There are two new posts on the Expeditions blog – one yesterday, one today – both from the Problems Without Passports: Scientific Research Diving at USC Dornsife course:
First, Why Palau? by David Ginsburg, one of the instructors.
About a week ago, Catherine Clabby (editor at American Scientist), Anton Zuiker and I did a two-day workshop on science communication with the graduate students in the Biology Department at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. Here are some of the things we mentioned and websites we showed during those two days.
Links shown by Anton for the personal web page session:
Probably the best and most current book on science communication for scientists is ‘Explaining Research‘ by Dennis Meredith – see the book homepage and the associated blog for a wealth of additional information and updates.
Some interesting Twitter hashtags: #scio12 (chatter about ScienceOnline conference, and discussions within that community) #SITT (Science In The Triangle, NC) #madwriting (writing support community) #wherethesciencehappens (pictures of locations where science happens) #icanhazpdf (asking for and receiving PDFs of papers hidden behind paywalls) #scimom – scientists and mothers and scientist-mothers. #scienceblogging
There are two new posts – one yesterday and one today:
On the Guest Blog, Kristina Bjoran who just graduated from the MIT Science Writing program, wrote Looking for Empathy in a Conflict-Ridden World, a nuanced look at brain imaging research.
Charles Q. Choi runs a bi-weekly series on the Guest Blog over at Scienctific American – Too Hard for Science? In these posts, he asks scientists about experiments that cannot be or should not be done, for a variety of reasons, though it would be fun and informative it such experiments could get done.
For one of his posts, he interviewed me. What I came up with, inspired by the emergence of periodic cicadas in my neighborhood, was a traditional circadian experiment applied to a much longer cycle of 13 or 17 years.
The idea: Everything in living organisms cycles. Some processes repeat in miliseconds, others in seconds, minutes or hours, yet others in days, months or years. Biological cycles that are most studied and best understood by science are those that repeat approximately once a day – circadian rhythms.
One of the reasons why daily rhythms are best understood is that pioneers of the field came up with a metaphor of the ‘biological clock‘ which, in turn, prompted them to adapt oscillator theory (the stuff you learned in school about the pendulum) from physics to biology.
And while the clock metaphor sometimes breaks down, it has been a surprisingly useful and powerful idea in this line of research. Circadian researchers came up with all sorts of experimental protocols to study how daily rhythms get entrained (synchronized) to the environmental cycles (usually light-dark cycles of day and night), and how organisms use their internal clocks to measure other relevant environmental parameters, especially the changes in daylength (photoperiod) – information they use to precisely measure the time of year and thus migrate, molt or mate during an appropriate season.
These kinds of experiments – for example buildingPhase-ResponseCurves to a variety of environmental cues, or a variety of tests for photoperiodism (night-break protocol, skeleton photoperiods, resonance cycles, T-cycles, Nanda-Hamner protocol etc.) – take a long time to perform.
Each data point requires several weeks: measuring period and phase of the oscillation before and after the pulse (or a series of pulses) of an environmental cue in order to see how application of that cue at a particular phase of the cycle affects the biological rhythm (or the outcome of measuring daylength, e.g., reproductive response). It requires many data points, gathered from many individual organisms.
And all along the organisms need to be kept in constant conditions: not even the slightest fluctuations in light (usually constant darkness), temperature, air pressure, etc. are allowed.
It is not surprising that these kinds of experiments, though sometimes applied to shorter cycles (e.g., miliseconds-long brain cycles), are rarely applied to biological rhythms that are longer than a day, e.g., rhythms that evolved as adaptations to tidal, lunar and annual environmental cycles. It would take longer to do than a usual, five-year period of a grant, and some experiments may last an entire researcher’s career. Which is one of the reasons we know so little about these biological rhythms.
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Living out in the country, in the South, just outside Chapel Hill, NC, every day I open the door I hear the deafening and ominous-sounding noise (often described as “horror movie soundtrack) coming from the woods surrounding the neighborhood. The cicadas have emerged! The 13-year periodic cicadas, that is. Brood XIX.
I was not paying attention ahead of time, so I did not know they were slated to appear this year in my neck of the woods. One morning last week, I saw a cicada on the back porch and noticed red eyes! A rule of thumb that is easy to remember: green eyes = annual cicadas, red eyes = periodic cicadas. I got excited! I was waiting for this all my life!
Fortunately, once they emerge, cicadas are out for a few weeks, so my busy travel schedule did not prevent me from going to find them (just follow the sound) to take a few pictures and short videos.
There are three species of periodic cicadas that emerge every 17 years – Magicicada septendecim, Magicicada cassini and Magicicada septendecula. Each of these species has a ‘sister species’ that emerges every 13 years: M.tredecim, M. tredecassini and M.tredecula. A newer species split produced another 13-year species: Magicicada neotredecim. The species differ in morphology and color, while the 13 and 17-year pairs of sister species are essentially indistinguishable from each other. M.tredecim and M.neotredecim, since they appear at the same time and place, differ in the pitch of their songs: M.neotredecim sings a higher tone.
So, how do they count to 13 or 17?
While under ground, they undergo metamorphosis four times and thus go through five larval instars. The 13 and 17-year cicadas only differ in the duration of the fifth instar. They emerge simultaneously, live as adults for a few weeks, climb up the trees, sing, mate, lay eggs and die.
When the eggs hatch, the newly emerged larvae fall from the trees to the ground, dig themselves deeper down, latch onto the tree roots to feed on the sap, and wait another 13 or 17 years to emerge again.
There are a number of hypotheses (and speculations) why periodic cicadas emerge every 13 or 17 years, including some that home in on the fact that these two numbers are prime numbers (pdf).
Perhaps that is a way to fool predators which cannot evolve the same periodicity (but predators are there anyway, and will gladly gorge on these defenseless insects when they appear, whenever that is, even though it may not be so good for them). Perhaps this is a speciation mechanism, lowering the risk of hybridization between recently split sister species?
Or perhaps that is all just crude adaptationist thinking and the strangeness of the prime-number cycles is in the eye of the beholder – the humans! After all, if an insect shows up every year, it is not very exciting. Numerous species of annual cicadas do that every year and it seems to be a perfectly adaptive strategy for them. But if an insect, especially one that is so large, noisy and numerous, shows up very rarely, this is an event that will get your attention.
Perhaps our fascination with them is due to their geographic distribution. Annual cicadas may also have very long developmental times, but all of their broods are in one place, thus the insects show up every year. In periodic cicadas, different broods appear in different parts of the country, which makes their appearance rare and unusual in each geographic spot.
In any case, I am more interested in the precision of their timing than in potential adaptive explanations for it. How do they get to be so exact? Is this just a by-product of their developmental biology? Is 13 or 17 years just a simple addition of the duration of five larval stages?
Or should we consider this cycle to be an output of a “clock” (or “calendar”) of sorts? Or perhaps a result of interactions between two or more biological timepieces, similarly to photoperiodism? In which case, we should use the experimental protocols from circadian research and apply them to cicada cycles.
Finally, it is possible that a ling developmental cycle is driven by one timing mechanism, but the synchronization of emergence in the last year is driven by another, perhaps some kind of clock that may be sensitive to sound made by other insects of the same species as they start digging their way up to the surface. The problem: In order to apply the standard experiments (like construction of a Phase-Response Curve, or T-cycles), we need to bring the cicadas into the lab. And that is really difficult to do. Husbandry has been a big problem for research on these insect, which is why almost all of it was done out in the field.
When kept in the lab, the only way to feed them is to provide them with the trees so they can drink the sap from the roots. This makes it impossible to keep them in constant conditions – trees require light and will have their own rhythms that the cicadas can potentially pick up, as timing cues, from the sap. So, the first thing we need to do is figure out a way to feed them artificially, without reliance on living trees for food.
Also, we do not know which environmental cues are relevant. Is it light cycle? Photoperiod? Or something cycling in the tree-sap? Or temperature cycles? What are the roles of developmental hormones like Juvenile Hormone or Ecdysone? We would have to test all of them simultaneously, hoping that at least one of them turns out to be the correct one.
Second, more obvious problem, is time. These experiments would last hundreds of years, perhaps thousands! Some experiments rely on outcomes of previous experiments for the proper design. Who would do them? What funding agency would finance them? Why would anyone start such experiments while knowing full well that the results would not be known within one’s lifetime? Isn’t this too tantalizing for a scientist’s curiosity?
The solution? One obvious solution is to figure out ways to get to the same answers in shorter time-frames. Perhaps by sequencing the genome and figuring out what each gene does (perhaps by looking at equivalents in other species, like fruitflies, or inserting them into Drosophila and observing their effects), hoping to find out the way timing is regulated. This will probably not answer all our questions, but may be good enough.
Another way is to set aside space and funding for such experiments and place them into an unusual administrative framework – a longitudinal study guided by an organization, not a single researcher getting a grant to do this in his or her lab. This way the work will probably get done, and the papers will get published somewhere around 2835 A.D.
~~~~
See? How long and complex my text is? Now go back to the post by Charles to see again how nicely he edited the story.
Continuing with the tradition from last three years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2011 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January 2011. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Geographically I’m based at the University of New Hampshire, but mentally I’m always in the city – I love the urban lifestyle because it makes me happy, and ironically I’m now living in the rural land of North Face clothing and Crocs. I’m one of those scientist bloggers, currently working as a postdoc with sights on academia. My background is nematode taxonomy and molecular phylogenetics, but now I’m turning into a computational biologist because of the way my field is moving. I hear myself talk about servers and CPUs nowadays, and I think “Who IS this person?!”
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’m born and bred American, but after graduating high school I moved to London to complete my Bachelor’s degree and then Ph.D. I did my doctoral research at the Natural History Museum, London – the NHM is such a fantastic institution, and it was there that I really got hooked on science communication. I often participated in “Nature Live” meet-a-scientist events run for the general public (inevitably I would be talking about nematode worms and someone would ask me a question about Finding Nemo). One of the highlights of my career so far was participating in a 6-week scientific research cruise to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 2009.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Research! I absolutely love the field I’m in – ‘eukaryotic metagenetics’ – we’re using cutting-edge DNA sequencing technologies (datasets containing millions of sequences) to look at species ‘barcodes’ and study microscopic eukaryote communities in marine sediments. I thought that my schedule would calm down after I finished my Ph.D., but now I’m ten times as busy as a postdoc (they don’t tell you this in grad school). Instead of working on one, focused project with a finite end goal, as a postdoc I am now spread across four or five projects, writing grants, travelling to meet collaborators, and in constant demand from students. And then trying to fit in some science communication on the side. I wish I was a vampire so I didn’t need to sleep.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I’m really passionate about dispelling the stereotype of the old and stuffy scientist, and I think that reaching out to a younger, tech-savvy generation is a very powerful approach for mustering up excitement towards science. Our 21st century lives are built on scientific knowledge. Yet technology is now so commonplace that it is easy to forget about the hunter-gatherer human species living on the savannah a few short Millennia ago. Science is testament to the awesomeness of human brainpower – everyone can be a scientist, because everyone has the innate cognitive ability to think logically. Society gives us the perception that science and math are so hard, but they really aren’t – scientists are trained to do their job, just like anyone else. I think practicing law and being a plumber are hard, but that’s because I was never trained to do either.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others? How do you intergrate all of your online activity into a coherent whole? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Blogging is something I do outside the lab, on my own time, because I think it is vitally important to communicate why and how we scientists do research. I could just as easily sit in my Ivory Tower and only talk to other scientists (and on the academic track, focusing only on your research is often necessary and encouraged). As for integrating online activity…I’m still pretty new to this, so sometimes I find that the barrage of information is just too much; you almost get sucked into this desperate urge to keep up – blog more, tweet more, blog first, tweet first. As I’m getting used to the online science community, I’m taking the attitude that more infrequent, but quality, posts leave me the most satisfied and don’t interfere too much with my Postdoc responsibilities. I’ve really enjoyed joining the online science community, and everyone I speak to is always so supportive.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I first discovered science blogs a few years ago when I googled “hot scientist shoes” – Dr. Isis’s blog came up as one of the top hits (try it!) and I remember bookmarking the site immediately and being stunned that actual scientists maintain blogs. From then on I only read a couple blogs very intermittently – then I met Dr. M at the Deep-sea Symposium in Iceland last year, was amalgamated into the DSN crew, and the rest became history. I discovered the concept of blog networks at the conference, so I’m having fun exploring them all and learning about the different bloggers.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2011 for you? Any suggestions for next year?
The microbrew beers! (I’m a marine scientist, I had to say that…) The diverse program of topics was really great, and the passionate, interactive discussions in some sessions were fabulous. For me, the best aspect was being immersed in this whole other world–science journalism and media–that I’m keenly interested in yet separated from because of my day job as a researcher.
Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, or to your science reading and writing?
Oh boy, if I typed down everything here I’d have carpal tunnel by the end. I learned some tricks journalists use to get scientists to loosen up (“ask them about a personal item in their office…”). I guess I never really thought about it before, but science is all about the story; I knew this beforehand, but hearing it repeated over and over at ScienceOnline really brought it to the front of my mind. Now whenever I sit down to write something (whether scientific manuscript or blog post), I always ask myself “What is the plot?” and write a succinct summary sentence to use as a guide. I am also more focused on my own writing process – playing with literary devices to improve my style and really suck in readers.
Thank you so much for the interview. I hope you I’ll see you again next year.
Before we take a break for the summer, join us for one more Pizza Lunch talk.
At noon on Tuesday, May 24, come hear biologist Kendra Sewall discuss how bird calls accomplish more than you might think. A postdoctoral researcher in Steve Nowicki’s lab at Duke, Sewall studies how the calls serve as badges of social identity.
Thanks to a grant from the N.C. Biotechnology Center, American Scientist Pizza Lunch is free and open to science journalists and science communicators of all stripes. Feel free to forward this message to anyone who might want to attend. RSVPs are required (for the slice count) to cclabby@amsci.org
Directions to Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society in RTP, are here.
I would be remiss if I did not proudly announce that Scientific American received the 2011 National Magazine Award (so-called ‘Ellies’) for general excellence. If I understand correctly, SciAm never won one of these, and was not even nominated in the past 27 years. This year, out of two nominations, we won one. The excitement in the office, even from the telecommuting distance, is palpable.
This is a great time to be working at SciAm – a fantastic team, with a fantastic leader, with vision and courage to always experiment and explore the new media ecosystem.
Continuing with the tradition from last three years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2011 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January 2011. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Geographically I am a child of fly-over country. I grew up in Missouri, trained in Chicago and Minnesota, and have held faculty positions in St. Louis and Omaha. My family will be relocating to Oklahoma this fall.
I trained first as a medical doctor, with training as a pediatric nephrologist (kidney specialist). I caught the research bug during fellowship, and I have pursued this direction in my career ever since.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
My career direction changed in 2008 when the American Society of Nephrology hired me to edit a brand-new magazine, ASN Kidney News. Up to that time, I read an occasional blog post, but never embedded myself in social media. As part of our media endeavor, I knew we needed more online presence, especially interactive Web 2.0 stuff. I started a blog, signed up for Facebook, and began tweeting. Now I have personal accounts, magazine accounts, and a new online media project, AWEnow.org.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
In addition to my online activities, I am changing my career direction. My “hobby” for the last decade has been faculty development. Both MDs and PhDs become faculty members at medical colleges without strong teaching or administrative skills. Some clinicians lack writing skills. Most medical centers must help faculty become more proficient in these areas, and other skills often need ongoing improvement. For example, I helped develop a writing workshop at Nebraska that has drawn in more than 100 participants for 3 years in a row. My new job in Oklahoma will include 1/3 of my time as Associate Dean for Faculty Development. I plan to organize comprehensive support for all career activities, as well as doing research on what actually works.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The web serves up a lot of bad information. I feel we should counter it with the truth, and make real science and medicine available in an accessible manner to anyone who wants to read it. I also love learning about all science. Since I started in social media, I read a wider variety of science and information.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others? How do you intergrate all of your online activity into a coherent whole? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Blogging started as part of a paid job, editing ASN KIdney News, and social media goes along with it. I run TweetDeck on my computer to follow accounts and activity during the day, and my BlackBerry and iPad let me track things on the hoof. I can turn the gizmos off (like during leisure activities or when I’m seeing patients). I am finding that a lot of organizations, including academic health centers, have no idea where to begin with all of these new activities. My social media skills have become a bonus rather than a detriment, as I seek out new opportunities.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I recently served on the Animal Care and Experimentation Committee for the American Physiological Society. A couple of years back, they sent around a post by Dr. Isis on the importance of the IACUC for the investigator. I browsed through some of her other posts, and discovered another woman out there who loved biomedical science and shoes! As I became involved in that blog, after a very brief period of lurking, I made other connections in this portion of the blogosphere/twitterverse. Now I am part of the Scientopia group. At the conference, I was shocked to discover a like-minded blogger at the Lincoln campus of University of Nebraska, Kiyomi Deards. Less than an hour away, and I had not heard about her!
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2011 for you? Any suggestions for next year?
Meeting online friends in the flesh was clearly the best part of ScienceOnline. And the free books. Anyone who sends me a pre-publication book will get a read and review. I read fast, and I have fairly broad interests. In that way, I am the perfect book reviewer!
Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, or to your science reading and writing?
So much happened at Science Online… In my “real life” almost no one else I know has the passion for writing that I do, along with the science thing. I felt like the mother ship had called me home, with all of these similar-interest alien beings. I do remember a number of speakers suggesting that online activities would get little attention until tenured full professors put them on their CV, so I did. My blogs are now part of my “permanent record.”
I’m still working on making a Prezi of my CV. Getting a house ready to sell has slowed me down a bit. Anyone out there looking for a home in Omaha?
Thank you so much for the interview. I hope you can come again next year.
There are two new posts on the Scientific American Guest Blog, one posted last night, the other one just a few minutes ago, both related to the science behind the capture and death of Osama bin Laden:
Continuing with the tradition from last three years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2011 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January 2011. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
After obtaining a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, my wife and I moved to a small town not far from there where I worked in a hospital as a respiratory therapy technician. Ten years later after being laid off from the hospital and working a variety of odd jobs such as picking apples and writing a book published by Prentice Hall, we moved to Fort Collins, CO where I enrolled in Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University obtaining M.S. in cloud microphysics and Ph.D. in satellite climatology. While I thought satellite data were the wave of the future, my career turned out focusing on historical weather station data. Currently I am the Chief Scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I started out my professional career leading the effort to create NOAA’s century-scale land surface climate data set which is now used by NOAA and NASA to help monitor global temperatures. My early years were spent focusing on science on the data, such as how to detect artificial biases in the data and remove them. Later I moved on to science with the data, such as assessing how the global climate has changed. The expertise I gained during this process got me invited to participate in a variety of fascinating international activities, such as Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
While I still have some time to conduct original research, I now spend most of my time consulting and coordinating on a wide variety of projects. In February 2010, I was elected President of the World Meteorological Organization’s Commission for Climatology which means I also lead the activities of over 200 volunteers from 54 countries. An example of this work that really excites me is holding regional climate change workshops where we bring in a few world-recognized experts along with scientists from about a dozen neighboring countries, guide the local scientists in applying quality control to the daily data they brought and then teach them how to assess how extremes are changing in their countries. These workshops help us both understand global climate change better and educate scientists around the world.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
My professional grandfather (my Ph.D. advisor’s Ph.D. advisor) famously said that to make sense out of satellite data was like trying “to get a drink from a fire hydrant.” That same analogy can be applied to making sense out of information that is available on the web. Rather than adding my few few drops to this deluge, I mainly communicate the old fashioned way by giving talks to lay and professional audiences.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others? How do you intergrate all of your online activity into a coherent whole? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I admire those who have time and energy to blog sound scientific information and respond to the comments they get. It seems a lot like teaching. I once considered a career in teaching but determined I had enough patience to be a good teacher or to be a good father, but not both. Now I don’t think I have enough patience for either. But as the head of an organization that depends on the dedication of its hundreds of volunteers, I realize the importance of keeping the volunteers engaged. Towards that end, the Vice President of the Commission for Climatology, Serhat Sensoy from Turkey, has created a Facebook page for us. Under Serhat’s tutelage, I am slowly moving into the use of social media to keep a community informed.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
My earliest memories of blogs were those that attacked me and my work. It is a strange experience to, for example, dedicate years of your life improving the availability of global climate data and then be accused of deleting data. As a counterpoint, though, I do appreciate several humorous science blog posts that both accurately address the science and at times provide insights that resonate with my experiences all too well, such as “1) Any errors, however inconsequential, will be taken Very Seriously and accusations of fraud will be made. 2) If you adjust the raw data we will accuse you of fraudulently fiddling the figures whilst cooking the books. 3) If you don’t adjust the raw data we will accuse you of fraudulently failing to account for station biases and UHI [Urban Heat Island]. 4) . . .”
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2011 for you? Any suggestions for next year?
The interactions. While the talks were fascinating, the questions and answers were more so.
Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, or to your science reading and writing?
During my talk at ScienceOnline2011, I mentioned that after speaking before a subcommittee of Congress, a Congressman took us aside and told us that climate scientists are in a knife fight and we need to fight back. Our response to him was yes but the way scientists fight back is to do more sound peer-reviewed science. One person at the meeting tweeted a brief reference to me saying ”knife fight” and soon a blogger who was not at ScienceOnline2011 was taking me to task for my attitude and for using such harsh rhetoric. As a result of experiences like that, I’ve noticed in myself as well as colleagues an increasing concern for structuring sentence fragments in papers so they would be less susceptible to being taken out of context and misinterpreted. Unfortunately, this hampers effective communication complex concepts.
Thank you so much for the interview. I hope you can come again next year.
This was an incredibly busy day on Scientific American website! And I was offline most of the time, in flight to Boston, praising the technology that lets us schedule blog posts in advance.
First, take a look at a redesigned homepage. Like?
There were at least three big themes on the site today….
First, the news of the death of Osama bin Laden prompted us to take a look at the scientific angles to the story. You can see the collection of articles in our In-Depth Report: Osama bin Laden: The Science of His End. Included in the collection are some articles from the archives, but also several new ones:
Continuing with the tradition from last three years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2011 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January 2011. See all the interviews in this series here.
Today I chat with Robin Lloyd (Twitter), editor of Scientific American Online and thus a colleague I work with closely every day.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’m a sociologist who left academia and fell into science writing as a second career via a stint as a temporary receptionist at a news wire service in Los Angeles. My boss at that job learned that I had a Ph.D. and figured I might be able to fill-in for the woman who wrote a daily list for clients of the next day’s press conferences. She had carpal tunnel syndrome and never came back. After a couple years of doing her job, answering phones, making coffee and photocopies, and learning how to write simple, useful sentences, I asked for and grudgingly was given a real newsroom job.
My editors sneered at my academic background (probably, rightly so) and figured they could punish me by handing off all science stories to me, ranging from physics to economics findings, daring me to understand them because I had a Ph.D. in something or other. So I started this science writing phase in general assignment journalism (cops, courts, celebrities, city councils, school boards, bird ladies and barbershops) before I got to cover science much of the time.
Then I received a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT and became CNN.com’s science writer in 1999, which I soon ditched to become Employee No. 35 at Lou Dobbs’ Space.com. To survive the dot-com crash, I fled after a couple years to a good media relations job that allowed me to learn and write about paleontology, biodiversity and systematic biology at a world class natural history museum for five years; then I got back into full-time science journalism at an online-only network of science web sites where I’d been moonlighting while at the museum. Now I’m on the news editor on web side of things at Scientific American. I’ve been very fortunate.
My goal is to be helpful, advance science communications and rational thinking, promote peace and harmony, take care of my boyfriend, cats and worms (composting), paint the kitchen and organize the basement.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Blogging, clear writing, Twitter.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? Do you find all this online activity to be a necessity in what you do?
I blog occasionally for Scientific American and I think of blogs I’d like to start all the time but I’m consumed these days with editing others’ work. I find Donna Haraway’s, Neal Stephenson’s and John Varley’s concepts of cyborgs helpful in integrating my online activity into a coherent whole. I use Twitter every day, usually for at least an hour total. It’s invaluable. Facebook is becoming a mini-Twitter for me, less of a social network, more informational.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2011 for you?
The best aspect of Scio11 was meeting science bloggers in person who I’d been following on Twitter and learning that not all non-scientist bloggers want to be journalists. I gained a lot of respect for science blogging and its diversity, and I made new friends. I think the conference was very smartly organized — not sure I can think of how to improve it. No plastic bottles?
Thank you so much for the interview. I’ll see you next time I am up in the office!
The first couple of reviews of the 2010 anthology are now out: by Dr. Alistair Dove at Deep Sea News and by Ariel Carpenter at USC News. Check them out. If you have read the book and have a place to publish a review, we’ll appreciate it – just send us the link.
Second Big Announcement:
I am very excited to announce the Guest Editor for the 2011 – a good friend, a marvelous writer, and a great blogger: Jennifer Ouellette (blog, Twitter). I am looking forward to working with Jennifer over the course of the year to produce the best anthology yet!
I am happy to announce that the sixth anthology will be published by Scientific American Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Both Scientific American and Farrar, Straus and Giroux are part of the same publishing empire – McMillan – so this is a natural marriage between the two.
Jennifer Ouellette and I will work closely with Amanda Moon, Book Editor at Scientific American and Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, on producing the next volume.
What does this mean, and what will change?
The first phase of the production of the book will remain the same. You will keep submitting your own and other bloggers’ work via the same submission form. I will keep posting the growing list of submissions every Monday morning.
At the end of the year, some time in December, we’ll close the submission form as we always do. Jennifer will devise the judging methodology and will ask a group of bloggers, writers and scientists to serves as judges, to help us go through hundreds of entries at a fast pace. Thus the crowdsourced, community aspects of the book will remain intact.
Once the final decisions have been made and 50 essays, one cartoon and one poem are chosen for the inclusion in the book, Jennifer, Amanda and I will work closely with the authors to edit, copyedit and proofread the entries until they are in a perfectly publishable form (but without losing the webby ‘feel’). Then the project will get turned over to the professionals for design, typesetting and marketing – the aspects of publishing that were always the hardest for us to do as amateurs until now. Also, though Open Laboratory is a brand in our small circles (and quite popular there – see #openlab hashtag on Twitter), we may need to change its name to something more broadly marketable – but that is far from final yet, more information to come later.
This process lasts a little bit longer when done professionally, so we expect the book not to get published early in the year as before, but rather in early Fall, perhaps September, just before people start shopping for the holidays.
It took five years to find the publisher for this project, and it has finally happened, mainly due to continuous and strong support of the community – yes, that’s you. And I should not forget to mention the help of people most closely involved in the project over the years – the past Guest Editors Reed Cartwright, Jenny Rohn, Scicurious and Jason G. Goldman, the LaTeX guru Blake Stacey and, person without whom this idea would not have even been hatched – Anton Zuiker.
I am very, very happy with these developments and am looking forward to working on it over the next year, and hopefully into the future.
This past week I was in New York City (again – my monthly trip), trying, as always, to couple business with pleasure. Apart from coming into SA office for work and meetings, I also got to attend a couple of nifty events.
On Tuesday evening, I finally got to meet Mary Roach in person. I learned on Twitter she was going to be in town and doing a reading from her latest book ‘Packing For Mars’, but I thought (and tweeted) it was too late as I already had other things planned. Well, she tweeted right back at me and politely suggested I better show up or else….so I changed my plans and showed up and it was great fun – she is such an amazing person and a great public speaker (there is a video of her in this post in which I review her previous book ‘Bonk’).
And of course, the topic is fascinating – how do astronauts and cosmonauts deal with various aspects of life we take for granted here on solid ground and gravity: how they eat, sleep, go to bathroom, take care of hygiene, take care of mental hygiene, and more.
On Wednesday night I went to see The Story Collider, a science-themed storytelling show (sorta like Moth in NYC or The Monti here in the Triangle). This time, the topic was the intersection of science and art – The Cambrian Explosion, an art exhibit and storytelling performance with six wonderful personal stories by artist who draw inspiration from science and nature and math. It was also wonderful to see some of their art in the gallery right after the show to connect what they said to what they do as artists.
Continuing with the tradition from last three years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2011 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January 2011. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Geographically, I’m a Londoner. In terms of my scientific background, I don’t really have one other than a tiny bit of 1st year undergrad chemistry. I make no pretense to be a scientist. However, I do see myself as part of the scientific community, as long as you define scientific community quite broadly (which I think you should). I’m a sociologist and social historian, so I’m interested in people, it just happens that the particular thing about people I find the most fascinating is when they try to talk to each other about science.
I teach science communication at Imperial College most of the week, and do a bit of freelance science writing, science communication consultancy and research with the rest of my time. In the future, I may go back to academia fulltime, or back to focus exclusively on more practical work, but I quite like the mix (I’ve find doing a bit of one helps with the other) even if it can be hard to juggle at times.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I got into science communication when I was 16, though I didn’t realise this until I was a bit older. I did some press work in tech policy and some theatre in education work on mental health issues, and then I got a full time job as an Explainer at the Science Museum (I basically got paid to stand around and chat to kids about physics, sometimes I’d make paper planes or do a show where I had to set fire to bubbles or get kids to sit on a chair of nails… it was a fun job!).
I ended up doing a degree on the history of science, and then another on the sociology of education, and then a PhD on children’s science books. I kept working throughout this: part-time at the museum, but also some freelance writing. I had a job working for the UK’s National Year of Science website, which I guess was my first real work in online science (c.2001-3). After my PhD, I was lucky enough to get a lectureship at Imperial, and I developed courses for their MSc in Science Communication on science’s interactions with fiction, children and online media, as well as bringing some more sociology and policy into the core course. I went part-time last year, taking a post which involves working with scientists more, and has allowed more time to write professionally.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days?
I’m about to spend two months in North America – mainly DC, but some time in Ottawa, Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York. I want to spend most of my time focusing on writing up some research, but I hope to learn more about the similarities and differences between UK science communication and the cultures in the US and Canada while I’m there.
Back home in London, I seem to keep getting pulled into a whole load of science-themed scrapes and japes like running events or producing charity calendars… (generally agreeing to stuff late at night in the pub and then later crying over the length of my to do lists).
I have an idea for a book, but I think I’m going to come back to that in the summer and see if I still like the idea before taking it further. I have a couple of ideas for academic research projects too, but I’m keeping quiet about them for now.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Um… All of it? Or at least a load of different bits of it. When I characterise my research interests for my CV I tend to say I’m interested in science writers, with a particular focus on those who write for children, and those who write online. In reality, my interests stretch a lot further. As a teacher, I cover a fair bit of public engagement and other ideas about the rights and wrongs of science communication, as well as some science policy and things like the use of fiction or humour in science communicaiton.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? Do you find all this online activity to be a necessity in what you do?
In a similar interview to this, I once said that I blog to play around with an idea and/or keep a record of things I’ve done, in the hope that doing so in public will be useful in some way. I’d stick with that.
I was thinking more about why I blog after ScienceOnline2011, and I think it’s because I like conversing with people. It’s the possibility for interaction and mutual learning. I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s true. I also love the possibility for serendipitous discovery online. I take all the talk of echochambers, etc, and I think it’s important to think about Balkanisation of online niche communities, but digital communication does also allow for an awful lot of accidental stumbling upon awesomeness (and awesomeness accidentally stumbling upon you).
… and yes, it’s a necessity because it’s what I work in. Blogging is a research object for me, by which I mean it’s something I look at, as well as something I do for myself.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
You know, I don’t remember? Um… I guess I first discovered blogs a bit over a decade ago, and kept an eye out for science ones. I remember writing an essay as an undergrad about online communities of fossil enthusiasts c.2001 but I don’t think I looked at any blogs. I suppose I started reading more of them as there were more, and then engaging with the online science writing community a bit more actively when I had to develop a course on science online about two years ago. It was developing that course that pulled me into the community properly, for sure.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2011 for you?
Meeting people! Even the embarrassment of realising that I’d just greeted Brian Switek with ‘OMG you’re Brian the Dino Man’ (it’s always so hard to know what to say when you ‘meet’ someone you actually know already).
Thank you so much for the interview. It was great to finally meet you in person. I hope you will come again next January!
I am really bad with using my various Google and other calendars, so this is mostly a Note To Self, so have it handy if/when I get invitations etc. to know when I am actually free….
Continuing with the tradition from last three years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2011 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January 2011. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m a freelance science journalist who somehow carves out his existence in New York City. My roots are back in Ohio, however, where my first teachers injected me with science as a wee lad. I’ve been foaming at the mouth for it ever since, so much that I thought I wanted to do biological research as a career. Until I actually did some of it in college. The monotony got to me fairly quickly.
Having an unofficial license to ask dumb questions about science all day — and then write about it — seemed like a good career path for me, so I added a journalism degree. The rest is history.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
Right now, I’m a contributor to Wired.com/Wired Science and an editor (out of love) for The Time Hack — an ambitious exploration of time perception by Matthew Danzico, an amazing/intelligent/talented friend and BBC journalist.
Before all of that, I worked for Discovery.com and Space.com/LiveScience.com. Those jobs combined with a potpourri of internships prior to them took me to some interesting places in space and time. For example: Flying into the shadow of a total solar eclipse near the North Pole, living in a house full of Russian physicists for three months, chasing space shuttles and astronauts across the country, etc.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I’ve been working extremely hard for Wired Science since I joined the team in October 2010, but I’m now splitting my time in half between that and freelancing. Needless to say, there are a lot of rabbits out there I now have time to chase! Other than world domination, my goals are pretty simple: Do what I love, do it the best I can, and somehow make a living in the process.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Science has the unique ability to provide the most current, thorough and valid conclusions about the universe we live in. No other discipline, belief, philosophy, manner or being — or whatever you want to call it — can claim that. Meanwhile, the Internet is a vast and evolving communications organism.
When you pair science with the web, some truly astonishing shit happens. Notwithstanding the phenomenally improved scientific collaboration, data sharing, publication speed, etc. you have a prime medium to satiate the public’s interest in science. Sharing tales of this knowledge with people, using one of the greatest inventions our species has produced, is something that’s difficult to describe in words. You can tell stories unlike any other medium can, with a barrage of text, video, audio, and — budget permitting — a healthy dose of interactivity.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others? How do you integrate all of your online activity into a coherent whole? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
It’s funny to me, as I write for a living, but my personal blog is often the first thing I neglect in pursuit of other passions/hobbies, e.g. photography, reading, movies, travel, tickle fights, etc. Pounding out a news story or blog post for pay is easy enough, but my personal space transforms me into a strange, inefficient and over-thinking writer. I’m not sure why, so someone’s welcome to tell me. Anyway, I’m trying to overcome this hurdle and develop my blog into a place for asides that emerge during my news reporting. You know, the stuff you can’t write or explore in the mainstream (e.g. what do penis spines look like?).
Social networks, especially Twitter, are crucial to my work in so many ways. Once I get over the initial time investment of understanding how they work, I learn to make them work for me . An example with Twitter: Without it, I wouldn’t be as up-to-date on the latest science news, find as many exclusive story ideas, gain familiarity with topics that I can eventually cover, or stay on top of trending/emerging themes in science. There was a post I read about how some people are extraordinary filters of information (I can’t recall where). Well, it’s true. Just look at Steve Silberman, a friend of mine and a fantastic science writer. He’s one of my top sources of information because he’s an extraordinary filter of what’s out there on the web. He almost always shares items that are interesting and relevant to me. Build a diverse network of these people from many disciplines, and you can save yourself oodles of time, not to mention self-loathing for not being an omniscient Internet-scanning robot.
“Integrate … into a coherent whole” isn’t the right phrase for how I treat social networking; it’s more like compartmentalization. I say this because I don’t have the cognitive capacity to handle a firehouse of tweets from hundreds of people everyday, let alone my RSS reader. So I break things up into groups that make sense. On Twitter: writers, scientists, publications, PIOs, etc. On Facebook: friends, family, professional colleagues, etc. In this way, social networking becomes manageable — ignore what you don’t have time for/aren’t interested in at the moment, and focus on what’s important. This style makes my online activity a positive and powerful element in my daily routine.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites?
I encountered them in college and started my first (now-defunct) science blog in 2005, but it wasn’t until 2006 that I was fully conscious of how many were out there, their depth and their promise. That was thanks to an internship at Discover magazine under Amos Zeeberg, an amazing web editor who’s still kicking butt there today.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2011 for you? Any suggestions for next year?
The best part, plain and simple, was meeting people I knew only over the internet. The event allowed me to get a real feel for who these strangers are, and foster some true human-to-human connections with them. It was also fun to see how much people distort their actual physical appearance online (e.g. silly avatars, pics outdated by 10 years, MySpace’d mugshots, etc.).
Suggestions? Sure. Science writer David Harris, on his own accord, hosted a great Twitter-based networking game at NASW in 2010. It forced me to meet new people that I still speak with today, and I think a social networking-powered activity like that would be phenomenally appropriate at ScienceOnline2012. Note that great prizes to motivate people really helps.
Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, or to your science reading and writing?
All of the sessions stick with me to this day, but I found the most value in those on creating/maintaining online journalism standards and what makes online science writing better/different/worse. These both cemented concerns I’ve encountered during my work, as well as introduced me to new ways of seeing things. I certainly feel more cognizant of problems I could cause (and avoid) as a writer.
Thank you so much for the interview. I hope to see you again soon, and at ScienceOnline2012 in January.
Hear the amazing story of Darwin’s finches when legendary evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant present highlights of their life’s work on Monday, April 11 at 7pm in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences auditorium, downtown Raleigh. Free.
Peter Grant is professor emeritus of zoology, and Rosemary Grant is a retired senior research scholar, both in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton. In their dogged study of a population of birds popularly known as “Darwin’s finches,” the Grants have won renown for detecting and recording evolution in action, and proving and extending the theories of pioneering evolutionist Charles Darwin, work for which they were recently awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize.
For much of the public, the work of the Grants first came to light in Jonathan Weiner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of their efforts, “The Beak of the Finch.” Published in 1994, the book detailed the couple’s arduous, yearly six-month stay in tents on Daphne Major, a desolate volcanic island 600 miles west of Ecuador. There, since 1973, they have undertaken what was described in Weiner’s book as one of the most intensive and valuable animal studies ever conducted in the wild.
“We choose a single group of related species for close scrutiny,” the Grants wrote, “and attempt to answer the following questions: Where did they come from, how did they diversify, what caused them to diversify as much as they did (and no more) and over what period of time did this happen?” What the Grants have shown through their relentless study and cataloging of 14 varieties of island finches is how beak size and shape evolve through natural selection within a dramatically changing environment, according to certain mechanisms and conditions.
This presentation is made possible through a partnership between the Museum, North Carolina State University’s WM Keck Center for Behavioral Biology, and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent).
You can find all about my online presence at http://coturnix.org. Views presented on this blog and all other online spaces are mine and do not represent the views of Scientific American or its owners (NPG and McMillan).
