In its 166+ year history, Scientific American has changed and evolved in different directions many times. There were periods when it was a densely-packed, jargony, almost unreadable publication aiming for a small niche of super-geek readers, and there were periods (like the last couple of decades, fortunately for all of us) when the magazine went back to its original mission of being a premier popular science magazine, accessible to readers of all backgrounds. There were times when technology, engineering, patents and “hard sciences” dominated its pages, and also better times (like now, just look around!), when the publication adopted a broad coverage of all areas of science.
But no matter what period it was, people have read (or tried to read, or pretended they could read and understand) the magazine in its entirety, regardless of the subject matter. This includes some readers who themselves were prominent leaders in their scientific disciplines. And sometimes they’d say something about that reading habit in public. Here are two examples from anthropology.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the founders of Anthropology, said, among else, this in his 1977 Massey Lecture:
Let me start with a personal confession. There is a magazine which I read faithfully each month from the first line to the last, even though I don’t understand all of it; it is the Scientific American. I am extremely eager to be as informed as possible of everything that takes place in modern science and its new developments.
To see the context in which he uttered these words, you can listen to the lecture here, read it online here, or buy it in book form here.
Alfred Gell, another prominent anthropologist, wrote this in his 1999 book (really a collection of essays) The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, on page 24:
You can read the book online here or buy the book here.
Thanks to my brother for bringing my attention to these two quotes.
If you find similar quotes by other notable people from the past, let me know so I can post them here.
I posted 19 times in March. That is, on A Blog Around The Clock only (not counting the posts on The Network Central, The SA Incubator, Video of the Week, Image of the Week, or editing Guest Blog and Expeditions).
Big news of the month – ScienceOnlineNOW news and ScienceOnline2013 date:
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. 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 background? Any scientific education?
Like a lot of us in the Carolinas, I’m a transplanted Northerner. I grew up in the great state of Rhode Island, spent some time in Vermont, and then went back to RI where I got my B.S. in marine biology at URI. I worked in an environmental testing lab for a bit after graduation, then had an internship with the Rhode Island state Marine Fisheries Division before budget cuts sent me south for grad school. I joined up with the Rulifson lab at East Carolina University, where I finished off my M.S. in Biology and am now working on a PhD in Coastal Resource Management. Basically I never grew out of my childhood shark phase and my main research interest is interactions between marine apex predators and fisheries.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’ve had the good luck to have a little experience in all three angles of fisheries research. I got an inside view of fisheries management in Rhode Island that gave me perspective on how difficult a job that can be. I’ve been on the academic side of it through grad school, and our lab works extensively with commercial fishermen, so I get to talk to them and get their side of the story as well. So that’s been pretty valuable.
My Master’s work was on the feeding habits of spiny dogfish overwintering off of North Carolina, which allowed me to experiment with a non-lethal method of collecting shark gut contents and get into a little predator-prey theory. I’ve also been involved in some other dogfish projects using acoustic telemetry, which has let me do some of the cool stuff I used to be amazed by on the Discovery Channel growing up. Currently I’m putting together a project using a combination of fishery surveys and acoustic tracking to identify shark nurseries within the North Carolina sounds.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Right now securing time, gear, and funding for that shark nursery project is keeping me busy (and up at night). I’m still in the middle of taking classes for the PhD program as well, which takes up a lot of free time. I’m on track to begin some pilot studies in the field this summer, so if anyone wants some (unpaid) experience working with sharks in lovely North Carolina…
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
This is probably the really obvious answer that everyone gives, but outreach is a great benefit of your research out there online. I’ve had people I’ve never met at conferences come up and ask me about things they saw on the blog, which is still a really surreal experience every time it happens. It’s also put me in this community of scientists and general science fans that I would have never even been aware of otherwise. In some ways it’s made it easier to set up new projects, because there’s this record of things I’ve done that’s out there way before any of it gets published. But overall I’d say the people you make connections with is probably the most valuable aspect of communicating science online.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Ya Like Dags? was what got me into this, and I use Twitter basically as a complement to the blog. I do have a Facebook page, but I use that more for personal stuff so there’s really not much there. I’ve only really scratched the surface with Google+; I have a page on there but I really only post links to new posts on the blog. I really haven’t found the need to sit on G+ and check out posts the way I do sometimes on Twitter. One thing Twitter has affected is the quantity (and maybe quality) of posts on the blog: where I used to have posts made up of just links on the blog, now I can just instantly make people aware of things I stumble across that are neat on Twitter. So the overall number of posts have gone down, but the posts are all actual content now (no offense to bloggers who put out a lot of link posts). Overall I think it’s been a net positive, and at some points I’m pretty sure the Twitter feed gets more attention than the blog.
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?
Deep Sea News and Pharyngula were probably my gateway drugs into science blogs, and of course Southern Friend Science followed very quickly after them. By seeing what other blogs those would link to, I was able to see just how big this community is and discover new blogs to read. I started out just leaving some comments on DSN and SFS, and then I did some guest posts for my friend Matt on his Marine Music blog, which lead to me actually meeting Kevin and Andrew in real life and starting my own. So marine blogs figure pretty heavily into the “science blogs” list of bookmarks. Obviously I have to shout-out the other blogs on the Southern Fried network, and I think we’ve done a good job getting a lot of quality content on there. Christie always has some really insightful posts (now at Science Sushi) and SeaMonster has a really cool mix of science and general ocean interest that I really think helps show scientists as “real people.” Tetrapod Zoology is always a fun read because you can tell Darren has a blast writing his posts, which makes reading about a subject as potentially bland as taxonomy really enjoyable. Some non-science ocean blogs I really enjoy include The Dented Bucket, which captures the more artistic side of commercial fishing really well, and some of the blogs about shark ecotourism (Underwater Thrills and Da Shark in particular). I met some pretty awesome people who write outside of my discipline at Science Online, though PsySociety stands out both for having some great writing about psychology and for being able to hang with the ocean bloggers.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
Honestly, ScienceOnline 2012 was probably the most well-run conference I’ve ever been to. The venue was great, lots of opportunities for good conversation, and the only free lunch I’ve ever seen at a conference. ScienceOnline was so smooth that it actually made me mad at other conferences I go to regularly for the way they’re run. I think the way SciO really facilitates conversation, both through the “unconference” format and having plenty of places to sit and chat, is probably the best reason to go. And it doesn’t shy away from the tough conversations either. With all conferences the networking is really the best reason to go, and SciO acknowledges that and does a great job making it the main focus. I really wouldn’t change a thing, and I’m excited for next year’s already.
Thank you for the interview. Hope to see you next year!
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. 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)?
Though I’ve lived in southern New Jersey for the last 12 years, I was born in Detroit and still feel like a Michigander most of the time, thanks to online newspapers, journals and photos. I also work for Michigan State University by telecommuting, so I talk to people in East Lansing every day.
Philosophically, my goal is to live in the moment as much as I can and make that moment a great one.
What is your background? Any scientific education? Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’ve always loved animals, so from the time I was about 10 or so, I wanted to be a veterinarian. But I also loved to read anything and everything – from trashy novels to literature to essays. When I graphed my interests during a career class in high school, my twin interests of writing and science ended up all alone in the top left quadrant, with no jobs or careers in the space.
I went to Michigan State as a pre-vet major, so I took lots of biology courses, but realized after my freshman year that I didn’t have enough money to get an undergraduate degree and then go to vet school. (I naively thought that I could apply and get in to vet school after my sophomore year; once on campus I learned that no one, not even super geniuses did that.) So while literature was my love, I switched my major to journalism, thinking it would be easier to find a job in three years. I quickly found out that not very many people liked writing about science or math, and since I liked learning new things and talking to the scientists, it kind of became my niche. I don’t think there were many official science writing programs at the time and even if there were, I hadn’t heard of them.
After I graduated, I worked for the Michigan Dental Association for three years, then returned to Michigan State to take a position in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources writing about research and outreach. I stayed there for 13 years until I moved to New Jersey in 2000.
I took a hiatus from science writing for a few years, working for the New Jersey State Bar Association and the LeBow College of Business at Drexel University from 2000 to 2003. I had just decided that I needed to get my resume in order to start looking for another science writing position, when my old department chair at Michigan State called and asked me if I would be interested in doing part of my old job long distance on contract. It was rather serendipitous. Today, I would say I’m technically a free-lancer, but I have a group of long-term clients, including the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State, that take up most of my time. I also write for Breastcancer.org, an education site for people diagnosed with breast cancer, and help out with social media for CORE Health Care, a brain injury rehab facility in Texas.
Looking back, it’s interesting to me that I started out doing mainly writing and print production work. My pica ruler and my Pantone PMS books were always in use. Today, I still do a lot of writing, but it’s all for the web, Facebook, Twitter or blogs. I think I’ve produced only one printed piece in the last three years. I’ve also learned html coding basics and can create and edit websites in several platforms. I’ve learned how to create jazzy Powerpoint slides and fillable Acrobat documents. I think it’s telling that I use my printer/scanner/fax machine mainly for scanning and not for printing. I can’t remember the last time I sent a fax to anyone.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Professionally, my goals are to help my clients strategically present their work clearly and concisely through a variety of media to achieve their goals, whether that’s more customers or being seen as the go-to group for sustainability research. I want everyone to see that while science can sometimes be hard, it’s also fun, helpful and enriches all of our lives. I want to keep up with the latest trends in news and media, all the while considering how they can benefit my clients. The aspect of my job that I enjoy the most is learning from the scientists I talk to – I don’t have degrees in medicine or entomology or social science, but I learn something new every day. To me, that’s the essence of living.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The idea that scientists can use the web to tell their own stories, in words and images and videos, is fascinating to me. In the past, scientists have felt handcuffed when trying to communicate directly with the public. Today, some of the most popular bloggers are scientists.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Blogging, Twitter, Facebook and other social media all figure into my work. I can’t even imagine how I would keep up with what’s going on in so many fields without them – they are absolutely a necessity.
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 ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The session on whether PIOs need journalists anymore, led by Haley Bridger and Karl Bates, was the most pertinent to me. The discussion reinforced what I suspected (that in many cases, journalists aren’t needed) and gave me some excellent tips and ideas on how to connect with bloggers and how to tweet news.
Just being around all the people at ScienceOnline was energizing – I still have the hashtag marked in my TweetDeck dashboard.
Thank you for the interview. Hope to see you next year!
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. See all the interviews in this series here.
Today my guest is Michele Arduengo, Scientific Communications Specialist at Promega Corporation (blog, Twitter).
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 background? Any scientific education? Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I guess you can say that these days I eat my grits with lots of cheese. I was born and raised near Atlanta, GA, but now call southern Wisconsin home. I hold a PhD earned through the Biochemistry, Cell and Developmental Biology Program at Emory University in Atlanta, where I studied cell differentiation in C. elegans.
I had difficulty staying focused while I was a graduate student and was constantly doing things like taking adjunct teaching positions at local colleges, enrolling graduate level theology courses, trekking off on watercolor painting workshops, and even participating in a lay chaplaincy program at Emory University Hospital. The chaplaincy program was an incredibly valuable experience, and it was in this program that for me science, medicine and ethics collided head first, and I began to get a broader view of what it means to be a scientist in the “real world”. These experiences led me to participate in a high school ethics teaching program and eventually to team teach a seminar in science and religion for college students.
After finishing my PhD I took a tenure-track teaching position at Morningside College in Sioux City, IA. (I bucked the system and didn’t do a postdoc.) I loved teaching, and at Morningside I was able to broaden my knowledge of biology as the only molecular geneticist in a biology department that included a parasitologist, zoologist, paleobiologist, and an ecologist. The experience teaching in Sioux City was great; it was the perfect antidote to narrow PhD training, and I loved learning about prairie ecology, participating in frog and toad calling surveys and teaching introductory biology. However, I missed city life (particularly the food scene), so when the opportunity arose to move to Madison, WI, and work for Promega, I seized it.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Most of my time and passion centers on being a mom. There are days when my goal is simply to get out the door in the morning and not forget to take my daughter to school. There are other days when my goals are loftier. At work I think about writing and the best way to communicate new science technologies to researchers. As a writer, I am always searching for ways to improve. I confess that I still do not know what I am going to be when I grow up, but someday I hope to craft the perfect sentence.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I’m curious to see how the web can facilitate the development of communities across communities, particularly to see if science communities can interact meaningfully with non-science communities.
I am concerned that the ability to personalize news pages, subscribe to particular news feeds or blogs, actually makes it easier for people to become more isolated. People connect with others across the world, but the only those who share the same interests or views. Back when folks only had access to one or two newspapers and three network TV channels, they had to listen to what was offered. People had to interact with the people around or not interact at all. So, is all this social media fostering the formation of lots of little islands of like-minded people, or can social media and the web really be used to cross-fertilize, to form vibrant diverse communities that drive innovation and a better world?
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Promega Corporation went “paperless” in 2009, discontinuing all of our print technical magazines (one of which I edited). We converted our print magazines into two online technical publications and began a corporate blog, Promega Connections. As one of the charter bloggers, I have been involved in the development of the philosophy that guides our blogging activities. We see Promega Connections as a place for scientists to come to read things that are interesting to them, whether it’s technical tips, summaries of peer-reviewed literature, career discussions or just fun stuff. We are not looking to measure return-on-investment; we are looking to build relationships with our readers. The writing I do for the blog is the favorite part of my job. Actually, I like it so much that I always feel a little guilty—like I’m not really doing work—when I’m researching and writing Promega Connections pieces.
To learn a little more about blogging and gain some experience that I could translate to my work at Promega, I started my own personal blog, Grits and Purls. Occasionally I write a little science there, but mostly I write about being a mom. These posts are usually recycled into columns for my hometown newspaper. So, when I do write about science, I’m bringing science to a new audience.
To understand something, I have to do it. So to get a feel for social media, I am also on Twitter, Facebook and was on Google+. Twitter is a great tool for following other bloggers and discovering new ones. It’s really how I keep up with other science writers. I use Twitter more than aggregators, RSS feeds or anything else. Facebook seems still to remain in the personal realm for me as a user, although our Promega Facebook page routinely gets technical and customer service questions posted to it. I was on Google+ for a while. Lots of people were there, but nobody was there who wasn’t also on Twitter, so I dropped it. Pinterest is intriguing; I’m interested to see what happens with it.
I am connecting with science writers I would have never met otherwise through social media. I like that, but I also think face-to-face contact is important. And, frankly nothing gets my attention these days like a hand-written note arriving via snail mail.
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 started poking around the science blogosphere just as Promega Connections was becoming reality. I found ScienceBlogs.com (where I discovered Janet Stemwedel, Ed Yong, Travis Saunders and Peter Janiszewski) and ResearchBlogging.org; I followed the “Pepsigate” controversy and then found other science blogging networks. I joined Twitter, and that is where I really began to engage with other science writers and bloggers, and it’s where I learned about science online.
This year, after registering for #scio12, I shamelessly copied Science Goddess’ idea of blog visits based on the scio12 attendees list (I wasn’t as thorough as she was; I took the random visit approach). I discovered many wonderful writers this way. I particularly love the writings and musings of @leafwarbler on his Posterous blog and Meera Lee Sethi on The Science Essayist. The “I am Science” and “This is what a scientist looks like” tweets and photo essays that have grown out of #scio12 have been absolutely fascinating.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I am having a blast with the Science Scribing that Perrin Ireland shared with the #scio12 this year. Not only did I use it for sessions at #scio12, but I have also used it in some literature reviews that I have posted on the Promega Connections blog. My advice—have even more Science Scribing next year.
I loved the scio12 conference and learned a lot. I found it easiest to talk to people and connect in the small group for the tour of the arboretum that I attended. I’m just not a person who will start a conversation with someone during a coffee break and feel at all “normal” about it. It would be nice to be able to work a few more small-group activities/field trips into the meeting, where conversation might come more easily for those of us who will gladly speak in a formal setting, shout into cyberspace, but quickly duck and run for cover at an informal gathering.
Thank you for the interview. Hope to see you next year!
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. 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 background? Any scientific education?
Photo: Russ Creech
Thanks for the invite, Bora. I currently live in Cambridge, England with my wife and two daughters where I work for the Laboratory of Molecular Biology as a Career Development Fellow (aka, post-doc). I’m originally from Columbus, Ohio and went to college at Duke in Durham, NC. In college, I majored in biology with a minors in history and, accidentally, in chemistry. I started working in a fruit fly research lab during my sophomore year and have been doing biology research ever since. The only other thing I have done so consistently is play rugby.
My research has a theme of understanding variation between individuals, which puts me in the odd philosophical position of generally ignoring the “average” and spending a lot of time thinking about diversity. I try to bring that way of thinking and of love of the scientific process to everything I do.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
As I mentioned before, I went to college at Duke, where I began working in research labs as an undergraduate. After college, I took a year off to play rugby in England in Bath with Avon Rugby Football Club. While I was in England, I applied to graduate schools and wound up going to Washington University in St. Louis to get my PhD in molecular cell biology. For my PhD, I investigated the applicability of evolutionary experiments on yeast and the genetic basis of cellular variation in humans. I spent most of my free time playing hooker (and flanker, but people seem to only remember the “hooker” bit) for the St. Louis Bombers rugby club in the US Rugby Super League, which was the highest level of club rugby in the US at the time. In 2008, I started blogging at the suggestion of Mike White, a post-doc in my thesis lab, who was looking for a way to get me to stop pestering him with my crazy ideas.
I finished my PhD at the start of 2010 and moved to England to study how a cells decode the complex information encoded in the genome and newly transcribed RNAs to make splicing decisions in a crowded and chaotic environment. My research incorporates elements from the fields of evolution, genetics, genomics, cell biology, biochemistry, and statistics.
At about the same time, Mike White and I created The Finch & Pea, which we bill as an “online science pub”. We started The Finch & Pea for a couple of reasons. As researchers, we felt it was very important that we could really “own” the content with which we were associated. We also wanted a more flexible science communication space. We are passionate about science, but we both have wide ranging and divergent interests. Instead of only focusing on what was in common (i.e., traditional science communication) we wanted to create a space where we could be our whole selves, all the time.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Obviously, my research is a major time commitment. Most of my time outside the lab is dedicated to the little experiment in human developmental genetics my wife and I have been running for the past three years. In the little bit of the day (or middle of the night) that is left, I’m very passionate about communicating the joys of the scientific process.
If you visit The Finch & Pea, you will notice that I spend most of my time explicitly not writing about the business of science or translating papers into non-expert language. Instead, I like to take the scientific worldview and apply it to everyday things (and TV/movies), which is pretty much what I do all the time in real life to which my wife will bear exasperated witness. My major goal is to help people learn the methods and pleasures of applying the scientific process, without worrying about whether they learn the jargon or the trivia. A scientific life is a better life, a more fun life.
I’m also a bit of a crusader for a more complete understanding of evolutionary theory. We have a bad habit of equating natural selection with evolution, but natural selection is simply the first of several forces that drive evolution. We only really started to understand some of the other forces, like random drift, once natural selection, genetics, and molecular biology began to be unified. The way we talk about evolution often predates modern evolutionary synthesis. One of the architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis, Theodosius Dobzhansky famously stated, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” He certainly meant all of evolutionary theory. Biology, its beauty, its quirks, all of it, only makes sense with a more complete understanding of evolutionary theory than we are currently offering the public.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The non-linearity of the Web is really exciting to me. Traditional science communication in print limited the reader to the experience that the writer thinks will be relevant to them. On the Web, a story can be surrounded in depth and only one click away by links to other detailed analyses, source materials, alternative views, and tangentially related content. This network can be provided by the original author and can be added to by commenter or other authors providing links in their own content.
This means that a reader can plot their own course that suits their own interests (or even mood that day) through the information. The content of this network creates a mutually supportive community experience that invites people in on their own terms.
The traditional audience for science writing is limited, but it is also only a fraction of the audience for online content. As the branches of that network are extended by creative folks finding connections the rest of us miss, we also have the potential to expand the audience for science writing by providing people who do not usually consume online science writing a way in that speaks to their interests.
It is understandable that individuals will worry about whether people accessed their article when picking their way through the network surrounding a topic. That is, however, limiting the thinking to “I’m competing for my slice of the pie” with everyone else in the network. An alternative approach is to cooperate to increase the size of the entire pie by reaching audiences that aren’t inclined read science blogs.
I think we are making a lot of progress on increasing the connectivity and efficiency of these networks, and I cannot wait to see where this goes in the near future.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Blogging gives me an outlet for ideas that would, otherwise, distract me in the lab. That is as far as the direct relationship goes. My experience within academic research is that blogging and social media are generally considered distractions that are acceptable as long as your productivity is not affected. Technically, I’m not allowed to share details of my work publicly without prior permission as it, theoretically, could affect things like future patent applications.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
As an American in England, the time difference and distance isolates me from many of my favorite people. It was great fun getting to be in the same time zone for a weekend. It was also very exciting to discover that the people in the science communication community are the same online and in person, which made both existing and new connections feel more authentic. I think the depth and variety of conversations between individuals in the science communication community doesn’t give us any option other than to be who we really are. And, it is very exciting to be part of a community with that kind of depth and character.
ScienceOnline2012 inspired me to think about creatively representing how science permeates and inspires the lives of people like us. An immediate result was the addition of the new “Song of the Week” feature to The Finch & Pea. You all know Marie-Claire Shanahan as a brilliant science education researcher, teacher, and story-teller, but she is also very knowledgeable independent music fanatic. For her “Song of the Week” pick she blends her loves of music and science to talk about the thoughts a particular song inspires in her. Personally, I have zero musical talent. So, it is really fun to see someone extract so much from songs in a way that would not be accessible to me without Marie-Claire’s writing. It’s also much better writing, at least to a fan of science, than the typical, overwrought reviews that generally pass as music writing.
Probably the most concise way to sum up my experience at ScienceOnline2012 is that I’m planning on coming back for ScienceOnline2013.
Thank you for the interview. Hope to see you next year!
The ScienceOnlineNOW website is now live. This will be the hub, the central place, for all of our activities.
ScienceOnlineNOW is the home of ScienceOnline, a non-profit organization that facilitates discussion about science through online networks and face-to-face events.
From there, you will be able to access the archives of the past conferences, including ScienceOnline2012 (and its wiki), ScienceOnline2011 (wiki), and soon, once we put all the pieces together, the archives of saved information about the older conferences (2007-2010). You’ll find all the relevant news and updates on all of our activities.
Our community is growing. The main event in Raleigh is not capable of hosting everyone who would like to come. So people in our community decided to organize their own events modeled after ScienceOnline and following its core principles.
This year for the first time, there will be three ScienceOnline events (or series of events) on the West Coast – in Seattle, Vancouver, and the Bay Area.
On April 13th, 2013, there will be the first Science Online Teen in New York City – stay tuned for more.
Our online tools
Over the past few years, we have developed a couple of online aggregators for science news, specifically for science coverage on blogs. First we built Science Blogging Aggregated (aka Scienceblogging.org) (learn more), a relatively simple aggregator of feeds from major science blogging networks, group blogs and news blogs.
A little later, we developed a more complex aggregator – ScienceSeeker.org (learn more). We keep developing it further – it now has many of the functionalities of ResearchBlogging.org, plus ways to filter the information in various ways.
We intend to develop it further – adding additional sources of science news, conversation and information pooled from other, non-blog platforms, including traditional media sources, social networks, and more.
But the most important new development in our plans is the Science Concierge, an advanced search engine with a human editor touch, including a system for micropayments, microgrants and crowdfunding for science communicators and others. This would enable readers to financially reward writers, granters to be matched with grantees for various projects in science communication, education, citizen science, small research projects and more.
But building this takes time, effort, skill and money. Thus, we have applied for some grants recently. For one of these grants YOU can help us. We have applied for the Knight News Challenge. Proposals that get most “Likes”, shares, reblogs and comments have the greatest chance of getting funded, so please go to our proposal and give it some love! Thank you!
And stay tuned – more updates will be coming soon.
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to Blog Around the Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where you are coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your background? Any scientific education?
I was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in its suburbs in Maryland, but I’ve also lived in various towns in New Jersey and New York over the years. I’ve been a science geek all my life, reading Scientific American and Discover as a kid and bugging my family with what I thought were cool science facts. I don’t really know how that all started—none of my family were in the science biz. I wound up in a “science and technology” program in high school, majored in biology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and earned my Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. While at Hopkins, I used biochemistry, cell biology, and molecular biology techniques to study cell division. Then, I did a postdoc at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
While in grad school, I realized that I didn’t want to work at the bench, though I still loved science. Actually, writing my thesis made me realize that I loved writing about science. After that, I looked for opportunities to do just that. As a postdoc, I wrote for and edited an NIH newsletter as a volunteer, then applied for science writing jobs.
I worked for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; publisher of Science) on their GrantsNet and Science’s Next Wave websites, writing about how to get funding and about science and non-science careers for researchers. Next, the writing bug took me to the American Chemical Society (ACS), where I was a journalist writing about chemistry methods and proteomics. I freelanced for a while, then returned to ACS, where I am now the senior science writer in the Science Communications group in the Office of Public Affairs. So I guess I’m a scientist-turned-journalist-turned-communications professional.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I’m really enjoying Twitter these days. And my related goal would be to try and keep up with my Twitter feed—but I’m failing miserably at it! My latest strategy is just to jump in for a while, absorb what I can, then jump back out.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Again, I would have to say Twitter. It’s amazing how some people can be so poetic and impart so much scientific information and wisdom in just 140 characters. I’m so jealous!
How does (if it does) blogging fit in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I haven’t blogged yet, but I may start soon at ACS. I wanted to wait until after attending the ScienceOnline unconference so I could learn a little more about blogging before actually doing it. I also tweet now and then as @acspressroom, especially during our ACS National Meetings, which we hold twice a year. However, a colleague of mine is the primary tweeter. I haven’t gotten into Google Plus, which looks to me like another Facebook, and I only visit FB for personal use right now.
I find that my personal Twitter account, @medbiochem, is my most useful online venue. I learn so much from reading tweets from the people I follow there that I can then incorporate into my work life as a science communicator.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline 2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The best aspect of ScienceOnline 2012 for me was meeting several of my Twitter “idols” and fellow science writers. I especially enjoyed the session on Blogging the Mel Brooks Way, run by @davidmanly and @DrRubidium. I picked up lots of little tips on blogging from them. It was also interesting hearing from researchers in various sessions. When I was in research, the Internet was just being born (I’m dating myself here). Now, some researchers are embracing social media and making full use of it, while others are afraid of saying something that will come back at them, especially at tenure-decision time. I had no idea that scientists’ use of these Web forums was so complicated. That was eye-opening. My only suggestion for next year would be to keep up the good work! It was a fascinating and inspiring time!
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. 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 background? Any scientific education?
I grew up in a small town in western North Carolina in the foothills. I wasn’t a hillbilly, but I was related to a lot of them. I mean that in a positive way to better define where I was coming from and influences in my life. Western NC people seem to have an independent streak and a number of them are characters rather than caricatures. City people seem to have a lot of distractions. You always knew of people making things or building things. People spent a lot of time outdoors.
I grew up in a furniture family. My father was a partner in a small upholstered furniture factory. I worked during summers pushing around frames or helping out in different jobs from an early age. If a job was too nasty for an employee to agree to do it, I usually got the job. I learned quickly that I didn’t want to spend my life doing manual labor.
Ever since I can remember, I was interested in science. I had a little lab set up in the basement where I could get away from my sisters. I would get bits of stuff for presents and sometimes was able to get my parents to pay for some glassware. Luckily, I did not blow up the house, but ended up learning a good bit. I ended up getting into college at NC State University and majored in chemistry. I thank my family for that opportunity. So, four years later, I had a chemistry degree with a significant biochemistry course load and there was a major recession.
I ended up interviewing at eighteen different companies with a nice stack of rejection letters to show for it. The last place I interviewed was with Ivy Carroll at the Research Triangle Institute for a job as a junior chemist. One of my professors, Bill Tucker, had recommended me as he saw that I was a dexterous lab worker though not the brightest in the class. After a long drawn out stay back at home, I was ready to hit the road as my older sister lived in Tampa at the time. I was going on the road with her to see what I could do down in Florida when I called Ivy on a Friday to see if there was an update to the job. He said they were going to offer me a job and asked when I wanted to start. I told him I would be there Monday morning. I don’t think he was expecting that. I lived in my MGB for a month since you only get paid at the end of the month. I was able to stay with friends many nights, but there is a bit of vagabond feel when you have nothing but a bag of clothes.
I worked under Ivy and Jack Kepler for ten years making high specific activity radiolabeled organic compounds in very small amounts. About seven years into it, I realized that there was only so much upward movement for a BS chemist. I interviewed a few places, but almost always came down to the fact that they wanted a PhD. There were postdocs in my lab that made less money than me and some of them had friends pumping gas. I figured a decade in grad school to make less than I was making with a lower degree didn’t compute.
I had a decision to make about my future. I could go to graduate school or go into another field. I made a list of things I wanted. I wanted to be able to work anywhere. I wanted to go to school at night since I didn’t want to be poor again. I wanted something that I might be able to work for myself eventually. This new thing called computer science was interesting since NCSU had a night program that taught computer programming. I jumped at it. RTI even had a reimbursement program which was sweet. Three years later I had a piece of paper and wind in my sails.
RTI was very good about me transitioning to programming. I was able to join a great project that was just getting started at the time (1983.) Early on, I was the main computer guy and loved it. I programmed on a Heathkit H-8 in FORTRAN. I also did some mainframe COBOL work and then some VAX work for a number of years. When the dual floppy PC first came out, it was happy days. I had a blast developing PC to instrument communications in C so we could replace the teletypes and paper tape outputs. It was like magic that the data would come out of a liquid scintillation spectrometer and directly into the computer! We made our own interface cables. Later, I helped move the department to data processing systems on employee desks. I still remember having to convince people that the computers needed Ethernet cards. Many people didn’t think they needed email and most refused until they needed to communicate with their college kids. Things moved faster then.
I wrote software to automate all sorts of analyses from EIAs and RIAs to data processing of liquid scintillation spectrometers to calculating genetic information on mice. The conversion of old FORTRAN to Pascal and C code was my specialty for a while. Later, I used first generation relational databases to work with larger datasets. I also did a lot of software development for the business side and wrote an elaborate contract and grant costing system for our business unit.
I gained a manager role for a while. You would have to ask my employees if I was a good manager, but things seemed to work out. For the past six years, I have been back at software development full time doing database driven web sites. I have the opportunity now to do some front end work with HTML5 and CSS3 to go along with the backend work with databases and middleware.
I also serve on the RTI IRB and do data security analysis on the submissions on one of our three committees. Serving on the IRB lets me see a wider range of the research we do such as social science and clinical trials. I also meet people I would never have met otherwise across our diverse institute. In a way, I am also giving back to the organization that has allowed me to do things that a lot of developers don’t get to do. I always learn something with every IRB submission. I am very happy to have had the opportunity to be involved in human research subject issues.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
By far the most interesting past projects I have had were building specialized systems for enzyme and radio immunoassays. These ended up being elaborate multi-calibration curve systems due to the flaky nature of the assays at the time. It allowed us to do much better science since it allowed the lab staff to make quick decisions on time-sensitive techniques. One past and current project is one for a NIH institute which is a very complex task management system with many different inputs from task management, inventory/transactions, accounting, quality assurance inspection scheduling and control, and a number of other inputs. It is very complex, but staff members tell me it is easy to use. I guess the most interesting part of my current work is day to day consulting for a diverse scientific staff who are always coming up with novel ideas. My goal is for the science to drive the software rather than the other way around. Being a scientist/geek hybrid helps me accomplish that.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I would say there are two divergent paths these days with professional and personal. Professionally, the life of a software developer is one of constant reinvention. Technology changes so fast that you have to rely on being able to learn quickly and change quickly. My latest goals are improving my skills at basic HTML5 and CSS3 to go along with my skills in building database driven web applications. As a secondary goal, I am trying to learn Clojure which is a Lisp variant that has become popular for concurrent processing. It is very different than the procedure code that most of us use, but it is very powerful, especially in concurrent processing with multiple cores. You never know what interesting problem will pop up in contract research. Some esoteric things I have learned over the years for fun ended up being a great solution to problems years later.
Personally, we are in the process of a home addition. Within the addition will be a new wood studio for me so I can get back to woodworking. I have worked with the wood lathe for decades and served a long period of time as a leader of the local and national woodturning associations. I have taught a number of workshops at the NCSU Crafts Center in woodturning, but I really haven’t had a decent studio space in a decade. I look forward to spending time working with my hands again. My goals for this are to advance my skills and develop some signature pieces in the next few years. Lathe work is my specialty, but I also build furniture and whatever else I dream up. I also hope to enhance the partnership with a special person shares my life.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Science without communication is a hobby. We know how to communicate between those of us who are in on the specific scientific nomenclature. We spend an inordinate amount of time to reduce several words to very specific words when we write for each other. It is when we have to write for people who don’t know the secret code words that we can fail. The public can look at a scientific paper and it must be like looking at an alien language. I remember trying to tell my parents what I did for a living when I was a synthetic chemist.
There is a great need to explain science to the general public as well as have resources for those who have more advanced science backgrounds. The different science shows on cable television do a great job of showing interesting scientific topics for consumption by the general public, but I don’t know that they educate the public as much as entertain them. The web has a much better chance of giving more long form communications if we are good at it. It is also there 24/7 for anyone to consume that has a connection.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I have only lately started blogging. My early education had very good writing classes so I had a good background in general writing and literature. Those skills gave me an advantage in many cases in my work career. I push the soft skills as I mentor younger people since those seem to set people back more than the technical skills.
Geeks take to social media immediately. We were all over early BBSs, usenet, and other systems even before the web existed. When the web started up, we jumped and haven’t looked back. I started with gophers and was an early adopter of the web. I created the first woodturning web site for the local RTP AAW chapter. I started using the web at RTI very early making prototypes of sites for use with client projects. Now, development of database driven web applications is pretty much my job.
Today, I use Twitter constantly and Google+ a lot, but Facebook is mostly used for family. I think that Twitter and Google+ offer the most to scientists and geeks. Twitter allows quick and accessible link delivery. Google+ allows for longer conversations simply because it is open ended versus 140 characters.
I also use Goodreads.com a good bit to organize my to-read list. I also use my Amazon wish list to quickly record books people note. I can see smaller and more focused social media sites becoming more useful in the same way that apps on mobile phones have become more popular.
I have experimented with live blogging user groups and meetings. I live-blogged the latest North Carolina Analytics Camp in Chapel Hill last month. It helps when the wifi is excellent.
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?
There are so many great science writers and bloggers and I don’t have enough time to get to them all. I read most of the Discover and Wired blogs. I read the ScienceBlogs for a long time. It also helps to follow one person on Twitter who streams out huge numbers of fascinating links on different science blogs and articles.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
One thing I love about Science Online is the feeling of community with the attendees. It is the same as at an art school where everyone is so engrossed in art that the outside world seems to fade away. This was my experience at Arrowmont School when I went for workshops. Nothing mattered but the arts and crafts. Science Online has that sort of vibe. I like the unconference format where sessions can be spontaneous to some degree.
The attendees have to suspend their belief for a while and open up to let things soak into their pores. I think this is harder for some people, especially those with specific ideas on what they want out of a conference. The same can be true for creativity workshops where people can’t get much out of a workshop if they don’t give up strong opinions and go with the flow.
Deborah Blum and David Dobbs session hit a strong note for me. I don’t have a lot of writing training so I was fascinated by the discussions in their session on long-form writing. I also enjoyed the shorter sessions on specific topics on the second day. I got something out of all the sessions I attended. I was sorry not to get to the blogging while female session.
It is normal for people to congregate with friends and it is a struggle to be inclusive when discussing things at an unconference. It may be helpful to have some sort of mechanism to get different people to talk to strangers. Some sort of speed dating routine could be used. You may want to crowdsource some ideas on that.
I want to thank all the organizers for a great event. I have wanted to attend for several years and followed the feeds over that time. This year, I think I was the final person who came off the waiting list. Next year, I definitely will have faster fingers to register. I look forward to it. I might also be finished with all the great books I either got in the lottery or ordered later. That was a wonderful idea.
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. 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 background, scientific education?
I’m originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I learned about the ocean from the Discovery Channel, books, and frequent visits to the Pittsburgh Zoo’s aquarium. After getting SCUBA certified as soon as I was old enough, I started attending SeaCamp, a marine science camp in the Florida Keys. I went there for five consecutive summers as a camper, and eventually worked there as a science instructor. I graduated with distinction in Biology (with a concentration in Marine Science) from Duke University in 2007, after studying abroad on the Great Barrier Reef and spending a semester at Duke’s marine lab in the Outer Banks. I earned my Masters in Marine Biology from the College of Charleston (Charleston, SC) in 2011, and am currently working on my Ph.D. at the University of Miami’s Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
David and an RJ Dunlap intern restraining an 8 foot lemon shark so that other interns can take samples. The tube in the shark's mouth is a water pump, allowing it to breathe while out of the water.
I’ve always been passionate about (more than a few have called me obsessed with) sharks. My Masters thesis focused on using state-of-the-art techniques to determine what a local shark species was eating and how it fit into the food chain without sacrificing the animal. We found the same results as a series of previous studies that had resulted in sacrificing over 10,000 sharks, and did it by taking only small muscle samples and releasing the animals unharmed. My Ph.D. dissertation will focus on, surprisingly, why sharks matter – specifically, why coral reef shark species in Florida and the Bahamas are important ecologically and economically.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Eventually, I see myself doing university-level teaching and research. These days, my time is divided between classwork (yes, technically I’m in the 20th grade, but I still have classes), using social media to educate people about the oceans, planning my dissertation, and tagging sharks in the Florida Keys. Our field program has taken over a thousand high school students and community members out with us to tag sharks and learn about the oceans, and this strong commitment to citizen science and public education is a big part of what attracted me to this lab.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I am fascinated by the use of social media to educate people about science and the environment, and to create real conservation policy changes. I’m working with colleagues in Australia to write the first published case study of using twitter to change a government policy that would have harmed an endangered species of shark.
Additionally, I’ve used our lab twitter account (@RJ_Dunlap) to teach marine biology 101 courses. I write a lesson plan, convert it into 140 character chunks (including links to YouTube videos, news articles, research papers, photos, etc) and tweet for about half an hour. A live Q & A follows. We’ve had participants from all over the world.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Running my lab (The RJ Dunlap Marine Conservation Program) social media accounts, including a blog, twitter account, and Facebook fan page, is half of my research assistantship for my Ph.D., and social media will actually be a part of my dissertation. I’m going to use advanced twitter analytical tools to track how science and conservation ideas spread across the world via twitter.
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?
Andrew Thaler, the Southern Fried Scientist, was my roommate at Duke and we’ve been close friends since. He attended Science Online 2009 and called me excitedly soon after. I started blogging on Southern Fried Science right after that, and joined twitter a few months later. At this point, I primarily find new science blogs through my twitter feed. There are so many good ones by Science Online participants and others that it’d be hard for me to name favorites, but as a marine scientist, I’m also sure to keep up with Deep Sea News. In addition to throwing legendary Science Online parties, those folks have their finger on the pulse of the marine science and conservation world.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I always leave Science Online inspired to try new things in the social media world, and this year was no exception. A University of Miami colleague and I are going to try to start a podcast based on Alok’s workshop.
Thank you for the interview. Looking forward to seeing you again next January (if not before – tagging sharks in Florida)!
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. See all the interviews in this series here.
Today my guest is Elizabeth Preston (blog, Twitter).
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 background? Any scientific education?
Thank you! I live in Chicago now, though I grew up in Syracuse and went to college in Massachusetts. In college I double-majored in English and biology, a combination that seemed to really distress people when they heard it.
I had some great biology professors and lab work opportunities in college, and wrote a senior thesis on the evolutionary genetics of malaria resistance in humans. But I found I didn’t want to stay in the lab forever. Enough PCR is enough.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
Right after college I was lucky enough to get a job I was totally unqualified for, as an assistant editor for the children’s publishing company that produces the magazines Muse and Cricket, among many others. Less than a year after that, some unusual circumstances left me running Muse on my own. It was, let’s say, a very steep learning curve for a while. (How do I assign deadlines? When are commas used in Chicago style? What are permissions?)
Over time, as I found my footing, I was able to start having fun with the magazine. Muse primarily focuses on science, but has always included stories about history and culture too. (It also has a silly streak and a bit of a sassy tone, which is fine with me.) What’s amazing is that I can really make the magazine my vision each month. I experiment with different kinds of articles, I make jokes, I wrap up this package of things I think are interesting and then send it off to a whole bunch of excited kids.
That’s not to say it’s all fun and fan letters. You can find me smashing my face against my desk on most days. But there are rewards. I also do a lot of writing for the magazine myself–partly because it’s free and I never complain about my edits, but also because I enjoy it. And in 2010 I started my blog, Inkfish, as another outlet for what I wanted to write.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
A lot of my time outside of the office goes to my blog. I’ve also done some freelance writing, and I’m looking to do more. I’m excited about writing for different audiences and reaching people who might not think of themselves as sciencey. I want to pop up in someone’s favorite magazine or website and share a compelling enough story that they don’t realize they’re reading about a subject they normally wouldn’t.
I also write poetry, which has always embarrassed me to admit. But in the past couple of years I’ve started actually trying to get published in that area, and I’ve had a few successes, so maybe it’s OK to tell people. If anyone’s looking to thicken their skin, I recommend submitting to literary journals. They’ll reject you immediately with a nice note, reject you slowly with a form letter, lose your submission for nine months and then find it again and reject you. One magazine I submitted to folded while I was waiting to hear back, so I put that in the “not a rejection” column.
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 started following 80beats and ScienceNOW a few years ago. I write a monthly feature in Muse called “Bo’s Page,” which is a set of 6 or so quirky science news stories summarized very briefly. (There’s also one made-up story mixed in, and the game is to guess which “fact” is false. The answer is at the bottom of the page.) These two blogs gave me a lot of material for Bo’s Page. But there were so many more of these interesting items than I could use in the magazine; I found that I was always regaling my friends with these tidbits, whether they liked it or not. This was part of what led me to start my own blog. It was an outlet for stories I wanted to share but didn’t have space for in the magazine–not to mention stories on, say, insect genitalia that aren’t as appropriate for the 10-to-14 crowd.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
My blogging is currently separate from my work, in that it’s not tied to Muse and I don’t get paid for it. But it is a large part of what I’m doing these days.
When I joined Twitter in the summer of 2011, it was kind of revolutionary. My blog audience started growing quickly, and I found this great community of science writers and communicators. They were so welcoming and enthusiastic (present company very much included!) that I decided I had to sign up for Science Online 2012.
Google Plus still confuses me, though.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I told my friends and family when I came back that this conference was like the mothership. I couldn’t believe I was meeting all these smart, creative, talented people who are passionate about the same things I am. It inspired me to work harder at what I’m doing and gave me faith that that work will take me to interesting places.
Thank you for the interview. Looking forward to seeing you again next January!
This post was originally published on June 27, 2006. It is somewhat out-dated so I will revisit this topic in the future with coverage of more recent research.
The origin and early evolution of circadian clocks are far from clear. It is now widely believed that the clocks in cyanobacteria and the clocks in Eukarya evolved independently from each other. It is also possible that some Archaea possess clock – at least they have clock genes, thought to have arrived there by lateral transfer from cyanobacteria.
It is not well known, though, if the clocks in major groups of Eukarya – Protista, Plants, Fungi and Animals – originated independently or out of a common ancestral clock. On one hand, the internal logic of the clock machinery appears to be the same in all Eukarya. It also appears that in all plants, fungi and animals, at least one of the core clock genes has a PAS domain. On the other hand, the identities of clock genes are vastly different between the Kingdoms. Perhaps the last common ancestor possessed something like an hourglass mechanism or even just a simple relay switch, out of which the full-fledged circadian clock evolved independently in different lines of Eukaryotes.
While it is understandable that much of the funding is targeted at medically important research, leading to most chronobiologists working on vertebrates (especially mammals) or the genetics work-horse Drosophila, it is still surprising how little work has been done on the most ancient groups of animals. I could not detect a single study on daily rhythms in Choanoflagellates. There are only a handful of studies in sponges, barely scratching the surface and not even being able to conclude with any degree of certainty if sponges have a clock at all or not.
While the literature on the daily (and lunar) rhythms in Cnidaria is somewhat larger than that of sponges, it is by no means extensive and most of it suffers form the same weaknesses – studies of rhythms in the field in natural light-dark cycles can detect diurnal rhythms, but cannot determine if those rhythms are also circadian, i.e., if they are generated by an internal endogenous clock.
Let me just briefly refresh your memory on Cnidaria. Those are animals like corals, sea anemones and jellyfish. How, you may ask, do corals and jellyfish get lumped together in one group – after all, they look so different? Cnidaria, as a rule, have a complex life history cycle. There is a ‘polyp phase’ which is sessile (fixed to the substrate of the ocean floor), it releases gametes which, after fertilization, develop into a larva called ‘planula’. Larva develops into the ‘medusa’ stage which is a freely swimming predator. The medusa can, after a while, drop onto the floor and metamorphose into a polyp again. In many cnidarians, e.g., corals and sea anemones, the polyp phase is dominant – the medusa is small and short-lived. In some, as in Hydra, there is no medusa stage at all. In jellyfish, it is the medusa stage that is dominant – it becomes large and complex and that is what stings you if you are not careful swimming in the ocean. Here, the polyp phase is short and small, or may be abolished altogether.
Actinodiscus
Many corals have symbionts – zooxanthella. Research on daily rhythms mostly looks at corals or sea anemones in the field, (e.g., B. E. Chalker, D. L. Taylor, Rhythmic Variations in Calcification and Photosynthesis Associated with the Coral Acropora cervicornis (Lamarck), Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 201, No. 1143 (May 5, 1978) , pp. 179-189, or, Boero, F; Cicogna, F; Pessani, D; Pronzato, R, In situ observations on contraction behaviour and diel activity of Halcampoides purpurea var. mediterranea (Cnidaria, Anthozoa) in a marine cave. Marine Ecology. Vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 185-192. 1991.), noting daily changes in movement.
Interestingly, melatonin, a hormone apparently ubiquitous in nature and tightly related to visual and circadian physiology, induces movement in sea anemones (WH Tsang, NJ McGaughey, YH Wong, JTY Wong – Melatonin and 5-methoxytryptamine induced muscular contraction in sea anemones – The Journal of Experimental Zoology, 1997, Volume 279, Issue 3, Pages 201 – 207), but there was no attempt to test if melatonin produced its effect directly, or via a circadian mechanism.
Porites porites
In some studies, the rhythms of the coral and its zooxanthela are studied together. For instance, responses of the coral to light, photosynthetic activity of zooxanthela, and biochemical responses of coral to the oxygen produced by zooxanthela all follow the daily cycle and rise and fall with the level of illumination in the ocean (G. Muller-Parker, Photosynthesis-irradiance responses and photosynthetic periodicity in the sea anemone Aiptasia pulchella and its zooxanthellae, Marine Biology, Volume 82, Number 3, pp.225 – 232, September 1984.).
A number of papers notes that release of the larvae is synchronized with the phase of the moon (e.g., P. L. Jokiel, R. Y. Ito and P. M. Liu, Night irradiance and synchronization of lunar release of planula larvae in the reef coral Pocillopora damicornis, Marine Biology, Volume 88, Number 2, Pages: 167 – 174, August 1985.).
What all of these papers have in common is that there is no attempt to monitor the animals in prolonged constant conditions in order to see if the rhythms persist. Thus, we do not know if the daily rhythms are generated in direct response to daily changes in the environment or if they are generated endogenously by some kind of timer, possibly a proper circadian clock.
One exception is this paper – F Sinniger, R Maldonado-Rodriguez, RJ Strasser, Coral life as probed by their fluorescence emission (PDF is protected from copying – click on it to see the figures) – in which photosynthetic driving force in three species of corals kept in the lab in semi-natural conditions exhibited continuous oscillations during a four-day period in which the animals were kept in constant darkness. Interestingly, it shows three oscillations during that 4-day period. This is sufficient to characterize it as circadian, though. The consensus in the field is that ability to exhibit 2-3 oscillations is sufficient to deem it circadian. If, after that, the rhythms disappear, it is because the circadian clock is a damped oscillator, not because there is no circadian clock at all. This is, to date, the only set of data suggesting that a cnidarian may actually have a true circadian oscillator.
Interestingly, all of those studies were done in the polyp stage of the cnidarian life-cycle. Isn’t it more commonsensical that a freely moving animal would have a clock? Where are the studies in jellyfish? Jellyfish are notoriously difficult to keep in captivity so I doubt that any systematic experiments have been done.
While optic properties of spicules suggest that sponges may be sensitive to light, those animals have no nerve cells. On the other hand, jellyfish have complex nets of neurons and, moreover, they have multitudes of very complex eyes (Nilsson D-E, Gislén L, Coates MM, Skogh C, Garm A (2005) Advanced optics in a jellyfish eye. Nature 435:201-205.)
The paper described here sounds like one of the early stages of research on jellyfish eyes – anatomy first! – and may lead to further studies on the function and behavior.
Interestingly, though very complex, the jellyfish eyes are not suited for image-detection, e.i., the detection of light radiance. Their lenses are positioned in a way that diffuses light. In eyes evolved for vision, the role of the lens is to focus light. So, what are their eyes for? It appears that their eyes are specifically evolved for detection of irradiance – the light intensity – similarly to the melanopsin-containing retinal ganglion cells in mammals, the pineal, parapineal and frontal organ in non-mammalian vertebrates, the deep brain photoreceptors in non-mammalian vertebrates, and ocelli in arthoropods.
One possibile function for the jellyfish eyes is photokinesis, i.e. perception of light inducing movement, often a very specific type of movement, e.g., swift attack or even swifter retreat (or “freezing” – playing dead). Passing of a shadow over the eyes may mean “shark” or “food” and induce a particular response.
The other possibility is phototaxis, i.e., movement towards (positive phototaxis) or away (negative phototaxis) from light. The main sources of light are the Sun and the Moon. Many aquatic creatures exhibit phototaxis as a way to orient in the vertical column, i.e., light is up, dark is down.
Many aquatic creatures switch their phototaxis between day and night, for instance they may be attracted to light at night (as the food is on the surface) while swimming to the bottom during the day (avoiding UV damage and/or predators).
In order to know when is the day and when is the night, they need to know the time of day, i.e., to have a circadian clock.
Another role for the eyes is to entrain the circadian clock to the day/night cycle.
It is possible that there are some aspects of the jellyfish physiology/behavior that are seasonal, e.g., reproduction or migration. Eyes are needed to perceive (and the circadian clock to measure) the changing length of day (photoperiod) and induce appropriate seasonal changes: photoperiodism.
Finally, many aquatic organisms do stuff (e.g., spawn) at a particular phase of the Moon. Light intensity at night is a good (and most relevant) measure of the moon-phase. The eyes may be used to measure the moonlight intensity, or, also likely to entrain endogenous circalunar rhythms.
Having two types of eyes with poor focus makes all of the above possible. Real vision (image formation) is the only photoreceptive function that is excluded.
In vertebrates like us, such eyes (that little subset of retinal ganglion cells I mentioned above) have additional functions, e.g., pupilar reflex (pupils get smaller in brighter light), melatonin secretion (bright light quickly and severely shuts down melatonin synthesis in the eyes and the pineal) and control of mood (the axons project directly to the “mood center” in the brain, explaining to some extent the depression-inducing effects of prolonged darkness, e.g., in prisons).
I hope that the studies continue. Knowing if cnidarians have circadian clocks, what genes they use (and how) to run the clock, and what adaptive functions their clocks may have, would illuminate the question of origin and early evolution of animal circadian rhythms and clocks.
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. See all the interviews in this series here.
Today my guest is Jessica Morrison (blog, Twitter).
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 background? Any scientific education?
Hey there. I’m a Ph.D. student in Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. You all know we have a football team, but everyone always asks, “So where is the University of Notre Dame?” It’s in South Bend, Indiana, about 90 minutes east of Chicago. I live in the Midwest for now, but my heart will always be in the South.
I have a B.S. in geology from Middle Tennessee State University, and I’m about a year away from completing a Ph.D. in actinide geochemistry. What’s this mean? I synthesize inorganic compounds featuring our radioactive friends on the bottom row of the periodic table. This basic research has broader implications for nuclear fuel storage and environmental remediation.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
It’s hard to call it a career so far. I’ve basically been a student my entire life. The type of student has changed dramatically though. I started college as an advertising major. Don’t hate me yet! I was into art, and I wanted to make money. I was 18. I quickly switched into journalism, and just as quickly fell in love with geology. Fewer than 7 years later, I’m ABD in a science Ph.D. program.
The most exciting aspect of my graduate work is that I work with radioactive elements. My dissertation work involves both uranium and its periodic neighbor, neptunium. The folks in my lab take special precautions while working “hot,” it’s completely safe…and no we don’t glow in the dark!
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
For about a year now, I’ve been writing about science as often as I can. I discovered early on in graduate school that I had not actually left journalism behind when I fell in love with geology. When I finish my degree at Notre Dame, I hope to chase a career in science journalism. I’m currently a semi-finalist for a science media fellowship, and I’ve been applying for media internships . With any luck, this summer I’ll be interning at a newsroom near you!
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I haven’t always been interested in science. Throughout primary and secondary school I preferred art, literature and history. I’m still completely in awe that I can be a scientist…and I want to share that with other people who have no idea this is even possible.
Now that I’ve become a part of the science writing community online, I am blown away by how connected we all are. The Web allows us to become lampposts throughout the world that cast a science-y light onto our surrounding. We’re sucking them into our science jet engines…mwahaha. [Aside: Yeah, metaphors, I don’t know.]
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Blogging doesn’t factor into my actual paid work…yet. I blog personally at ihearttheroad.com, and I occasionally contribute to the Scientific American Guest Blog. I also participate actively on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. I absolutely would not be as successful as I am now without the science writing friends that I met through Twitter…starting with @stevesilberman and then @BoraZ. Thanks guys!
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 through @stevesilberman. He’s a serious force when it comes to posting science news. I don’t spend as much time as I would like reading science blogs, but the big ones pop up on my radar almost every day.
One of my favorite pieces of work on a science blog was @edyong209’s post containing the transcript of Robert Krulwich’s 2011 commencement speech to the Berkeley School of Journalism. I’m obsessed with the idea of becoming a journalist, and while I flail about, Krulwich’s words remind me to keep flailing until I do it well.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
Going to ScienceOnline2012 was like going to a family reunion…even though I’d never met anyone there. I made new friends, met old ones and spent a lot of time marveling at just how much @David_Dobbs looked like a real journalist. [Aside: I’ve played “Spot the Geologist” many times, “Spot the Journalist” was a totally new experience.]
Through #scio12 I also met a bunch of people I’d see again at AAAS 2012. I went to AAAS with press credentials, an experience that blew my mind. I’ll be honest, I’m terrified that I’ll somehow miss registration for ScienceOnline2013. If I were to have a recurring nightmare, this would be it.
Thank you for the interview. Looking forward to seeing you again next January!
Much of the biological research is done in a handful of model organisms. Important studies in organisms that can help us better understand the evolutionary relationships on a large scale tend to be hidden far away from the limelight of press releases and big journals. Here’s one example:
Do sponges have circadian clocks?
Short answer: nobody knows.
Sponge photoreception
Nobody has looked yet. Most of the research in biology is, quite rightfully, performed in just a handful of standard models. A sponge is not a standard animal lab model.
Should one expect sponges to have circadian clock? Considering that every animal, plant, fungus and protist, as well as somebacteria have clocks, it would be more surprising if sponges did not have one.
I’ve been on a lookout, for quite some time now, for any mention in the literature of a possible daily rhythm in sponges. There is not much, but there is some. What is known for sure, is that both adult [1] and larval [2] sponges perceive light, thus they should be capable of entraining to the environmental light-dark cycles.
In the field, sponges release their larvae (spawn) in a manner that suggests that they a) can perceive environmental light, b) use such information to calculate the time of day, and c) also have a lunar rhythm (either an endogenous circalunar clock entrained by the moon, or exogenous rhythm driven directly by moonlight):
Release started every day of 3 3-d period (12 to 14 October) at about 1400 hrs and lasted until just after sunset (1830 hrs). Ninety percent of the population showed reproductive activity. Exactly one lunar month later (11 to 12 November), a second release of gametes occurred. In the following year the same sequence of events was observed for the original population (2 to 4 October and 1 to 2 November, 1985). In all instances the first gamete release began on the third day after the full moon. These and earlier observations on this phenomenon show a strong correlation between moon phase and the time of gamete release [3].
Another interesting behavior in sponges is called “pumping”. Those are the contractions of the whole body of the sponge. Apparently [4], the contractions are slower during the night than during the day, indicating a diurnal, if not a circadian rhythm. Here is a pattern recorded from one sponge in the lab:
Here is the light-to-dark comparison in two individual sponges:
Locomotor activity is the most favored overt rhythm by researchers in chronobiology.
If you did not know this before, sponges can move. Not fast enough to grab your ankle while swimming – more on the order of 6mm per day. This was a serendipitous finding a couple of decades ago, about a mile from where I live now, at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Calhoun Bond, then doing his PhD here (and now teaching at Greensboro College), happened to have an aquarium in his office. One day he looked at it and noticed that a sponge was not in the same place where it was before. So, he bought a Sharpie pen (not needing a multi-million-dollar grant for this) and started drawing the position of the sponge on the glass wall of the aquarium. Yup, the sponge sure moved:
Dr.Bond has since published a couple of papers on the exact mechanism the sponge moves. It does not have a moving “leg” on the bottom. Instead, the whole animal rearranges itself as cells move over each other, pulling the spicules along. I’ve seen the stop-motion movies and they are impressive.
He has not noticed, though, if the sponge had different speeds during the day as opposed to during the night, but this could be easily done by an undergraduate student in a biology lab. Instead of drawing a mark once per day, draw a mark every 3-4 hours over a period of a couple of days, and the answer will be there. If there is a day/night difference in the sponge locomotion speed in a light-dark cycle, then it would be worth running the sponges through a standard battery of tests, including phase-shifts of the light-dark cycle, exposure to constant dark and constant light, and phase-shifting the rhythm with light pulses. This process could even be automated with a camera which can allow one to monitor the behavior over longer periods of time (e.g,. weeks or months).
The study that most directly tested the effects of light-dark cycle on a behavior of a sponge looked, again, at the timing of spawning. Apparently [7], the sponge releases its larvae 24 hours after the last perceived dawn (i.e., light-to-dark transition) regardless of the light conditions transpiring during those 24 hours. This, in the wild, places the larval release right around the dawn of the next day.
One thing that I am surprised nobody did so far was to see if sponges have core circadian clock genes, like period, timeless, clock and cryptochrome. It is apparently relatively easy technically to do so. I have seen phylogenetic analyses of sequences of clock genes in dozens of, for instance, insect species. It can’t be that hard to take a look at a sponge and, if the clock genes are there, see in which cells and with what temporal dynamics they are expressed.
References:
[1] Werner E.G. Muller, Klaus Wendt, Christopher Geppert, Matthias Wiens, Andreas Reiber, Heinz C. Schroder, Novel photoreception system in sponges? Unique transmission properties of the stalk spicules from the hexactinellid Hyalonema sieboldi, Biosensors and Bioelectronics 21 (2006) 1149-1155
[2] Sally P. Leys and Bernard M. Degnan, Cytological Basis of Photoresponsive Behavior in a Sponge Larva. Biol. Bull. 201: 323-338. (December 2001)
[3] W. F. Hoppe and M. J. M. Reichert, Predictable annual mass release of gametes by the coral reef sponge Neofibularia nolitangere (Porifera: Demospongiae). Marine Biology, Volume 94, Number 2, 277 – 285 (March 1987)
[4] Michael Nickel, Kinetics and rhythm of body contractions in the sponge Tethya wilhelma (Porifera: Demospongiae). The Journal of Experimental Biology 207, 4515-4524
[5] CALHOUN BOND AND ALBERT K. HARRIS, Locomotion of Sponges and Its Physical Mechanism. The Journal of Experimental Zoology 246:271-284 (1988)
[6] CALHOUN BOND, Continuous Cell Movements Rearrange Anatomical – Structures in Intact Sponges. The Journal of Experimental Zoology 263:284-302 (1992)
[7] Amano, S, Morning release of larvae controlled by the light in an intertidal sponge, Callyspongia ramosa. Biological Bulletin, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole. Vol. 175, pp. 181-184. (1988).
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. 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 background? Any scientific education?
I’m a science writer and public information officer (PIO) at North Carolina State University. I grew up in southern Virginia and, after a stint in the DC area, now live in Raleigh.
I set out to be a marine scientist, but hated chemistry so much as an undergraduate that I ended up majoring in English. I made up for it by becoming a science writer – and marrying a marine scientist.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
After college I went to work for a news company called Inside Washington Publishers that focused on federal policy issues. I specialized in environmental policy, running a publication called Water Policy Report for six years. Later I spent a few years editing a publication that covered risk assessment issues related to federal policy. When you write about environmental and human health issues, you have to write about science: ecology, toxicology, biology, chemistry, you name it. I found that I was really good at explaining scientific issues to a non-expert audience. Over time, I came to enjoy writing about scientific research more than writing about the related federal policy decisions.
I came to work for NC State in 2008, and love the fact that I get to write about everything from forensic anthropology to computer malware. I get a lot of satisfaction from helping to explain diverse research findings to people who would otherwise never hear about it.
Last year I also took on a project in my free time to help promote evolution education. I worked with a great group of people – many of whom were at ScienceOnline2012 – and pulled together a video on the subject that garnered a fair amount of attention. The video was written up, favorably, in outlets ranging from the Guardian to SciAm blogs to Jezebel. Our goal was to take a positive approach to promoting evolution education, while also highlighting female role models in the science community. I think we accomplished those goals, and I’m proud of the work we did.
More recently I’ve been writing a series of posts for Nature’s Soapbox Science blog, focusing on science communication. There has been a lot of discussion about the flawed relationship among scientists, reporters and PIOs. This is nothing new, but much of the debate seems to be circular, with journalists complaining about scientists, scientists complaining about reporters and everyone complaining about PIOs. Rather than placing blame, I’m hoping these posts encourage discussion about what each of these parties can do to improve our odds of getting it right. Science communication is important, and all parties involved want to talk to the public about science, so we should focus on working together. The first two posts in the series are available here and here.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I have three daughters, so a lot of my time and energy is devoted to being a dad. Professionally, I spend a lot of my mental energy trying to find new ways to get people interested in research taking place at NC State. I grew up in Petersburg, Va., less than three hours from Raleigh – but I knew almost nothing about the university until I came to work here. When I got here, I discovered that a lot of really exciting research is being done at NC State. Now it’s my job to find ways to tell people about it.
Part of that work focuses on identifying which reporters would be interested in a given piece of research. And part of that work involves identifying opportunities to talk about research through social media. You can’t just tweet about something and expect the universe to notice. People are excited about the potential of social media, but it is not a panacea for science communication. You need good content. And you need to understand the strengths and limitations of the various social media platforms. As a reporter, I had lots of experience developing good content. I’ve spent the past few years focusing on how to utilize social media to distribute that content. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also very interesting. I’ve been amazed by how few people really understand the social media tools they’re using – or how they might be able to use them more effectively.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I’m interested in how we can use social media to communicate about science. (Obviously – see above.) But I’m also really excited about the potential of citizen science and the Web. Rob Dunn, a biology prof at NC State, has done some really great work in this area – tapping into public interest in ants, the wild life of our homes, etc. I think the science community should take every possible opportunity to engage the public – especially kids – in scientific endeavors. Not only can it give researchers access to a larger data set, but it is a grass roots way of building support for scientific research.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Blogging is a critical component of what I do. If you want to engage an audience – any audience – you need to bring something to the table. Why should anyone listen to you? Blogging gives me, as a science communicator, the opportunity to tell a story and share information in a (hopefully) interesting way. Twitter and Facebook are great, but they’re limiting. If you want to convey a significant amount of information, you need to use social media to drive the audience to a platform where you can really sink your teeth into the subject. For me, that platform is usually a blog. Most often, it’s NC State’s research blog, The Abstract.
When I tell a researcher that I want to write a blog post about his or her work, they’re often offended at first. They translate “I want to write a post for our blog” into “I want to write something and then put it in a place where no one will ever see it.” Then I explain that we also use The Abstract as a pitching tool. I’ll contact a reporter who might be interested, give them a two-sentence pitch and then refer them to the blog post if they want more information. This has led to articles in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, The Atlantic, etc. When I tell researchers that, they usually start taking the idea more seriously.
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 can’t remember when I first started checking out science blogs. Probably 2002 or 2003. I read them from time to time for years. I didn’t become a daily reader of science blogs until I came to work for NC State in 2008. Most of the blogs I read are written by folks who attended ScienceOnline2012: Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science, Jennifer Ouellette’s Cocktail Party Physics and Jen Frazer’s Artful Amoeba spring to mind. Good content, well written and – perhaps most importantly – a lot of fun to read. I also like Ben Chapman and Doug Powell’s BarfBlog, and Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes – which isn’t updated nearly often enough.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
ScienceOnline2012 was a great experience. I had the chance to meet quite a few writers whose work I admire, which was great. It was also nice to meet so many of the people I worked with on the evolution video. The entire video project was done via email and social media, so I hadn’t met any of the participants in person (except David Wescott, who I already knew – and who is fantastic). The heated discussions regarding the scientist/journalist relationship also spurred me to write the pieces I’m writing for Soapbox Science. Hopefully that will help at least a few people.
Writing a chronobiology blog for a year and a half now [see note above – this was written in 2006] has been quite a learning experience for me. I did not know how much I did not know (I am aware that most of my readers know even less, but still….). Thus, when I wrote about clocks in birds I was on my territory – this is the stuff I know first-hand and have probably read every paper in the field. The same goes for topics touching on seasonality and photoperiodism as my MS Thesis was on this topic.
I feel equally at home when discussing evolution of clocks. I am also familiar with the clocks in some, but not all, arthropods. And that is all fine and well….but, my readers are anthropocentric. They want more posts about humans – both clocks and sleep – something I knew very little about. So, I have learned a lot over the past year and a half by digging through the literature and books on the subject. I was also forced to learn more about the molecular machinery of the circadian clock as most newsworthy (thus bloggable) new papers are on the clock genetics.
Acetabularia
I know almost nothing about clocks in plants, fungi or fish, for instance, but I intend to learn – both for my own sake and for the sake of my blog readers. Actually, I started digging through the literature taxon by taxon some while ago, pretty much on two tracks: one covering the Invertebrates (like this and this), the other on microorganisms.
It is interesting to see how much I have regurgitated textbook dogma and conference hallway “truths” in my initial post on the clocks in microorganisms, only to have to contradict myself once I actually delved into the literature and learned for myself (see the series here: one, two, three, four and five).
So, over the next couple of months, expect a series of posts on the clocks in protists. From the old textbooks and conference lore, I believe that one of the first (if not THE first) circadian mutation was discovered in the Chlamydomonas, belonging to the group of green algae (recently moved into the Kingdom Plantae, but I will treat it as a Protist for the purposes of my series) which was an important laboratory model early in the development of the field.
Euglena
People like Leland Edmunds have worked out a lot of cell biology of clocks in the Paramecium (Ciliata) and Euglena (Flagellates).
The most astonishing results came from some 1950s studies in the Acetabularia, another green alga, in which rhythms persisted in the absence of the cell nucleus. The studies were repeated in early 1990s, yet to this day there is no good explanation of the findings – I am looking forward to reviewing that part!
Starting on my literature search, I discovered that some work was also done on Rhodophyta (red algae), e.g., this and this.
Gonyalax polyedra
Most of the work in protists, however, was performed on Lingulodinium polyedrum, much better known by its old name Gonyaulax polyedra. It was initially studied by one of the pioneers of chronobiology, J.Woodland Hastings. ‘Woody’, as he was known, had many graduate students who, after leaving his lab, took Gonyaulax with them and did further research for many years. Several very important findings, with implications for the whole field of chronobiology, came out of that research on Gonyaulax.
Unfortunately, the way science funding is going these days, when even fruitfly researchers are complaining, little to no research is currently done on clocks in protista – all those researchers have moved to mice and rats in order to get their work funded. I hope this situation changes in the future. Protists are such a huge and diverse group of organisms, they are bound to keep many cool secrets we should try to uncover.
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. 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 background? Any scientific education?
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Nutrition and in the Department of Pharmacology & Cancer Biology at Duke University Medical Center, and my lab is in the Sarah W. Stedman Nutrition and Metabolism Center at Duke. I grew up in Minnesota, and like many scientists, I was a curious child but wasn’t overly drawn to science. During my undergraduate studies at the University of Vermont (UVM), my major was pre-med and I planned to go to medical school. To build my resume, I did what every other pre-med student did: studied, got involved in extra-curriculars, volunteered, and studied more. One of my extracurricular activities brought me to a research lab in the UVM Medical School. I pipetted and entered numbers into spreadsheets, and it was all very romantic, and I felt very important. I mean, I was curing diseases, wasn’t I?
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
Soon after I graduated from UVM, I enrolled in the graduate program in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara. I worked primarily on novel applications for semi-conductors (aka quantum dots), which was a sexy project, as quantum dots were new, exotic materials that people didn’t know much about; it was also a difficult project, because quantum dots were new, exotic materials that people didn’t know much about.
Like many graduate students, I quickly discovered that graduate school was more challenging than I expected. My experiments did not work much of the time and were hard to troubleshoot. When they did actually work, it was difficult to interpret and plan the next experiment – which inevitably would not work. I often questioned whether graduate school was the right choice for me. Did I enjoy science? Who needs a PhD? Did I really want to be a scientist? I toyed with different career ideas, both in and out of science, (N.B. blogs didn’t exist back then, and scientific writing wasn’t even on the map); I sought the advice of colleagues, friends, family, and virtually anyone with something to say. One summer toward the end of graduate school I was talking with my uncle Mark, who is a professor at the University of Kansas. Uncle Mark said to me, “Listen, Matt, stop worrying about what job you’ll have. Instead, figure out what you like to do, and make a career out of it. And if you really love it, you’ll be so good at it and successful, that everything else will fall into place.”
After uncle Mark’s advice, I considered what I liked and did not like about graduate school. I knew I enjoyed chemistry, but felt my studies were lacking a human component. I remembered back to how much I enjoyed my early pre-med studies in biology. With this new understanding in mind, I finished my doctoral studies and began seeking a post-doctoral position where I could apply my technical expertise in chemistry to biological problems and human disease. I found a perfect fit at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology. While the learning curve was steep for a chemist-turned-biologist, in the end I came up to speed on cloning, cell culture techniques, mouse work and more.
Meanwhile, I placed a lot of pressure on myself to determine my career path, and found myself asking many of the same questions that I did during graduate school. Would I go into academia? Industry? Was another option a better fit for me? These are common questions directed at post-docs that have the unintended consequence of inducing anxiety in those who have not yet decided the answer. Like me. At the Gladstone Institutes, I was surrounded by highly intelligent, driven, and motivated scientists, who all appeared to know their career path as well as the exact steps needed to get there. Unlike me. I spent a lot of time, again, considering my options, toying with different career ideas and seeking advice of colleagues, friends and family. With this on-going internal debate, I quickly realized the career options I would have at the end of my post-doc were dependent upon the success of my work: if I were successful, I would be presented with a set of options different than if I were less successful. Success, of course, can be measured different ways, but I decided at the time I needed to focus on my work.
As I approached the end of my post-doc and finished up remaining projects and papers, I thought back to my Uncle Mark’s advice: to figure out what I’m good at and what I like to do, and find a job where I can do those things. For me, that job is being a scientist. And just last year, I joined the faculty at Duke.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
In the past year, I have a new job, new state, new house, and new family (Henry is 6 months old now), and so it all is taking up all of my time. Except sleep; sleep takes up a lot less time than it used to. Professionally, my goals are to get my lab up and running, do great science, and mentor young scientists. I had a lot of help along the way (see above), and so feel driven to help others too. Even with all the training required to get to the point of becoming a faculty member, I would argue most scientists are woefully unprepared. In fact, a lot of scientists are trained to do science; and that’s it. While I was taught to design a well-controlled experiment, I wasn’t formally trained to interview and identify rock-star scientists. Or manage a lab budget, or the other things I think about now. But, Duke is a great environment and I’m still getting a lot of help along the way, so things are coming together in the lab.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The first time I heard about “science communication” was in graduate school when I was asked to be interviewed for a science writing class. Fast-forward 10 years, and science communication has come a long way. Professionally, three aspects of science communication are important for my work. First, as a scientist, I need to communicate my work. Sounds straight-forward enough, and appropriately named. But many scientists I know don’t think about communication and the best way they can share their studies. Science communication to me is the intersection of writing (papers, grants, blogs), speaking (seminars and presentations), and visualization (infographics and slides). An effective science communicator will create each of these well, and contribute to more effective communication and sharing of ideas.
Secondly, I use science communication less directly related to my science, and more related to mentoring. Part of my lab website (http://lab.hirschey.org) is dedicated to scientific advice and mentoring. Some of the things I have learned throughout my scientific journey might be useful for other scientists-in-training, and so I’ve begun a repository, in the format of a blog, to become a resource that will slowly build over time. Your mileage may vary.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
The third aspect of science communication in my work is related to the internets, series of tubes, and other social media hotness. While I don’t see the social networks as critical for my work as a scientist (yet), I do find value in them. Here’s my take: the focus of my lab right now is to write papers and get grants — the two metrics most important at this stage of my career. Even if I make an exciting discovery, I don’t imagine it’ll be on the cover of a top journal, and probably won’t be picked up in the mainstream press, so again, the utility of social networks to spread science is limited for me. My work won’t be spread, and I won’t be the one spreading. However, I find all sorts of interesting and useful information come through the social networks; most of it just isn’t science-y. I also see communities connecting or even forming on these networks: the science writing community is an excellent example.
The week after attending #scio12, I attended a scientific conference on diabetes and obesity. The conference organizer suggested a #hashtag for the conference, to my surprise, and I thought to myself that perhaps scientists are finally joining the rest of the world by embracing new types of communication. I was wrong. 3 tweets the entire meeting (2 were mine). So it seems that many scientists have still not joined in to use new types of science communication. When I speak to older, more established scientists, they all lament that they don’t have enough time. When I speak to younger scientists, who embrace these types of media, they lament that they aren’t yet established. So perhaps scientists, young and old, just need more time.
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?
Most of the blogs I’m reading currently are not science blogs, but more related to culture: an important part of the creative scientific process for me. If you’re not reading Maria Popova’s blog entitled Brain Pickings, you’re doing it wrong.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I was especially interested by the conversations at the intersection of open science and science communication. How can you encourage open science? How can you put the onus on the scientific researcher to be more open, to share more, to communicate more, to do more science communication? In my mind, there’s an interesting overlap here, and perhaps they are two sides of the same coin. Regardless of the possible answers, I think that more scientists should be involved in the conversation.
Even though this was a science communication conference, I was struck by the lack of scientists. I don’t recall what the numbers were for the breakdown of self-identified profession of the attendees, but either the scientists who attended were painfully quiet (a distinct possibility for scientists) or scientists need to be encourage to attend and participate in sessions or conferences outside respective areas of expertise.
Thank you for the interview – hope to see you back next year!
This is the fifth in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria, covering more politics than biology, originally published on May 17, 2006.
In the previous posts in this series, I covered the circadian clocks in Synechococcus, potential circadian clocks in a couple of other bacteria, and the presence of clock genes (thus potentially clocks) in a number of other bacteria. But what happened to the microbiological workhorse, the Escherichia coli? Does it have a clock? Hasn’t anyone checked?
Believe it or not, this question is colored by politics. But I have to give you a little background first. Latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century saw a number of researchers discovering circadian rhythms independently from each other. They came from different backgrounds and did research in a variety of questions in different organisms. There were botanists and entomologists, physiologists and ecologists, behavioral biologists and microbiologists, evolutionary biologists and physicians.
The founding moment of the field was the Cold Spring Harbour meeting in 1960, which produced the Proceedings (Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology: Volume XXV. Biological Clocks. New York: Cold Spring Harbor Press, 1960.) which is, arguably, the founding document of the field. It is there and then that everyone realized that they were all studying the same phenomenon, they agreed on common terminology, and learned from each other what became standard experimental methods in the field.
Not much later, in the 1970s, the Society for Research in Biological Rhythms (SRBR) was formed and had its first meeting. Apart from wonderful talks and posters, and rambunctious partying, one of the key moments of the meeting was the election of the Society President. By that time, something akin to War of the Roses was going on in the field. The two candidates for the position were the leaders of the two factions.
One faction, led by Franz Halberg (who coined the term “circadian” among else), was medically minded and argued for a practical, applied approach to the study of rhythmic phenomena, coupling mathematical modelling with clinical studies in humans and some model animals like rats and mice. The other faction, led by Colin Pittendrigh (student of Theodozius Dobzhansky), came from an evolutionary, ecological and ethological tradition, arguing for an integrative and comparative approach to the study of the basic science of biological rhythms.
Fortunately for all, Pittendrigh won. The rest is history – chronobiology took off and nobody could stop its meteoric rise. The human/medical approach that plagued the sleep research for so many decades was avoided by chronobiology. But the bad blood between Pittendrighians and the Halbergians remained for a long time – it actually still simmers underneath the surface, especially among the seniors in the field. Most of the top researchers in the field, the meeting organizers, the Society officials, textbook writers, journal editors, and the plenary lecture speakers are Pittendrigh’s academic children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren (OK, I am one, too).
When I mentioned, in the first post in this series, that it was believed for decades that bacteria had no clocks, I was just parroting the party line. But there were some people who thought otherwise all along. Here is what Franz Halberg himself says about the question of clocks in Echerichia coli:
A circadian rhythm in bacteria was documented time-microscopically in 1961 on impeccable data collected by Lore A. Rogers (a noted bacteriologist described by a Cosmos Club Vignette of December 1967 as “the bright star in the [U.S. Department of Agriculture’s] scientific horizon before World War II”). Rogers’ data stemmed from a fluid culture of E. coli, analyzed both by a periodogram and by power spectra, showing clear free-running circadians. Nonetheless, for years international symposia and cell chronobiologists in particular, including a committee formed by them in 1975, held the view that circadians are a property only of eukaryotes. I wrote to each committee member asking why they ignored the demonstration in E. coli and the extension of the finding by Sturtevant in John Pauly’s laboratory in Arkansas. I regarded, and continue to regard the organizers as friends. Both Woody Hastings and the late Hans-Georg Schweiger thereafter extended their focus to circaseptans, documenting their open mind. Schweiger became a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and was my house guest (and I his house and institute guest), and in later years cooperated extremely closely. A friend on the committee, however, wrote that he “ate crow” and noted that the “consensus” had been that there were “too many analyses” in the 1961 publication and again too much time-microscopy in the follow-up study, a thesis notwithstanding. The consensus was also in keeping with negative unpublished results by several symposium participants; so went the critique leading to the committee’s decree that circadians are limited to eukaryotes. Jürgen Aschoff also responded by asking something like “Do you wish to hold us responsible for posterity?” I answered in a qualified affirmative, that the rules we postulate today may be revised tomorrow, always based on data. Microbial circadians abound today and constitute an active field of investigation.[1]
Ah, how diplomatically he had to put it for publication!
Well, I dug through Google Scholar, then through ISI Web of Science, and none of the papers Halberg mentions (see below) exist online – they are just too old. So, I cannot tell you now what I think about this question. Perhaps one day I’ll be idle and have a lot of time and will dig out and photocopy the hardcopies of these papers at the library and check the data myself. For now, let’s keep the question open.
Perhaps the 1930 data were nice and clear, while 1970s data not so because of decades of relaxed selection for rhythmicity in laboratory cultures of E.coli held in acyclic conditions in the incubators. Perhaps they just lost rhythms during the intervening four decades. A new test should, perhaps, be performed on fresh wild-caught Escherichia coli.
At least we know that short-period cycles can evolve in E.coli under artifical selection [7], so, even if they do not naturally have circadian clocks, we can make them evolve one and solve the political problem once and for all.
[2] Halberg F, Conner RL: Circadian organization and microbiology: Variance spectra and a periodogram on behavior of Escherichia coli growing in fluid culture. Proc minn Acad Sci 1961, 29:227-239.
[3] Rogers LA, Greenbank GR: The intermittent growth of bacterial cultures. J Bacteriol 1930, 19:181-190.
[4] Halberg F, Cornélissen G: The spectrum of rhythms in microorganisms revisited. Chronobiologia 1991, 18:114.
[5] Sturtevant R: Circadian patterns in linear growth of Escherichia coli. Anat Rec 1973, 175:453.
[6] Sturtevant R: Circadian variability in Klebsiella demonstrated by cosinor analysis. Int J Chronobiol 1973, 1:141-146.
[7] Michael B. Elowitz and Stanislas Leibler, A synthetic oscillatory network of transcriptional regulators. Nature 403, 335-338 (20 January 2000)
This is the fourth in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria originally published onApril 30, 2006.
For decades, it was thought that prokaryotes did not have circadian clocks. Then, a clock was discovered in a unicellular cyanobacterium, Synechococcus (later also in Synechocystis [1] and Trichodesmium [2]) which quickly became an important model in the study of circadian rhythms in general. Still, it was thought, for ten years or so, that no other prokaryotes had a circadian clock.
Recently, the clock genes were found in filamentous (chain-forming) cyanobacteria, as well as a whole host of other bacteria and archaea. However, having clock genes does not neccessarily translate into having a functioning clock – the genes may have other functions (e.g., photoreception, or DNA repair) in bacteria other than Synechococcus.
So, two recent papers tried to address this question – do photosynthetic bacteria exhibit circadian rhythms? And the results of the two studies, in two different species of bacteria, have some interesting similarities to each other, so let’s look at them in parallel.
Van Praag et al.[3], used Rhodospirillum rubrum, a gram-negative purple non-sulfur bacteria. Min et al.[4], also chose a purple photosynthetic bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides. In the former, the measured output was hydrogenase uptake, while in the latter a battery of luciferase reporter genes was inserted in the genome – strains exhibiting fluoresecence (presumably those in which the construct got inserted behind a promoter) were used in the study.
Rhodospirillum
Rhodospirillum
In the first study, hydrogenase uptake was measured in unoxic (anaerobic) conditions in constant light (LL) at 32oC, and in constant darkness at 32oC and 16oC. In each of the three conditions, a rhythm was observed. The period of the freerunning rhythms was markedly different between the three conditions. In LL-32oC, period was ultradian: 12.1 hours. In DD at 32oC, the period was also ultradian: 14.8 hours. Only in DD at 16oC was the rhythm within a circadian range: 23.4 hours.
Rhodobacter
Rhodobacter
In the second study, light output was measured in three experiments. In all three, bacteria were assayed in constant darkness at 23oC. In the first and second groups, bacteria were pre-treated and their putative clocks entrained by a warm-cold-warm cycle prior to release into constant conditions. In the third group, the pre-treatments was exposure to a light-dark cycle prior to release into constant conditions. The first group was tested under aerobic conditions, while the second and the thir group were tested under anaerobic conditions.
Again, rhythms were observed in all three groups. What was observed was a difference in phase at which the rhythm begins dependent on the type of entraining cycle preceding the testing. The most important difference, however, was the difference in the freerunning period between the aerobic and anaerobic treatments. In the aerobic group, period was circadian: 20.5 hours. In the anaerobic conditions, the period was ultradian: 10.6 and 12.7 in groups II and III respectively.
What does this all mean? Temperature, light and oxygenation all appeared to have an effect on period. These experiments are difficult to do – if one was working with rodents or insects, the natural thing would be to test a large number of animals at several different temperatures to test for the possible lack of temperature compensation of the circadian rhythm, as well as at several different light intensities to test for the Aschoff’s Rule. It is possible that this is a circadian clock that is not well temperature compensated, that is extremely sensitive to light, and that is based on the red-ox environment.
The way the studies have been reported, it is not clear that the rhythms are actually circadian, or if it just happened that some of the rhythms fell into the circadian range by accident. What is clear is that these bacteria generate endogenous rhythms. Are these rhythms circadian or not, and if so, are they driven by core-clock genes kaiA, kaiB and kaiC remains to be elucidated in the future.
References and sources of images:
[1] Aoki S, Kondo T, Wada H, and Ishiura M (1997) Circadian rhythm of the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. strain PCC 6803 in the dark. J Bacteriology 179:5751-5755.
[2] Chen YB, Domonic B, Mellon MT, and Zehr JP (1998) Circadian rhythm of nitrogenase gene expression in the diazotrophic filamentous nonheterocystous cyanobacterium Trichodesmium sp. strain IMS 101. J Bacteriology 180:3598-3605.
[3] Esther Van Praag, Robert Degli Agosti and Reinhard Bachofen, Rhythmic Activity of Uptake Hydrogenase in the Prokaryote Rhodospirillum rubrum, JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL RHYTHMS, Vol. 15 No. 3, June 2000 218-224
[4] Hongtao Min, Haitao Guo, Jin Xiong, Rhythmic gene expression in a purple photosynthetic bacterium, Rhodobacter sphaeroides, FEBS Letters 579 (2005) 808-812
Posted onMarch 1, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on Clocks in Bacteria III: Evolution of Clocks in Cyanobacteria
This is the third installment in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria, originally published on April 19, 2006.
As you probably know, my specialty are birds, so writing this series on clocks in microorganisms was quite an eye-opener for me and I have learned a lot. The previous two posts cover the clocks in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus, the first bacterium in which circadian rhythms were discovered and, thus, the species most studied to date.
The work in Synechococcus has uncovered a cluster of three genes – kaiA, kaiB and kaiC – that are essential for circadian rhytmicity in this species. kaiA positively regulates the kaiBC promoter and overexpression of kaiC represses the kaiBC promoter. Deletion of any one of the three genes leads to the complete loss of rhythmicity.
Synechococcus is a unicellular cyanobacterium. It was thought that circadian clock evolved in it due to incompatibility between nitrogen fixation and photosynthesis. Thus, temporal separation of these two processes was needed, phosynthesis occuring only during the day, while nitrogen fixation was relagated to the night time. It is known that filamentous cyanobacteria, those that build chains of cell, utilize a different strategy, that of spatial separation, some cells being involved in nitrogen fixation and others in photosynthesis. The two cell types exchange the end-results of those processes. Thus, it was thought that filamentous cyanobacteria have no need for a circadian clock.
Nostoc
However, it appears that Synechococcus is not the only bacterium to have a clock. Laboratory of Eviatar Nevo in Israel has taken a look at another cyanobacterium, this time a filamentous, chain-forming species, Nostoc linckia, and the work that ensued suggests that a number of other bacteria may possess a circadian clock as well [1,2,3].
Cyanobacteria are some of the oldest organisms on Earth, at least 3.5 billion years old, appearing in the fossil record relatively soon after the split between Eubacteria and Archaea (3.8 billion years ago). For most of the evolutionary history of cyanobacteria, the environment was very harsh, and UV radiation was one of the major factors influencing the evolution of prokaryotes. For most of that evolutionary history, the environment has undergone large changes, not just in oxygen levels, but also in the levels of UV radiation.
Volodymir Dvornik, Eviatar Nevo and collaborators hypothesized that a circadian clock, involved in temporal processing of light (including UV light) may be an important adaptation in all cyanobacteria and have detected the kaiABC cluster in Nostoc. Moreover, they hypothesized that Nostoc living in harsh, exposed environments (on sun-bathed slopes of so-called Evolution Canyons in Israel) would show greater mutation rate and higher nuclotide polymorphisam in the kai genes than Nostoc living on less harsh slopes of the Canyons. This is exactly what they found [1]. Some of the data from that study was intiguing – suggesting gene duplications and horizontal gene transfer of kai genes. So, they followed this up with a study of kai genes in a number of species of cyanobacteria [2] and later in a number of species of Eubacteria and Archea [3]. Here is the tree of kaiC (right) compared to the tree of 16S rRNA genes (left) – with quite amazing overlap:
Their analysis suggests that kaiC is the oldest element of the complex, while the kaiA is the youngest. kaiA occurs only in cyanobacteria, while kaiB, kaiC and the kaiBC complex occur in other types of bacteria and Archaea. There are also two types of kaiC: short and long. The long, double-domain kaiC (dd-kaiC) is found only in photosynthetic bacteria. Likewise, kaiBC cluster is found only in photosynthetic bacteria. Here is the tree of the kaiBC cluster:
Non-photosynthetis bacteria tend to have the short version of kaiC (sd-kaiC), as well as independent kaiB elsewhere in the genome (i.e., not in a cluster with kaiC). Analysis of the trees of kai gene evolution sugests many duplication events, as well as many occurences of gene loss and horizontal tranfer. Curiously, all the horizontal tranfers occured from cyanobacteria, as donors, to other types of bacteria and Archaea as recipients. Here is the proposed evolutionary history of the kai genes:
Thus, a number of bacteria and Archaea posses one, two or three kai genes, sometimes in multiple copies. Does that mean they have functioning circadian clocks?
Bacteria other than cyanobacteria do not have kaiA. Deletion of kaiA in Synechococcus abolishes rhythms. It is not inconceivable that a different gene (and several additional transcription factors besides kaiA are involved in the Synechococcus clock, so there is no lack of potential candidates) may fulfill that role in other microorganisms. Still, Synechococcus is the only prokaryote in which circadian rhythms have been measured and studied (OK, there is a recent exception – but you will have to wait for the next post to hear about it). Is it possible that kai genes in other bacteria have other functions and only in cynobacteria they got exapted for the circadian role? Time and new research will tell.
References and sources of images:
[1] Volodymyr Dvornyk, Oxana Vinogradova, and Eviatar Nevo, Long-term microclimatic stress causes rapid adaptive radiation of kaiABC clock gene family in a cyanobacterium, Nostoc linckia, from “Evolution Canyons” I and II, Israel, PNAS, February 19, 2002, vol. 99, no. 4, 2082-2087
[2] Volodymyr Dvornyk, Eviatar Nevo, Evidence for Multiple Lateral Transfers of the Circadian Clock Cluster in Filamentous Heterocystic Cyanobacteria Nostocaceae, JMol Evol (2004) 58:341-347
[3] Volodymyr Dvornyk, Oxana Vinogradova, and Eviatar Nevo, Origin and evolution of circadian clock genes in prokaryotes, PNAS, March 4, 2003, vol. 100, no. 5, 2495-2500
Welcome to the newest edition of Berry Go Round, a blogcarnivaldevoted to highlighting recent blog posts about any and every aspect of plant life. This is the third time I am hosting BRG (see #7 and #31) which is not so bad for a zoologist 😉
There is not much more I can add, and the entries this month are wonderful, so instead of wasting your time with my own musings, let’s dig into the carnival itself!
This unseasonably warm winter has seen the blossoming of crocuses, daffodils and snowdrops in gardens throughout Ireland a lot earlier than usual. It makes a change from the previous two years, when this blog noted that daffodils had yet to bloom by March…
Hollis at In the Company of Plants and Rocks: Leaving Home:
Isn’t it interesting that many humans have a hard time letting their children go, while most animals and plants take the opposite approach — rebuffing, excluding and even hurling their progeny into the unknown…
Confession: As a nerdlet of nine or ten, I decided to help flowers get fertilized. I loved seeing the glossy seeds hidden inside the fat green ovaries of dead flowers when I split them open with my thumbnail. I must have watched one of those nature specials where the scientists climb up to the top of the Alps and dust pollen onto endangered flowers with a paintbrush, because I started going around roadside fields with cotton balls and gathering pollen. Partway through my project I realized that these particular plants were doing fine without human intervention, and abandoned them…
Fruits in my fruit bowl tend to rot into a mulchy mess after a couple of weeks. Fruits that are chilled in permanent Siberian ice fare rather better. After more than 30,000 years, and some care from Russian scientists, some ancient fruits have produced this delicate white flower…
Botanically, a tomato is a fruit: a seed-bearing structure that grows from the flowering part of a plant. In 1893, however, the highest court in the land ruled in the case of Nix v. Hedden that the tomato was a vegetable, subject to vegetable import tariffs. Unfortunately, the vegetal confusion did not end in 1893. Indeed, confusion over botanical categorization has a proud history in America. Just recently, the US Congress mistook pizza (or, specifically, the tomato paste found on what passes for pizza in school lunchrooms) for a vegetable! And a Fox News anchor apparently had trouble distinguishing between peppers and military-grade pepper spray.
There are several different types of native shrub communities in Knowland Park, but none is as rare or fascinating as the remnant stand of maritime chaparral located on the northwestern side of the park. Chaparral is a quintessential California vegetation, and winter is an excellent time of year to explore the chaparral at Knowland Park. As you follow the path into brush, you’ll find yourself in a maze-like realm of twisted, lichen-encrusted trunks and unique plant life. Truly wondrous!…
The desert has secrets, and it doesn’t give them up freely. This patch of Low Desert I’m camped on east of Joshua Tree National Park seems a quiet bit of desolation, a few scraggly shrubs separated widely with non-descript gravel between them. A few aging beer cans, a few tracks across the landscape left by off-road vehicles. The surroundings mostly seem to contain wind, and cold sun, and silence. Not much to write home about, a person might think.
Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest in my series of Pollination Methods videos that I make as part of my thesis project. While carrots and beets are not closely related, they share similar life cycles, pollination methods, and even breeding goals – so I put both of these root vegetables in the same video…
Every now and then I stumble across a graph in a paper that blows me away. Some show patterns I hadn’t imagined, while others show patterns far stronger than I’d thought possible. The other day I came across an ‘in your face’ graph that’s worth sharing…
The fact that IRGC 59101 (which is pictured below, thanks to Ms de Guzman again) is a bit of a strange morphological variant isn’t mentioned in the genebank database, however. Not the electronic version, anyway. Ms de Guzman simply remembered the variety and dove back into her notebooks to find it. Next time I think about venturing into Genebank Database Hell, I want her as my guide…
Spinescent. Now there’s a word! It simply means having spines and one of the first things many visitors to the African savannah notice is that everything is covered in thorns. Or, in other words, Africa is spinescent. It’s not a wise idea to brush past a bush when you’re walking, and you certainly want to keep arms and legs inside a car through narrow tracks. These are thorns that puncture heavy-duty car tyres, let alone delicate skin. But why is the savanna so much thornier than many of the places visitors come from? Or even than other biomes within Africa, such as the forests?…
Having last week given you the bad news about the biological warfare that plants with thorns are engaging in, I thought it only fair to share some tips that may help you stave off those tropical nasties threatening to kill you… So the good news is that some of those very same thorny trees that are out to get you also hold the cure in their sap…
Gladiolus is latin for ‘little sword’, a fitting name for a plant whose flowers grow along giant spikes. While these plants are ubiquitous in gardens across the United States, they actually are complete foreigners. Of the 260 species around the world, almost all are from southern Africa, and none are from North or South America…
Our seeds from last week were tough to identify, but thank you to everyone who sent guesses. I appreciate your attempts because they give me great ideas for upcoming mystery seed posts 🙂 The mystery seeds were from a giraffe thorn tree, Acacia erioloba. It is also commonly called camel thorn…
It’s surprisingly easy these days to find information on the medicinal use of plants (there’s a great list for the Samuru people here, for example), such as the Commiphora uses we covered last week, but many plants have cultural significance beyond the simple medicinal uses and it’s often much harder to find information about these uses…
How native is native? We have to applaud the trend toward using more native species in efforts to reclaim natural landscapes after disturbance, don’t we? Sometimes, unfortunately, the gesture backfires no matter how well intentioned it may be. Such was the case several years ago (about 2006?), when the Town of Morrison built a water pipeline through the local open space park (Mt. Falcon)…
There are various methods to reconstruct the plant community of a past landscape. Flowering plants produce pollen grains composed by a chemically very stable substance named Sporopollenin, therefore pollen grains usually are well preserved in sediments (but as correctly noted in the comments not in soils). Identifying and counting the pollen deposited over time on the bottom of a lake or conserved in the layers of a bog we can infer the vegetation that once surrounded these sediment traps. In such sediments also plant detritus can be conserved…
The orchid genus Dipodium, collectively known as the hyacinth orchids, includes somewhere between 20 to 30 species native to Southeast Asia and Australia. Interestingly, the majority of the species are leafy epiphytes – well, terrestrials that climb and then become epiphytes – dispersed throughout Southeast Asia. A small group of these plants, however, have lost the leaves entirely and live as terrestrial parasites at the base of Eucalyptus trees in Australia…
Right now the various species of Prunus are in flower all over northern California; the ornamental plums that are so popular as sidewalk decor are shedding petals everywhere, apricot blossoms are peeking out from yards, and the almond trees that crop up as renegades from the big orchards near Davis and in the central valley are covered in popcorn-y pinkish white flowers. With constant reminders of stone fruit everywhere but none actually in season to eat, I’ve been doing a lot of baking with almonds and almond extract…
I have a soft-spot for plant biology. In my final year at university, having exhausted all of the bacteria-related biochemistry lectures, I took a bacteria-related lecture course with the plants department. It was a smaller department, and seemed a lot friendlier and nicer. Also the biscuits in the tea-room were cheaper. So I do like to write about plants every now and again, and it isn’t a very difficult task because like every other multicellular organism on the planet, plants also suffer from bacterial infections. Unlike humans, they don’t have a blood stream to carry immune cells around, so they instead rely on bombarding bacteria with nasty chemicals, quickly killing off any parts of the plant that get infected and acquiring a kind of plant resistance to stop attacks occurring again…
With that, we conclude this month’s edition of Berry Go Round. Next month’s carnival will be hosted by Greg Laden. Send in your submissions and volunteer to host.
Posted onFebruary 29, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on Clocks in Bacteria II: Adaptive Function of Clocks in Cyanobacteria
This is the second post in a series of five, originally published on April 05, 2006:
In the previous two posts, here and here, I have mentioned how the discovery of circadian clocks in Cyanobacteria changed the way we think about the origin and evolution of circadian clocks. Quite soon after the initial discovery, the team from Carl Johnson’s laboratory published two papers [1,2] describing a more direct test of adaptive function of circadian clocks in the Synechococcus elongatus.
Wild-type and various clock-mutants in Synechoccocus, when raised in isolation in light-dark cycles, have comparable reproductive rates. When raised in constant light, they fare even a little better, i.e., multiply faster. Thus, in isolation, clock does not appear to confer adaptive advantage.
However, when the strains are cultured together, two strains grown in the same petri-dish, and exposed to light-dark cycle, the strain whose endogenous period is closer to the period of the environmental cycle “wins” the contest. This suggests that circadian clock confers fitness in rhythmic environments. In constant light, arrhythmic mutants outperform rhythmic strains.
Here is how Johnson describes the experiments (from a book chapter not available online):
“The authors’ laboratory tested the adaptive significance of circadian programs by using competition experiments between different strains of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus (Ouyang et al., 1998; Woelfle et al., 2004). For asexual microbes such as S. elongatus, differential growth of one strain under competition with other strains is a good measure of reproductive fitness. In pure culture, because the strains grew at about the same rate in constant light and in LD cycles, there did not appear to be a significant advantage or disadvantage in having different circadian periods when the strains were grown individually. The fitness test was to mix different strains together and to grow them in competition to determine whether the composition of the population changes as a function of time. The cultures were diluted at intervals to allow growth to continue. Different period mutants were used to answer the question, ”Does having a period that is similar to the period of the environmental cycle enhance fitness?” The circadian phenotypes of the strains used had freerunning periods of about 22 h (B22a, C22a) and 30 h (A30a, C28a). These strains were determined by point mutations in three different clock genes: kaiA (A30a), kaiB (B22a), and kaiC (C22a, C28a). Wild type has a period of about 25 h under these conditions. When each of the strains was mixed with another strain and grown together in competition, a pattern emerged that depended on the frequency of the LD cycle and the circadian period. When grown on a 22-h cycle (LD 11:11), the 22 h-period mutants could overtake wild type in the mixed cultures. On a 30-h cycle (LD 15:15), the 30 h-period mutants could defeat either wild type or the 22 h-period mutants. On a ”normal” 24-h cycle (LD 12:12), the wild-type strain could overgrow either mutant (Ouyang et al., 1998). Note that over many cycles, each of these LD conditions have equal amounts of light and dark (which is important, as photosynthetic cyanobacteria derive their energy from light); it is only the frequency of light versus dark that differs among the LD cycles. Figure 1 shows results from the competition between wild type and the mutant strains (Ouyang et al., 1998).
Clearly, the strain whose period most closely matched that of the LD cycle eliminated the competitor. Under a nonselective condition (in this case, constant light), each strain was able to maintain itself in the mixed cultures. Because the mutant strains could defeat the wild-type strain in LD cycles in which the periods are similar to their endogenous periods, the differential effects that were observed are likely to result from the differences in the circadian clock. A genetic test was also performed to demonstrate that the clock gene mutation was specifically responsible for the differential effects in the competition experiment (Ouyang et al., 1998). Because the growth rate of the various cyanobacterial strains in pure culture is not detectably different, these results are most likely an example of ”soft selection” where the reduced fitness of one genotype is seen only under competition (Futuyma, 1998).
In a test of the extrinsic versus intrinsic value of the clock system of cyanobacteria, wild type was competed with an apparently arrhythmic strain (CLAb). As shown in Fig. 2, the arrhythmic strain was defeated rapidly by wild type in LD 12:12, but under competition in constant light, the arrhythmic strain grew slightly better than wild type (Woelfle et al., 2004). Taken together, results show that an intact clock system whose freerunning period is consonant with the environment significantly enhances the reproductive fitness of cyanobacteria in rhythmic environments; however, this same clock system provides no adaptive advantage in constant environments and may even be slightly detrimental to this organism. Therefore, the clock system does not appear to confer an intrinsic value for cyanobacteria in constant conditions.”
It is telling how many control experiments they had to do in order to eliminate various alternative explanations. They had to show that mutations in clock genes do not have additional effects on the ability of the cell to grow and reproduce. Check. They had to show that clock mutations do not affect the ability of the cells to utilize the food and light energy. Check. They had to show that clock mutations do not affect any conceivable way by which one strain can, perhaps by secreting chemicals, actively disrupt the health of the other strain. Check. And in the end, although they demonstrated that “resonance”, i.e., similarity between environmental cycle and the intrinsic period confers some advantage, they still could not state with certainty that this “proves” that the circadian clock has an adaptive function. Here is Johnson [3] again:
“The original adaptation of circadian clocks was presumably to enhance reproductive fitness in natural environments, which are cyclic (24h) conditions. We can refer to this situation as an adaptation to extrinsic conditions. However, some researchers have proposed that circadian clocks may additionally provide an “intrinsic” adaptive value (Klarsfeld 1998; Paranjpe 2003 and Pittendrigh 1993). That is, circadian pacemakers may have evolved to become an intrinsic part of internal temporal organization and, as such, may have become intertwined with other traits that influence reproductive fitness in addition to their original role for adaptation to environmental cycles. Note that a rigorous evolutionary biologist would no longer consider an intrinsic value for clocks to be an adaptation if their original extrinsic value has been lost. However, if clocks retain extrinsic value and additionally accrue intrinsic value, then they would still be considered an adaptation.”
Testing if a trait is an adaptation is a very difficult task. Testing if something as ubiquitous as a circadian clock is an adaptation is even harder. Can you imagine testing if using ATP for energy storage, or using DNA for information storage are adaptations? Are there organisms that do not use these, so we can use them in comparative or competitive studies?
In his book Adaptation and Environment (1990), Robert Brandon came up with five criteria that need to be satisfied in order to determine if a trait is an adaptation (thanks to Robert Skipper for a reminder of this):
“One must have
1. evidence that selection has occurred;
2. an ecological explanation of the fact that some types are better adapted than others;
3. evidence that the trait in question is heritable;
4. information about the structure of the population, including both demic structure and the structure of the selective environment;
5. phylogenetic information concerning what has evolved from what.”
The early cyanobacterial studies have shown criterion #3 to be correct. The competitive assay studies started cracking the criterion #2. In the next post on this topic, I will describe some studies that started investigating the criterion #5, with some additional evidence for criteria Nos. 1, 2 and 4. Apparently, we still have a long way to go. Johnson again:
An example from the circadian literature of a ”just-so” story that the author has personally promulgated is that of ”temporal separation” of photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation in cyanobacteria. In nitrogen-fixing unicellular bacteria, nitrogen fixation is often phased to occur at night. Nitrogen (N2) fixation is inhibited by low levels of oxygen, which poses a dilemma for photosynthetic bacteria because photosynthesis generates oxygen. Mitsui et al. (1986) proposed that the nocturnal phasing of nitrogen fixation was an adaptation to permit N2 fixation to occur when photosynthesis was not evolving oxygen, and the author has repeated this hypothesis in several publications (Johnson et al., 1996, 1998). This hypothesis would predict that cyanobacterial growth in constant light would be slower than in a light/dark (LD) cycle because nitrogen fixation would be inhibited under these conditions and therefore the growing cells might rapidly become starved for metabolically available nitrogen. The problem is that cyanobacteria grow perfectly well in constant light–in fact, they grow faster in constant light than in LD cycles, presumably because of the extra energy they derive from the additional photosynthesis. This result is inconsistent with the ”temporal separation” hypothesis. It does not mean that the ”temporal separation” hypothesis is incorrect–in fact, the author believes that under appropriate (but as yet untested) conditions of medium, light, and carbon dioxide, the ”temporal separation” hypothesis will emerge triumphant. Nevertheless, the point here is that ”temporal separation in cyanobacteria” is an example of a ”just-so” circadian story that we like to tell without its being rigorously supported by appropriate data. This was the conclusion of Gould and Lewontin (1979) for many investigations in the field of population biology, and this criticism is on target.”
References and image sources:
[1] YAN OUYANG, CAROL R. ANDERSSON, TAKAO KONDO, SUSAN S. GOLDEN, AND CARL HIRSCHIE JOHNSON, Resonating circadian clocks enhance fitness in cyanobacteria, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 95, pp. 8660-8664, July 1998
[2] Mark A. Woelfle, Yan Ouyang, Kittiporn Phanvijhitsiri and Carl Hirschie Johnson, The Adaptive Value of Circadian Clocks: An Experimental Assessment in Cyanobacteria, Current Biology, Vol. 14, 1481-1486, August 24, 2004,
[3] Carl Hirschie Johnson, Testing the Adaptive Value of Circadian Systems, Methods in Enzymology, Volume 393 , 2005, Pages 818-837
I posted 16 times in February. That is, on A Blog Around The Clock only (not counting the posts on The Network Central, The SA Incubator, Video of the Week, Image of the Week, or editing Guest Blog and Expeditions).
Following #scio12, I wrote a long summary of the event, with personal thoughts included:
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Invitation to the NRC opening - click to see large!
The new Nature Research Center (NRC), a technology wing of the existing North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, is opening on April 20, 2012. Everyone is invited! Invitation attached (click on the image left)!!! It will be a 24-hour science party! There will be live feeds in the SECU Daily Planet multi-media theater from scientists around the planet, ongoing activities in each research lab by our own “rock-star” NRC scientists, food and events related to science, and citizen science take-home ideas. …. and More. My recent article in the Observer summarizes all the stats about the NRC — read and enjoy!
The theme of the new NRC is “how we know what we know.” All exhibits explain how scientists work to solve mysteries that affect our daily lives. The Daily Planet is four stories high, and the giant Earth-shaped structure houses a round multimedia theater featuring global science adventures. Awesome footage, ranging from exploration of forest canopies to digging up ancient dinosaur bones, will be broadcast. Schools can attend live presentations, or access recordings through an extensive virtual library.
The NRC also features citizen science, where the public can engage in science affecting our lives. Analyze the water in your local stream? Check out your DNA? Monitor birds in your backyard? Measure black holes in outer space? Students, classes, citizens, and legislators will be welcome to visit our Investigate Labs to participate in ongoing research. Education staff will help you experience the excitement of discovery. The new wing features a Science Café which is modeled along the lines of a sports bar – except all the TV screens will feature live feeds from science around the world.
Canopymeg with the heirs of Ethiopia's forests -- kids who are disciples of the Coptic church take on the stewardship of conservation in this unique situation where the last forest fragments exist in church yards, otherwise called "church forests".
My passion continues to be mentoring youth in science, especially minorities, and also global forest conservation. I hope the new NRC will offer role models for kids from all walks of life, so that diverse youth are inspired to seek careers in science. During my own childhood, I never had a woman science teacher throughout my career, which made me pretty anxious at times about pursuing ecology as a career. I hope that the emerging generation will never experience that anxiety.
My other passion is conserving global forests. Not only are they the lungs of the planet, but they are also the drug stores, the carbon storage agents, the climate control, the gas exchange headquarters, the biodiversity libraries and the spiritual and cultural meccas of many societies. My recent work in Ethiopia was just published in a short piece in Science Magazine (hooray!) and has seen some great success with the simple solution of working together with the local priests to build stone walls around their church yards which house the last remaining forest patches in Northeastern Ethiopia (read more on my website). Read more in my recent nature column.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I am totally excited about using social media as a “hook” to get young people engaged in science at our NRC. Our new and amazing Science Communication Director, Dr. DavidKroll, is awesome in creating these pathways and it is a privilege to work with him on this. With his blogging and all of our staff’s global research and outreach, we should be twittering and facebooking and blogging our way into many K-12 classrooms as well as into folks’ everyday lives with exciting science and more science!
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? 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, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The best part of Sci Online is always the people – I would also love to see a Techno-Geek table next year, where those of us in mid-career can get a tune-up to make sure our mobile phones are tweeting and facebooking to our best capabilities. Little things like image size and how to transmit videos make a big difference in our science communication. I would also love to host something at our SECU Daily Planet technology theater at the NRC next year, where we actually take some of the rock-star attendees of the conference, and broadcast our own TED series to students around the state and the country, using our internet capabilities and cool visual technologies.
Looking forward to 2013!
Thank you! See you at the NRC opening and at ScienceOnline2013!
From the Archives: first in a series of five posts on clocks in bacteria first published on March 08, 2006.
As I stated in the introductory post on this topic, it was thought for a long time that Prokaryotes were incapable of generating circadian rhythms. When it was discovered, in 1994 [1], that one group of Prokaryotes, the cyanobacteria, possess a circadian clock, the news was greeted with great excitement. This was the first definitive demonstration of a circadian clock in a bacterium (I intend to revisit the E.coli saga in a later post).
Synechococcus
All three hypotheses for the origin of the circadian clock suppose that it first evolved in an aquatic, unicellular organism. While protists fit the bill quite nicely, having a bacterium with a circadian clock pushed the origin of the clock further back into the past. This made the researchers happy as it supported the notion that the clock was a universal property of life, as well as that it evolved only once in the history of Life on Earth. This also suggested that clocks in all organisms use same or similar intercellular mechanisms for generation of circadian rhythms.
At the time that clocks were discovered in cyanobacteria, only two circadian genes were characterized: period in fruitflies and frequency in Neurospora crassa. The second fly gene, timeless, was discovered the following year, and the first mammalian gene Clock and the first plant gene Toc were discovered some years later. Thus, at the time, it was still plausible that all of life used the same mechanism for the circadian clock, just as all of life uses ATP for energy storage and DNA for information storage.
However, studying genetics in bacteria is a much quicker and easier task than in the large multicellular eukaryotes. Very soon, the cyanobacterial clock genes were discovered and it turned out that they had no resemblance to fly or mold genes. KaiA, KaiB and KaiC (as they were discovered in Japan, they were named “kaiten”, which implies a cycle of events reminiscent of the turning of the heavens) have no homologies with any of the clock genes found in any other group of organisms and the internal logic of the bacterial clock is different from that in plants, fungi and animals, i.e., it is not a typical transcription-translation feedback loop.
Method for studying the cyanobacteria clock
The clock in cyanobacteria is better thought of as a relay switch. It turns about 2/3 of the genome on in the morning (and off in the evening) and turns on the remaining 1/3 of the genome at dusk (and off at dawn). Recent findings about bacterial, plant, protist, fungal and animal clocks suggests as many as five separate events of the origin of a circadian clock on Earth – one for each major group of organisms.
Mutations and deletions [1,2 5,6] of either one of the three Kai genes affect the circadian phenotype, either by altering the inherent period of the freerunning rhythm, or by abolishing rhythmicity altogether. Interestingly, Synechococcus cells appear to have a “memory” of the circadian phase in which they find themselves and this memory gets transmitted from parental to daughter cells during cell division.
Synechococcus rhythm
Actually, under certain conditions, cell division is a much more rapid process than a circadian cycle. In other words, Synechococcus may undergo several cell divisions over a period of a single day, yet the colony as a whole keeps its circadian rhythms running all along [2,3].
Next time, I will focus on the contributions of cyanobacteria to the understanding of the origin, evolution and adaptive function of circadian clocks.
~~~~~
References, sources of images, and further reading:
[2] Circadian clocks in prokaryotes by Carl Hirschie Johnson, Susan S. Golden, Masahiro Ishiura & Takao Kondo, Molecular Microbiology, Volume 21 Page 5 (July 1996).
[3] Circadian Rhythms in Rapidly Dividing Cyanobacteria by Takao Kondo, Tetsuya Mori, Nadya V. Lebedeva, Setsuyuki Aoki, Masahiro Ishiura and Susan S. Golden, Science, Vol. 275. no. 5297, pp. 224 – 227 (10 January 1997)
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. 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 background? Any scientific education?
I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and went to college on a swimming scholarship. After graduating from Iowa State University in journalism with a minor in biology, and after putting in a couple of years as a business reporter for the Des Moines Register and Tribune, I moved west.
I ended up in San Francisco in the mid-70s, working for a trade paper put out by Fairchild Publications. As San Francisco bureau editor for Electronic News, I made regular trips to Silicon Valley to cover the new chipmakers, known as the semiconductor industry, composed of companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. I came out of a liberal arts background, but was asked to cover Silicon Valley based on my editor’s belief that journalists who could learn the science were preferable to a staff of engineers who understood the technology behind it all, but couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag.
As I found out later, I was one of the first reporters in America to cover Silicon Valley as a full-time beat. It was a brutal learning curve, but I can’t imagine a better training ground for science reporting. I interviewed people like Ted Hoff, inventor of the microprocessor, and Robert Noyce, president of Intel and co-inventor of the integrated circuit. I ended up writing a book about it called The New Alchemists: Silicon Valley and the Microelectronics Revolution.
Eventually my wife and I moved out of San Francisco and plunged into the woods of northern Minnesota, where I wrote a novel, a technology thriller called The Seventh Level. I freelanced for computers magazines, and later on, I picked up an MA in Humanities at Cal State.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
Somewhere along the way, my interests migrated from computers and machine intelligence to the human brain and neuroscience. I wrote a draft of a book about recent scientific research on addiction, for interested laypeople, but my agent had absolutely no luck finding a publisher. The only thing publishers wanted to hear about were drug confessionals. Newspapers and magazines were no longer a trustworthy market, and my two previous books were out of print. Luckily, I had started a modest blog called Addiction Inbox as a landing site on the Internet for discussion of the book—just the odd post about biochemical aspects of addiction, mostly press release rewrites, sort of a holding pattern, because I didn’t really know anything about blogging. But the blog grew slowly and steadily and took on a life of its own.
And of course, all of this coincided with the revolution in neuroscience, and our whole understanding of the brain changing due to insights about synaptic neurotransmission. I interviewed dozens of key researchers and decided to focus on pharmacological approaches to treatment—fighting fire with fire. In the book, I concentrated on explaining brain function, and particularly the function of reward systems. Eventually, I self-published the book, called The Chemical Carousel, in both paperback and Kindle formats, and continued to blog. I’ve been an online journalist ever since.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
The blogging led to a stint as senior contributing editor for the online addiction and recovery site The Fix. And I’ve stepped back into magazine freelancing, including a recent news piece at Scientific American about the ways in which alcohol affects women differently than men. A lot of my professional energy over the past year went toward establishing a daily news blog at The Fix, but I’ve stepped away from that to spend more time on stories at Addiction Inbox. I’m also interested in continuing to freelance as a science writer. And I’m looking at some e-book projects. And forever trying to finish another novel.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I’ve always been drawn to the places where art and science meet. That’s a good description of the key components of science blogging, I think. You’re writing about science and technology for digital media, in an entertaining way, with attention to the design details of your blog or website. The Science Online conferences are another good example of a science/technology/art/ mash-up.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
My primary writing activity at present is blogging. My recent book helps pay for that, since I’m an unaffiliated, independent operator. As for social networks, I wasn’t really interested until I discovered Twitter. With Twitter, there was suddenly this space on the web where information and intelligence and humor were being exchanged in real time by some very interesting and hard-working scientists and writers. And it’s basically a meritocracy. It’s also a fairly safe, nonjudgmental atmosphere for interacting informally with brilliant, accomplished women—and what, really, is more fun than that? Author William Gibson didn’t beat around the bush when he said that Twitter was “the most powerful aggregator of shared novelty humanity has yet possessed.”
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites?
I came into the picture right when ScienceBlogs blew apart a few years back, and there was this frantic game of musical chairs, with science bloggers trying to find institutional homes, or branding themselves as independent bloggers. I thought maybe I had just wrapped up the shortest blogging career in history. Then along came what evolved into Independent Neuroblogs, the network where Addiction Inbox found a home, and then ScienceSeeker, the big science blog aggregator. That helped make it easier to join the party and keep track of things and get listed officially as a science blog.
But what really made it work for me was the early support I got from established science bloggers. People like Drugmonkey, Maia Szalavitz, DavidKroll, Scicurious, Daniel Lende, among others, were all very open and encouraging in the early going. And Dr. Shaheen Lakhan at Brain Blogger encouraged me to write for him, giving me an early outlet to the greater blogosphere. Psychologist Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks was particularly helpful. He retweeted a lot of my stuff in the early going, for which I’ll be forever grateful. That brought attention to Addiction Inbox that couldn’t have happened in any other way.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you?
I’ve never attended a conference quite like it. It reminded me of some of the earlier collaborative stuff, like The Whole Earth Catalog and The Well and the Electronic Freedom Foundation. A highlight for me was sneaking off to the North Carolina Museum of Art to see a Rembrandt exhibition with a group of attendees that included two Pulitzer Prize winners.
The sweet spot where art and science meeting is definitely on the Web now, and it spins off into stimulating real-world activities like Science Online 2012. I’m really pleased to have managed to insinuate myself into the online structure, so to speak. I think as time passes, and as more science and science writing migrates online, it’ll get tougher and tougher for journalists to get back in the game if they’re offline.
Thank you so much for the interview, and I hope to see you back next year, at ScienceOnline2013.
From the Archives: this is the first in a series of posts on circadian clocks in microorganisms , originally published on February 23, 2006…
Many papers in chronobiology state that circadian clocks are ubiquitous. That has been a mantra since at least 1960. This suggests that most or all organisms on Earth possess biological clocks.
In the pioneering days of chronobiology, it was a common practice to go out in the woods and collect as many species as possible and document the existence of circadian rhythms. Technical limitations certainly influenced what kinds of organisms were usually tested.
Rhythms of locomotor activity are the easiest to measure. Rodents, as well as large walking insects like cockroaches, will turn running wheels, each revolution triggering a switch that sends a signal to the computer. Songbirds will jump from one perch to another, each perch flipping a switch connected to a computer. Lizards, while walking around the cage will tilt the cage from left to right around an axis – a metal bar on the bottom – which will turn a switch. Plants that exhibit leaf movements (closing at night, opening during the day) were the prime experimental models for a while (e.g., Kalanchoe, mimosa, tobacco).
Monitoring rhythms in other organisms is much harder: it is mighty difficult to make a fish run in a running wheel, or build hopping perches sensitive enough to be triggered by the landing of a butterfly. That was even harder back in the late 1940s and early 1950s when most of this work was done.
The tree of life.
It is no suprise that nobody looked at microorganisms back then – it was just technically too hard. The fact is that most of the pioneers in the field came in from vertebrate physiology, ethology or ecology. It is easy for us, large mammals, to forget that we are not among the dominant life-forms on the planet – that title goes to bacteria, in terms of numbers of individuals, in terms of biodiversity, and in terms of total biomass. See if you can find mammals, or even all animals on the Tree of Life:
Some old papers, mostly parts of Conference Proceedings of various kinds, mention as fact that Bacteria do not have clocks but do not provide any citations. It took me years to dig out three papers (Rogers and Greenbank, 1930, Halberg and Connor, 1961; and Sturtevant, 1973) with relevance to this question and all three are ambiguous about the final verdict. Why is nobody revisiting this with modern molecular techniques?
Being unicellular does not preclude one from having a clock, though, as single-cell Protista and Fungi all have circadian rhythms, which have been studied quite extensively since the 1970s or so (I intend to delve some more in that literature and write some posts on them in the future).
Cyanobacteria
One group of bacteria does have a clock – the unicellular Cyanobacteria (if you are above a certain age, you may remember them under their old name: blue-green algae), in particular those species that do not form chains, e.g., Synechococcus and Nostoc. This was discovered very recently – only ten years ago (Mori et al. 1996). I was two years into my Masters when that paper appeared and I remember the excitement. I will certainly write a post or two on those soon [Note: yes, those posts are written and will be republished here over the next few days].
There has not yet been a single study of any kind of rhythmicity in Archaea [Note: there has been since this post was first published]. Most of those microorganisms live in strange places – miles deep under the surface of the earth, in rocks, in ice, on the ocean floors and in the hydrothermal vents. They mostly do not inhabit rhythmic environments, so perhaps they do not need to have clocks – but it would be really nice to know if that is really the case.
Archaea
Old Faithful, the famous geyser in Yellowstone park contains Archea. As the geyser erupts every 45 minutes or so, the microbes are suddenly exposed to very different environment: light, turbulence, lower temperature. Should we expect them to evolve a 45-minute clock that will help them predict the eruption so they can limit some sensitive biochemical reactions to the quiet periods and switch on the defenses against light and cold every 45 minutes?
“… should be possible to demonstrate the effect by bacterial selection experiments in a chemostat. By alternating the nutrient influx from glucose without oxygen, to oxygen without glucose, to alanine and oxygen, cells would be forced into a three-point metabolic cycle.” and “… reversing the order of the driving cycle, it should be possible also to select cells whose clocks run backward.”
In a later edition (after we learned that cyanobacteria have clocks) he suggested, instead, to use
“one of the species of cyanobacteria that revealed no circadian rhythms in surveys before Mori et al. (1996), and use light as the alternative nutrient”.
E.coli
As of today, nobody has performed such an experiment, although Elowitz and Leibler (2000) came pretty close with a study in which they produced oscillations in Escherichia coli with periods of 3-4 hours, which are slower than the cell-division cycle:
So, if most of Life on Earth is Prokaryotic (Eubacteria and Archaea), and those groups do not have clocks, then clocks are not ubiqutous, are they? In my papers and in my Dissertation I try to hedge a bit by stating that they are found in “organisms that live on or close to the surface of the Earth”, thus at least avoiding the deep-oceanic, deep-soil, and parasitic microorganisms (as well as burrowing and cave organisms that may have secondarily lost their clock).
The very last event, ‘Beyond 42: How science can use stories to explain life, the universe and everything’ (title coined by Desiree, not meant to refer to my age, or to NYC’s famous old Studio 42), will be outside of campus, in town, at The Artery, where several local science storytellers, Robin Woywitka (with his band Super 92) and I will be telling science stories and generally having great fun.
So, if you will be in Edmonton that week, come by and say Hello (if you are at the University, ask Marie-Claire for the schedule of campus events you may be interested in attending).
I originally published this post on May 23, 2007, on the day of the 300th birthday of Karl Linne.
When it’s someone’s birthday it is nice to give presents, or a flower. Perhaps a whole boquet of roses. But if the birthday is a really big round number, like 300, and the birthday boy is the one who actually gave names to many of those flowers, it gets a little tougher. Perhaps you may try to do something really difficult and build, actually plant, a Flower Clock. After all, it was Carl von Linne, aka Carolus Linnaeus, today’s birthday celebrator, who invented the flower clock. He drew it like this, but he never actully built one:
The first one to make (and write down) an observation that some plants (in that case, a tropical Tamarind tree) raise their leaves during the day and let them droop down during the night, was Androsthenes, an officer who accompanied Alexander the Great. In the first century, Pliny the Elder made a similar observation, repeated in the thirteenth century by Albertus Magnus.
In 1729, Jean Jacque d’Ortous de Mairan, an astronomer, not a botanist, reported an experiment – considered to be the first true chronobiologial experiment in history – in which he observed the spontaneous daily rise and nightly fall of leaves of Mimosa pudica kept in a closet in the dark. The experiment was repeated with some improvements by Duhamel de Monceau and by Zinn, both in 1759.
Another Swede, Arrhenius argued that a mysterious cosmic Factor X triggered the movements. Charles Darwin published an entire book on the Movement of Plants, arguing that the plant itself generates the daily rhythms. The most famous botanist of the 19th century, Pfeffer, started out favouring the “external hypothesis”, but Darwin’s experiments forced him to change his mind later in his career and accept the “internal” source of such rhythmic movements. In the early 20th century, Erwin Bunning was the first to really thoroughly study circadian rhythms in plants. For the rest of the century, animal research took over and though there has been some progress recently, the understanding of clocks in plants still lags behind that of Drosophila and the mouse.
But it was Carolus Linnaeus back in the 18th century who, fond of personifying plants (mostly in regard to sex) named this phenomenon “sleep” in plants. Soon, he switched his focus from movements of leaves to the daily opening and closing of flowers and performed a broad study of the times of day when each flower species opened and closed:
Linnaeus observed over a number of years that certain plants constantly opened and closed their flowers at particular times of the day, these times varying from species to species. Hence one could deduce the approximate time of day according to which species had opened or closed their flowers. Arranged in sequence of flowering over the day they constituted a kind of floral clock or horologium florae, as Linnaeus called it in his Philosophia Botanica (1751, pages 274-276). A detailed and extended account of this in English will be found in F.W.Oliver’s translation of Anton Kerner’s The Natural History of Plants, 1895, vol.2, pages 215-218. As many of the indicator plants are wildflowers and the opening/closing times depend on latitude, the complexities of planting a floral clock make it an impractical proposition.
While it is not easy to make a functioning flower clock, people have done it. There is one in his hometown of Uppsala, for instance. It has been made in the classroom (pdf) and one can pretty easily find locally useful lists of plants to try to build one.
Linnaeus; in writings titled Philosophia Botanica wrote about 3 types of flowers:1. Meteorici, A category which changes their opening and closing times according to the weather conditions.
2. Tropici, Flowers which change their opening and closing specifically to the length of the day.
3. Aequinoctales, Most important here to this story, are the flowers having fixed times for opening and closing, regardless of weather or season.
It is only those last ones that could be used for buildiing Floral Clocks, while the first two groups were important for the studies of vernalization and photoperiodism in plants in the early 20th century.
You can find some more detail of the flower clock history here. And the idea of a flower clock was also picked up by artists of various kinds:
Linnaeus’s idea for a collection of flowers that opened or closed at a particular time of day was taken up by the French composer Jean Fran aix in his composition L’horloge de flore (The Flower Clock), a concerto for solo oboe and orchestra.———————
A floral clock features in the fictional city of Quirm, in Soul Music, one of the books in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.
In the old days, when people communed with nature more closely, the fact that plants and animals did different things at different times of day or year did not raise any eyebrows. That’s just how the world works – you sleep at night and work during the day, and so do (or in reverse) many other organisms. Nothing exciting there, is it? Nobody that we know of ever wondered how and why this happens – it just does. Thus, for many centuries, all we got are short snippets of observations without any thoughts about causes:
“Aristotle [noted] that the ovaries of sea-urchins acquire greater size than usual at the time of the full moon.”(Cloudsley-Thompson 1980,p.5.)
“Androsthenes reported that the tamarind tree…, opened its leaves during the day and closed them at night.”(Moore-Ede et al. 1982,p.5.)
“Cicero mentioned that the flesh of oysters waxed and waned with the Moon, an observation confirmed later by Pliny.”(Campbell 1988, Coveney and Highfield 1990)
“…Hippocrates had advised his associates that regularity was a sign of health, and that irregular body functions or habits promoted an unsalutory condition. He counseled them to pay close attention to fluctuations in their symptoms, to look at both good and bad days in their patients and healthy people.”(Luce 1971,p.8.)
“Herophilus of Alexandria is said to have measured biological periodicity by timing the human pulse with the aid of a water clock.”(Cloudsley-Thompson 1980, p.5.)
“Early Greek therapies involved cycles of treatment, known as metasyncrasis….Caelius Aurelianus on Chronic and Acute Diseases…describes these treatments.. .”(Luce 1971, p.8.)
“Nobody seems to have noticed any biological rhythmicities throughout the Middle Ages. The lone exception was Albertus Magnus who wrote about the sleep movements of plants in the thirteenth century” (Bennet 1974).
The first person to ask the question – and perform the very first experiment in the field of Chronobiology – was Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan, a French astronomer. What did he do?
In 1729, intrigued by the daily opening and closing of the leaves of a heliotrope plant (the phenomenon of ‘sleep in plants’ was well known due to Linneaus), de Mairan decided to test whether this biological “behavior” was simply a response to the sun. He took a plant (most likely Mimosa pudica but we do not know for sure as Linnean taxonomy came about a decade later) and placed it in a dark closet. He then observed it and noted that, without having access to the information about sunlight, the plant still raised its leaves during the day and let them droop down during the night.
However, De Mairan was an astronomer busy with other questions:
“….about the aurora borealis, and the relation of a prism’s rainbow colors to the musical scale, and the diurnal rotation of the earth, and the satellites of Venus, and the total eclipse of the sun that had occurred in 1706. He would waste no time writing to the Academy about the sleep of a plant!”(Ward 1971,p.43.)
He did not wanted to waste his time writing and publishing a paper on a mere plant. So his experiment was reported by his friend Marchant. It was not unusual at that time for one person to report someone else’s findings. Marchand published it in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Paris as he was a member, and the official citation is: De Mairan, J.J.O. 1729. Observation Botanique, Histoire de l’Academie Royale des Sciences, Paris, p.35.
In the paper Marchant wrote:
“It is well known that the most sensitive of the heliotropes turns its leaves and branches in the direction of the greatest light intensity. This property is common to many other plants, but the heliothrope is peculiar in that it is sensitive to the sun (or time of day) in another way: the leaves and stems fold up when the sun goes down, in just the same way as when touches or agutates the plant.
But M. de Mairan observed that this phenomenon was not restricted to the sunset or to the open air; it is only a little less marked when one maintains the plant continually enclosed in a dark place – it opens very appreciably during the day, and at evening folds up again for the night. This experiment was carried out towards the end of one summer, and well duplicated. The sensitive plant sense the sun without being exposed to it in any way, and is reminiscent of that delicate perception by which invalids in their beds can tell the difference between day and night. (Ward 1971)”
Marchant and de Mairan were quite careful about not automatically assuming that the capacity for time measurement resides within the plant. They could not exclude other potential factors: temperature cycles, or light leaks, or changes in other meteorological parameters.
Also, the paper, being just a page long (a “short communication”, see image to the right), does not provide detailed “materials and methods” so we do not know if “well repeated” experiments meant that this was done a few times for a day or two, or if the same plants were monitored over many days. We also do not know how, as well as how often and when, did de Mairan check on the plants. He certainly missed that the plants opened up their leaves a little earlier each day – a freerunning rhythm with a period slightly shorter than 24 hours – a dead giveaway that the rhythm is endogenous.
The idea that clocks are endogenous, residing inside organisms, was controversial for a very long time – top botanists of Europe were debating this throughout the 19th century, and the debate lasted well into the 1970s with Frank Brown and a few others desperately inventing more and more complicated mathematical models that could potentially explain how each individual, with its own period, could actually be responding to a celestial cue (blame Skinner and behaviorism for treating all behaviors as reactive, i.e., automatic responses to the cues from the environment).
The early 18th century science did not progress at a speed we are used to today. But the paper was not obscure and forgotten either – it just took some time for others to revisit it. And revisit it they did. In 1758 and 1759 two botanists repeated the experiment: both Zinn and Duhamel de Monceau (Duhamel de Monceau 1758) controlled for both light and temperature and the plants still exhibited the rhythms. They used Mimosa pudica, which suggests to us today that this was the plant originally tested by de Mairan.
Suspecting light-leaks in de Mairan’s experiment, Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau repeated the same experiment several times (Duhamel du Monceau 1758). At first, he placed the plants inside an old wine cave. It had no air vent through which the light could leak in, and it had a front vault which could serve as a light lock. He observed the regular opening and closing of the leaves for many days (using a candle for observation). He once took a plant out in the late afternoon – which phase-shifted the clock with a light pulse. The plant remained open all night (i.e.., not directly responding to darkness), but then re-entrained to the normal cycle the next day. Still not happy, he placed a plant in a leather trunk, wrapped it in a blanket and placed it in a closet inside the cave – with the same result: the plant leaves opened and closed every day.
So, he was convinced that no light leaks were responsible for the plant behavior. Yet he was still not sure if the temperature in the cave was absolutely constant, so he repeated the experiment in a hothouse where the temperature was constant and quite high, suspecting that perhaps a night chill prompted the leaves to close. He had to conclude: “I have seen this plant close up every evening in the hothouse even though the heat of the stoves had been much increased. One can conclude from these experiments that the movements of the sensitive plant are dependent neither on the light nor on the heat” (Duhamel de Monceau 1758). He did not know it at the time, of course, but he was the first to demonstrate that circadian rhythms are temperature compesated – the period is the same at a broad range of constant temperatures.
The research picked up speed in the 19th century. Augustus Pyramus de Candolle repeated the experiments while making sure not just that the darkness was absolute and the temperature constant, but also that the humidity was constant, thus eliminating another potential cue. He then showed that the period of diurnal movements of Mimosa is very close to 24 hours in constant darkness, but around 22 hours in constant light (using a bank of six lamps). He also managed to reverse day and night by using artificial light to which the plants responded by reversing their rhythms (De Candolle 1832) after the initial few days of “confusion”.
Another astronomer, Svante Arrhenius argued that a mysterious cosmic Factor X triggered the movements (Arrhenius 1898). He attributed the rhythms to the “physiological influence of atmospheric electricity”. Charles Darwin published an entire book on the Movement of Plants in 1880, arguing that the plant itself generates the daily rhythms (Darwin 1880).
The most famous botanist of the 19th century, Wilhelm Pfeffer, started out favouring the “external hypothesis”, arguing that light leaks were the source of external information for de Mairan’s and Duhamel’s plants (Pfeffer 1880, 1897, 1899). But his own well-designed experiments (as well as those of Darwin) forced him to change his mind later in his career and accept the “internal” source of such rhythmic movements. Unfortunately, Pfeffer published his latter views in an obscure (surprisingly, considering the short and catchy title) German journal Abhandlungen der Mathematisch-Physischen Klasse der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, so most people were (and still are) not aware that he changed his mind on this matter.
In the early 20th century, Erwin Bunning was the first to really thoroughly study circadian rhythms in plants and to link the daily rhythms to seasonality. He and many others at the time mostly studied photoperiodism and vernalization in plants, two phenomena then thought to be closely related (we know better today). For the rest of the century, animal research took over and only recently, with the advent of molecular techniques in Arabidopsis, has the plant chronobiology rejoined the rest of the field.
Here is a movie of Mimosa pudica closing its leaves due to mechanical stimulation:
And here you can see a movie of a plant sleeping and waking over several cycles (you can download an even better one here).
References:
Arrhenius, S. 1898. Die Einwirkung kosmicher Einflusse auf physiologische Verhaltnisse. Skandinavisches Archiv fur Physiologie, Vol. VIII.
Bennett, M.F. 1974. Living Clocks in the Animal World. Charles C Thomas – Publisher.
Campbell, J. 1988. Winston Churchill’s Afternoon Nap: a Wide Awake Inquiry into the Human Nature of Time. Aurum, London.
Cloudsley-Thompson, J. 1980. Biological Clocks, Their Functions in Nature. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
Coveney, P. and R.Highfield, 1990. The Arrow of Time: A Voyage Through Science to Solve Time’s Greatest Mystery. Fawcett Columbine, New York.
Darwin, C. 1880. The power of movement in plants (assisted by F. Darwin). Murray, London.
De Candolle, A.P. 1832. Physiologie Vegetale. Paris: Bechet jeune.
Duhamel de Monceau, H.L. 1758. La Physique des Arbres. Paris: H.L.Guerin & L.F.Delatour.
Luce, G.G. 1971. Biological Rhythms in Human & Animal Physiology. Dover, NY.
Moore-Ede, M.C., F.M.Sulzman and C.A.Fuller. 1982. The Clocks That Time Us. Harvard University Press.
Pfeffer, W.F.P. 1880, 1897, 1899, (reprinted1903.,1905.), Pfeffer’s Physiology of Plants, Volumes I -III, Ed. and Trans. Alfred J.Ewert., Oxford .
Ward, R.R. 1971. The Living Clocks. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Posted onFebruary 22, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on Tomorrow in Charlotte: “How the Web is Changing the Way Science Is Communicated, Taught and Done.”
I will be giving a public talk about the way the World Wide Web is changing the way science is communicated, taught and done on the campus of UNC Charlotte, tomorrow, Thursday February 23rd, at 6:30 p.m. in the Bioinformatics Lecture Room 105.
If you can, come to the talk, don’t be shy to approach me and say Hello, and perhaps join us for dinner and drinks afterward.
The persistence of circadian rhythmicity during long bouts of hibernation in mammals has been a somewhat controversial topic in the literature. While somestudies suggest that circadian clock is active during hibernation, other studies dispute this. Apparently, the truth is somewhere in-between – it differs between species:
Not all hibernating animals retain apparent circadian rhythmicity during the hibernation season. Whereas some species, such as bats and golden-mantled ground squirrels, maintain circadian rhythmicity in Tb [core body temperature] throughout the hibernation season when held in constant conditions, other species, such as European hamsters, Syrian hamsters, and hedgehogs, lose circadian rhythmicity in Tb.
The outputs of the clock measured in these studies range from body temperature and brain temperature, to timing of waking, to metabolic and behavioral parameters. But, to my knowledge, nobody has yet looked if the circadian pattern of expression of “core clock gene” persists during hibernation.
Thus, it was really interesting to see a study on the state of hibernation in a completely different kind of organism – a tree. About a year ago [Note: that was in 2005, this is a re-post from the archives], a group from Spain did exactly what was needed – they measured the levels of expression of circadian clock genes in the chestnut tree.
They measured the expression of clock genes both during naturally occurring winter dormancy and in the laboratory experiments involving chilling of seedlings combining with exposure to different photoperiods. In both cases, the core molecular mechanism of the circadian clock stopped entirely if the temperature and photoperiod both indicated ‘winter’, and was revived by warming-up the seedlings or the onset of spring.
Circadian clocks exhibit temperature independence, i.e., the period of the rhythm is not affected by temperature, within relatively broad limits. Apparently, the winter temperatures are outside the lower limit in the chestnut tree. Furthermore, it appears that the chestnut actively stops the clock with the onset of winter.
How can we interpret these data?
Overwintering is the stage in which all energetically expensive processes are minimized or shut down. However, workings of the clock itself are not very energetically expensive, so this is an unlikely reason for the elimination of rhythmicity during winter.
Second interpretation would be that, as the tree shuts down all its processes, there is nothing for the clock to regulate any more. There is also no feedback from the rest of metabolism into the clock. Thus, circadian rhythmicity fades as a by-product of overall dormancy of the plant.
Third, the clock itself may be a part of the mechanism that keeps everything else down. In other words, a clock stopped at (for instance – this is a random choice of phase) midnight will keep giving the midnight signal to the rest of the plant for months on end, keeping all the other processes at their normal midnight level (which may be very low). Thus, the clock may be central to the overall mechanism of hibernation in trees – i.e., the autumnal stopping of the clock is an evolved adaptation.
Posted onFebruary 21, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on Berry Go Round – send in your posts for the next botanical blog carnival
Berry Go Round is a blogcarnivaldevoted to highlighting recent blog posts about any aspect of plant life.
If you have published a blog post about plants since the last issue on January 30th, send me the link by using this submission form.
Officially, the deadline for submissions is February 25th, but I am lenient – even if you send it as late as 28th at noon, I will still likely include it, and will post the carnival on the morning of the 29th of February. But sending early is appreciated. If you see a post by someone else that you think fits the concept, send it in (but insert a note to me that it is not your own post).
Berry Go Round covers all thing botanical. That is, featured articles should just be about plants, from cells & chemistry to plant ecology and communities. Pictures can also be submitted whenever a minimum amount of information is given (such as scientific name, family and the like), and recipes may also be featured if the main ingredient is a plant and provided a decent botanical account follows.
So yes – small plants, big plants, common plants, rare plants, extinct or extant, mosses, liverworts, horsetails, ferns, with or without flowers, microscopic or giant trees – all of them are eligible. Biochemistry, molecular, cellular and developmental biology, physiology, behavior (yup, plants behave), evolution, genetics, paleontology, biogeography, taxonomy/systematics, ecology, conservation – anything goes. It can focus on a recent finding, or a historical account, it can explain the basics, or it can be a timeless truth, it can be basic or applied, or you can write a personal account of awe in encountering a baobab for the first time in your life.
Apart from text, we welcome original art, illustration, photography, cartoons, podcasts, videos, animations, infographics or any other forms of multimedia (especially if all mixed into a single post). If you are using someone else’s art, please properly credit and link to the original artist in your posts.
Still digging myself out of dozens of “starred” must-reply-in-detail emails after ScienceOnline2012, as well as editing some blog posts and articles, etc, before I get back into my regular blogging routine. I am on the train to NYC right now, to work in the office for a few days, attend meetings, meet with colleagues, etc., as well as attend a couple of classes at NYU. But in the evenings, there are plenty of cool events this week, and I intend to go to these three:
A Mother’s Love: Memoirs in the Digital Age – A Valentine’s Day event about family, love and heartbreak, brought to you by The Atavist. February 14 at Melville House, 145 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY at 6:30 p.m. Featuring: Clive Thompson, Cris Beam and David Dobbs.
“Brains” – a Story Collider storytelling event: Wednesday the 15th of February, 2012, at Union Hall, Brooklyn, NY.
With these three events attracting some of the same crowd, we feel there is no need to organize an additional #NYCSciTweetUp – let’s assume that all three events combined also serve as one long three-day tweetup.
On your way to ScienceOnline2012, your plane finally lands at Raleigh-Durham International airport. While you slowly taxi to the gate, what do you do? Naturally, you turn on your smart-phone, open up your favorite Twitter app, and announce to the world: “#scio12 – I have landed at RDU. Anyone else here? Want to share a ride to the hotel?”.
If you are lucky, you’ll find a couple of other attendees have landed at about the same time, so you meet them at the baggage claim (fortunately, Terminal 1 is under renovation so everyone had to land at the same over-crowded Terminal 2), and share a shuttle or cab into town.
This is the first moment of serendipitous meetings, as you introduce yourselves to each other, who are you, where you come from, what you do, what brings you to ScienceOnline… you just made your first #scio12 friends.
Twenty minutes later, your taxi pulls up at the Doubletree/Brownstone hotel. As you and your fellow passengers exit the car and start gathering your luggage, this tall, skinny, bespectacled, excitable creature runs out of the hotel, waiving his arms, and starts hugging everyone. Oh, that must be Bora! So, you get a hug. And naturally, the next thing you do is take your iPhone out again and tweet: “#scio12 has officially started: #IhuggedBora!”
And so the adventure begins… (most of the images in this post are thumbnails – click to see them larger)
The Close-contact community
In 2007 we met at UNC. The following four years, we convened at the wonderfully scienc-ey Sigma Xi. This year we moved to McKimmon Center at NCSU. We keep moving to bigger spaces, but our community keeps getting larger, so the density remains high. Thus, wherever we met, we were always tightly close together, rubbing shoulders with each other. There are hugs (not just with me, but among others).
This is me, getting a hug from the NCSU chancellor – photo by Tim Skellet:
There is some (though controversial) research showing that hugging and close contact increase mutual trust, thus strengthening the community. Close proximity to friends, by increasing oxytocin levels, may help people get bolder, perhaps speak up at conferences, which is a good thing at unconferences like ours.
But there is a flip-side to this coin. Strengthening of bonds within an in-group weakens the bonds to people outside of it. If you are all hugged-out at #scio12, are you then suspicious of perfectly nice passers-by on the streets of Raleigh as you are walking to a restaurant? Are you going to tip your waitress less because she is not a part of the in-group? Are you more unpleasant when replying to emails, tweets or blog comments by people who are not at the conference? We certainly do not want that side-effect to happen!
And then there is the question of new people at the meeting. As veterans, now old friends, hug each other (and me), do the newbies feel left out? Are they now out-group and treated as such by the in-group? Judging from the feedback, generally not, but at least initially some may feel that way until they realize how welcome they are by everyone else. Those are some hard questions we want to ask (and I asked a few times on Twitter after the conference), because we do not want anyone to feel left out – at the conference physically, or watching from afar online.
The introvert reaction to #IhuggedBora
With the fast growth of the conference, there were more newbies attending this year than repeat offenders veterans. This had a potential of changing the atmosphere of the conference, so we did our best to prepare the new people, as well as to recruit the veterans to actively welcome new people to the community. Blog posts by Pascale, Zuska, Janet and me, as well as asking the question on Twitter, we hope, helped new people prepare better for what they will be experiencing. The “SXSW of science”, “SciFoo, but democratic”, The Bonnaroo of the Blogosphere, or “Burning Man for scientists” – those are some comparisons made with ScienceOnline over the years (and see for yourself), so we wanted to make sure that new attendees understood this well in advance.
But not everyone is ready for such a close-contact and furiously-paced event. Some people are introverted. Others are shy. Some may be both introverted and shy. Some may be suffering from the impostor syndrome at the beginning, not knowing if they fully belong to this community. Some are not active on Twitter (or not on Twitter at all – 64 did not enter a Twitter account into their registration form, and most of them I could not find there with searching either) and thus may not know the rest of the community well yet.
I probably have mild Aspergers (not diagnosed, but people who know me very well – including a psychiatrist – agree that all signs are there), so had to spend decades studying people’s body language and training myself to recognize subtle cues and respond appropriately. As people walk in, especially new people, I have to quickly figure out if the person will be comfortable getting a hug from me or not. I don’t want to assault anyone, or make anyone uncomfortable. I had to make fast to-hug-or-not-to-hug decisions on the fly, and I hope my success rate is not too bad. So some people got a handshake or a nice word instead. Some of the same people gave me spontaneous hugs three days later, some did not. I want everyone to be comfortable and to get the most they can from the conference. Not everyone is here in order to become my personal friend (Dunbar be damned) and that is OK.
But not getting hugged may make people feel like they are not a part of the in-group. Perhaps there is a hugged circle, and an un-hugged outside group. This would be against the ethos of our meeting, but this is the BlogTogether spirit that was the original inspiration to the conference – that being in the same space as others, with hugging or handshakes or just eye contact, helps us know more about each other and affects our online relationships. But I want to try something different next year. I have no idea how and when #IhuggedBora tradition started (a couple of years ago), and it is fun, and I like it, and many others like it. But there should be a way for non-hugged people to feel just as welcome. Perhaps a second hashtag?
Someone on Twitter suggested high-fiving. But then I remembered when I first arrived in the USA I was unfamiliar with the gesture. I worked at a horse farm, working with young horses in the mornings and teaching riding school in the afternoons. There were a couple of big, burly guys working at the barn, feeding horses and such. They would come down the aisle of the barn, raise their hands and say “Hi, five” and I would step to the side and do this:
Hi Five!
I had no idea I was supposed to come toward them and that our palms were supposed to meet! Obviously, a cultural difference…
Perhaps this Web-savvy community has seen the “Like” button enough times to understand the “thumbs-up” gesture (despite the thumbs-up gesture being considered rude in some cultures)?
Thumbs up!
We have a year to think about this, and welcome all of your feedback, but we will definitely ponder a number of ideas on how to make the event more comfortable for people who are new, shy, introvert, or just plain exhausted and overstimulated.
Perhaps we can designate a “silent room” where there is no talking, where people can come in for a few minutes to recharge their batteries (both their mental batteries, and those charging their elecronic devices), get online and write in peace, perhaps take a nap, meditate, do some yoga….the Cafe room is awesome for interactions, but it is anything but quiet.
We may also try to do some veteran-n00b pairings ahead of time, essentially providing each new attendee (or at least the students, or people who indicate at registration they would like this) with a “go to” person for questions and help, perhaps starting the conference with an event designed to get the pairs to meet each other for a few minutes. A broader, speed-meeting rotation (like speed-dating events) to get people to break the ice and talk to someone new, may also be considered.
At ScienceWriters meetings, there are all sorts of ribbons one can attach to the name-tag, including “first-timer” and “talk to me”, the latter indicating a veteran willing to field questions or help the new people. Perhaps we can do something similar.
And of course, serendipitous meetings of small groups of new people are already embedded in the program – random banquet seating, bus rides to and from the hotel, tours you sign up for without knowing who else will be going there with you, chairs all over the Cafe room and the main hallway, parties at the hotel, going out for dinner at a restaurant – opportunities for talking to new people one-on-one or in small groups are numerous.
Obviously, we are obsessed with details. Not just because it frees you up to focus on the proceedings, but because not paying attention to detail can actively hinder and spoil the experience for some people.
Diversity
We had attendees from 40 states of the USA (if you count D.C. as a state), five Canadian provinces, and seven other countries.
Unsurprisingly for the host state that is a hotbed of science and technology, North Carolina was represented by 119 people (plus four locals who snuck in for a single session without registering, but that is OK). There were 56 attendees from New York, 34 from California, 21 from Massachussets, 15 from Washington D.C., 14 from Maryland, 13 from Virginia, 12 from Illinois, and 10 from Wisconsin. There were also representatives from Pennsylvania (9), Washington State (8), Minnesota (7), Florida and Colorado (6 each), Arizona, Indiana, Montana and Connecticut (5 each), Ohio and Texas (4 each), Alaska, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Utah (2 each), and one person each from Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Maine, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Vermont.
Canadians were represented by 8 Ontarians, 4 people from British Columbia, 3 from Alberta, and one each from Quebec and Nova Scotia. From other continents, we had 13 guests from the U.K., 5 from Germany, two from Denmark, and one each from the Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Mauritius. Of course, those are people’s current addresses. If we asked for the place of origin, it would have been even more geographically distributed (Peru, Hong Kong, Costa Rica…). After all, Nadja Popovich and I spoke Serbian to each other at the conference, as we were both born in Belgrade (which also continues the tradition of having someone from Serbia every year)…
The diversity of people attending ScienceOnline, in terms of geography, gender, race, ethnicity or culture, means that everyone brought something different to the meeting – different background, history and culture, different angles and goals and needs. While here, they cross-fertilized their ideas, told their stories and learned from others. This also means that people have gone home to all those distant places and are now sharing what they learned, teaching, influencing their colleagues, neighbors and students, thus enlarging this community even more.
On the wearing of many hats
According to our registration form report, ScienceOnline2012 had 243 bloggers (high time to defenestrate the notion that this is a ‘bloggers conference’ when half the people don’t blog), 153 journalists, 151 scientists, 115 educators, 71 students, 43 enterpreneurs, 34 Web developers and 46 who identified as ‘other’. That total is almost 900, so on average everyone (457 people checked in at the registration desk) checked two boxes.
Thus, the success in cross-fertilization of ideas at ScienceOnline is not just due to it being a rare event bringing together people who do different things in science, e.g,. researchers, teachers, journalists, bloggers, web developers, publishers, public information officers, librarians, artists, historians, students, etc. but because almost everyone at the meeting is currently (or has experiences in the past of being) in multiple roles. Not because people here wear different hats, but because everyone wears many hats.
There was an interesting moment at the end of the closing plenary panel, moderated by David Kroll with panelists Maggie Koerth-Baker, Seth Mnookin and myself. Someone in the audience grumbled that the scientists were not represented on the panel. David and I looked at each other in puzzlement. David just boxed up his lab equipment a couple of weeks before the event, moving from full-time research to full-time communication. How is he so suddenly not a scientist any more?
Although most of us at ScienceOnline play multiple roles, it seems that people have an automatic tendency to assign only a single “profession” to each other, mainly guided by the most recent place of employment. Some people think of me as a freewheeling, provocative blogger. Others think of me as a ‘journalist’ because I am an editor at a respected media entity. Others think of me primarily as an educator because I teach BIO101 to adult students and blog my lecture notes and am a Visiting Faculty at NYU school of journalism.
I am all of that, for sure. But if you forced me to identify myself with just a single word, I would easily choose this one: “scientist”. Just because I haven’t messed around a lab for a decade does not mysteriously make me a non-scientist. ‘Once a scientist always a scientist’, because being a scientist is not a profession but a worldview. I cannot quit being a scientist now. Not to mention that I still have research collaborations that occasionally lead to publication. Which is why I tend to take the scientists’ side in various scientists vs. journalists debates.
The realization, after the conference already ended, that we are all a bunch of misfits, pioneers, and generally crazy risk-takers, led to an amazing new hashtag – #IamScience. Inspired by unlikely career trajectory of Mireya Mayor, our keynote speaker, Kevin Zelnio finally let it all out – an incredible and courageous story of his life and how he got into science, and into and out of a research career. Hundreds of tweets, and dozens of blog posts are being now assembled on a Tumblr blog, while Allie Wilkinson started a photo-Tumblr with pictures of scientists – This Is What A Scientist Looks Like – and Mindy Weisberger put together a video:
There are many blog posts already posted, some old some new, and here is just a small sample of posts I could find most easily: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
It seems that #scio12 attendees are not the only ones with unusual and circuitous career trajectories in and out of science. Perhaps the “usual” path is the most unusual of all. There is a lesson in this somewhere….
Move aside, C.P.Snow, we bridged dozens of cultures
Writing text is not the only way of communicating science. And it can only reach certain audiences. There are many other ways to communicate science, either independently or in conjunction with text, each method potentially reaching a different segment of the target population: art, illustration, photography, maps, data visualization, sounds, music, animation, video, games…possibilities are endless.
We’ve always had sessions on art and video, but this year we really upped the ante. There was a whole slew of workshops on art, photography, data visualization, making maps, makingvideos, etc, and many sessions discussed the relationship between science and various areas of art, photography and music.
Artists submitted their art for the Art Contest. Their submissions were projected on a screen in the Cafe room and were given prizes in the end. Videographers, likewise, sent in their work ahead of time and their videos were projected during the Film Festival, again with prizes.
Maggie Pingolt, Russ Creech and Brian Crawford took most of the “official” photos at the conference, but others did their share as well. Probably the most popular was the #youhavebeenframed series – many of the people in those photos now use the images as their new Twitter avatars.
If you look at Flickr sets tagged with scio12 or scienceonline2012 or YouTube videos tagged with scio12, you will see that many participants used the conference to practice their skills – some with amazing results.
Podcasts are still coming out, but listen to Nadja Popovich’s official ones here. Finally, several videos were made at the venue, some still in production, some embedded into this post, others easily found on YouTube.
And then….oh my! Some attendees decided to make art permanent, on their own bodies! They went to Dogstar Tattoo Company for a Science Ink tour. After hearing Carl Zimmer talk about the history of tattooing, and having his book signed, several participants got their own tattoos (less courageous of us got temporary tattoos, provided to everyone at registration).
From the Raleigh News & Observer: Rebecca Guenard, center, and Russ Creech, left, watch as Christie Wilcox, who is getting her PHd at the University of Hawaii, gets a lionfish tattoo from Kathryn Moore at Dogstar Tattoo Company in Durham Friday, January 20, 2012. Wilcox is one of the attendees in the ScienceOnline2012 conference in Raleigh.
And it is not just art – history, philosophy, sociology, ethics, politics, mathematics, literary narrative and humor kept cropping up in many sessions and events, some dedicated to it, some not. Music had its own session, but also made an appearance in discussion of crafting a longform narrative, in a session on data journalism, and in discussions of video. And at the Open Mic, we could see that many scientists and science communicators have tremendousmusical talents.
Math had its own two sessions and two Blitz-talks, yet also invaded many other talks and sessions, from narrative to altmetrics. I doubt anyone at #scio12 is such a stereotypical data-robot not to be moved and impressed by this interweaving of a whole slew of ‘cultures’. After all, it’s all about context. Person most excited exiting the altmetrics Blitz-talk was a historian! If years of library digging – stuff that makes a PhDs in history – can be replaced by a few clicks to get patterns of citations and mentions over time, then historians can finally focus on the real deal: analysis and interpretation of such patterns. Can you imagine the time-saving and re-focus that discipline can have?
Storytelling, though part of the discussion in several sessions, also had a DIY component – the Monti storytelling show during the banquet. Humor was discussed in a dedicated session (as well as in a couple of others), and then there was Brian Malow, switching from theory to practice, doing stand-up science comedy (which also included art) during lunch.
Heck, even sports snuck in somehow – we all got an introduction to the wonderful world of curling.
To boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before…
A lot of the discussion at ScienceOnline2012 was, without stating so overtly, about the distinction between push and pull strategies for reaching new audiences. We are pretty happy with what we can do – and the quality of work – at science-dedicated venues, be it the science section of NYTimes, or pop-sci magazines, or specialized science radio shows, or blogs, podcasts and websites. People working at such venues tend to be good at what they do and they tend to be… at ScienceOnline!
As the now famous diagram by Ed Yong demonstrates – the good scientists and good journalists talk to each other about bad scientists and bad journalists who are conspicuously absent. But those bad scientists and journalists have to be reached or replaced. How? They work in mass media we cannot penetrate, addressing audiences we cannot reach. How do we also get there and reach those same vast audiences with well-done science stories?
It’s hard, but it can be done. There were more than several people at the meeting who do it, daily or occasionally. They have great success and their new audiences appreciate them. The resistance mostly comes from our own ranks!
When a scientist publishes text and data in a scientific paper (especially behind a paywall), the audience is miniscule and the effect on popular understanding of science and trust in scientists is zero. But when a scientist decides to show up in the media as a source, s/he gets tagged as a “media whore” by the colleagues in the department (or in the entire discipline). The ‘Sagan-Gould effect’. If you popularize science, your research must be suspicious, right?
And if on top of appearing in traditional media you also do some of your own blogging, or engagement on social networks, the eye-rolling and ‘tsk-tsk’-ing must be endless. You may have to do this pseudonymously because your PI or your Department Head may explicitly forbid online engagement. In some places it is the government that prohibits scientists from talking to the media. It takes some courage to go ahead and do it anyway. The problem is not the audience, but one’s bosses and colleagues. People who do this anyway are at ScienceOnline. But how do we reach people who are too afraid to do this – they are too afraid to come to ScienceOnline as well!
Scientists are also chastised by their colleagues if they voice a political opinion, even if it comes to policies that directly affect them, e.g, opposing the RWA bill. The instinct to present an apolitical face is strong among scientists (as well as many journalists), with sometimes devastating consequences.
Other science communicators push the envelope by doing something else – publishing in unlikely venues or trying to reach new audiences by going where those audiences are.
You may go where the cheerleading fans are, then serve them science. The audiences love it, the traditional science communicators accuse you of sexism.
A reader of Playboy magazine may read it for the Vonnegut stories, but then gets served science. The target audience loves it. The traditional science communicators accuse you of sexism.
Your audience may go to BlogHer to get sex advice, and get served science. The audience loves it. The traditional science communicators think you are not really up to par.
Your audience may follow the links to hear some hip-hop, and there they get served science. The audiences love it, but since the traditional communicators do not grok that culture, they may not think you are good enough. Seriously?
You start pushing hard science and skepticism at the super-popular website infamous for its richness of dangerous medical quackery and ridiculous New Age pseudoscience. The audience laps it up. The traditional science communicators are skeptical.
You may have an unusual background, unusual career, unusual “looks” for a scientist, more balls and ovaries than the remaining 456 people in the room for the Keynote lecture, go where most guys have no courage to go, face certain death five times, discover a new species, still do your own lab science, are a role-model for balancing career with life as a parent, but since you are on TV, with your own show, this must mean that you are a bad scientist or no scientist at all, right? It does not matter that TV is the hardest medium to penetrate, and the hardestmedium to get science done right (it is a very male, ego-driven culture, full of people who “know what works on TV” and thus will not listen), and that we are all saying that someone’s gotta do it because everyone watches TV – that’s where the real “mass” audience is. But when someone does, and does it well, we are all up in arms? We invited Mireya to do the keynote specifically to break those biases among ourselves. It seems it worked. And everyone who got to chat with her during the remainder of the meeting has a new appreciation for her as a person with passion, for her science, for her work as a science communicator, for her groundedness and level-headedness, sense of humor and overall humanity. She’ll be back next year, as one of us, doing something fun, TBD.
If we want to reach broader audiences, we have to get out of our own comfort zones, adopt the cultures of those audiences, and serve them science wherever they are, in ways they can like and appreciate. Hard to do. But if the ScienceOnline community does not lead the way, who will? We may think, from our perspectives, that some of those cultures are imperfect for various, often valid reasons (e.g., sexism). But are we going to avoid communicating science to all the people we deem imperfect? If so, all we are left is our own echo-chamber. We need to break out of it – isn’t that what the Web is good for?
We keep saying that we should divert attention of people who are browsing the Web looking for celebrity gossip, or politics, or attractive human forms, to cool science stories instead. Let’s do even more of that! And support those of us who are trying.
Your feedback
So far, 186 out of 457 attendees responded to the feedback form. If you have not yet done so, please do it now (we’ll later have a separate feedback form for people who attended virtually).
We read your responses very carefully every year, many times throughout the year, and try to address the issues you identify, or incorporate your ideas. Your feedback is extremely valuable to us so we can always try to make the conference better than the previous year.
I take it as a sign of generally even and high quality of the program that so many sessions are picked as the “strongest point” or “highlight” of the conference, instead of one or two sessions dominating that question. On the other hand, each session that was identified as “weakest point” by some people was also touted as the best session by someone else – just goes to show that tastes differ.
This also tells me I need to work closer with moderators in making descriptions of sessions as crystal-clear as possible as to what exactly they will cover, at which level, for which audiences (though unconference format can lead to a different session anyway), so people have a better idea what to expect. And some of the feedback noted serendipity – attending a session that was very different from expected and learning a lot from it nonetheless. We are also happy that many informal events got frequent mentions as highlights – Keynote, The Monti, comedy lunch, several tours, evening at the Museum…
The reaction to the Keynote was overwhelmingly positive. Some extremely positive. About a dozen respondents (all women) replied in a similar vein – they came in with trepidation and skepticism and came out enlightened and with their worlds turned upside-down, the same reaction Zuska wrote about in public. And Janet’s banquet story was a perfect book-end to it as well. There were only three strongly negative responses, including one by a person who did not attend the Keynote or talk to Mireya in person, carefully protecting one’s a priori biases from potential challenge.
And every time we get an email notification that a new feedback form came in, we have the urge to respond, to answer your questions. I will not break your anonymity, but I can speak to some concerns in general terms. In some cases, our reaction is “Hey, we sent out this information in advance, you should have read our email messages”. In other cases we think “Oh well, we have to make sure to use ALL methods of communication, and repeatedly so, and not hope that one tl:dr email and a few tweets are sufficient.
Different people have different communications habits, and different personal schedules (travel, work, teaching, ups and downs in ability to respond), so each piece of information needs to be sent out multiple times by email, Twitter, G+, Facebook, blog, etc., in order to reach everyone and make sure that everyone has all the information in timely manner. As I noted above, 64 attendees did not enter a Twitter account into their registration form (and most of those really are not on Twitter), while some others may use it rarely, or are new to the platform and still do not know how to follow hashtags and lists well. So Twitter, while it reaches most of our participants, does not reach 100% and we need to keep that in mind.
For many other questions, comments and suggestions in the forms, we have a generic response: “Yes, we wanted to do that, but could not due to reasons X, Y and Z”, where X = insufficient funds, Y = insufficient time/manpower, and Z = there are legal or administrative barriers to doing this.
– Hotel. It would be great (and so much easier for us and everyone) if all the attendees were housed at the same hotel. We’ll try to do that for next year. Now that Doubletree has survived us once, saw that we can fill the hotel during off-season, make a little noise but no damage, and can clean up the bar supplies every night, I bet they will like to have us back again next year (though not sure they have enough room for all of us). We can negotiate with them earlier in the year for more rooms for everyone.
– Shuttles. We’d love to have more buses going at more times, but that is an extremely expensive part of our budget. As a quarter of our attendees are locals, we can try to summon them to do more carpooling of guests next time. Or if a good sponsor comes along, we can perhaps provide more buses.
– Banquet. It is absolutely wonderful working with the McKimmon crew and the NCSU people. It is due to them that we could have a small miracle of actually serving alcoholic drinks at the banquet. McKimmon is on state property and has to abide by state laws and regulations. Serving alcohol requires a lot of paperwork being approved by several layers of bureaucracy, but our hosts helped us navigate that potential quagmire with grace and ease.
As you know, Doubletree/Brownstone hotel was just renovated… except the ballroom which is still under renovation. By this time next year, their ballroom will be looking good again, so perhaps we can have the banquet there, allowing us to spend more time there, have a greater variety of food and drinks, and not worry about transportation to and from it. This can have an additional effect of bringing the locals to the hotel bar to mingle with the guests from out of town a little more.
– Technical stuff. There were some glitches in some sessions – screens going up, laptops requiring passwords we were not given etc. Happens when one moves to a new building after four years of intimate familiarity with every detail of the old building. The McKimmon crew is very responsive and is actively seeking our feedback. I am sure those problems will be eliminated by next year (but, as is normal with technology, who knows what new problems will arise).
– Wifi. This is the third year in a row that our friends from SignalShare provided wifi for us (I bet they are providing wifi for SuperBowl as I write this – they’ll read this later). It rocks! With 450 highly-connected people constantly uploading and downloading stuff, tweeting, blogging, etc., no building can support our conference with its native wifi.
It seems from the feedback forms that one or two people erroneously chose one of the NCSU or McKimmon wifis instead of the official “ScienceOnline2012” one, in which case they reported some slow-downs and hiccups. We’ll try to make sure to communicate this little detail repeatedly next year, so people know what to do. Despite getting a good deal on this from our neighborly crew, wifi is one of the biggest items in our budget – if your organization is interested in sponsoring wifi next year (with the banner with your name occasionally showing up at the bottom – just start scrolling and it disappears), let us know as soon as you can.
– Livestreaming and recording. This is by far the most expensive item on our list and this year we just did not have the funds to do it. We tried until the very last day to find a sponsor (we had people lined up, ready to do it) but it did not materialize. In retrospect, we should have abandoned the idea earlier and focused more strongly on Plan B – providing a bunch of tripods and Flip cameras and asking our student-volunteers to record all the sessions and instantly upload them.
This way, we had to do it in a rush and rely on voluntary action of participants. We brought in a few Flips and issued a call for people to come and get them and to film sessions. Luckily, several people did, so many sessions are now online (just search YouTube for “scio12“). Hopefully a couple of generous sponsors will come in to fund this important service next year, or if the date is right we may explore a partnership with the Elon University school of journalism and hire their students to do this – livestreaming and recording are essential for including the virtual participants.
– Twitter and screens. We wanted to have a big screen with Twitterfall in the hallway, as well as to project the Art Contest entries on a larger screen, but this also fell by the wayside due to insufficient funds. Hopefully next year…
Twitter.com is actively blocking people from collecting tweets. A Twapperkeeper with about 11,000+ tweets generated before the conference is now gone, but I copied and pasted them all into an RTF document. There is roughly a day-long break during Tue-Wed of active tweeting where we have no collection I know of. There were apparently more than 17,000 tweets generated during the conference itself. And many more since then.
I have all of those tweets saved in my Gmail – I use tweetymail.com service which sends me notifications whenever the #scio12 hastag is used, usually sending it in batches of 20-100 tweets. That is still hundreds (perhaps thousands) of email notifications, but I have them and if I find a free hour or two I may also copy them into an RTF file – useless for Storifys, but if anyone has a use for them, let me know and I can compile and send. Finally, there are some collected subsets of tweets here, here and here that you may be able to use for Storifys, stats, etc.
– Babysitting. We want to make the conference family friendly. There were several kids (and even babies) at the conference – luckily we had LEGOs and plenty of fresh fruit. Unfortunately, we cannot legally organize or hire babysitters and have the kids be taken care at McKimmon. The best we can do is provide information in advance, e.g., names and recommendations for local babysitters or services, and let the parents make their own arrangements. We will also look into options for science-themed kids programing off-campus, since we are not allowed to make any such arrangements on campus.
– Cafe room. Big hit of the conference. Kudos to Karyn for her creative vision in organizing this space. LEGOs, coffee, food, tables for laptops, comfy chairs for chatting, power strips, books, art, bones, armpit swabs, more coffee, and the man behind the curtain! Definitely the center of activity for the entire conference, a place for serendipitous encounter and fun conversations.
– Swag. Most people are very happy with our decision to reduce the swag from an enormous bag of stuff to a nifty little notebook filled with stickers and temporary tattoos. The book lottery was a huge hit as well. So was the ThinkGeek swag served for the banquet dinner. But we were floored as to how many people mentioned in their feedback forms how much they loved the automatic dispensers of M&Ms with the #scio12 and Mendeley logos. Note to self: repeat something like this next year.
Next year
Yes, we will do this again next year. We do not have the date yet. First we need to confirm that McKimmon will have us again, then see what is on their calendar. It will be at roughly the same time – second half of January or perhaps very early February. Different people have different dates for their first day of classes, or attend different conferences. Still, once February comes, the density of other conferences becomes so high, we are bound to conflict with many of them. But let us know about the big ones that our attendees are likely to attend in large numbers, e.g., TAM or SICB.
At this point, there are 209 names on the waitlist. We did not “clean it up” as we went, so a couple of dozen of those people actually registered and attended, but that is still a large number. The mention and link in the New York Times article earlier in the week sent a flurry of new applicants to the waitlist, some as late as Saturday afternoon when the conference was already wrapping up. I guess people know that getting on the waitlist also automatically means getting on our mailing list, so they can get alerts in advance for the next year.
So, what do we do next? It seems that with 457 people we have reached the limit. Anything bigger than that and there is no way the intimate feel of the meeting can remain. Already a common theme on Twitter, after the conference ended, was people lamenting missing meeting some of the others.
In his post, Ed Yong stresses that we “rig things so that the most passionate people show up”. But that is only half of the picture – as I explained a couple of weeks ago, the excitable and tuned-in folks are essential but not sufficient for the success of the conference. Yes, they help shape the program throughout the year, they hit the ground running on Day One, they know how to do the ‘unconference’ method of leading sessions, they are more than welcoming to the newbies, but without newbies there would be no ScienceOnline. They refresh us every year. They bring in new ideas. They connect us to different communities back home once they leave.
They may be exactly the kind of people we want – non-blogging scientists, “bad” journalists, high school students, senior citizens with decades of media experience under their belts, as well as representatives of different groups, cultures or subcultures that can inject new ways of thinking into our community. They may belong to groups that are traditionally not welcome at the table so they may be reluctant to push their way in by being super-fast during registration times, but rather need to be invited, with a genuine welcome they can trust.
So we actually “rig things” so we get a little bit of both – as you could see this year: half veterans, half new people, more than half women, less than half bloggers or journalists, a quarter locals, many representatives of different scientific, geographic, professional or ethnic communities. The excitable veterans may fill first 100 slots within two minutes, but there are ways to bring in others as well – as moderators of sessions, as volunteers, as scholarship recipients, as Keynote speakers or Blitz-talk presenters. As the conference grows, and more and more people really, truly want to be here, this task becomes more difficult. We welcome other ideas that can help this happen.
As I also explained a couple of weeks ago, we do not want to change our funding methods. We don’t want to accept a large sponsorship from a large company that can then turn around and start shaping the program, e.g., insisting their CEO gives the Keynote lecture, or veto-ing a session. And we don’t want to substantially increase the registration fee because it is important to us to provide few barriers to people who cannot really afford to come here – we’d rather help them by waiving the fee and providing travel grants.
But this does not scale well. The registration fee does not pay for the participant. For $150 (or $75 if you are student), you get 6-7 complete meals, three whole days of coffee and snacks, rocking wifi, free transportation, entertainment, swag, books, personalized M&Ms, the Keynote speaker, use of equipment, and a good feeling that your fee or personal donation went toward travel grants for students, people without steady jobs, or people traveling from other continents. All of that needs to be sponsored and we prefer to have many small sponsors, each paying for one element of the event, rather than one or two huge sponsors who cover everything. Thus, we have to work hard to use every single dollar in the best possible way, often pondering late at night what would be the best use of the limited funds we have. We are pondering alternative methods of funding as well – from crowdfunding to setting up a swag store – and are interested in your thoughts.
According to Jeff Jarvis and his commenters, at this point, a popular conference can go in two ways: it can keep growing, like SXSW, and become more corporate and less of a community event; or it can limit the growth, like TED, and become exclusive, expensive and elitist. We don’t want to go either way.
It is likely, if the trend continues, that next year we’ll have more people stuck (and unhappy) on the waitlist than people registered. Thus, doing much more to include virtual participants is essential. We are also working on releasing some of that pressure by organizing additional events, either by ourselves, or in partnership with other organizations like Nature Publishing Group, or releasing our brand name to other groups to organize on their own. Sorta like TEDx events soften the exclusivity of the original TED, or the way 140conf has branched out to different cities and topics.
There are three potential models for this. One is an annual large event in other cities, like Science Online London. Another is a smaller monthly event with a single evening session, modeled after Science Online NYC. The third is a completely informal gather-and-drink monthly event, like #NYCSciTweetUp (now already copied in Washington DC and in Chicago, with Raleigh and Seattle doing some thinking about doing the same). We are exploring all of these options with potential partners for San Francisco this year, and potentially Austin, Chicago, Vancouver, Belgrade and Antananarivo in the future. Also, a topical Science Online Teen (#sciojr) is being planned for New York City in 2013. Events that occur entirely online are not out of the question, either.
Call to action
Over the past couple of years, we’ve been trying to get ScienceOnline to slowly move from just talking to also doing. This year we did it – I think quite successfully – with art, photography, music, podcasting and video, as I already described above in the “bridging the cultures” subheading. In each of these areas we had workshops where people learned new skills, sessions where people discussed the applications of these skills, and events or opportunities to practice those skills on the spot.
Next year we want to do more. This year moderators got a gentle nudge to try to have goals, hopefully actionable goals, for their sessions. Next year, we’ll work in advance to make sure that some such actions materialize. There is already a discussion about a Hackaton on the 2013 wiki, with potentially multiple activities – some involving coding, some involving online activity not requiring coding skills, and some involving offline activity (yes, this year we had LEGO blocks for practice, but no clear goal as to what to do with them).
We are also interested in heeding Dave Wescott’s call for preparing action in countering politically motivated anti-science movements, both those coming from the Right (GW denialism, creationism, ban on stem cell research, etc.) and those coming from the Left (animal rights terrorism, anti-vaccination movement, New Age woo, anti-GMO-foods, etc.) – the two may require different strategies. Suggestions as to how to do this right are welcome – or just add ideas to the wiki.
Citizen Science projects are especially of interest to us. Last year, a number of participants got their navels swabbed, and the bacteria from them subsequently cultured. This year, the people from Rob Dunn’s lab were back, taking samples from the armpits. I am afraid to ask which orifice they intend to sample next year…and we hope we can do some other stuff as well.
Inspiration
We really like the way ScienceOnline inspires people to do more, or to start new projects with people they just met, or dig into information they first heard at the conference and write about it in greater depth later.
In the years past, many such projects had their first seeds at our meeting, and often were officially announced at the same meeting a year after. For example, ScienceSeeker was unveiled at last year’s conference, while some nifty upgrades were announced during this one.
This year, I understand that the session on using music and geometry to craft longform pieces will soon result in a webinar of sorts. Rachel Nuwer was inspired by the Lemur tour to dig deeper. Robin Lloyd and Matt Shipman were impressed by the Forensic Anthropology tour (as well as the table of bones the lab brought to McKimmon Center). Helen Chappel, Elizabeth Preston, Anna Kuchment and Brian Switek heard or saw something new and quirky at the two (Raleigh and Durham) Museum tours and wrote pieces with more details.
That’s the spirit!
See the current listing of blog and media coverage of #scio12 (and add any missing links if you know of them, please). If anything else comes out of the meeting, please let us know. And see you online, for the online year-long #scio13 until we meet again in person next January.
I posted only 6 times in January. That is, on A Blog Around The Clock only (not counting the posts on The Network Central, The SA Incubator, Video of the Week, Image of the Week, or editing Guest Blog and Expeditions). I guess I was just too busy with ScienceOnline2012 and managing the rest of the blogs…. But here they are:
A couple of weeks ago, Huffington Post launched its Science section. I invited Cara Santa Maria, the science correspondent at Huffington Post to tell us more about this new endeavor.
Bora Zivkovic: Hello, welcome to the Scientific American blog network. The launch of the brand new Science section at the Huffington Post created quite a lot of buzz two weeks ago, so I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you, as their science correspondent, to tell us more about the project, its history, and its future. But it is probably best to first introduce you – can you tell us something about yourself, your beginnings, how you got into science, what kind of research you did, how you got into journalism, and how you ended up at Huffington Post?
Cara Santa Maria: Thanks so much for having me. Here’s a little about my background: I became interested in neuroscience while studying psychology and philosophy as an undergraduate in Texas. I had an opportunity to complete a practicum with a clinical neuropsychologist, and the more I learned about brain damage and dysfunction, the more I wanted to know about the electrophysiological, neurochemical, and network-level underpinnings of brain-behavior relationships. So, I went on to earn a graduate degree in biology with a neuroscience concentration. While in school, I worked at the Center for Network Neuroscience, where I was the chief cell culture technician and managed the culture facility. I also did some research in the area of cell-cell communication and network organization. Then, in New York, I worked in an adult neurogenesis lab, where we used a songbird (zebra finch) model. While I was furthering my education on the East Coast, life took me on an unexpected path (as it is prone to do), and I ended up in Los Angeles. Here, I was offered the opportunity to develop a pilot for HBO and to appear on different television programs, promoting science education for a mainstream audience. Along the way, I met Arianna Huffington, and when she decided that it was time to start developing a science section for The Huffington Post, she called me up and asked for my help.
BZ.: The idea about a science section at Huffington Post has been circulating for a few years now. What took HuffPost so long to start a Science section? Also: why now? What changed at HuffPost recently to make this section now possible after so many years of people proposing it?
CSM.: I didn’t start working at HuffPost until after the merger with AOL, but I know the editors have always taken science seriously. I think that the growth in editorial resources has allowed AOL/HuffPost to launch multiple new sites and sections, and it was important—especially to Arianna—that science be one of them.
BZ.: How do you go about recruiting bloggers for the section? How many did you have at the moment of launch, and how many do you expect to have as a maximum?
CSM.: HuffPost welcomes diverse voices to use its platform. We’ve reached out to many different scientists, educators, and science writers. During our launch week, we showcased blogs by Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11 moonwalker), Michael Shermer (editor of Skeptic Magazine), Lisa Randall (Harvard Physics professor), Seth Mnookin (M.I.T. science writing program educator), Saul Perlmutter (Nobel laureate), Jean-Lou Chameau (president of Cal-Tech), and even Richard Branson (founder of the Virgin Group). Site-wide, HuffPost has somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 active bloggers. At the time of the launch, we had engaged nearly 200 bloggers specifically for the science section, and that list grows every day.
BZ.: As HuffPost does not pay its bloggers, I am assuming that most of your bloggers are not going to be professional writers and freelancers, but rather researchers and others with day jobs who also like to write on the side (is that correct?). Many people like to write and gladly do it for free (just watch a billion or so people writing on blogs and social networks every day!), so why not expand one’s audience a thousand times by abandoning a small, independent, personal blog and joining Huffington Post instead? Yet this business model is making a lot of people uneasy – HuffPost is a business that makes money, so there is a sense of fairness that people who produce the product should be paid for it. Also, there is a fear of a slippery slope – if a big site like this can get away with not paying the authors, that makes it easier for other media organizations to follow the model, leaving the professional writers without a source of income. Do you have a good response to those concerns?
CSM.: Between our New York, DC, and Los Angeles offices, HuffPost has a paid newsroom staff of 320 journalists, with over 60 of them doing original reporting daily. We make a distinction between our newsroom staffers and our bloggers. People choose to blog for us because they are passionate about their ideas, and they want their words to reach the largest possible audience. Our site gets over a billion hits a month. Also, they know that they have the opportunity to cross-post the work from their independent blogs to our site, where readers have an unparalleled community experience. We also encourage our bloggers to engage with readers. Any time I write a piece or produce a new video, I find myself answering challenging questions and having exciting conversations with the commenters on my posts.
BZ.: The reactions to the launch of the new Science section have been quite interesting to watch. Most are in a “wait in see” mode, and they range between cautiously optimistic and deeply skeptical (see, for example, posts by Charlie Petit, Carl Zimmer, Keith Kloor, Mark Hoofnagle, Seth Mnookin, Michael Conniff, Autism Blog and Orac). This is understandable as Huffington Post has a long reputation as a repository for all kinds of pseudoscience, New Age woo and medical quackery, and most dangerously, the anti-vaccine screeds. Of course, only time will tell, but is there anything you can tell the skeptics today, this early in the game, why they should give the new section benefit of the doubt, and perhaps some support? You will try to do the same here at ScienceOnline2012 where many of the critics of the past Huffington Post science and medical coverage will be present (someone said to me that you must be “very brave to enter the lion’s den” there) – how can you turn your critics into your supporters?
CSM.: I am a scientist and educator first. I strive to promote rational, skeptical, evidence-based thought and to improve scientific literacy with every word I write and every conversation I have. When it comes to the science section as a whole, my editors and I feel very strongly that scientific rigor is the priority. Generally speaking, when scientists write peer-reviewed journal articles, they often take some liberties in their closing statements within the discussion section, because this is the appropriate place to discuss implications of their work, future developments, and its philosophical/moral/ethical ramifications. Without a rigorous materials and methods and results section, however, the author hasn’t really earned the right to speculate on its implications, no? Similarly, with popular science writing, information must be vetted. This isn’t to say that we don’t welcome writers with differing opinions or questioning, skeptical eyes. Instead, what I’m trying to say is that pseudoscience, junk science, and anti-science are vastly different from views that use scientific fundamentals to challenge the status-quo. I can guarantee that this is a science section, not a pseudoscience section. I can also guarantee that false equivalencies will not find a home here.
BZ.: Media outlets dedicated to science (e.g., science magazines, science sections of newspapers, science programs on the radio, science channels in cable TV, science blogs/networks, etc.) are examples of the so-called “pull” media strategy – they are destinations for the audiences that already know they are interested in science. They are easily skipped and ignored by the general audience. It takes awareness of their existence, as well as personal interest, for one to find and then consume science stories in such outlets. What we’d all like to do more is the “push” strategy – going to the audiences where they already are. This means inserting science stories into places where they will be seen by people who came there to see news about celebrities or sports or politics, and perhaps do not even think they like science. This is a way to “hook” them to science. But this strategy is hard to accomplish, mostly because of the old myth that science stories do not have audiences (myths busted over the past couple of years when outlets ranging from The New York Times to Slate noted that science stories are some of the most viewed and shared stories on their sites). Thus legacy generalist media, still with the largest general audiences out there, is really hard to penetrate. Huffington Post is one of the most visited and popular general media outlets. Its audience comes to the site for all sorts of different reasons. This is potentially a great opportunity to do the “push” method – to mix science stories in with other stuff. Which leads me to the question: how mixed is it really going to be? Will the Science section going to be just a “pull” destination for those already interested, or is it going to be always mixed in with the other topics and “pushed” on the readers no matter where on the site they may find themselves?
CSM.: Oh, I think that moving forward, we will have a very strong mix of push and pull. Our editorial mission is to inform readers, but also to engage them with the awe and beauty of the natural world. I personally find science to be poetic, intriguing, and often very, very human. I find that most individuals who run screaming from the word “science” do so out of fear more than out of boredom. Almost any topic can be described in such a way that it connects with a personal interest or emotion of a reader. I am lucky enough to be able to produce a video series, Talk Nerdy To Me, where I attempt to do just that. I discuss topics—sometimes ones that are in the news, and sometimes ones that are evergreen in nature—in a way that invites my viewers to start their own conversations around the dinner table or water cooler. I think it’s important to break down complex scientific ideas, or translate them, without dumbing down the content. Generally speaking, I think that many popular media producers underestimate the intelligence of their audiences. If we can hook a front page reader who’s perusing an article about the race for the republican nomination, the Golden Globes, or even the NFL playoffs with a snappy title and then deliver on that promise of offering an eye-opening perspective on the way the universe works, I think we’ve done what we all want to do: make a small step toward increasing the scientific literacy of the public at large.
BZ.: In his post about the launch, Charlie Petit was wondering how much science “reporting” there will be on the site. Of course, that word is tricky – there is “news reporting”, there is “investigative reporting“, and then there are op-eds, “cool animals” stories, and videos. All of that is “reporting” in a sense. There are cool stories (“look, this is so cool what they just discovered!”), there are relevant stories (“wow, this is useful information for me to have”), and there are ‘fishy’ stories (“yuck, scientists are up to no good again”). Cool stories are the best “push” stories that excite, entertain and hook readers who then, hopefully, become regular readers of science stories. Relevant stories may not be as sexy, but tend to get shared a lot. ‘Fishy’ stories are very important to do, but perhaps should go to specialized science sites rather than generalist sites as they may have a tendency to reduce trust by lay audiences in science and scientists – something that may not be a good idea on a site that is already (in)famous for its pseudoscience and angry rants against some invented conspiracies by scientists or “Big Pharma”. Or perhaps HuffPost Science may be the ideal place specifically for skeptical stories – active debunking of pseudoscientific claims (including those that appear on other parts of the site). So, how would you respond to Charlie Petit – what kind of media site is Huffington Post, and what kinds of stories can he (and all of us) expect to see there?
CSM.: As mentioned before, I think there will be a fair amount of push and pull on our site. The hope is that we will create an environment where interested readers can “hang out,” reading up on new science developments, looking at “wow” photos, watching cool videos, and engaging with bloggers and other readers within our expansive commenter community. When it comes to deniers, I have a slightly different approach than some of my peers in the scientific community. I think that scientific literacy is a gift, and not everyone has been lucky enough to receive it. It is difficult for somebody who hasn’t learned how to think scientifically to have an immediate filter for non-science, which often masquerades as science, throwing around big words that sound legitimate and hiding behind .org or .edu domain names. For example, when it comes to how many people view Big Pharma, a controversy you raised in your question, I attempt to make key distinctions between what happens in the research lab and what happens when companies market and sell their products. I, like many others, am critical of the health care system in this country. But I’m careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because I do not trust that my insurance company has my best interests at heart, it doesn’t mean that I also distrust the medication or surgical procedure that could save my life. This is an important, nuanced distinction to make, and without education, we can’t expect everyone to have the tools to make it.
BZ.: Tell us more about David Freeman, the new editor of the Science section? His introductory post was well-received. What is his vision for the place?
CSM.:David is a wonderful editor, and we are so lucky to have him. His experience and wisdom having worked at CBSNews.com, and having written for WebMD, Men’s Health, Consumer Reports, and Popular Mechanics (among others) is invaluable to the section. As for his vision, he has this to say: “Science has become absolutely central to our lives and is certain to be increasingly important as the 21st Century unspools. My goal for the new science vertical is to bring HufPost’s signature journalistic flair to the world of science, presenting science news in a way that is engaging and accessible but always intellectually rock solid. Our aim is to entertain as well as inform our readers–and to present science broadly, looking at its intersection with the arts, politics, and other aspects of popular culture. And as with all the verticals at The Huffington Post, another key goal is to foster a conversation, bringing together scientifically minded people for a spirited but always respectful exchange of ideas.”
BZ.: What exactly will be your role as a science correspondent?
CSM.: As I mentioned before, I produce a video series called Talk Nerdy To Me, in which I explore topical and evergreen scientific subjects. I also write original pieces, which generally reflect my personal style and vision, incorporating original reporting with op-ed sensibilities. Moving forward, I plan on doing more interviews/discussions both with scientific minds and everyday people. And, I am always on the lookout for new ways to engage readers and viewers, especially with new media. As Arianna said in her introductory blog, “HuffPost Science will be anchored by our Science Correspondent Cara Santa Maria.” I work closely both with my editorial team and with my video production team to ensure that the page continues to inform, entertain, educate, and inspire.
BZ.: Traffic to HuffPost as a whole is huge, but there is, I heard (correct me if I am wrong), a pronounced “Long Tail” pattern: almost all of the traffic goes to a small number of articles, while most articles get very little traffic and few or no comments. How will you ensure that Science articles get top traffic (get into the “head” or at least “neck” as opposed to the “long tail” of the traffic distribution)? Will they be routinely promoted on the HuffPo homepage? Syndicated on the sites of media partners (including Scientific American)? How much social media activity will be used to promote the content? We all have the same goal – promoting realism, rationality and science. How can we, as a community, help you do it better and reach more people?
CSM.: Science content is represented on the HuffPost homepage daily. Articles are always linked to other relevant articles within the site, and cross-promotion on other verticals (pages) is common. But, getting people to click on an article is only half the battle. We also want them to join the discussion. Site-wide, we have already reached over 2.26 million comments so far this year. The science page alone got over 4,000 comments the day it launched. We also have a team of social media geniuses on staff that are helping us engage people via all of the social tools available. We’re definitely open to any and all suggestions from the online science community at large. We are all on the same team here: team science!
Just watch this over and over again – I’ll be back in a few days:
Featuring: Francie Diep, Emily Elert, Rose Eveleth, Mary Beth Griggs, Mara Grunbaum, Ferris Jabr and Douglas Main, all recent graduates of the Science Writing program (SHERP) at the NYU school of journalism.
Posted onJanuary 17, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on #scio12: Multitudes of Sciences, Multitudes of Journalisms, and the Disappearance of the Quote.
ScienceOnline2012 is this week! Yikes! Lots of last-minute details still to put in place, but I think we’ll be fine. Of course, as one of the organizers, it’s hard for me to relax even during the event, always watching, making sure that everything is OK. But at the very end, when it is all over, I can be relaxed enough to focus. So I can do something that requires a functioning brain, like be on a panel. While the conference is generally an Unconference, with no panels, we decided to end the event with one panel anyway. It is this one:
The motivation for this panel came from a stormy debate that took place a few months ago on science blogs, social networks and The Guardian pages, about the pros and cons of some journalists’ practice of checking one’s facts or quotes with one’s sources. If you missed it, or if you want to refresh your memory, here is the listing of the main links to the debate:
I hope you read those – quite an interesting debate. There was some misunderstanding, at least at first, as to what is really meant. Checking facts, or checking copy, checking with sources, or checking with subjects, or checking with third parties? In general, journalists were on the side “never show copy to scientists”, while scientists were on the side of “you better show me the copy to approve”. A clash of cultures.
What struck me, as I was reading all those posts and articles back then, how much the debate is anchored in the “here and now” of the current practices in the current media environment (or perhaps, a media environment of the late 20th century). I like, when thinking about such topics, to take a longer view. I want to explore how the practice started. How was it done in some relevant time in the past, be it a decade ago, or a century ago, or in the 17th century, or in the caves, or the savannah or the Primordial Soup, whatever is the appropriate time period to look at. On the other end, I like to think into the future. It is perilous to make exact predictions about the future, especially giving confident numbers (e.g., “5 years from now”), but one can assess current trends, project them into the future assuming the trends will continue, then envision a new future environment and examine how it would affect the practices in question. So let me try to take a quick stab at the clash of cultures exemplified by the articles linked above.
Who is the author of the article?
A journalist is writing an article about a scientific topic. He/she calls up a couple of experts to make sure all the facts are right. As a reward, the experts will get named and briefly quoted in the article. This also shows that the journalist did the duty of checking with experts. The journalist finishes the article and turns it in for publication. His/her name will be up on top, so the assumption is that his/her reputation is on the line, and that he/she is the author of the piece and has full control over it.
A scientist – one of those experts called in – does not think that way about the authorship. In science, the author is NOT the one who writes the words. In science, the authors are people who identify the problem, ask the question, get hired by an institution that can provide space, successfully get grant money, set up a lab, gather a good team (students, postdocs, technicians, collaborators), get the experiments done, analyze data, interpret the results. The last step of the scientific process, communication of the results, is often seen as separate endeavor. Sure, most scientists, especially in smaller labs, write their manuscripts themselves. But bigger labs employ professional writers to write all the manuscripts, grant proposals, etc. Those writers are never considered to be authors, because they are not considered to have intellectually contributed to the work. In the world of science, authorship has nothing to do with writing.
Thus, in the example above, the scientist, being the one who supplied the information, considers him/herself to be the author of the article, with the journalist acting as someone who just writes it up. The article is about “my area of expertise, quoting me as an expert, so if the guy gets something wrong the whole scientific community will laugh at me, and my reputation is going to hell, thus as the author of the piece I have to have complete control over it, just like when I write a manuscript or a grant proposal”.
Think about it: two people each inhabit their own cultures, and each fails to recognize that the other person’s reputation hinges on the accuracy of the same piece of writing! Of course they both want control over it!
The problem of the quote
I do not know when the practice of quoting began and why. I can guess at a couple of reasons for it. First, that was a way for a reporter to signal to the editor that he has actually called experts instead of writing something out of thin air. Second, it saves space, which in the realm of paper publishing, is limited. Third, it moves some of the responsibility off the reporter and onto the expert. If the statement is wrong, the reporter can have an excuse: “That’s what she said”.
A scientist interviewed for an article will talk for an hour. She would much prefer if the reporter summarized that hour in a paragraph and let her check if it’s accurate. The quote, no matter which two sentences have been pulled out of an hour-long interview, can never be representative of the entire hour’s material. Every quote is by definition a quote out of context. Every quote is always a misquote.
But if a quote is a must, then the scientist is worried – which two sentences will get picked and how much will those two sentences be misleading without the proper context?
Everyone who’s ever been quoted is always unhappy with the quote. Reporter is often blamed, but really, it is the problem of the form. If no quote can ever be representative of what the person said in an hour, then every quote must be, by definition, an atrocity that puts the quotee in bad light. Many people have quit doing interviews entirely because of this.
I was interviewed for and quoted in an article in New York Times today (it is actually a very good article – the discussion below is not a judgment on the article as a whole). See:
We spoke on the phone for more than an hour. We covered a lot of ground. I got two quotes in there. They are kinda OK, not totally misleading, but they are not representative of what I said, nor are they representative of who I am and what I stand for, and why I was interviewed in the first place. Was the whole interview a waste of time if the key ingredients did not make it into the article?
One quote is about journals, specifically Nature. I was pushed to say something, but I was reluctant to say much, since SciAm is owned by Nature, and I have no idea what the bosses at Nature are thinking and planning – I am not an expert on the inner workings of NPG. But I did go at lengths about the journal publishing business as a whole, various new models, how the Web is changing the publishing industry, how different major players are responding to changes, etc. In the end, I guess the NPG bosses are happy with my quotes because it appears I am defending them. My friends may raise their eyebrows, thinking I am abandoning my proselytizing for Open Access. Other readers may be misled in thinking that my off-the-cuff semi-sentences are indications of some big changes at Nature that are secret but I know about them. Yet others may think, because of the context of the previous paragraph, that I am defending the entire publishing industry. Not clear. Not where my expertise lies. Not what I wanted to talk about. Not why I was supposed to be in that article in the first place. But hey, I am happy to have a photo in NYT and a link to my blog and to ScienceOnline2012.com homepage.
My other quote says something about replacing articles about Lindsay Lohan with articles about science. Catchy quote. Good for SEO. But the point of that part of the interview was different – I was talking about the differences between push and pull strategies for science communication and how science stories should appear where the people are, e.g., right next to Lohan stories. The idea is that all science communicators, including professional science media, are in the same business with the same goal – promoting science. Instead of thinking of each other as competitors, more and more such organizations see each other as collaborators. The true competitor for audience attention is popular culture. Really, all I did was rehash what I wrote a long time ago in this post, just updating the name of the celebrity. You could not glean any of it from my quote, right?
So, what to do?
This is the era of the Web. There is no limit to space. And not using links is rude and diminishes one’s trust with the readers. Thus:
Both the reporter and the interviewee should record the whole thing (and really, at this day and age you should be recording, not hammering notes into a stone tablet). And then, they should both post the recording online. And the final article should link to the recording (or full transcript) of the interview. A quote should never stand alone – it should only serve as a ‘hook’ for the readers to click on the link and listen to (or read) the whole thing. That is what I have in the past dubbed The Ethics of The Quote.
This way, nobody is quoted out of context. No more finger-pointing between the two parties. No more battle over control of the final text, or “who is the real author here” debate. The whole “sharing with sources” debate becomes moot.
Multitudes of Sciences
In all of these debates about science journalism, we always tend to talk about Science as if it was a unified ‘thing’. But it is not. There are numerous scientific cultures. The culture is affected by one’s discipline, by the department and institution, and by country in which the lab resides.
Some disciplines attract a lot of money. They are a potential road to fame, wealth and power. They can be extremely competitive, attracting people into it who are already competitive, then enculturating them to become even more so. Careers are made or broken by the Impact Factor of the journal one manages to publish in. Speedy lab techniques introduce a real potential for getting scooped. Secretiveness rules. The discipline is potentially politicized. The field may be essentially basic science, but it masquerades as applied in order to garner funding and attention. Labs are likely to be in top-level research institutions, usually in the Western countries.
Other disciplines attract loners, in small departments, in small schools, often in other countries, where pressures are lower. They pursue some weird, quirky research out of personal curiosity. It costs very little. There is no Nobel prize for what they do. Society journals (or PLoS ONE these days) are perfectly fine venues for the occasional publication. Teaching and outreach are as important as research. It is unlikely or impossible to get scooped, so free and open discourse is a norm. Drafts of manuscripts are shared with “competitors” asking for feedback (well, there are only three other people in the world doing the same thing, might as well be friends and coordinate work instead of wasting time doing exact same experiments). The society does not even have to notify the hotel that the entire field will come in one day and have their annual meeting in their lobby.
Covering these two disciplines, as a journalist, cannot be the same thing. Practitioners in one of them you can trust much more than the other, right? So your attitude is different – more antagonistic for one discipline (or institution, or country), more collaborative for the other.
Multitudes of Journalisms
Just like there are many sciences, not just one, there are also many ‘journalisms’, not just one, and we should be aware of this in these discussions. A lot of these debates assume that everyone knows the inside baseball of a newsroom. But people who are just the audience don’t know much about how the divisions work within the media. Everything that is in the paper is, well, “in the paper”. News, features, investigative reporting, op-eds, obituaries, sports results, TV listings, ads, comics, horoscopes…all of that is in the paper. Thus, for a casual reader, a regular citizen, all of it is media, and journalism, and news. Even before the Web, when one arrives to a page via link with no orientation where it belongs on the website, people did not know the difference between “straight” reporting, and editorials, etc. The same also includes radio, television and, these days, also the Internet. It is all media.
But, whenever we get into these debates, especially when bloggers start showing examples of the quality of their work in many areas – news coverage, features, explainers, fact-checking, investigative reporting, etc. the old-style journos retreat into defining “real journalism” very narrowly, as investigative journalism only. They tend to cling to the WoodwardBernsteinMyth, as if that was real, and if that was usual, and as if that was the only journalism worth the name. But cartoons are journalism, too, you know, if you ask anyone on the street reading your newspaper….
So yes, an intrepid reporter who sniffs a fishy story and doggedly pursues it until the dirt is uncovered and a career affected (e.g., by sending someone to jail, or leading to loss of job, or medical/law licence, etc. – see Brian Deer vs. Wakefield) is doing an extraordinary feat of journalism.
But is that science journalism?
For a long time I have been arguing that journalism that investigates misdeeds by scientists is not science journalism, but political (or economic or financial or whatever) journalism that just happens to involve a scientist, so the academic context is important (how does the money flow through the system, how does reputation and hierarchy work in it, etc.).
In science journalism, it is the scientists who discovered the secrets, and the journalists help share the discovery with the public. The scientist has nothing to hide. Collaborative, not antagonistic work. Mutual trust, not suspicion. In science journalism, as opposed to investigative journalism that happens to involve a scientist, the scientist is the source, not subject. The process of writing the article is a collaborative project. Both are authors. So why not share? Not just quotes – heck, work on the article together in a Google doc.
I know the people with the Woodward-Bernstein Complex will not like the paragraphs above (and by golly, how many students go into journalism due to the Woodward-Bernstein Complex because they saw “All The President’s Men”!!!!). I still stand by them – science journalism is writing about science to lay audiences with a goal to inform, educate and entertain.
If we classify science stories into ‘cool’, ‘relevant’ and ‘fishy’, the third one is not really science journalism as its goal is not to promote science to the lay audience. Indeed, it may have the opposite effect, that of reducing trust in science and scientists, especially if that is all people see. It is important, it forces the academic world to act against its bad actors faster than the usual “we’ll do it fast, in about two years of committee meetings” speed.
But it is inside baseball, and it is not the kind of stories I would push very much in front of completely lay audience, side-by-side with Lindsey Lohan. Perhaps it would be better to put those pieces into the “pull media” outlets, where those who need to see it – because they can act to exert pressure – can see it. Better that than projecting the image of science as being eternally untrustworthy, leading to all the climate denialism and other politicized anti-science movements that capitalize on that kind of perception.
Remember: 99.9% of scientists are honest, are excited about their work and about science, and are careful not to over-stress the importance of their findings. It’s part of their culture and their training. They are not trying to sell you anything. I understand that reporters whose daily beat forces them to deal entirely with the dirty deeds of a few individuals (or only cover papers in GlamourMagz authored by scientific superstars with named chairs at Ivy League schools) may have such a jaded, yet highly skewed, view of science. But it is just not correct. Most reporters, covering most areas of science, need not be so suspicious of scientists, or of PIOs at institutions, etc – they are all working collaboratively together to present the cool, new findings to the world. Work with them, not against them.
Who is a science journalist these days?
The science journalism ecosystem has been rapidly changing lately. It is becoming very difficult these days to say who is a journalist. The courts are having trouble with this as well, especially when they try to identify a person, who by virtue of working for a media organization, can be legally considered to be a journalist. What we need instead is to define acts of journalism. Anyone can commit such acts, so in court cases the point would be to determine if the act in question should be considered an act of journalism, thus perhaps deserving some protections.
In science journalism, in particular, there is a fuzzy division now between journalists and scientists. Many scientists are not sources any more, but ‘go direct’ (as Dave Winer would say) and communicate straight to their audiences.
On the other hand, more and more science journalists these days have a real background in science – they got science degrees, did scientific research, then leaked out of the tenure-track pipeline and decided to become science writers, or science journalists, or PIOs. Instead of backgrounds in English or communications, or accidentally being assigned the science beat by editors, today’s science journalists are likely to be scientists as well.
Some of them have completely quit research, but “once a scientist, always a scientist” – being a scientist is a mindset, not a profession. It comes with training. It never leaves. Though one can always learn to write better 😉
Others still have one foot in the lab and their writing is either a semi-amateur outlet for one’s passion for writing, or is a test for a potential move into full-time writing careers.
Some scientists move from research to writing by going through specialized science writing programs in journalism schools, while others enter more ‘laterally’, by becoming successful science bloggers first.
Some are writers first, but are also heavily involved in doing Citizen Science or DIY science.
And others never intend to leave the lab, but thoroughly enjoy writing their science blogs in the evenings.
Many are not the usual white, male, middle-class, top-research-university-in-the-USA kinds of people, bringing diversity of angles, approaches and voices that help reach a broader audience than what the old-style journalists interviewing old-style scientists could ever dream of (look around the #SciAmBlogs network – there is a reason why the chosen line-up is so diverse in geography, gender, age, race/ethnicity, scientific background, writing experience, and more…despite having very different writing styles they are all awesome bloggers, and as a group they can reach an incredibly diverse and broad audience).
But then…what does it mean to be a “source” any more?
Expert bloggers, and it’s hard to think of bloggers with more expertise on their subject (or a subject requiring more expertise) than science bloggers, are their own sources. Bloggers have the liberty to cover only the areas of science they are comfortable with, those in which they are confident they have sufficient expertise in. Why call and interview (and quote) anyone else? If a paper on circadian biology comes out, I can explain it because I am one of the experts. I am both the source and the journalist when covering that paper (so I guess I will share the “copy” with myself throughout the process of me collaborating with myself).
Moreover, if a mainstream media outlet writes about the same paper, I expect they will check what the expert bloggers are saying first (easy sources that don’t need to be called) and thus see my coverage. They will then quote me, name me and link to my post (well, they should, and they better!) – my post is their expert source. It is the ready-made transcript of the interview they never conducted – they didn’t have to, because I already provided the whole text for them in advance, in public, on my blog. And if there is something fishy about the paper, I am much more likely to notice and write about it, sparing the journalist the embarrassment of getting it wrong at first, then correcting later (or worse – see the #arseniclife media debacle).
Obviously, in the new media ecosystem, the whole notion of sharing with sources is all fuzzy – who is the source these days when scientists write in public, and journalists are themselves scientists? Makes no sense. But it makes sense that people who write for the public know what they writing about. This is why science journalism has never been as good as it is now – scientists write, journalists know their science, commenters know it even better, and the audience is having great fun. Society benefits.
For many years people who attend conferences – including scientific conferences – noticed something interesting: the best discussions were those that occurred outside of lecture halls. Conversations that happened in the hallways, at the hotel bar, on a bus going to see a local attraction, or, if you are lucky with the location, on the beach, were informative, exciting and useful. This is where real information got exchanged, where younger members learned the “lore” and “tacit knowledge” from their elders in the field, where people started real connections, even friendships, where plans got hatched to start new collaborative projects, and more.
Experienced conference-goers can rarely be found in the actual conference rooms, or, if that would sometimes happen, they could be seen dozing off in the back row, or amusing themselves with the technology of the day (doodling on their notepad, later laptops, later iPhones/iPads). The speakers would prepare slideshows, the student presenters would all dress up and then sweat, the organizers would do their best to promote the sessions, only to see the rooms half-empty because everyone is having much more productive conversations out in the hallway.
So, some smart people a few years back decide to do something about this. Why not scratch most or all of the boring lecturing from the program, and instead move the hallway discussions into the conference rooms? Thus, the Unconference format was born. There are several different methods to organizing and participating in an Unconference (I provided some “Related” links at the bottom if you want to learn more, especially if you intend to organize an unconference yourself), but here I want to focus on the format we use at ScienceOnline conferences. While this post is public for everyone to read and think about and perhaps implement some of it in the future, the real target audience for this post are the participants (and even more: session moderators) of ScienceOnline2012, especially as more than half of the attendees this year are first-timers and may not be familiar with the format.
Building the Program
Some Unconferences build the program after the meeting starts, once everyone is in the room, using markers and a white-board over about an hour to put together a program. This can work wonderfully for a one-off local tech conference, but it has some serious drawbacks when organizing a large, international annual meeting with a particular topic. For example, this method privileges aggressive, A-type, middle-aged, white males over all the others who may not want to be so quick dashing to the board and grabbing the markers. Some topics may not be appropriate (for ScienceOnline each topic has to have a science component and an online component, not just one of the two).
Year after year the same topics would be rehashed over and over again – an annual conference needs some work to make each year new and fresh and creative and cutting-edge (and balanced – not everything should be about blogging or journalism as there are many other topics), one year’s topics are building on top of the topics already covered previously, making sure that there is interesting stuff both for the veterans and for the newcomers. Some people are paying a lot of money out of their own pockets to travel large distances, including from other continents – we cannot leave to chance the quality of the program, so this has to be done in advance.
But this does not mean that we invent the program out of our own heads. Instead, we just funnel the energy of the community. The program is crowdsourced and community-built. We put up the Program Suggestions page on the wiki early on (in March, I believe) and let the people edit the page and add their suggestions, start talking to each other and plotting (many of those ideas were first hatched on Twitter before getting added to the wiki – this shows the importance of following the #scio12 hashtag throughout the year – there are more than 10,000 tweets using this hashtag already, and the meeting is yet to start in two weeks).
In August and September we started contacting some of the people who posted interesting suggestions and helped them develop their ideas and build really interesting sessions. By October or so, this produced a rough draft of the program. By November, the final Program was set in stone. Now everyone can start preparing in advance for the sessions – it is very important to come prepared, as the quality of the discussion is dependent on the sum of the knowledge and wisdom of the people in the room (very important link to a post to read carefully), for which preparation in advance is an important factor.
Moderators of all the sessions are encouraged to start their own individual wiki pages where they can add more information, links, documents, ask questions, start the discussion in advance. Several have already done so (see examples here, here, here, here, here and here – there should be more soon). Once more of those single-session pages are built, we will also link to them from this nifty and useful Sched.org Agenda which you can use to personalize your own schedule (watch this video to get the most out of it).
Sessions – how to moderate, how to participate
There are three types of sessions this year. First, there are Blitz-talks on Friday afternoon (color-coded right now as light blue on the Agenda, but the color may change). These are fast 15-minute presentations done in a more traditional style, hoping that the discussions will commence afterwards in the hallways (and oh yeah, some of them WILL!).
Then, there are several workshop-style sessions (provisionally lavender-ish color on the Sched.org Agenda) where the people in front have skills that the people in the room are trying to learn. Just because this is more of a classroom-type situation does not mean that the session cannot be lively and interactive, as other people in the room are encouraged to ask questions and inject their own knowledge from the beginning. At previous iterations of the meeting, that is exactly what happened in each workshop.
But the majority of sessions (right now coded with banana-yellow on the Agenda, though this may change) are meant to be in a truly unconference mode: the people in front are not speakers or lecturers, they are moderators. Use of PowerPoint is strongly discouraged – if something needs to be shown, it usually can be quickly found and shown on the Web. Moderators will start the session with a brief introduction to the topic and the goals of the session, and will be ready to instantly respond to the questions and comments from the room. Their job is to make sure that the discussion goes smoothly, that it stays on topic, that no individual (including themselves) hijacks the conversation, and, in the best of all worlds, to end the session either with a resolution, an answer to a question, or with something actionable that the people in the room can commit to do or build over the following few weeks or months of collaborative work online. The session ends when people decide it’s over. Yes, the session physically ends when the time is up, but the discussion can spill into subsequent related sessions, or continue in the hallways and online as long as people want to continue – some topics go on in the blogosphere for many months after the session ends. Be prepared.
This year, for the first time (though we toyed with the idea before), we implemented three new rules which should help make the Program and the sessions more lively. First, we set a limit to two moderators per session. Tendency to build large panels (which allows more people to register as moderators, with a guaranteed slot) is not conducive to free-flowing discussion. By the time all the panelists have their say, half the allocated time is over and it is hard to get the discussion going. We’ve had a couple of panels in the past that were done well and were interactive, but those were done by organizational geniuses and we cannot be sure that can always happen. If moderators want the knowledge and wisdom of particular people to be tapped into during their session, they are encouraged to ask those people to register, come to their session, sit in the room with everyone else, and be prepared to be productive contributors to the conversation.
Second, we set a limit to two sessions per moderator. This way we avoided the situation in which many sessions are led by the same usual suspects. Instead, many sessions are going to be moderated by new people, bringing in fresh perspectives and voices, thus rejuvenating the conference and making it more interesting and more fun. Due to this year’s growth-spurt of the meeting, more than half of the attendees will be first-timers, which should prevent the veterans from forming cliques and dominating the discourse.
Third, we discourage Skyping in people. First, Skype is a drain on the wifi (and that is expensive). Second, it stilts the discussion and has to be done with care and not everyone knows how to do it well. It is not 100% reliable it will work. And, although we may do it in an emergency (e.g., if a moderator gets stuck and cannot show up at the last moment), we did not want any session moderators to plan in advance on skyping in other people, or having virtual co-moderation (hard to moderate a discussion when one cannot see/hear/feel the room, anyway).
Oh, and it is perfectly OK to enter or leave the room in the middle of the session – if the discussion goes in the direction you are not interested in, don’t waste your time, but go to another session instead. It’s fine. No, really, it’s OK.
Virtual participation
As I noted before, ScienceOnline is a kind of conference that is ongoing online throughout the year, mainly on Twitter using the official hasthtag #scio12, as well as on blogs and other online platforms. Once a year, the physical interaction gets added to this. Both AntonZuiker and I find great value in meeting online friends in person. It raises the subsequent quality of online discourse to a higher level and allows magical things to happen – from personal friendships, to gigs and jobs, to business start-ups, to scientific collaborations and more. Meeting in person makes a community grow stronger.
But we are also aware that not everyone can come to the conference. There is limited space (about 450 people this year which is huge growth from 320 last year). Some people have to be elsewhere. Some people just live too far away. But they are part of this community, so they cannot and should not be cut off from the proceedings. The attendees themselves do most of the communication out of the conference, on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, FriendFeed, Flickr, YouTube, blogs and more. Everyone is encouraged to relay as much as possible about the event to the online audiences in as real-time as humanely possible. Some sessions will probably be livestreamed and most or all sessions will be recorded in one way or another. And we will have volunteers whose task will be to produce blog posts, Storify-s of tweets, photography, podcasts and videos of the event. There will also be a variety of ways for people to post their artistic renderings of the meeting online as well (e.g., sketches, aka, livescribes of the sessions). And as many in the attendance are professional journalists, we expect, as in the past years, that MSM articles will appear soon afterward.
That is information going out. How about information coming in? There will be a Twitterfall in the hallway, but there will be none in the session rooms (for a good reason). With our attendees being so hooked online, with everyone livetweeting or liveblogging, essentially everyone in the room will be monitoring the outside twitterverse (and Facebook, G+, blogs etc) and will be ready to instantly reply. As long as people use the #scio12 hashtag, everyone in the room will be able to see their tweets, perhaps insert Twitter-posted questions into the live discussion in the room. That seemed to work the last couple of years, and should work again. Moreover, all the moderators will be instructed to pay attention to the online discussion themselves, as they have the power to move discussion in different direction in response to the online chatter.
Again this year, our friends at SignalShare will provide rocket-speed wifi at the venue. They usually do bigger events, like Super Bowl and Grammys, but from their perspective, although numerically smaller in regard to the number of people on site, we are a big event. Every year they are flabbergasted as to how much data this crowd can push through the intertubes in such a small period of time. This is a very connected crowd and people are constantly tweeting, blogging, uploading photos, podcasts and videos, and more. Not to mention livestreaming. No building has native wifi that can support this kind of crowd, but with the help of SignalShare, wifi will rock.
The ScienceOnline Community
ScienceOnline2012 is a community-organized, community-planned, community-funded, community-owned and community-run conference. The ethos of the meeting is that this is an egalitarian community. Nobody is VIP, nobody is a priori a superstar. One becomes a superstar by virtue of being here (including virtually, yes). Participating in ScienceOnline is a badge of honor and a matter of pride – it means “I am a part of the small but cutting-edge community that is changing the worlds of science and science communication”. Even those who tend to get treated as VIPs by other conferences – New York Times and The New Yorker columnists, senior scientists, Pulitzer Prize winners, familiar NPR voices, CEOs, top bloggers – love the fact that, once a year, they are equal to undergrads, high school students (and their teachers), beginner bloggers, programmers, artists, librarians, and others in the community. Everyone is a superstar in their own domain, and a n00b in others. Everyone has something to teach and something to learn. It is a lot of fun. A lot of networking goes on. A lot of intense learning goes on. Many, many collaborations and projects got started here, and those often turned into gigs and jobs later on. Some of those projects would then be first announced to the world at the next meeting.
This is one conference where personal finances do not (or at least should not, in theory) determine who can and who cannot come. This is what the community is for – to help each other. Those who can, donate their registration fees (and often more) towards the travel fund for those who cannot afford the trip. Students, freelancers, and others, come from all over the world – apart from people coming from all over the USA and Canada, we always have someone from the U.K., Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Serbia. We’ve had attendees in the past traveling from Brazil, Poland, Sweden, South Africa, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand, and this year we also expect people from Denmark, Australia and Mauritius. It is a global community, each helping the others come here if possible, perhaps being recipients of such help in the previous years as people’s fortunes change over time.
Every aspect of the conference is underwritten by small sponsorships from many, many organizations, big and small, preventing any one organization from starting to dominate and thus dictate the agenda. This model of funding is not only in line with the ethos of the conference but also the first step in putting together a new system of funding. Whenever old systems break and new ones are arising, many people in the new system do not have regular jobs because such jobs do not yet exist – they are in the process of inventing them. Others in the new system, the pioneers, make sure that all the others are well taken care of before they collectively build a new system that actually creates jobs for everyone within it. This is one of the things that ScienceOnline meeting is all about.
As the Program is built by the community on the wiki over several months, and as all the extra-curricularactivities, old and new, initially started as ideas from the community, everyone contributes ideas and realization of those ideas. This is why everyone feels it is their meeting. They feel an ownership of it. They do not come as guests, to see what we have prepared for them. Instead they come as hosts (even though they may live in Vancouver or Warsaw or Amsterdam or Sydney), ready to run this show. And the locals feel it doubly – for a couple of days each year, all the eyes are on the Triangle, for everyone to see what an amazing center of science, tech, and innovation this is.
Conversation
If the point of an Unconference is to take the hallway, tour-bus and hotel-bar discussions and move them into the conference rooms, then it makes sense to get the discussions started in the hallways first. To do that we have, in the past, dedicated the first day (or more) to the opportunities to mingle: Early-Bird dinner, workshops, tours, finally a Keynote, all of those happening before the official program started. This gave people plenty of time to arrive, rest, relax, get comfortable, start schmoozing and networking, serendipitously meeting other interesting people on the tour buses, etc. By the time the first session starts, the discussions have already been going on for some time, and it was easy to move them into conference rooms and continue – on a particular topic each hour.
One drawback to this kind of schedule is that not everyone would come to the first day of the meeting. Not having scheduled sessions felt to some like this was not an essential part of the conference (it is), so some people would arrive just in time for the main program (this included a lot of locals) at which point they can be confused and disoriented because they have missed all the informal discussions and socializing of the previous day.
The move to a new, bigger venue, as well as a great increase in the number of people attending in person, provided us with new challenges – how to let the meeting grow without losing the community spirit and the opportunities for serendipitous meetings, for networking and schmoozing. Also, how to make sure people understand that the informal events are an essential part of the meeting, not just the sessions?
We decided to try to expand the meeting to three full days (well, it always was three days, but it did not look like that on paper) and to have formal and informal aspects of the conference alternate – a little bit of sessions, then a little bit of something informal, then more sessions, more informal stuff, etc. This way, everyone will be here from the beginning to the end, and nobody will miss out on the important informal parts of the conference (one would have to actively leave in order to miss them, not just fail to show up). This also provides for continuous discussions going into and out of the session rooms for quite a while. Fortunately, it seems that many people are arriving on Wednesday afternoon (or even earlier) so the informal chatting can start early. We hope this works – fingers crossed.
On top of that, we (and when I say “we” I mean Karyn Traphagen, the Master of Ceremonies and an organizational genius) have planned on some creative use of space. McKimmon Center is large and was recently renovated (I remember when it was a deadly boring space – it is much more cozy and lively now). It has many interesting spaces and lots of nooks and crannies. Central to our conference – more central than any of the conference rooms – will be the large Cafe room. It will, apart from coffee flowing all day every day (and other drinks, water, cookies, candy and more), have all sorts of nice places to sit and chat in small groups, for individuals to sit down and use laptops, for others to see, touch, hear, explore stuff, leaf through books, watch attendee-produced art, monitor Twitterfall, and more (I myself do not know everything about this – I know Karyn will surprise us all with some of the things in there). This will be the Central-place foraging spot (from which people will go “foraging” to sessions and other events), the “activity hub” and the “home” for everyone. This is where you start and end your day, and where you come to take a break and meet people. I am looking forward to seeing you all in there.
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 my guest is Kristi Holmes of VIVOweb.org (Twitter).
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?
Thank you for welcoming me, Bora!
It has been a bit of a journey to get to where I am now: a scientist completely immersed in the library environment. I was always incredibly interested in science – even from a very early age and spent many hours with my nose in a science book. In college, I had a great mentor who encouraged me to pursue advanced studies in chemistry, and I am grateful for his kindness and support (Thanks, Dr. Mosher!). I eventually graduated with a PhD in Biochemistry from Iowa State University where I worked on small ribosomal subunit assembly, learned how to think critically and had some fun along the way (Thanks, Dr. Culver!). Iowa State also gave me a great introduction to the library, as I served as the Graduate Student Senate representative to the University Library Committee. Upon graduation, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life – I knew that a traditional academic career wasn’t for me, as I find so many (too many?) topics of interest. I thought that intellectual property law might be a good fit, so my family and I moved to St. Louis so that I could go to law school. While in St. Louis, I stumbled into a career in the library, left behind law school, and I have been here ever since!
I have the good fortune to have a career that allows me to be able to bring my science background to a service-based library environment. I work as a bioinformaticist at the Becker Medical Library at Washington University in St. Louis. My job duties there are incredibly varied: I teach classes and coordinate training opportunities on campus on software platforms and databases, offer research consultations, support collaboration at our university, and I even work on projects related to research impact and genomic medicine.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I am fortunate to have an opportunity to work on a number of other exciting projects and I’ll describe a few of them for you. A great deal of my efforts in the library support the mission of the Washington University Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences (WU-ICTS). The WU-ICTS is one of 60 Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) institutions that “… are transforming the way biomedical research is conducted [by accelerating] the translation of laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients, [engaging] communities in clinical research efforts, and [training] a new generation of clinical and translational researchers.” (CTSA Consortium, 2011) I am a member of the WU-ICTS and also serve as a member of the WU-ICTS Tracking & Evaluation program where we work to track research output and understand the impact of the Institute’s efforts. One particularly exciting project I’m involved with which is supported by the WU-ICTS and carried out in partnership with the Becker Medical Library and the Washington University Departments of Medicine, Genetics, Pediatrics and Pathology & Immunology is the interdisciplinary seminar series, Introduction to Genomic Medicine. The series offers attendees a practical background in topics related to genomic research and applications of genomic technologies in the research environment and aims to increase understanding of the clinical application of gained knowledge. The 2011 series was a resounding success and we look forward to the 2012 series.
I also serve as the National Outreach Coordinator for an open source Semantic Web-based research discovery platform called VIVO (www.vivoweb.org). VIVO facilitates research discovery by providing verifiable information about researchers and their interests, expertise, publications, grants, courses, and more. Across institutions, VIVO provides a uniform semantic structure to enable a new class of tools that use this data to advance science. I have been working in this role for about two years as part of a National Institutes of Health–funded ARRA award. This role necessitates that I am on the road a lot, visiting universities and organizations and attending conferences (like Science Online!). I conduct webinars for groups wishing to know more about the VIVO software and work on a number of policy- and data-related tasks, as well. We’ve had a national conference for two years now, with the third scheduled for August 22-24, 2012 in Miami, FL. We also sponsor other events such as workshops, an implementation fest, and hackathons. The open source VIVO community is vibrant and growing and it has been great fun to collaborate with amazing people from across the country and around the world.
Locally, our library is interested in how we can support our researchers in areas related to data management and preservation, dissemination, and so on. I’ve been working with a group of librarians from across both campuses at Washington University as part of the Association of Research Libraries/Digital Library Foundation (ARL/DLF) E-Science Institute. As part of this work, each team carries out an environmental scan of their university, conducts interviews with the major stakeholders, performs a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, Threats) and eventually develops a game plan to support the needs of our research community around data. We’re in the middle of this process right now and I anxiously await the end so that we have a good perspective of how best to move forward at our university.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I find that I tend to be a “jack of all trades” at work. There are so many interesting projects and ideas flowing right now, I find it hard to restrict my time to just a few areas! Beyond my daily responsibilities supporting WU researchers, I have several other projects that occupy my time. Certainly my roles on the local and national VIVO projects are a major effort, as is my work on topics related to “e-research” topics at our institution. I am collaborating with the Scholarly Communications Specialist at Becker Library, Cathy Sarli, on updates to the Becker Model – a framework for moving beyond citation counts to track the impact of biomedical research. I have also been spending a great deal of time working to develop programs that educate and provide information support for a wide range of stakeholders on topics related to genomic medicine (e.g. researchers, various health care providers, patients and their advocates).
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
My work on VIVO has given me a good perspective of the limitations in the discovery process in the academic environment. Data are spread out, often out of date, and poorly structured and maintained. There is an increasing recognition by a variety of stakeholders of the value of semantic web standards and technologies to facilitate research discovery. I’m eager to share the opportunities that the Semantic Web presents for not only connecting people, but also for building a rich open web of information that can be used for a variety of purposes for everyone – researchers, journalists, patients, librarians, and physicians, alike. I’m also very excited about some of the recent efforts related to scholarly output and impact, such as microattribution, nanopublications, and various alternative metric efforts by a number of groups. A good discussion of many of these issues can be found in a recent article from Nature Genetics, The value of data. (Mons, 2011)
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 have a couple of blogs and I use them primarily as a way to share information with readers. While I don’t often write long posts, I have found that the blog medium fits my needs. My library blog, Bioinformatics@Becker, serves as a place for me to share resources, advertise classes, and post interesting ideas that pop up. I also have a VIVO blog where I post project announcements and press releases.
As far as other social media goes, even though I feel as though I was a late adopter, I really value Twitter as a way to stay up to date in a variety of topic areas. The tweets are short, relevant, and contain extra information such as links to websites if I want to learn more about the topic. I also like Twitter because it allows me to virtually attend conferences by following a conference hash tag – a great way to stretch tight travel budgets.
My online activities allow me to be more productive than ever. I depend on blogs, wikis, and Twitter for information and I depend on other tools like Google Docs, Dropbox, Skype, and GoToMeeting to make online collaboration and communication easier.
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?
There are far too many good blogs to mention them all – especially this year with the increased attendance. I am definitely looking forward to chatting with some of my favorite bloggers (old and new!) at Science Online 2012.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2011 for you? Any suggestions for next year?
Science Online 2011 was a great opportunity to have a front-row seat to different aspects of science communication. There are so many interesting people doing very interesting work – what a great community! It was also wonderful to see many library-based folks at Science Online. Libraries tend to be on the bleeding edge of information and technology and I loved hearing about work in other organizations.
I’m really excited for Science Online 2012! I think that the preliminary program looks amazing – although I will certainly have a difficult time deciding which sessions to attend. I look forward to participating in sessions related to things I do at work related to the Semantic Web (VIVO) and Genomic Medicine – it will be fun to share some of my interests with the other attendees. There is an amazing session of three full tracks of Techno Blitz presentations planned for Friday afternoon on topics related to doing science, communicating science and issues related to credit, identity, and discoverability in science. Most of all, I look forward to seeing familiar faces and to finally meeting a lot of the people I follow on Twitter and through blogs. This is going to be the most amazing weekend to hear about all of the cool things that are happening in this great big beautiful online world!
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 68,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
I was initially not going to do a year in review, but all the cool kids are doing it, so why not? It was an eventful year, after all.
The launch of this network was the #1 event of the year for me. But I also traveled a lot – every month (or so) to New York City, also to Boston, Philly, Washington DC (twice), Asheville, Winston-Salem, Flagstaff, London (UK) and Belgrade (Serbia). I did not blog much about those travels or personal stuff. And my blogging is not nearly as frequent as it once was (remember when my output was 8.2 posts per day?). A lot of the quick stuff – links, quotes, personal stuff, humor/cartoons, etc. – I moved to Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Google Plus, Tumblr and Posterous, leaving the blog for the most important and serious stuff only. I also have to write or edit multiple blogs now, so A Blog Around The Clock is not the only place I can focus my attention to. But here we go – the key posts of the year:
January is all about ScienceOnline, of course, but I did manage to sneak in a post that was not about it:
Now I have to write the Preface for Open Laboratory anthology, and another lengthy media/blogging post before #scio12, but organization of that meeting will probably suck up most of my free (i.e., writing/blogging) time in January. Let’s hope the next year is even better and productive than this one. Have a Happy New Year!
I posted 15 times in December (this is 16th). That is, on A Blog Around The Clock only (not counting the posts on The Network Central, The SA Incubator, Video of the Week, Image of the Week, or editing Guest Blog and Expeditions).
Aside from the main Program, there will be many additional events and activities. For example, during the Friday banquet, we’ll have a storytelling event organized by our friends at The Monti. There will be an Art Show, Open Mic night, a book/swag show and exchange, a Science tattoo trip, stand-up comedy (Saturday lunch), an art+photo nature walk (sign-up coming soon) and several lab/museum tours (info and sign-up coming very soon).
Blog coverage is already growing – if you blog about #scio12, please let us know or just add your link to the wiki. The participants’ blogroll is growing, as more people are slowly moving from the (enormous) waitlist into registration.
There will be good wifi, good coffee and food at all times. But we are still not sure we can afford the livestreaming, and still do not have sufficient funds for all the travel grants for students coming from far away. So we are still open for new sponsorships or donations.
Posted onDecember 28, 2011byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on The wonderful quail…and what Sen.Coburn should learn about it.
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) released his “Wastebook” a week ago – a list of 100 government-funded projects that are supposedly a waste of money.
Every campaign season, quite predictably, someone from the GOP makes a document like this, listing examples of spending that, in their view, represents the most egregious excesses of governmental spending. Counting on their voters not to know or understand anything about these projects (especially the way these are carefully framed) and aware that nobody in the mainstream media will be pointing and laughing at them, they push these memes onto the unsuspecting public.
Many of these projects are competitive grant-funded scientific research, already paid by NIH or NSF after a draconian process of peer-review of the grant proposals by the experts in the field.
Remember the autism fruitfly research that Sarah Palin thought was wasteful? John McCain’s deriding of important bear DNA research? The “projector” at the Adler Planetarium? All horrendous misinterpretations of the actual research for the sake of scoring political points.
Just a campaign tactic to get people riled up against the “pointy-heads”.
Unsurprisingly, this latest list contains quite a few volleys against science – in service of politicking. A quick scan finds about a dozen scientific research projects already funded by federal grants, and I think some of the other bloggers on the network may cover some of them. I will focus on this one:
23) Rockin’ Robins: Study Looks for Connections Between Cocaine and Risky Sex Habits of Quail – (KY) $175,587
What common sense suggests, science has confirmed over and over again: namely, that cocaine use is linked to increased risky sexual behavior. Just to be sure, however, one federal agency thought it should test the hypothesis on a new subject: Japanese quail.
The University of Kentucky received a grant of $181,406 in 2010 from the National Institute of Health to study how cocaine enhances the sex drive of Japanese quail. In 2011, grant funding was extended and an additional $175,587 was provided for the study. The total awarded to the project will be $356,933.140
The study seeks to verify the clinical observations that indicated that cocaine use in humans may increase sexual motivation, thereby increasing the likelihood of the occurrence of high-risk sexual behavior. The researcher conducting the study highlighted how Japanese quail are ‘ideal‘ animals to use when studying the link between sex and drugs because the birds readily engage in reproductive behavior in the laboratory. University of Kentucky‘s website stated that quail provide a convenient and interesting alternative to standard laboratory rats and pigeons. This study is slated to continue through 2015.
Note that these reviews span about a century. That’s not “new”.
Also note that most of these reviews are behind the paywalls.
Not everyone in the country is deeply ideological. Most of the US voters are intelligent and open-minded. Every couple of years they need to go to the polls so they want to be making informed decisions. They will look for information, but will not spend too much time and effort (and certainly not money) finding it. So, it is deplorable that the side of reason, the Reality-Based community, is keeping its information hidden behind paywalls, while the side of Anti-Science is not just making it all free, but actively pushing their disinformation by every avenue and channel available. Why is it a surprise that the guys who deny reality keep winning? It is easy for snake-oil salesmen to make fun of stuff that most people cannot even access to read!
Why is Japanese quail such a good laboratory animal?
For example, gestation in mice lasts 18-21 days. In quail, the eggs hatch in 16-17 days. Those are both extremely fast developmental times, making it easy to quickly breed a lot of experimental animals.
It takes about six weeks for both mice and quail to attain sexual maturity after they are born. Again, that is a very fast maturation rate, making it efficient for breeding in the lab.
Mice can have litters anywhere between two and 12 pups at a time. Quail can lay essentially an egg per day throughout the year, throughout their lives. Quail win on this one – they can produce much more offspring per year. Efficient.
While techniques for genetic manipulation in quail lagged behind those of mice (just like those of mice lagged by many years behind Drosophila techniques), they are now available. It is now possible to make transgenic quail and use them in genetic research.
In many other aspects, quail is a better lab animal than the mouse (or rat or chicken). While laboratory strains of mice have been “domesticated” for only a few decades, the quail has been fully domesticated for about 500 years – it is poultry. While lab mice will rarely bite, they have to be handled with care – on the other hand, you can CUDDLE with a quail if you want to!
A decade ago, cuddling with quail.
Unlike its wild counterparts which are long-distance migrants, laboratory strains of Japanese quail are very slow fliers. Unlike wild songbirds (that need to be caught outside which is stressful) which, if they get lose in the lab one needs an army of technicians with butterfly nets to catch it (stressed), I can’t even remember how many times I caught runaway quail in mid-flight, with one hand, barely looking (actually, many times I caught them in the dark, not seeing but just hearing and feeling where they might be flying). Then you huddle it, and pet it on the head and put it back in its cage. And you get a loving look back and perhaps a quail-style “thank you” call. They are cute. But not as cute as many other species of birds, which makes it somewhat easier to overcome one’s reluctance to occasionally do something unpleasant to them, e.g., surgeries.
It is a hardy animal, very easy to keep, breed and feed, with minimal demands (which is why so many small farmers breed them around the world). They are social animals so they can be kept in groups. They are small and generally happy and content, so many more quail can be kept in a room without being stressed than, for example, one can keep comparatively enormous, slow-breeding, slow-maturing chicken in the room of the same size.
The lab rodents, like mice, have to be handled with utmost care, always keeping the threat of zoonozes in mind – there are many diseases that can jump from mice to human and back. There is essentially nothing that can infect both a human and a quail, especially not in the isolated, climate-controled environments of a university laboratory.
Quail’s immune system is amazing. While one has to perform a completely sterile surgery on mice, in quail it is done so only because IACUCs (Institutional Animal Care and Use Commitees) recently started demanding this (discussion of the wastefulness of this approach can be left for some other time). I bet you could do a surgery on a quail with dirty fingers and a rusty pocket-knife and the only consequence would be that the bird’s white blood cells would heartily laugh at you. This is also the reason why quail has been under intense research in Immunology for decades – if we learn something how the quail can be so resistant to essentially anything and everything in its environment, perhaps we can apply some of that knowledge to human medicine as well.
On the “intelligence scale” of birds, the quail hits the rock bottom. It is, frankly, not that smart. And this is a good thing from the point of view of research on behavioral neuroscience. They “don’t do” much thinking. They essentially go through the day like little automatons and most of their behaviors are routinized and stylized and automatic, like ‘fixed-action patterns’. Thus, manipulating a particular brain area usually results in a particular change of a particular behavior. This is repeatable and replicable, without too much noise in the data (at least in comparison to some other species), so the statistics are reasonably easy to do and findings are pretty clear. This makes research useful and efficient – sample sizes can be reasonably small.
There are very few species of animals about which we know as much as we do, and in so many areas of biology, as we understand the quail: embryonic development, genetics, physiology, metabolism, reproduction, immunology, endocrinology, neurobiology and behavior. With such a large amount of background information, it is much easier to make breakthroughs than when one is just starting to explore a new animal model (though as my regular readers know – I am very much in favor of adopting new models, as well as just purely comparative research). Studying effects of cocaine on reproductive behavior is so much more efficient in a species in which we do not have to start from scratch – we already know so much about its brain, behavior and reproduction, we can move on to more sophisticated studies than just the first exploratory “basic experiments”. Thus we can make faster progress. This is an efficient approach.
Most research on quail has – and often the same experiment simultaneously – relevance to three different areas of human interest: understanding of basic biology, application to human biomedical research, and application for agriculture – remember that quail is poultry.
Quail and chicken are very closely related. Each one of their genes is about 99% identical. In many ways, the quail is a model for the chicken. Instead of keeping just a few large, slow-breeding chickens in the lab, doing one slow experiment at the time, one can instead keep hundreds of quail in the same amount of space without stress, and do several fast, simultaneous experiments in the same amount of time. That is efficient. And that is how we can learn how to increase chicken (and turkey) productivity AND at the same time study how to make them healthy, unstressed and happy while doing so – a very important aspect of Poultry Science research.
A big advantage of quail over rodents is in the research on sleep. Rodents are nocturnal. Rats and mice sleep more during the day than during the night. But their sleep is not consolidated – they sleep in many short bursts: there are just more of these bursts during the day than night. On the other hand, quail is, like us, a diurnal animal. Quail are fully awake throughout the day and have a long consolidated sleep during the night (at least in short summer nights, while they may occasionally wake up during long winter nights…wow – just like us!!!!)
Not too shabby for a small bird, right? You really want to make fun of it for the sake of politics? You are lucky the quail is just too nice to bite you back!
Whenever I read a paper from Karl-Arne Stokkan’s lab, and I have read every one of them, no matter how dense the scientese language I always start imagining them running around the cold, dark Arctic, wielding enormous butterfly nets, looking for and catching reindeer (or ptarmigans, whichever animal the paper is about) to do their research.
If I was not so averse to cold, I’d think this would be the best career in science ever!
I agree, it is a cool story. It is an attention-grabbing, nifty story about charismatic megafauna living in a strange wilderness. I first saw the work from the lab in a poster session at a conference many years ago, and of all the posters I saw that day, it is the reindeer one that I still remember after all these years.
Yet, the coolness of the story should not hide the fact that this research is also very relevant – both to the understanding of evolution and to human medicine. Let me try to explain what they did and why that is much more important than what a quick glance at the headlines may suggest. I did it only part-way a few years ago when I blogged about one of their earlier papers. But let me start with that earlier paper as background, for context.
Rhythms of Behavior
In their 2005 Nature paper (which was really just a tiny subset of a much longer, detailed paper they published elsewhere a couple of years later), Stokkan and colleagues used radiotelemetry to continuously monitor activity of reindeer – when they sleep and when they roam around foraging.
You should remember that up in the Arctic the summer is essentially one single day that lasts several months, while the winter is a continuous night that lasts several months. During these long periods of constant illumination, reindeer did not show rhythms in activity – they moved around and rested in bouts and bursts, at almost unpredictable times of “day”. Their circadian rhythms of behavior were gone.
But, during brief periods of spring and fall, during which there are 24-hour light-dark cycles of day and night, the reindeer (on the northern end of the mainland Norway, but not the population living even further north on Svaldbard which remained arrhythmic throughout), showed daily rhythms of activity, suggesting that this species may possess a circadian clock.
Rhythms of Physiology
In a couple of studies, including the latest one, the lab also looked into a physiological rhythm – that of melatonin synthesis and secretion by the pineal gland. Just as in activity rhythms, melatonin concentrations in the blood showed a daily (24-hour) rhythm only during the brief periods of spring and fall. Furthermore, in the latest paper, they kept three reindeer indoors for a couple of days, in light-tight stalls, and exposed them to 2.5-hour-long periods of darkness during the normal light phase of the day. Each such ‘dark pulse’ resulted in a sharp rise of blood melatonin, followed by just as abrupt elimination of melatonin as soon as the lights went back on.
Rhythms of gene expression
Finally, in this latest paper, they also looked at the expression of two of the core clock genes in fibroblasts kept in vitro (in a dish). Fibroblasts are connective tissue cells found all around the body, probably taken out of reindeer by biopsy. In other mammals, e.g., in rodents, clock genes continue to cycle with a circadian period for a very long time in a dish. Yet, the reindeer fibroblasts, after a couple of very weak oscillations that were roughly in the circadian range, decayed into complete arrhytmicity – the cells were healthy, but their clocks were not ticking any more.
What do these results suggest?
There is something fishy about the reindeer clock. It is not working the same way it does in other mammals studied to date. For example, seals and humans living in the Arctic have normal circadian rhythms of melatonin. Some other animals show daily rhythms in behavior. But in reindeer, rhythms in behavior and melatonin can be seen only if the environment is rhythmic as well. In constant light conditions, it appears that the clock is not working. But, is it? How do we know?
During the long winter night and the long summer day, the behavior of reindeer is not completely random. It is in bouts which show some regularity – these are ultradian rhythms with the period much shorter than 24 hours. If the clock is not working in reindeer, i.e., if there is no clock in this species, then the ultradian rhythms would persist during spring and fall as well. Yet we see circadian rhythms during these seasons – there is an underlying clock there which can be entrained to a 24-hour light-dark cycle.
This argues for the notion that the deer’s circadian clock, unless forced into synchrony by a 24 external cycle, undergoes something called frequency demultiplication. The idea is that the underlying cellular clock runs with a 24-hour period but that is sends signals downstream of the clock, triggering phenotypic (observable) events, several times during each cycle. The events happen always at the same phases of the cycle, and are usually happening every 12 or 8 or 6 or 4 or 3 or 2 or 1 hours – the divisors of 24 (not necessarily whole hours, e.g., 90minute bursts are also possible). Likewise, the clock can trigger the event only every other cycle, resulting in a 48-hour period of the observable behavior.
If we forget for a moment the metaphor of the clock and think instead of a Player Piano, it is like the contraption plays the note G several times per cycle, always at the same moments during each cycle, but there is no need to limit each note to appear only once per cycle.
On the other hand, both the activity and melatonin rhythms appear to be driven directly by light and dark – like a stop-watch. In circadian parlance this is called an “hourglass clock” – an environmental trigger is needed to turn it over so it can start measuring time all over again. Dawn and dusk appear to directly stop and start the behavioral activity, and onset of dark stimulates while onset of light inhibits secretion of melatonin. An “hourglass clock” is an extreme example of a circadian clock with a very low amplitude.
While we mostly pay attention to period and phase, we should not forget that amplitude is important. Yes, amplitude is important. It determines how easy it is for the environmental cue to reset the clock to a new phase – lower the amplitude of the clock, easier it is to shift. In a very low-amplitude oscillator, onset of light (or dark) can instantly reset the clock to Phase Zero and start timing all over again – an “hourglass” behavior.
The molecular study of the reindeer fibroblasts also suggests a low-amplitude clock – there are a couple of weak oscillations to be seen before the rhythm goes away completely.
There may be other explanations for the observed data, e.g., masking (direct effect of light on behavior bypassing the clock) or relative coordination (weak and transient entrainment) but let’s not get too bogged down in arcane circadiana right now. For now, let’s say that the reindeer clock exists, that it is a very low-amplitude clock which entrains readily and immediately to light-dark cycles, while it fragments or demultiplies in long periods of constant conditions.
Why is this important to the reindeer?
During long night of the winter and the long day of the summer it does not make sense for the reindeer to behave in 24-hour cycles. Their internal drive to do so, driven by the clock, should be overpowered by the need to be flexible – in such a harsh environment, behavior needs to be opportunistic – if there’s a predator in sight: move away. If there is food in sight – go get it. If you are full and there is no danger, this is a good time to take a nap. One way to accomplish this is to de-couple the behavior from the clock. The other strategy is to have a clock that is very permissive to such opportunistic behavior – a very low-amplitude clock.
But why have clock at all?
Stokkan and colleagues stress that the day-night cycles in spring help reindeer time seasonal events, most importantly breeding. The calves/fawns should be born when the weather is the nicest and the food most plentiful. The reindeer use those few weeks of spring (and fall) to measure daylength (photoperiod) and thus time their seasonality – or in other words, to reset their internal calendar: the circannual clock.
But, what does it all mean?
All of the above deals only with one of the two hypotheses for the adaptive function (and thus evolution) of the circadian clock. This is the External Synchronization hypothesis. This means that it is adaptive for an organism to be synchronized (in its biochemistry, physiology and behavior) with the external environment – to sleep when it is safe to do so, to eat at times when it will be undisturbed, etc. In the case of reindeer, since there are no daily cycles in the environment for the most of the year, there is no adaptive value in keeping a 24-hour rhythm in behavior, so none is observed. But since Arctic is highly seasonal, and since the circadian clock, through daylength measurement (photoperiodism) times seasonal events, the clock is retained as an adaptive structure.
This is not so new – such things have been observed in cave animals, as well as in social insects.
What the paper does not address is the other hypothesis – the Internal Synchronization hypothesis for the existence of the circadian clock – to synchronize internal events. So a target cell does not need to keep producing (and wasting energy) to produce a hormone receptor except at the time when the endocrine gland is secreting the hormone. It is a way for the body to temporally divide potentially conflicting physiological functions so those that need to coincide do so, and those that conflict with each other are separated in time – do not occur simultaneously. In this hypothesis, the clock is the Coordination Center of all the physiological processes. Even if there is no cycle in the environment to adapt to, the clock is a necessity and will be retained no matter what for this internal function, though the period now need not be close to 24 hours any more.
What can be done next?
Unfortunately, reindeer are not fruitflies or mice or rats. They are not endangered (as far as I know), but they are not easy to keep in the laboratory in large numbers in ideal, controlled conditions, for long periods of time.
Out in the field, one is limited as to what one can do. The only output of the clock that can be monitored long-term in the field is gross locomotor activity. Yet, while easiest to do, this is probably the least reliable indicator of the workings of the clock. Behavior is too flexible and malleable, too susceptible to “masking” by direct effects of the environment (e.g., weather, predators, etc,). And measurement of just gross locomotor activity does not tell us which specific behaviors the animals are engaged in.
It would be so nice if a bunch of reindeer could be brought into a lab and placed under controlled lighting conditions for a year at a time. One could, first, monitor several different specific behaviors. For example, if feeding, drinking and defecation are rhythmic, that would suggest that the entire digestive system is under circadian control: the stomach, liver, pancreas, intestine and all of their enzymes. Likewise with drinking and urination – they can be indirect indicators of the rhythmicity of the kidneys and the rest of the excretory system.
In a lab, one could also continuously monitor some physiological parameters with simple, non-invasive techniques. One could, for example monitor body temperature, blood pressure and heart-rate, much more reliable markers of circadian output. One could also take more frequent blood samples (these are large animals, they can take it) and measure a whole plethora of hormones along with melatonin, e.g., cortisol, thyroid hormones, progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, etc (also useful for measuring seasonal responses). One could measure metabolites in urine and feces and also gain some insight into rhythms of the internal biochemistry and physiology. All of that with no surgery and no discomfort to the animals.
Then one can place reindeer in constant darkness and see if all these rhythms persist or decay over time. Then one canmake a Phase–ResponseCurve and thus test the amplitude of the underlying oscillator (or do that with entrainment to T-cycles, if you have been clicking on links all along, you’ll know what I’m talking about). One can test their reproductive response to photoperiod this way as well.
Finally, fibroblasts are peripheral cells. One cannot expect the group to dissect suprachiasmatic nuclei out of reindeer to check the state of the master pacemaker itself. And in a case of such a damped circadian system, testing a peripheral clock may not be very informative. Better fibroblasts than nothing, but there are big caveats about using them.
Remember that the circadian system is distributed all around the body, with each cell containing a molecular clock, but only the pacemaker cells in the suprachiasmatic nucleus are acting as a network. In a circadian system like the one in reindeer, where the system is low-amplitude to begin with, it is almost expected that peripheral clocks taken out of the body and isolated in a dish will not be able to sustain rhythms for very long. Yet those same cells, while inside of the body, may be perfectly rhythmic as a part of the ensemble of all the body cells, each sending entraining signals to the others every day, thus the entire system as a whole working quite well as a body-wide circadian clock. This can be monitored in real-time in transgenic mice, but the technology to do that in reindeer is still some years away.
Finally, one could test a hypothesis that the reindeer clock undergoes seasonal changes in its organization at the molecular level by comparing the performance of fibroblasts (and perhaps some other peripheral cells) taken out of animals at different times of year.
What’s up with this being medically relevant?
But why is all this important? Why is work on mice not sufficient and one needs to pay attention to a strange laboratory animal model like reindeer?
First, unlike rodents, reindeer is a large, mostly diurnal animal. Just like us.
Second, reindeer normally live in conditions that make people sick, yet they remain just fine, thank you. How do they do that?
Even humans who don’t live above the Arctic Circle (or in the Antarctica), tend to live in a 24-hour society with both light and social cues messing up with our internal rhythms.
We have complex circadian systems that are easy to get out of whack. We work night-shifts and rotating shifts and fly around the globe getting jet-lagged. Jet-lag is not desynchronization between the clock and the environment, it is internal desynchronization between all the cellular clocks in our bodies.
Why do we get all that and reindeer don’t? What is the trick they evolved to stay healthy in conditions that drive us insane and sick? Can we learn their trick, adopt it for our own medical practice, and use it? Those are kinds of things that a mouse and a rat cannot provide answers to, but reindeer can. I can’t think of another animal species that can do that for us. Which is why I am glad that Stokkan and friends are chasing reindeer with enormous butterfly nets across Arctic wasteland in the darkness of winter 😉
Reference:
Lu, W., Meng, Q., Tyler, N., Stokkan, K., & Loudon, A. (2010). A Circadian Clock Is Not Required in an Arctic Mammal Current Biology, 20 (6), 533-537 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.01.042
Are there any children’s books that are dear to you, either as a child or a parent, and especially ones that perhaps strike a chord with those from a science sensibility? Just curious really. And it doesn’t have to be a picture book, doesn’t even have to be a children’s book – just a book that, for whatever reason, worked for the younger mind set.
Here is my list of childhood favourites, the books that turned me on to science – a list that reflects the time and place where I grew up:
As a little kid, I have practically memorized the 1971 translation of the 1968 book The new golden treasury of natural history by Bertha Morris Parker (under the title of Riznica Prirode). This is where I learned all the names of prehistoric creatures like Dynichtys, trilobites, dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals. This is where I learned about the Solar system and about evolution. And everything else. This is the book that started it all.
At about the same time (very early childhood), I also had and read repeatedly Our Friend the Atom by Heinz Haber, where I learned the basic physics (which I, for the most part, forgot since then).
Then, I swallowed a number of translated books by Gerald Durrell and his Russian counterpart, Vera Caplina.
Later, I graduated to works by Konrad Lorenz and, at the age of 13, my first attempt at reading Darwin’s Origin Of Species.
Finally, probably the most important kids’ books I had were a trilogy by Dr.Zivko Kostic (which I see has been reissued): “Between Play and Physics”, “Between Play and Chemistry” and “Between Play and Mathematics”. Each of the books had a story – a bunch of kids (mostly boys!!!! – reflecting their origin in the 1950s and 1960s) having a club, meeting regularly and doing experiments or, even more often, using their knowledge to pull pranks on each other and the rest of the community.
But the story was restricted to just a few places scattered around the book. Most of each book was devoted to about 150 “experiments”. I have not just read each of the books many times, but I have also tried to do many of the things described within. Math was easy – paper and pencil was all one needed for most of it. Chemistry was great fun, but it was hard to come up with chemicals (probably impossible in the here and now). So, I mostly did the physics stuff, using materials easily found around the house – some string, a glass of water, a pencil, a coat-hanger and a bottle cork. That was great fun.
More importantly, each book is broken into chapters, each chapter covering a particular topic or sub-discipline. And each chapter started with a brief and fascinating history of that field. Archimedes. Mendeleyev. Newton. They were all in there, in anecdotes and coming alive on the pages of the book.
But the greatest fun was when I got to meet the author when I was about 10 years old or so. For a kid in Yugoslavia at the time, it was equivalent of you getting to meet Carl Sagan or Isaak Asimov. My idol, in flesh and blood! And not just for a few seconds at a book signing – he came to visit us for lunch and coffee at my grandparents’ summer cottage.
So I listened with awe to his stories and he answered about a zillion questions I had for him. He is still alive and my mother said she was in touch with him recently. She just bought me the three-book set of Kostic’s books. They were re-issued about three years ago and are now in EVERY school library in Serbia, as well as favourite prizes to give to good students at end-of-the-year ceremonies.
Perhaps they may be fun to translate. Or, I can do something that I wanted to do for decades now – write the fourth volume: “Between Play and Biology”.
You can read the book online here or buy the book here.
A Blog Around The Clock 