Our very own Ilias Berberi just published his first popular science article about bird flight and bioinspiration — read it here. Way to go Ilias!
Tag / writing
Hipsters who hunt
An update on a previous post: my good friends Martin and Vanya are the official poster boys of a new movement.
Collecting oyster mushrooms north of Kingston. Photo by Charlie Croskery.
Read about it here, as told by Vanya’s sister-in-law, Emma Marris. It’s a great article. Charlie took the photos at the Croskery farm (more here). I helped with the shoot, including costume changes and strategic placement of my shadow to avoid lens flare. It was a lot of fun. The only problem is, hipster isn’t the right word for what these guys do. Not sure what would be.
The Owl: why kids make great science writers
I finally had a chance to watch Steven Pinker’s excellent lecture on science communication this weekend. Pinker, a psychologist, linguist and top-notch writer, argues that psychology can help us tune up our writing and become better communicators.
His first point is that cognitive psychology points to the model that we should be aiming for: prose that directs the reader’s attention to something in the world that they can then come to understand on their own.
He also discusses why this is so hard to do: The Curse of Knowledge. Once you know a lot about something, it’s hard to put yourself in the mindset of your readers – i.e., the people who don’t know anything about the thing you are trying to write about. This is because it’s hard work, cognitively, to keep track of what other people know. The classic example of this is the false belief task in psychology. If you show a child a box of Smarties (the chocolate candy), and then ask him or her what might be in the box, the child will say candy. Suppose you then reveal that the box actually contains something else – coal. Then close the box and ask the child what another person would think is inside. A 7 year old will correctly say candy, but a child younger than 4 or so will claim that others would think it contains coal. Up until about age 4, we don’t seem to grasp that other people can have false beliefs about the world. Pinker’s point is that this ability – also known as theory of mind – isn’t a cut and dried thing that we suddenly achieve at age 4. It’s a sophisticated skill that proves to be a challenge even for adults.
His advice on writing? It’s pretty standard stuff. Pinker enlists his mom – or in other words, an intelligent reader who just happens to not know a lot about his particular topic already. His other point is to take a break from your writing before you edit, to give yourself time to shift away from the mental state you were in when you wrote it. You can also read your work aloud, since that seems to engage a different mental state as well (I wonder why?). It makes me wonder whether there is anything we can do to harness this mind reboot effect more efficiently. Say you don’t have a lot of time and your mom is not available. How can you reset your brain on demand? I’m thinking of a 20 minute nap, reading some fiction, or doing some physical exercise before editing your paper – which is best? I imagine this is something that cognitive neuroscientists will be able to tell us pretty soon.
Pinker ends with some sage advice: most good writers learn by example. So find a bit of writing that you admire, and try to figure out what makes it great. His choice? The short essay called “The Owl”. It’s remarkable for its clarity and worth checking out in the video below:
If only it was that easy for the rest of us to escape the curse of knowledge.
You can watch the whole lecture by Steven Pinker here. (The Owl is at the 57 minute mark.)
Pitting science against media
Photo by Dick Daniels from Wikimedia Commons.
Odds are that the Laysan albatrosses in the photo above are a male and his female mate, but it’s worth checking their sex chromosomes to be sure. The reason? In this long-lived species, most of the adults are females, and two females often pair up to raise chicks (fertilized by other males of course). In some populations, up to a third of the nesting couples are female-female pairs1.
They’re not alone – plenty of other organisms engage in same-sex courtship, copulation and even long-term pairing. And it’s often for a good reason. Take the deep sea squid Octopoteuthis deletron. Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium recently took to the deep in submarines to study their sex lives. They observed sperm packets attached to the bodies of both male and female squid, suggesting that males inseminate every other squid they can, “indiscriminately and swiftly” – a good strategy in a dark habitat where it may be hard to tell who you’re looking at2.
The media response was predictable, calling the squid bisexual, sex-starved, same-sex swingers. Promiscuous? Maybe. Indiscriminate? Yes. But pervy? I’m not so sure.
It’s an issue that Andrew Barron and Mark Brown commented on recently in the journal Nature3. Sensationalized coverage of research, especially when it makes great leaps to compare animal behaviour to human sex, can do real damage – to science and to society as well, by dredging up tired stereotypes about sex.
That was Barron and Brown’s main point, and I certainly agree. But their article got me far more worked up than the sex-starved squid.
Dating the rainbow
The truth is beautiful in Buttermilk Creek. That was the Texas site of a recent major archaeological find. In the village of Salado, just a couple hundred metres downstream from an important cache of artifacts of the early American Clovis people, anthropologists uncovered something just a few centimetres deeper1. In geological terms, that usually means older – and the assortment of stone tools found by Mike Waters and his team might be the definitive evidence needed to overturn the longstanding “Clovis first” theory.
“Clovis first” is the idea that North America was initially populated by a group of big game hunters known for their interchangeable fluted spear tips – a portable tool that fit well with the nomadic lifestyle. I won’t get into the details (see elsewhere), but many researchers now believe that other migrant groups arrived from the north well before Clovis domination. For example, fishing tools found in California’s Channel Islands provide evidence that a seafaring clan made its way south by hopping along the coastline2.
I also won’t cover the Buttermilk Creek find (again, see elsewhere for this). But there is a poetic element to this discovery worth sharing. The proof that the Buttermilk Creek people arrived ahead of Clovis hunters comes, not from the usual radiocarbon dating methods, but from dating the rainbow.