- This week, at The Molecular Ecologist: Tracking pollinators’ fungal hitchhikers and talking preprints at Haldane’s Sieve.
- Get a grip, people. How to respond to Ebola in the U.S. productively; and how not to.
- I’m shocked, shocked! The “Ark Encounter” creationist propaganda park stands to lose state subsidies over discriminatory hiring practices.
- I’m a bit disappointed there aren’t three simple laws. Isaac Asimov ponders how creativity works.
- “The Country of the English People”. How the early United States looked to the Ottoman Empire.
- Because you’re wondering how Yossarian takes his coffee. Literary Starbucks.
- Preferably for the sensible candidate. U.S. citizens, find your fucking polling place so you can vote next Tuesday.
Stuff online, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to be naturally selected” edition
- This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: In the movies and on TV, only bad guys evolve.
- Because it’s what you do, not what you are. Why douchebag is the anti-white-supremacist slur for our time.
- Is Minneapolis the new Portland? Is Pittsburgh the new Austin?
- Without climbing the walls. Finding the way out of academia.
- We can only hope. Next steps in Ferguson.
New trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey because yes please
Via io9.
Stuff online, grass of the field edition
- My latest in the LA Review of Books: How living things are evolving (or not) in response to human activity.
- From the front lines of the outbreak: The cultural links between ebola and zombies; how useful airport screening will probably be; the basic science that could have prevented this.
- Break’em down for parts. The best mutualists are the ones you can recycle when you’re done with them.
- Looks effective, in a small trial. We now know we can transplant gut microbes using the less awkward end of the alimentary canal.
- Fun! What it’s like to have right-wingers attack your NSF grant.
- Wake me when he’s governor. An Idaho state legislator who doesn’t hate Federal conservation agencies.
- The NRA is killing America. A university is unable to do anything about death threats against a guest speaker because of concealed carry laws.
- Set irony to maximum. Turns out we did find some WMDs in Iraq — they were from the U.S., and dangerously old, and the Pentagon covered it all up.
- Mortality sucks. We live among the dead.
- He’s seriously the best thing on this show. How Andre Braugher makes Brooklyn Nine-Nine the best.
- From slates to whiteboards. A brief history of the blackboard.
- Requiescat. The ScienceOnline organization.
Life, um, finds a way
Bedbug, up close. (Flickr: Armed Forces Pest Management Board)
The LA Review of Books has just posted my review of Unnatural Selection: How We Are Changing Life, Gene By Gene—a highly accessible book about how insect pests, weeds, disease organisms, wildlife, and even cancer cells evolve in response to the chemicals and drugs we use to contain them. I particularly focus on the skin-crawling case of bedbugs:
Bedbugs are a particularly intimate example, at least from the human perspective, of the broader trend. Surveys of exterminators report that between 2001 and 2007, the number of bedbug infestations across North America increased 20-fold, concentrated in places like apartment complexes, college dormitories, and homeless shelters in major urban areas. Some of this resurgence is due to international travel. Major ports like New York, San Francisco, and Miami are epicenters of bedbug activity, and genetic surveys show that the bugs are arriving from multiple populations, not spreading from a single geographic source. Still, a large part of the bedbug revival is attributable to the fact that the bugs have developed a resistance to many of the insecticides that kept them down for decades.
Go read the whole thing, and try not to scratch.
That show you like is going to come back in style
Oh, man. This is exciting, but I also feel a sense of creeping dread, as though I’m trapped in some sort of interdimensional cineplex of televisual entertainments and, after strange ages of wondering among endless theaters showing long-form serialized dramas of violence and disturbance and vague supernatural malevolence, I’ve just brushed aside yet a crimson curtain and walked into the room where I first met that backwards-talking dwarf.
He is holding a cup of coffee.
Upside down.
Hat tip to Steve Silberman.
Stuff online, marathoning monarchs edition
Frick Park, Pittsburgh. (Flickr: corbin_dana)
- Going down. A new study estimates that worldwide wildlife populations dropped more than 50% in the last 40 years.
- Long-haul leps. There’s a simple genetic basis to whether or not monarch butterflies have the endurance to migrate.
- Good news/bad news. Missionary doctors are providing critical services across Africa—but we don’t know how well they’re doing.
- And we don’t know what most of them do. U.S. environmental regulations aren’t keeping up with all the chemicals we’re dumping into the environment.
- Especially when its this integral to the literature? How do we deal with the racism of classic literature?
- Don’t try this at home. Or anywhere else. A guy who studies the human gut microbiome tries to go paleo.
- Too good to be true might just be. A tiny, long-isolated population of rare fish turns out to be not-quite-so long-isolated.
- Hey! I know some of these. The green and bucolic dumpsites of Pittsburgh.
- Am I really the only one who already knew you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps? Deflating the American legend of the self-made man.
- Possibly the worst. Here is a tumblr devoted to very bad cats.
Manhattan is a great drama about the problems of science careers
Two bodies: Liza Winter (Olivia Williams) and Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) are both Ph.D. scientists—but only Frank works in a field useful to the Project. (WGN America)
Some of the best dramatic fantasies project otherwise commonplace struggles and worries into extraordinary circumstances. Make that awkward teenage girl a vampire slayer, and put her in a high school that is literally built over a gateway to Hell. How do we feel about that military occupation if it’s reimagined as humans subjugated by their out-of-control cybernetic creations? A love affair is a lot more compelling if it involves the President of the United States and the woman who helped fix his election. So maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the most compelling television show about the daily drama of academic science is a historical drama about building the first atomic bomb.
Manhattan, which airs on WGN America and streams on Hulu, follows physicists designing what will become the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, starting about two years before August 6, 1945. The project staff and their families are living in a laboratory campus built and hyper-secured by the U.S. military in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico, but in many respects they could be working at any research university today. Here’s my (spoiler-y) list of the parallels, which are sometimes dangerously on-the-nose:
Stuff online, bad algorithms edition
- But with airplanes. The movement of lizard species introduced to new habitats by human travel follows the classic model of island biogeography.
- From Margaret Sanger to the lie detector. The real origin story for Wonder Woman.
- Perspective. How science should deal with race.
- New fad, new dubious statistics. Yeah, we actually don’t know that human bodies contain 10 bacteria for every human cell.
- What makes the Discworld spin. The powerful creative energy of Terry Pratchett’s anger.
- Part 762 in a series. More ways in which genetic testing is complicating diagnosis.
- Break out the birth control. Because China’s one-child policy was one of the top contributors to carbon emissions reductions in the last decade.
- Garbage in, garbage out. How algorithms just reinforce social assumptions.
Stuff online, endless waves edition
- This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Can we make the future more prosperous and healthy by steering evolution?
- And, at The Molecular Ecologist: A genomic scan for adaptation that probably misses a lot of the genome.
- Hope Jahren makes the trend personal. A raw testimonial to the risks women can face in science.
- Here’s hoping. How the People’s Climate March aims to reframe the climate change debate.
- Old-school sci-fi optimism. About, of all things, a consumerist apocalypse.
- Wow. A new genetic discovery will revolutionize wheat breeding.
- Can’t say I’ll miss them. Artificial sweeteners may screw up metabolism by changing the gut microbiome.
- Guess it’s preferable to plain old politics. The case for political science.
- Your bright point of hope for the week. Alison Bechdel is awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant, which is a perfect reason to go read her comics.
- Yum! The scientific method explained via cookies.