"Seeds of Doubt"

"Hundreds of millions of people, in twenty-eight countries, eat transgenic products every day, and if any of Shiva’s assertions were true the implications would be catastrophic. But no relationship between glyphosate and the diseases that Shiva mentioned has been discovered. Her claims were based on a single research paper, released last year, in a journal called Entropy, which charges scientists to publish their findings. The paper contains no new research. Shiva had committed a common, but dangerous, fallacy: confusing a correlation with causation. (It turns out, for example, that the growth in sales of organic produce in the past decade matches the rise of autism, almost exactly. For that matter, so does the rise in sales of high-definition televisions, as well as the number of Americans who commute to work every day by bicycle.)...

For years, people have been afraid that eating genetically modified foods would make them sick, and Shiva’s speeches are filled with terrifying anecdotes that play to that fear. But since 1996, when the crops were first planted, humans have consumed trillions of servings of foods that contain genetically engineered ingredients, and have draped themselves in thousands of tons of clothing made from genetically engineered cotton, yet there has not been a single documented case of any person becoming ill as a result. That is one reason that the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Health Organization, the U.K.’s Royal Society, the French Academy of Sciences, the European Commission, and dozens of other scientific organizations have all concluded that foods derived from genetically modified crops are as safe to eat as any other food...

When Shiva writes that “Golden Rice will make the malnutrition crisis worse” and that it will kill people, she reinforces the worst fears of her largely Western audience. Much of what she says resonates with the many people who feel that profit-seeking corporations hold too much power over the food they eat. Theirs is an argument well worth making. But her statements are rarely supported by data, and her positions often seem more like those of an end-of-days mystic than like those of a scientist."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/seeds-of-doubt

This is the liberal equivalent of climate change denial - no one is stupid, we are all just highly rewarded by ideological belongingness. And we all want to save ourselves and our community members from harms.

FB: "The all-encompassing obsession with Monsanto has made rational discussion of the risks and benefits of genetically modified products difficult. Many academic scientists who don’t work for Monsanto or any other large corporation are struggling to develop crops that have added nutrients and others that will tolerate drought, floods, or salty soil—all traits needed desperately by the world’s poorest farmers. Golden Rice—enriched with vitamin A—is the best-known example. More than a hundred and ninety million children under the age of five suffer from vitamin-A deficiency. Every year, as many as half a million will go blind. Rice plants produce beta carotene, the precursor to vitamin A, in the leaves but not in the grain. To make Golden Rice, scientists insert genes in the edible part of the plant, too.

Golden Rice would never offer more than a partial solution to micronutrient deficiency, and the intellectual-property rights have long been controlled by the nonprofit International Rice Research Institute, which makes the rights available to researchers at no cost. Still, after more than a decade of opposition, the rice is prohibited everywhere."

“Live In This All-Glass Dome, For Science"

“The project is based on the research of Oxford University neuroscientist Russell Foster, who studies the way light regulates our circadian rhythms and what the regulation does to our health and productivity. Over the course of four years on an island in Denmark, the Photon Project will study 300 participants' physical reaction to living in an almost all-transparent house for short periods of up to three weeks. The Photon Pods have special architectural glazing designed to keep their glass pods from becoming hothouses, and the company claims that the glass houses are comfortable in most climates without heating or cooling. Research suggests that exposure to natural light has several health benefits. People sleep better, have a decreased risk of prostate cancer, and more.”

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3039799/live-in-this-all-glass-dome-for-science

I almost want to do this, it sounds super amazing. Like, I’ve just realized that a glass house (in a secluded location where people can’t just like stare in at me all day) is my ideal living situation.

"Why Our Memory Fails Us"

“When he was first asked for the source of Mr. Bush’s quotation, Dr. Tyson insisted, “I have explicit memory of those words being spoken by the president. I reacted on the spot, making note for possible later reference in my public discourse. Odd that nobody seems to be able to find the quote anywhere.” He then added, “One of our mantras in science is that the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.”

That is how we all usually respond when our memory is challenged. We have an abstract understanding that people can remember the same event differently… But when our own memories are challenged, we may neglect all this and instead respond emotionally, acting as though we must be right and everyone else must be wrong… Erroneous witness recollections have become so concerning that the National Academy of Sciences convened an expert panel to review the state of research on the topic. This fall the panel (which one of us, Daniel Simons, served on) released a comprehensive report that recommended procedures to minimize the chances of false memory and mistaken identification, including videotaping police lineups and improving jury instructions.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/opinion/why-our-memory-fails-us.html?src=me

Memories are so funny. I sometimes, kind of, keep a diary and it’s really strange to go back and re-read what I wrote about some important moment because there are always not just details I have forgotten but really important nuances and contexts.

I also feel like there are things I don’t even bother trying to remember anymore, because I know that I can look them up later (as a friend of mine said recently “I have so many memories of this place… and by memories, I mean facebook photos).

"CSR Announces Winners of its America COMPETES Challenges to Maximize Fairness in NIH Peer Review"

“The NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR) has revealed the winners of its two America

COMPETE Act challenges to help identify new methods to detect bias in peer review and

identify strategies to strengthen fairness and impartiality in peer review. This effort to

study the possibility of bias is part of a much larger NIH effort to respond to the study that

showed Black applicants for NIH grants do not fare as well as White applicants after

researchers controlled for various factors.”

http://public.csr.nih.gov/Documents/LearnMoreabouttheWinningIdeas.pdf

This is really cool, and the paragraph-long proposal descriptions are worth reading.

I’m not super convinced by the last one, the pledge, because I doubt that most people walk into the room intending to be biased and most probably avidly consider themselves non-racist and not requiring any kind of intervention. In my dreamland, every potential reviewer would have to take an IAT or something first in order to observe their own biases, and then be presented with some quick thought process to help them process and be aware while reviewing.

“Drones Will Be Everywhere Watching, Listening, and…Planting Millions of Trees?”

“Advanced drones are able to autonomously fly pre-programmed flight paths, and limited only by weight, their payload can be pretty much anything you like.

Recently, for example, ten media giants, including the New York Times, Associated Press, and NBC, said they would test drones for news gathering. Drones may bring big savings for news organizations who rent helicopters for $1,500 an hour or own and operate them for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And they can go where reporters would rather not… Meanwhile, a million-dollar United Arab Emirates (UAE) competition, Drones For Good, recently attracted 800 entries from all over the world with a single aim—to find practical, positive uses for drones.”

http://singularityhub.com/2015/01/27/drones-will-be-everywhere-watching-listening-and-planting-millions-of-trees/

"The Strange Inevitability of Evolution"

FB: a lovely and informative read
http://static.nautil.us/5056_2654d1a3f16bf62d0dc4f91fa3ec9377.png

"Natural selection supplies an incredibly powerful way of pruning variation into effective solutions to the challenges of the environment. But it can’t explain where all that variation came from. As the biologist Hugo de Vries wrote in 1905, “natural selection may explain the survival  of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival  of the fittest.” Over the past several years, Wagner and a handful of others have been starting to understand the origins of evolutionary innovation. Thanks to their findings so far, we can now see not only how  Darwinian evolution works but why it works: what makes it possible...These ideas suggest that evolvability and openness to innovation are features not just of life but of information itself. That is a view long championed by Schuster’s sometime collaborator, Nobel laureate chemist Manfred Eigen, who insists that Darwinian evolution is not merely the organizing principle of biology but a “law of physics,” an inevitable result of how information is organized in complex systems. And if that’s right, it would seem that the appearance of life was not a fantastic fluke but almost a mathematical inevitability."

http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution

This was a beautiful article, certainly answering a question I had not heard posed before.

I really like this, kind of what I want part of my future research to be - "the connection between phenotype and genotype retains many mysteries. Arguably it is the biggest mystery of the post-genomic era we are now entering, in which it is proving unexpectedly hard to identify where many inherited phenotypic traits are encoded in the genotype"

“Retraction Watch is growing, thanks to a $400,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation”

“The goal of the grant — $200,000 per year for two years — is to create a comprehensive and freely available database of retractions, something that doesn’t now exist, as we and others have noted. That, we wrote in our proposal, is a gap that deprives scholarly publishing of a critical mechanism for self-correction… The funding will allow us to hire a reporter, an editor, and a database developer. (Retraction Watch remains a volunteer activity for Adam and Ivan, with any honoraria and payment for writing going toward expenses, including staff salaries.)”

http://retractionwatch.com/2014/12/15/retraction-watch-growing-thanks-400000-grant-macarthur-foundation/

"Nature Podcast 22 January 2015"

"Each week Nature publishes a free audio show. It's hosted by Kerri Smith, with reporters Noah Baker, Ewen Callaway, Lizzie Gibney, Geoff Marsh and Charlotte Stoddart. Every show features highlighted content from the week's edition ofNature including interviews with the people behind the science, and in-depth commentary and analysis from journalists covering science around the world...This week, the restorative power of young blood, cosmic hard drives and improving the safety of genetically modified organisms."

http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index-2015-01-22.html

This was just a really good episode of the Nature podcast – interesting science and it was also I think better produced than usual?

"Honoring The Dead"

"Annalee Newitz comes to terms with grief while exploring the remains of a mysterious ancient city."

http://storycollider.org/podcast/2014-12-10

I really enjoyed listening to this story, and the point at the end about how protecting our own realities onto mysteries prevents us from discovering the truth. 
I also am really intrigued by this city, and wishing that I had taken some classes on ancient civilizations. The ways we have tried out living, all the different possible ways to be human that we don't know about but that happened for millenia.

"Protein Project Could Help Expose Cancer’s Causes"

"It’s pretty hard to look under the hood of a cell,” says Frederick Roth, a biophysicist at the University of Toronto. To jump-start progress, scientists like Roth have been chipping away for years at the human interactome—a complete map of every protein interaction in humans. Last week Roth and his team published a paper in the journal Cell detailing one of the most comprehensive protein maps to date. It covers 14,000 interactions between protein pairs and may help scientists identify some of the genes involved in cancer."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/protein-project-could-help-expose-cancer-s-causes/

"We exhale lost fat. There it helps plants photosynthesize (if you're feeling noble) and contributes to global warming (if you're feeling guilty).

Exhale more CO_2, and you'll lose more weight — especially if you're exhaling more frequently because you're running."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/12/16/371210831/when-you-burn-off-that-fat-where-does-it-go

This is being reported as "Breathing more will help you lose weight!", so watch out for that. This is what was ACTUALLY found, and it's just kind of interesting.

"Climate change could affect the ratio of human males to human females that are born in some countries, a new study from Japan suggests. The researchers found that male fetuses may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change."

http://www.livescience.com/48070-male-fetus-climate-change.html

Related to: “Are Men the Weaker Sex?” (shitty title but interesting content)

"Why Saying Is Believing — The Science Of Self-Talk"

"It's clear that we all have an internal representation of our own bodies, Coslett says. We need that very specific sense of ourselves to understand how much space we take up — so we can walk and not bump into things, or perform simple tasks, like reaching out a hand and picking up a coffee cup. Studies show that this internal sense of oneself is a powerful thing. Research on what neurologists call motor imagery indicates that the same neurological networks are used both to imagine movement, and to actually move"

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/07/353292408/why-saying-is-believing-the-science-of-self-talk

This is useful - talking to yourself in the third person. Try it!

"New Insight on a Famous Study"

"Now an analysis of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram’s widely known 1963 “obedience” experiments—inspired in part by the 1961 Eichmann atrocities trial in Jerusalem—refutes assumptions made about the participants in Milgram’s experiments: Rather than mindlessly following brutal orders to inflict pain on others, many were often proud and felt privileged to have contributed to his scientific research. They were not passive conformists blindly following malevolent orders, but rather “engaged followers” who identified with the noble goals of Milgram’s research."

http://theamericanscholar.org/new-insight-on-a-famous-study/

I alps wonder if they did analysis on what kinds of personalities had different experiences with the experiment. I would love to see an experiment of how a person can create that sense of worth, in order to overcome skepticism about behavior.

"California’s 'Hot Drought' Ranks Worst in at Least 1,200 Years"

“Just how bad has California’s drought been? Modern measurements already showed it’s been drier than the 1930s dustbowl, worse than the historic droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. That's not all. New research going back further than the Viking conquests in Europe still can't find a drought as bad as this one.

To go back that far, scientists consulted one of the longest records available: tree rings. Tighter rings mean drier years, and by working with California’s exceptionally old trees, researchers from University of Minnesota and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute were able to reconstruct a chronology of drought in southern and central California. They identified 37 droughts that lasted three years or more, going back to the year 800.

None were as extreme as the conditions we’re seeing now.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-05/california-s-drought-ranks-worst-in-at-least-1-200-years.html

"Blown-up brains reveal nanoscale details"

“The technique, called expansion microscopy, involves physically inflating biological tissues using a material more commonly found in baby nappies (diapers)… Boyden and many other neuroscientists would like to glean molecular details such as the location of proteins at neural synapses — the junctions at which two neurons communicate — within a group of neurons or even across an entire brain. "What we’ve been trying to do is figure out if we can make everything bigger," Boyden told the meeting at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. To manage this, his team used a chemical called acrylate that has two useful properties: it can form a dense mesh that holds proteins in place, and it swells in the presence of water. Acrylate, a type of salt also known as waterlock, is the substance that gives nappies their sponginess. When inflated, Boyden's tissues grow about 4.5 times in each dimension.”

http://www.nature.com/news/blown-up-brains-reveal-nanoscale-details-1.16667?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews

I love that – “we wanted to make everything bigger” – that makes me so happy

"A Science and Technology Challenge for Congress | Commentary"

“When the 114th Congress convenes, it will find it has lost something of significance: much of its institutional memory about science and technology. And with the rest of the world making a strong play to topple America from its perch atop the innovation pyramid, that’s very troubling.”

http://www.rollcall.com/news/a_science_and_technology_challenge_for_congress_commentary-239014-1.html?pg=1&dczone=opinion

Briefly describes the problem, and the specific representatives who have carried S+T knowledge over the years. More STEM politicians please!

I like this summary of the system – “Jobs had the ability to foresee what consumers would want even before they knew they wanted it. And the federal research agencies had the ability to fund research even before American corporations knew they needed it.”

Also, there is an interesting suggestion for a ‘research bank’.

(credit to MA)

"The Pope's Views on Evolution Haven't Really Evolved"

"the media perpetuating the faith-versus-science binary is tiresome, ignorant, and takes away from the issues the Church is facing that perhaps do call for revisiting, like marriage, the role of women in the Church, and its finances among others. The Catholic Church made its decision a long time ago: Science is not incompatible with faith. The world is just finally paying attention."

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/pope-francis-evolution/382143/

"The genes that turned wildcats into kitty cats"

"The researchers uncovered at least 13 genes that changed as cats morphed from feral to friendly. Some of these, based on previous studies of knockout mice, seem to play a role in cognition and behavior, including fear responses and the ability to learn new behaviors when given food rewards. “That jibes with what we know about the domestication of cats,” Montague says, “because they would have needed to become less fearful of new locations and individuals, and the promise of food would have kept them sticking around.”

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/11/genes-turned-wildcats-kitty-cats

"The Red Juice in Raw Red Meat Isn't Blood"

"The level of myoglobin in meat is what ultimately dictates whether it will be "red," "dark," or "white." The muscles in red meat are used for standing, walking, and other frequent activity, and they're made up of slow-twitch muscle fibers. Red meats' high levels of myoglobin make it red or dark in color.

White meat, on the other hand, is made up of fast-twitch muscle fibers and is comprised of muscles used for quick bursts of activity only. They get energy from glycogen and contain little myoglobin."
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/10/25/myoglobin-red-meat.aspx

Huh. Things I never knew.