March 27, 2013, 6:44 pm
By Tom Bartlett
When you’re about to have your first child, parents of actual, free-from-the-womb kids will chuckle knowingly and warn that you have no idea what you’re in for. Read all the books, attend every class, but you can’t really anticipate the wonder and the challenge. I found this to be annoying and untrue. Turns out it’s a lot like what the books say, and pretty much what I’d imagined. In a good way. But still.
A forthcoming paper, “What Mary Can’t Expect When She Is Expecting,” by L.A. Paul, a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is stirring conversation even before it has appeared in the journal Res Philosophica. The paper is a 30-page knowing chuckle with footnotes, and it doesn’t do justice to what we’ve learned from the (admittedly imperfect and sometimes contradictory) social science about parental happiness.
Paul argues that you can’t…
Read More
March 11, 2013, 5:47 pm
By Tom Bartlett
Very few of us would argue that “it’s OK to kick a puppy in the face.” That’s not a nice thing to say. Here’s an even less nice thing to say: “I wish my parents would drown.” Maybe they never got you the sweet BMX bike you begged for, sticking you instead with that banana-seat Schwinn, but desiring their terminal submersion is a bit much. If there are advocates for kicking puppies and drowning parents, they (wisely) tend to keep those foul opinions to themselves.
Now consider this statement: “I dare God to make my home catch fire.”
It’s a little different, right? You’re still imagining a terrible event, but this time you’re invoking the supernatural. If you believe in God, and you believe that he answers your prayers, then you might worry that the Almighty would reduce your bungalow to cinders. But what if you don’t believe in God? You wouldn’t give it a second thought, right?…
Read More
March 7, 2013, 2:21 pm
By Paul Voosen
If there’s a point that may be lost in my recent take on synthetic biology, published this week in The Chronicle Review, it’s this: Once you get past the inflated rhetoric, synthetic biology still oozes a revolutionary vibe.
Last year, when I visited the lab of Jim Collins, one of the field’s founders, his team was coming off the creation of a plug-and-play “breadboarding” system for microbes. It’s an idea inspired by electrical engineering, where plastic “breadboards” serve as experimental bases for tweaking circuits without the permanence of soldering. Collins’s method allows much the same, but in bacteria.
There are plenty of tools around for inserting bits of DNA into bugs with some precision. But given the messiness of life, things rarely work out right the first time around. The team’s method makes pulling biological parts out of the DNA much easier, said Raffi B. Afeyan, an …
Read More
March 6, 2013, 3:48 pm
By Paul Voosen
In any science, it’s hard to talk to the outside world without resorting to metaphor and analogy. That is especially true for the nascent field of synthetic biology, which promises to apply the ideas of engineering to life, as I detail this week in The Chronicle Review. At some level, really, synthetic biology is nothing but an extended metaphor.
Yet such metaphors, designed to convey complex science to the public, could be why the expectations of synthetic biology have gone so far beyond its capabilities. By “debiologizing” the work, the metaphors of computing and Lego bricks suggest an advanced understanding of the function, reliability, and purpose of living organisms that is often at odds with what’s known in biology. At least, that’s the case made by Eleonore Pauwels, a research scholar who has studied synthetic biology for the past few years at the Woodrow Wilson International…
Read More
February 27, 2013, 5:34 pm
By Marc Parry
Scholars are increasingly taking a quantitative approach to history. You see that in the writing of the Stanford archaeologist-historian Ian Morris, whom I profiled in this week’s Chronicle Review, and in the work of even more radical quantifiers like Peter Turchin, a biologist at the University of Connecticut whose burgeoning discipline of “cliodynamics” is featured in a sidebar to the Morris article.
Yet scholars have experienced earlier infatuations with number-heavy history, notably the 70s-era boom-and-bust of “cliometrics.” And now we can quantify it.
In response to the Chronicle Review articles, Mr. Turchin graphed the evolution of quantitative history by tracing how frequently some relevant terms appear in Google’s enormous corpus of digitized books. What he found might be of interest to historians and social scientists, who sometimes tell different stories about what…
Read More
February 26, 2013, 11:14 am
By Paul Voosen
![411px-SoufriereHillsVolcano[1]](http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/files/2013/02/411px-SoufriereHillsVolcano1-205x300.jpg)
The Soufrière Hills eruption in Montserrat in 1995
Scientific outlines of global warming have remained relatively unchanged for decades. Climate scientists, however, armed with better satellites and long-term data, continue to refine their understanding of the jogs up and down that typify the planet’s surface temperature, which can remain flat for years at a time before rising again. There are many pieces to this puzzle, and for more than a decade, one mystery has been centered high in the sky, in the freezing stratosphere.
Given its height, many miles above sea level, the stratosphere is typically a barren place. Suspended above the weather, this dry atmospheric layer rarely houses anything more tangible than gases. Occasionally a vast volcanic eruption—like Mount Pinatubo, in 1991—might inject a load of…
Read More
February 20, 2013, 1:33 pm
By Paul Voosen
Ancient rice paddies released significant amounts of methane into the atmosphere, but scientists disagree on whether they helped trigger a change in climate.
When did the Epoch of Man begin?
In recent years, it’s become common to hear that the earth has entered the Anthropocene, a new geological time dominated by humanity. The term, very much a meme, unifies a host of environmental concerns—climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution. It’s so influential that the body governing geological time is now studying, as I detailed last year, whether to consider the Anthropocene as a formal epoch—like the Pleistocene or Miocene—to the chagrin of some stratigraphers, the fastidious adherents to the discipline that judges such things.
If we are to enter a new epoch, though, geologists will have to decide when…
Read More
February 14, 2013, 8:30 pm
By Paul Basken
Boston — Scientists have a hard enough time getting people to understand what they’re talking about.
Their thoughts can be complicated. Their sentences can be laden with jargon. And their conclusions can offend political or religious sensibilities.
And now, to make things worse, readers have an immediate forum to talk back. And when some readers post uncivil comments at the bottom of online articles, that alone can raise doubts about the underlying science, a new study has found. Or at least reinforce those doubts.
The study, outlined on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, involved a survey of 2,338 Americans asked to read an article that discussed the risks of nanotechnology, which involves engineering materials at the atomic scale.
Of participants who had already expressed wariness toward the technology, those who…
Read More
January 16, 2013, 9:01 am
By Paul Voosen
Like many scientific disciplines, mental health is a fragmented place, with individual researchers plugging away on their favorite disorders, like depression, often without regard to how the disease connects to, say, physical health, let alone molecular biology.
So just where is it that a group of scientists studying the intersection of Buddhist meditation and human-cell aging is supposed to publish?
Alan Kazdin, a Yale psychologist, has decided it will be in his new journal, Clinical Psychological Science. Started this month by the Association for Psychological Science, the journal is an attempt to provide a high-profile home for interdisciplinary research that pushes the study of mental health in new—and curious—directions.
“We’re doing the science of mental health, broadly conceived,” Kazdin says.
The director of the Yale Parenting Center, Kazdin formerly edited…
Read More
January 11, 2013, 2:45 pm
By Paul Basken
The federal government reported on Friday that this year’s influenza vaccine appears to be cutting the risk of getting sick by about 62 percent.
That rate is about on par with vaccine-effectiveness rates in recent years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a weekly report describing epidemic levels of flu across the entire country.
The vaccine may not be perfect, but overall numbers show that it is working, the CDC and other experts said.
“It’s not a great vaccine in terms of preventing infection, or even mild to moderate symptoms,” said Paul A. Offit, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania. But, Dr. Offit said, “the goal is to keep people out of the hospital and out of the morgue, and I think this vaccine does that.”
Other researchers, however, have been sending a different message. A group led by Michael T. Osterholm…
Read More
![411px-SoufriereHillsVolcano[1]](http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/files/2013/02/411px-SoufriereHillsVolcano1.jpg)
Follow Percolator through your favorite RSS reader.
