Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Everybody's over the moon about Steven Chu getting picked as Secretary of Energy. Sean at Cosmic Variance is among them:This is fantastic news. Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics for his work in laser cooling of atoms, has been nominated to be the next Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration. (Thanks to Elliot in comments.) This post is enormously important for science in general and physics in particular, as the DOE is responsible for much of the funding in physics and a lot of other R&D work. It’s also, needless to say, a crucial position for determining the country’s energy policy at a time when strong and imaginative leadership in this area is crucial. I can’t imagine a pick for the job that would make me happier. Obviously Chu is a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, which is not bad. Almost as obviously, he’s an incredibly smart and creative guy. For evidence, look no further than his group’s web page at LBL.


• Brian at Laelaps on frustration with older texts about apes (with those great old pictures of apes with canes): One of the most frustrating factors in studying early descriptions of apes is the multiple meanings of words like "baboon," "Jocko," "Pongo," "mandrill," and "Orang-Outang." Even though we now know apes are our closest living relatives, it has only been recently (within the last 250 years or so) that we have come to know very much about them. Even after they receiving scientific names and the distinct varieties were figured out, there was more myth, legend, and hearsay about them than fact until the latter half of the 20th century.


• Carl Zimmer of The Loom has written about the evolution of weird eyes (paper available in PDF or html): The history of life is an unbroken stream of evolution stretching over 3.5 billion years. In order to study it—and in order to describe it—it must be carved into episodes. If scientists want to understand the origin, say, of bats, they do not run experiments to test a hypothesis about how DNA first evolved on the early Earth. They do not do research on the transition from single-celled protozoans to the first animals 600 million years ago. Likewise, they do not get bogged down with bat evolution after bats first evolved—how, for example, bats spread around the world and how they coevolved with their prey. There is only so much time in the day. Science writers follow the same rules to describe evolution. A newspaper article on the evolution of bats must focus only on that brief episode of life’s history. Let its scope grow too large, and it will be too big for a book—or a shelf of books. This simple necessity can, unfortunately, give people the wrong impression about evolution. We tend to picture evolution as a series of isolated milestones. Once some particular trait evolves, we may assume that evolution simply stops. The history of eyes is particularly vulnerable to this illusion.


• Jennifer at Mind the Gap writes of being bested by an algorithm: In many B-movies, machines try to take over the world. And in real life, we often joke about losing our lab jobs to them. As case in point, three of my five years in graduate school were largely consumed by sequencing a few megabases of DNA. After performing the radioactive chain-termination reactions, I’d carefully clean and tape up the big glass plates, prepare the fresh polyacrylamide gel and run the samples through. When the dye ran off I’d dry down the gel and put it on film. Every day, there was also the previous evening’s film to develop and then – the worst part, as far as I was concerned – staring at this film, with its ladders of tiny horizontal black dash marks, and entering the sequences manually into the computer, running one finger upward as I went so I wouldn’t lose my place. After those three years, the G, C A and T keys on my computer were visibly faded compared to their neighbors. Today, the latest production-scale sequencers can analyze millions of base pairs of DNA in less than a day.


• Mike the Mad Biologist asks "How can we defend against bioterrorism if we can't handle the annual flu epidemic?": Let's start with the last question. What do I anticipate would happen in the event of an Avian Influenza outbreak? Lots and lots of dead people. This gets back to the previous point about needing a good public health system. Every year, roughly 36,000 people die from influenza, most of whom would live with a coherent, comprehensive vaccination program (which would also include a Streptococcus pneumoniae vaccine). We know the annual epidemic will happen and when it will happen. Yet we do nothing. Charging people $25 for a vaccine shot that gets little serious promotion, and is administered to the wrong people is not a policy, it is an utter absence of policy.

Enjoy!