Krulwich to climate change

In the Duke University research forest, towers like these dosed experimental plots with carbon dioxide to simulate the effects of climate change. Photo by jby.

I arrived last evening at ScienceOnline 2011 barely coherent after thirteen hours of travel from Moscow, Idaho (2 a.m. Pacific time) to Durham, North Carolina (about 6 p.m. Eastern time). Robert Krulwich's keynote address woke me back up. Krulwich explained his approach to science journalism and illustrated it with clips from his work, including the transcendently good Radiolab. How do you get your audience excited about science, according to Krulwich? Talk about what excites you, and lead them to discover it with you.

Science online, packing for #scio11 edition

Photo by foshydog.

As this post goes live, I'll be waking up for the first full day of Science Online 2011, for which I expect to do a lot of blog coverage. So I'm just listing a handful of links this week:

• And the twist is? It's a much bigger pill. Thalidomide may be making a comeback to treat cancer.
• Hey! Eyes up here. Ringtailed lemurs follow each other's gaze, a key behavior in social cognition.
• Geshundheit. Is it possible to sneeze while you're asleep? Scicurious wonders.
• Coming soon: Checkers-wrestling, Risk-fencing. In chess-boxing, the cognitive challenge is all about emotional control.

And here's a ScienceOnline-appropriate video, produced on behalf of NASA because "NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks."

Gardening ants grow their own treetop nests

If you were to combine ants' dispersal of seeds and plant protection interactions, and maybe squint a little, you might see something like epiphitic ant gardens. Ant gardens form when tree-nesting ants collect the seeds of some epiphytes—plants evolved to grow in the branches of trees—and the collected seeds sprout. The nests provide congenial conditions for the plants, since gardening ants frequently use dung as a building material. The roots running through the nest help stabilize its structure and suck out moisture to control interior conditions.

Ants cultivate "gardens" of epiphytes like Anthurium gracile to provide nesting space. Photo by gjofili.

This adds up to a mutually beneficial relationship between ant and epiphyte [$a]. A number of tropical epiphytes grow almost exclusively in ant gardens, and the inclusion of plants in the structure of their nests apparently helps gardening ant species to establish nests wherever food is most abundant.

Association with ant gardens has evolved independently in a number of epiphytic species, from arums like Anthurium gracile (pictured to the right) to orchids and philodendrons. When distantly-related species begin to perform the same ecological role, they often evolve convergent traits that facilitate the common role. Almost all ant-dispersed plants attach fatty bodies called elaisomes to their seeds to reward the ants that pick them up. Almost all ant-protected plants grow domatia in which the ants can nest, and nectaries to reward them with sugary sap. But plants that grow in ant gardens don't seem to have a common trait that prompts ants to collect their seeds. Can it be that every ant-garden plant species has a unique way to be an ant-garden plant?

Writing without a spotter

Photo by athena.

Writing is hard, but writing alone is even harder.

Most writing projects are team efforts. Even if only one person is responsible for the final product, there's someone else to read drafts and help shape the text into something clear and pleasing. Books or newspaper and magazine articles have editors. Scientific papers usually have coauthors, or at the very least colleagues who'll provide feedback on a draft—and then peer reviewers and journal editors who will point out inaccuracies and missed commas with equal delight.

You can even ask your roommate to look over the essay you're writing for English 102, if he's still awake at 2 a.m.

By comparison, blog posts are often composed in a vacuum. I'll read a scientific paper or a news article, or view a video on YouTube, compose my thoughts about it, drop in a Creative Commons-licensed photo or two from Flickr, and then give the whole thing a read-through in Blogger's "preview" mode to make sure I like it. Sometimes I'll repeat that final read-through a couple of times for a long post, but that's all the editorial process I have. I'm the only one to see the work until I click "publish post."

Re: guns, and killing people

Bloody news today. The best response I've seen in a long day of online chatter, via seelix aka Emily:



Widespread gun ownership does not make us safer. It just makes guns more common.

Open Lab 2010 finalists: I'm in a book!

More specifically, my post about J.B.S. Hadane's involvement in a Soviet propaganda film featuring the revival of a severed head will be included in the Open Lab 2010 anthology of online science writing. It's a huge honor to be chosen alongside such an incredible list of writers from such a long list of awesome submissions.

As one of forty volunteer reviewers, I know how stiff the competition was, and how hard the final decisions must have been. I only have an inkling, though, of the amazing effort editor Jason Goldman put in to sort through all the submissions, coordinate reviews, and develop a final list.

The cover design for the final print volume will apparently be unveiled at Science Online 2011 (which is next weekend!), and the book itself will be available for purchase once all the submissions are revised for dead-tree formatting.

Science online, decline of the "decline effect" edition

Bumblebee. Photo by je-sa.

• An alarmist take on publication bias? Ironic! Do scientific results fade over time? Not so much. Yes they do.
• Oh, and arguing that philosophy doesn't matter? That's philosophy. Scientists may not admit it, but philosophy of science is important.
• One arm was so small/ it was no arm at all ... Tyrannosaur-like abelisaurid dinosaurs had (probably) useless vestigial forelimbs
• Still going. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been operating for seven years now.
• It's not just honey bees. North American bumblebee populations are declining, too.
• Not so smug now, are you, Chemistry? Revisions to the Periodic Table will better account for uncertainty around atomic masses.
• Between 500 and 1000 bacteria species. In your mouth. Cold and flu season might be rough for you, but your internal bacterial community is fighting off viruses year-round.
• Always a catch. New desktop rapid-sequencing machines could make genomics truly accessible, but there's more to genomics than sequencing.
• Not adequately explained by stupidity. Andrew Wakefield's original study linking vaccines to autism wasn't just bad science, it was outright fraud.
• When natural selection fails. Stories about natural populations adapting to environmental change are cool, but the cases when adaptation fails may be more imporant.

Mutualist matchmaking made simple

Back in September, I wrote about a new economic model of mutualism that proposed mutualists could keep their partner species from cheating—exploiting the benefits of a mutualistic relationship without returning the favor—without explicitly punishing them, so long as failure to play nice led to a reduction in mutualistic benefit [$a]. Now the same research group has published an elaboration of the economic approach to mutualism in the January issue of The American Naturalist, which suggests that mutualists can recruit better partners by manipulating the cost of entering into partnership [$a].

The bobtail squid, whose mutualism with luminescent bacteria is an example for the new model. Photo by megpi.

As a concrete example for their model, the authors refer to the mutualism between bobtail squid and a species of bioluminescent bacteria, which colonize the squid's light organ and makes it glow. Short of some kind of complicated squid-bacterium signaling system, how does a squid ensure that its light organ is only colonized by bacterial strains that will pay it back and generate light?

They charge a cover.

Carnival of Evolution No. 31

Photo by kelseyxsunshine.

The 31st edition of the Carnival of Evolution is online at The Dispersal of Darwin—it went up at midnight, New Year's Day, if I'm not mistaken. In spite of the holiday season, the post list is pretty overwhelming—contributions include Jerry Coyne on reinforcement, John Hawks on the new proto-human genome, Brian Switek on fossils that contributed to evolutionary theory, and Krystal D'Costa on the evolution of gestures for communication.

Check'em out, and tune in next month, when CoE number 32 will be hosted ... right here! Submit your posts about evolutionary biology and all its myriad cultural and historical ramifications on the CoE blog carnival form, or e-mail links to denimandtweed AT gmail DOT com.

Denim and Tweed, now with more talkback?

In addition to self-congratulatory navel-gazing, I'm starting the new year with two new features to hopefully make it easier for readers to comment on posts, and contact me directly in a pinch.

The first is the Disqus commenting system, which will let anyone comment using their login identity from Twitter, Facebook, or Yahoo!—or any OpenID system. Disqus has all sorts of shiny social-site integration, so now you can explain what an idiot I am on the site, and then immediately tell all your Facebook friends, too. Give it a try and see what you think!

And if you hate Disqus because it won't let you log in/ ate your brilliant critique of Disqus/ is the wrong color, you can now e-mail me about those problems at denimandtweed AT gmail DOT com. Messages to that address are forwarded directly to my personal e-mail account, which is not posted on this site.

State of the blog, 2010

Happy New Year, everyone! The year 2010 was another good one for this little corner of cyberspace. As I did last year, I'm going to spend a post quantifying how good the year was.

Weekly visitors to D&T in 2010 (blue line) compared to the same date span in 2009 (green line), as tabulated by Google Analytics.

In 2010, I wrote 184 posts, just over 15 per month. These drew 28,308 pageviews by 18,994 visitors—that's almost 154 pageviews and just over 103 visitors per post, on average. That's also more than 1,580 visitors a month, and over 35 percent more than in 2009. This is all given that I actually did a little less posting than in 2009, when I wrote 229 posts.

More navel-gazing after the jump!