Snowy campus. Photo by jby.Yeah, so this is about what we can expect from now till March.◼
Snow-covered campus
Snowy campus. Photo by jby. Snowy campus. Photo by jby.The Hitchhiker’s Guide, animated
I tweeted about this yesterday, but whatever. It’s lovely. The original incarnation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a BBC radio play; so, in the wake of a charming but ultimately rather flat attempt at a big-screen film adaptation a few years back, Nick Page has been animating the radio play!
Via io9.◼
Science online, craziest of ants edition
It was probably all because Eve’s brain is so different. Photo by Sebastian Bergmann.- This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! How to get (scientifically) published, in ten rules and two cents.
- Technically, the selfish gene != single-gene thinking, but still. Looking for new language in a world of non-Mendelian genetics. But see also; and then also.
- In twenty easy steps? How non-scientists should interpret scientific claims.
- Want to buy an authorship? Apparently doing that is shockingly direct.
- Bad news gets worse. On funding rates for the NIH.
- Here we go again. No, the fact that men’s brains are detectably different in structure from women’s doesn’t mean the differences are not learned.
- “But anyway, the ants.” This is the best story about invasive ants you will read all year.
- Creationism: bad for bunnies! Based on plans published so far, the creationist “Ark Encounter” theme park is going to be an animal welfare catastrophe.
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Right on cue
Photo by jby.The first serious snowfall of the year, in the first week of December.◼
Progress, of a sort
“Christian University Rethinking Ban On Hiring Openly Gay Faculty” is ordinarily a headline I’d browse past without much thought (especially on Queerty, where the next thing in browsing order is probably a curated assortment of images of freshly-out Tom Daley) But when I saw it the week before last, the third paragraph caught my eye:
Eastern Mennonite University could be the first Mennonite institution to formally reverse its policy that prohibits tenure-track faculty from engaging in same-sex relationships. Currently, openly gay professors in same-sex relationships are not eligible for employment. If they want to work at the university, they must keep their relationship statuses a secret.
Yeah, so that would be the same Eastern Mennonite University that occupies an entry on my curriculum vitae.
As I found out from a press release at the university website, the EMU board of trustees has “authorized President Loren Swartzendruber, DMin, and his cabinet ‘to design and oversee a six-month listening process … to review current hiring policies and practices with respect to individuals in same-sex relationships.’”
What precisely are those “hiring policies and practices”? Well, EMU expects its faculty, staff, and students to adhere to a Community Lifestyle Commitment that includes a pledge to “refrain from sexual relationships outside of marriage.” Per the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective (a doctrinal document of Mennonite Church USA, the national organizing body of the church), “marriage to be a covenant between one man and one woman for life.” So if you’re gay or lesbian and want to work for EMU, well, you can’t have a dating life—and certainly not a long-term, committed relationship—and also keep your Lifestyle Commitment.
That fact that this effective ban on the employment of LGBT people (and, indeed, education of LGBT students) only becomes apparent if you cross-reference two different policy statements tells you everything you need to know about how the Mennonite Church has historically operated w/r/t queer people: as indirectly as humanly possible. Back when I was on the EMU campus, lo these almost 10 years ago, that cross-referencing was a highly effective way to ensure that anyone on campus who even thought he might be gay (ahem) was alone and afraid for his academic standing.
Things may be better now. Indeed, with the university finally moving to discuss the possibility of maybe thinking about catching up to such radical social innovators as the U.S. military and the state of Iowa, things could be about to get a lot better. But I can’t say that I’m encouraged by the framing of this “listening process” so far.
Citing the thoughts of one board member, Swartzendruber said, “Unilateral decision-making leads to broken relationships and rogue actions. Collaborative decision-making means that a community is functioning well. This board’s decision and this process will, I think, show how well our community functions …
“Collaborative decision-making” is also an excellent way to privilege the majority perspective over whatever harm it does to a minority. It’s what gave the Mennonite Church its Confession of Faith, and EMU its Community Lifestyle Commitment. So, on behalf of the students who are where I was a decade ago, I dearly hope this results in better treatment—but I think they’d be better off getting well away from any community that wants to collaboratively decide who they can love.◼
Science online, pumpkin pie hangover edition
Barnacles. Photo by Minette Layne.- Personal genomics should be “entertainment,” not a “medical test.” The personal genotyping service by 23andMe got smacked down by the U.S. FDA; but it probably won’t slow down the rush to consumer genomics.
- Freaky, but cool. How to cure cancer using altered HIV particles.
- Chemotherapy with a side of probiotics? The effectiveness of some anti-cancer drugs may depend on your gut bacteria.
- “… the reasoning employed here is primitive, at best.” Ow. Yet another evolutionary psychology study mistakes the modern university campus for the prehistoric savannah.
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Science online, if you give a mouse a thermostat edition
Is it cold in here? Photo by Ikayama.- This week at the Molecular Ecologist: Making the jump from postdoc to faculty, part one, and part two.
- Privilege check. An attempt to joke about sexism in science fails badly, and prompts some good discussion about what, exactly, it means to be an ally. Also, one pretty clever new metaphor.
- And blames the students. Classy! One of the earliest champions of online college courses admits they don’t really work.
- How the early air-mail planes crossed the U.S. Guided by lighthouses.
- Broad-minded, our ancestors. Analysis of early human genomes suggest interbreeding with a previously unknown proto-human species.
- Serving in Starfleet is basically a high-prestige hobby. How economics might work in the United Federation of Planets.
- “No, he has no family. He’s perfect!” On the infamous two-body problem.
- No, seriously. Thousands of studies on lab mice might be confounded by chilled mice.
- The “red edge”. How we might detect life on another planet using only light.
- For the umpteenth time. That welt on your leg is probably not a brown recluse bite.
- Oh, Florida. Green anacondas, which can grow to be 20 feet long, seem to be settling right into the Everglades.
- No one can cite you if no one can find you. The calculus of journal prestige for authors who need to get noticed.
- Antibiotics! U.S. states with higher rates of antibiotic prescription have more obesity. The evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria could dramatically restrict modern medicine. Here’s what working physicians are doing to prevent that.
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The Molecular Ecologist: From postdoc to faculty
The postdoc-to-faculty metamorphosis: mysterious, magical, sometimes kind of gross. Photo by chekabuje .Over at The Molecular Ecologist this week, K. E. Lotterhos has been writing about making the jump from a postdoctoral research position to being an actual, honest-to-gods faculty member. It’s in two parts, one about finding the faculty job and the other about getting started once you land it.
After I took the job, everyone told me how relaxed I must be to have a job lined up. Relaxed? There has been a substantial amount of busy work (ramping up the conference schedule, fielding emails and scheduling skype conversations with potential graduate students, dealing with lab renovations…). Plus, I’m still trying to work on my postdoc research and get it published, so more people will know who I am and so my grants will be more competitive. Everything I do now has a sense of urgency.
Congratulations! You have a job. Now get to work! But seriously, this all covers the career stage I’m hoping to enter myself, any year now. It’s definitely worthwhile reading, and bookmarking, the whole thing.◼
Science online, migrate me to the moon edition
Photo by dreamingyakker.- This week, at the Molecular Ecologist: Build a version-controlled workflow with GitHub and RStudio.
- And at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! A new fossil find illuminates the history of hummingbird flight, and it turns out that Little Red Riding Hood has a phylogeny.
- It involves my new favorite German word. How we learned that birds migrate.
- With great visualizations. A brief simulation study of genetic ancestry.
- No, but really. Here is a picture of a fruit fly with pictures of ants on its wings.
- Even with on-site comments, Twitter, PubMed Commons … On the difficulties of calling attention to potentially serious flaws in a published scientific paper.
- Ugh. A new Republican bill to revise science funding practice looks exactly as dodgy as you’d expect.
- Meanwhile … A survey of U.S. research universities shows that sequestration is already hurting science.
- Well, that’s a new one. Is it possible that Archaeopteryx was in the process of losing the ability to fly?
- Sure, why the hell not? Are these high-altitude grasslands in Venezuela the fastest-evolving communities on Earth?
- Sort of a filter for critical thinkers. The “Ark Experience” creationist theme park is going to be financed as a nonprofit, by selling junk bonds.
- Yum? Bamboo-eating beetles soften up their host plants by giving them yeast infections.
- Of course, how many protein shakes do they encounter in the wild? If it’s protein, ants assume they need to chew it.
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Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: A fossil swift, and the origin of hummingbird flight
Photo by Extra Medium.Over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, guest contributor Jessica Oswald explains how a new fossil of a bird that lived 52 million years ago helps explain the origins of some of nature’s greatest aerial acrobats:
Swifts are able to reach the highest speeds during level flight (Chantler 1999) and hummingbirds are well known for their hovering abilities and their sideways and backward flight. Swifts and hummingbirds, while sharing the same wing bone characteristics, have different lengths of flight feathers, resulting in different wing shapes across the group, which allows them to perform their different aerial feats. Hummingbirds have shorter wings relative to their body size compared to swifts, resulting in their hovering abilities. These different wing shapes are well suited for their modern functions, but we have almost no fossils from this group, so we don’t know how the wing shapes diverged, or anything about the ecology of ancient species in this lineage.
To learn what the common ancestor of swifts and hummingbirds (or, rather, one of its early descendants) looked like, go read the whole thing.◼