March 29, 2012, 9:59 pm
By David Wheeler
Rafe Sagarin
Rafe Sagarin trained as a marine ecologist but was working as a science adviser for a member of Congress when Washington began to take on strange traits.
It was 2002, and as Sagarin walked the sidewalks and Congressional corridors in the post-9/11 city, he saw it sprout uniformed police officers, Jersey barriers, and metal detectors. Mail arrived late after being screened for bombs and anthrax, and chemical masks were stored under desks. He saw Washington as an ecosystem, not that different from the tidal pools he had studied near Monterey, Calif.
“Frankly, I was becoming quite alarmed at what I was seeing,” says Sagarin, now an assistant research scientist at the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment. What bothered him was not the heightened security, but the…
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February 20, 2012, 8:42 pm
By David Wheeler
Vancouver, British Columbia—A new technology lets people control a speech synthesizer with gestures, allowing them to speak or sing with their hands. Along with opening new realms of musical expression, research with the speech-generating system may deepen understanding of how the brain drives spoken language and song.
Sidney Fels, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of British Columbia, led the team of researchers that created the device. He talked about it in a session here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The new technology is mimicking a complicated physiological process. Speech uses 200 muscles between the abdomen and the nose, with the lungs driving air movement and the larynx generating sound.
The speech-generating system (a video demonstration is available for download here) uses two…
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February 19, 2012, 6:08 pm
By David Wheeler
Vancouver, British Columbia—Peer reviewers are the dragons guarding the cave where the academic treasures of individual promotion and institutional rankings lie. But the dragons are getting weary as armies of researchers from all over the planet try to get by them.
In a popular session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here, one audience member complained he was “bombarded by requests to do reviews.” The task had begun to seem irrelevant to him, he said, because even when he criticized manuscripts, they still got published. “There is so much mediocre work in the journals, I just don’t know what to do,” he said.
Panelists at the session—a university dean, a journal editor, and a director of publishing for a scientific society—offered some insights on peer review and suggested ways to give it fresh strength.
Emilie Marcus,…
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February 18, 2012, 9:01 am
By David Wheeler
Vancouver, British Columbia — Technology is sometimes portrayed as an evil force of globalization, flattening local cultures as it sweeps around the world. But now some researchers are trying to reverse that story, using digital tools to save languages that exist only in tiny cultural pockets.
About half of the world’s 7,000 languages are considered endangered, with just elderly speakers left. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Vancouver, researchers described using online dictionaries, social media, and mobile-phone applications to document and revitalize some of those languages.
The session’s tone was sorrowful at times, with some researchers describing having to watch languages, and the culture stored in them, fade out. Margaret Noori, a lecturer in Native American studies at the University of Michigan, said that she could no …
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February 13, 2012, 5:33 pm
By David Wheeler
Serial killers and giant hogweed would seem to have little in common. But new research by British scientists suggests an investigative tool that helps the police find criminals can also help locate the sources of invasive species.
The research, published last week in Ecography, may reverberate beyond conservation biology and criminology. In a week when National Science Foundation officials are pushing for more interdisciplinary research, the paper indirectly suggests the benefits of seeking collaborators from other disciplines. Indeed, the tool, known as geographic profiling, has also been used to find patterns in the foraging of animals and the spread of infectious disease.
Invasive species are generally regarded as the second largest cause of biodiversity loss, right after habitat destruction. In Africa, researchers have estimated 200 fish species were lost in Lake Victoria after…
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December 7, 2011, 3:12 pm
By David Wheeler
Washington — There’s a new bully on the intellectual block, shoving scholars around. Lots of them are caving into the threats. The bully’s name is “scientism,” the belief that science has a monopoly on all real knowledge. All other knowledge, scientism asserts, is simply opinion, irrationality, or utter nonsense.
That was the perspective Ian Hutchinson, professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offered at an event titled “Can Science Explain Everything?” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science this week. Lisa Randall, a professor of physics at Harvard University, had a different take. The high-minded discussion that filled an auditorium and some overflow seating on a rainy night in the nation’s capitol might surprise the electorate, which often views intellectual affairs here as limited to bickering …
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