The Art of Science Journalism

Science journalism is notoriously difficult. Not only must writers grapple with complicated topics, but they must also communicate them in a concise (preferably entertaining) manner for a general audience. That's a tall order. But rising to meet this challenge are the science bloggers, many of whom are scientists themselves. These writers, perhaps more so than traditional journalists, have helped impart science's joys, wonders, and lessons. At RealClearScience our primary mission is to aggregate the best science writing the Internet has to offer. Since our launch in October 2010, we have read literally thousands of articles from hundreds of writers. But there are a handful of bloggers who stand out from the rest. This elite handful of informative, unique bloggers gathered together on RealClearScience.com is in their opinion, 

For more read the article.

The Open Principle of Contributing to Wikipedia

Reprinted from MyScienceWorks.com


There are a number of common points and some potentially instructive differences between the open principles of Wikipedia contribution and those ruling research. Both sides were presented by Adrienne Alix, until recently director of programs for Wikimedia France, at the launch of WikiCristallo. This French project, co-organized by the association Amcsti, aims to bring more of one particular area of science—crystallography— to the largest encyclopedia ever known, as well as a Wiki sense of collaboration to the diffusion of science.

 

Seeking Credibility

Fundamental to both activities is, of course, citing one’s sources. In a Wikipedia article, though, which could be written by tens, hundreds or even thousands of people, the reader doesn’t care who authored which bit; he or she is looking for credible information. Wiki depends even more heavily on the sources cited than does a scientific article, since, in research, some of that sought-after credibility is carried by the identity of the author. The role of the expert is, in fact, profoundly different between the two worlds. In the realm of Wikipedia contribution, authors are judged on their actions, not at all on the titles they may hold. “Who you are isn’t really important,” Adrienne Alix explains. “That can be troubling for people.”

 

Open and Collaborative Process, Better Product

Troubling, maybe, but mightn’t it be a good idea for science to bow a little less to prestige? We’ve already seen the research an untitled, 15-year-old can do when given the chance. So, what else can science and scientists borrow from the realm of a community-born and -managed wealth of information? Above all, the efficacy of a collaborative exchange of knowledge.

Before Wikipedia was born in 2001, there was Nupedia. Experts submitted articles to this encyclopedia, also founded by Jimmy Wales, which were read and validated by their peers, but the whole process moved slowly. With the arrival of wiki software, several people could contribute easily to the same page, without any particular technical skills. It started taking off, spreading knowledge beyond the English-speaking world as users created pages in their own language. Wikipedia emerged not so much in the spirit of openness, initially, but because the system worked so much better than the traditional method of expert validation, Adrienne Alix says. The bet was that if the process were opened to all, the quality would improve—a wager that Wikipedia’s founders took to the open knowledge bank.

The Wikimedia family has proven the value of other open knowledge models, some of which can be adapted for and adopted by the research community. Indeed, Wikimedia Commons is a centralized repository of over 20,000,000 illustrations and multimedia files under open license that already takes a scientific approach to its cataloguing. In 2010 the Muséum de Toulouse, a French natural history museum, launched the Phoebus program, calling on volunteers to photograph and upload images of its collections. With full descriptions, in English and in French, the result is, essentially, an open, digital database of the museum’s collection. Wikimedia reports (in French) that, “every month, on average, over 3 million pages containing images from the project are visited on more than 260 linguistic versions of Wikipedia.” Talk about visibility. 

Wikipedia’s bookish cousin, Wikisource, is a library of public domain and Creative Commons works – the parallel of an open access archive of scientific publications. Here, the community collaborates to correct errors generated by the text recognition software used to scan the works. Adrienne Alix explained that the francophone Wikisource is used a great deal by schools in Africa, for example, where classes usually have to rely on photocopies of photocopies of books. “It’s pretty fantastic for them. All of the French literature is available, they can just print it out.” That testimonial has a familiar ring to it, to anyone aware of the arguments for opening up access to scientific results.

 

Share Where Your Audience Is and Take the Best of Both

Given the similarities between the goals of researchers and contributors to collaborative projects, it could make sense for anyone communicating science to take a step closer to Wikipedia. Part of the motivation, in the spirit of popularization, Adrienne Alix says, would quite simply be to share knowledge where the audience is: Wikipedia is the number one site for science and culture in the world, and we’ve all noticed that Wiki sites always appear among the first search results. Another goal of Wikimedia groups is to build bridges with science institutions, by way of projects like WikiCristallo working to enrich French-language crystallography content and introduce new Wikipedians to the tools and the stakes of sharing science, or via contribution workshops for researchers. Adrienne Alix sees it as “a public service approach, adapted to current practices. We have a choice: leave a barrier between institutional communications and projects like Wikimedia’s, or try to take the best of both.”

Battle Mental Illness Or Embrace the Crazy?

When Mariel Hemingway titled a Sundance favorite  "Running From Crazy" one suspected it was about the actresses' eclectic clan's goings-on and her insistence on avoiding their darker side  - read suicide. You either thought, interesting  film name or a celebrity  rejecting a treatable health issue. 

Playing Devil's Advocate, instead of running from it or unleashing the medical establishment to cure it, perhaps embrace  or welcome momentary melancholy, applaud mania, put personality disorder on a pedestal.  I often wonder if the American fascination with constant happiness is unhealthy and that exploring the Mad Pride Movement is more in tune with the rest of the world that lets life be and doesn't seek to treat every blessed thing.

This New Year, millions of people will make a pledge to improve their health through diet and exercise. Yet before making this promise, one should know that it is not just a battle against motivation. It has become common knowledge that people harbor millions of toxic chemicals within their bodies, and recent studies, including a 2011 investigation on Bisphenol A, demonstrate a direct correlation between toxicity levels, weight gain, lack of weight los

Doctor 2.0 - - Training the Next Generation of Multicultural Docs

Sipping an orange juice and chatting with students at a large wooden table strewn with breakfast food and a book or two, Dr. Holden's peace and five minute break from lecturing, was shattered by a middle-aged lady, poking her head through the doorway, asking questions, seeking the doctor's help.



 It's May 2011 and like years past, most Saturday mornings this Spring, Dr. Holden will supplement grueling 14-hour days as an ER doc at Bronx's Montefiore Hospital, with 8:30 AM Saturday morning starts in front of some (50) fresh-faced college students all looking to ace the MCAT. The latter is the medical school's wickedly long and fairly brutal - some say -  standardized test. In (12) weeks these kids need to learn how to read physical and biological passages as well as navigate a healthy dose of verbal reading and score high enough to beat an army of competition. All want spots in the nation's medical and osteopathic schools where there are often 15 students competing for every one seat.

Dr. Holden's saturday morning test prep may get them there. The program is rigorously developed with a brisk pace guided by Princeton Review materials and highly skilled tutors. The whole thing is free to students who submit applications and essays for a chance at the gratis support. But while the drilling and tutoring should help them score higher, a subtle message to the kids that day -  as well as the middle-aged professional still hanging out and looking to Holden's advice - everyone has a shot, everyone can make it but you'll need to work harder than hard and use her to get a mentor.

Lynne Holden M.D. knows a thing or two about mentoring having been mentored herself as a grade school kid in Philly. Through high school, Howard University undergrad, Temple University Medical School and Chief Resident at Albert Einstein Hospital she learned from and leaned on her mentors. And just as she left the classroom to go full force in her professional career. She did a remarkable thing, made a u-turn and came back, starting a non-profit, http:\\medicalmentor.org along with two other doctors and an educator.


Dr Holden at a Mentoring in Medicine event at MS 391.


The group developed Mentoring in Medicine to focus on providing kids and adults from some of New York and Oakland's poorer and older neighbors a mentor, be it African-American, of European descent, Asian, Caribbean, Latino or Native American, any physician or health professional willing to lend an hear and a hand up to students whose ethnic backgrounds, country of origin, language and complexion are under-represented in medicine. The hope is that an "I can do it too" mind set trumps feelings of disconnectedness and resignment that medicine isn't for minorities.

Lynn Holden, MD

Quoted on CNN Human Factor Blog  Holden said .... that the nonprofit organization uses academic enrichment, leadership development, community service and mentoring to create a strategic plan for successful attainment of their dream."  Mentoring in Medicine not only has the test prep but Ambassadors in Medicine to promote health in the community and regular events for kids as young as eight years old to introduce them to the world of medicine.

Holden's and company's rather simple idea - each one reach back and teach one - has become a media darling of sorts. Within the last year and half the doctor's been lauded by everyone from Oprah to CNN to a national women's medical group.  You can read more about Mentoring in Medicine here.


"I am a strong believer in the power of visualization! It was the pastor and scholar William Arthur Ward who stated, 'If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it,'" said Holden.

Winning the Algebra Dash and the Trig Triatholon

If you don't know a horizontal asymptote from a partial-fraction decomposition, you may want to ask a teenager.
On Wednesday at the University of Montana, more than 1,000 math whizzes from western Montana spent most of their school day racking their left brains at the Montana Council of Teachers of Mathematics math contest, getting grilled on geometry, probability, algebra, trigonometry and calculus.

In the morning, the students .....

Jersey Stars

No this post isn't introducing a new ARENA football team.

It's an update on a scholastic program based in New Jersey for junior high school students. Dubbed "The Stars Challenge" the program was created and developed by a couple with two PhD's between them. Margaret Ann and Stephen G. Chappell of Rumson, started the challenge to encourage middle school students to develop their passion and curiosity for science-related stuff.
 In classes held at Monmouth University, students tackle real-world problems and work in small groups to create innovative solutions. Over the past five years, The Stars Challenge has taught 41 courses and served more than 600 middle school scholars. Most recently, during the Fall 2010 semester students were encouraged to work with gifted peers also are interested in science, in classes designed and taught by top notch teachers.



According to an article APP.com, there is a course named "Creativity and Experimental Design" was taught by Michael T. Roche, a research and biology teacher at High Technology High School in Lincroft, NJ.  The seventh graders who participated in Mr. Roches class hailed from Cedar Drive School in Colts Neck, Holy Cross School in Rumson, Hope Academy in Asbury Park, Howell Middle School South, Knollwood School in Fair Haven, Long Branch Middle School, Markham Place School in Little Silver, Ocean Intermediate School, Red Bank Charter School, Satz School in Holmdel, and Wall Intermediate School.



In Creativity and Experimental Design, students were challenged to formulate questions and devise answers via measuring devices, data logging hardware, and software in a playful yet professional setting. Via a non-public wiki, students could communicate with instructors, teaching assistants, and members of the High Technology High Schools Experimental Research Group.

Read more.

What a Drag: The Physics of Ski Jumping

Ahh, it's that time of year. I look at my two pairs of skiis, and every week-end until March, I contemplate whether or not to go to Camelback.

Then it's summer.

Maybe 2010 is the year. In any event I love watching skiing on NBC's Universal Sports channel, the skill and courage of ski jumpers in particular. Have you every wondered about the physics of that sport? I have and did a search to see if I could learn more.  Excerpted below is an article from National Geographic Kids on ski jumping and fighting the drag coefficient as an athlete takes off.

WHAT A DRAG!


Adam Malysz (MAH lish) wants an Olympic medal. He just might get one. The Polish ski jumper won five world contests recently. Experts think he may take the gold medal in Salt Lake City. To do so, he has to leap into some serious aerodynamics. Here's what Malysz will do. He'll take his place at the top of a giant, snow-covered slide. Before his turn to go, Malysz will coat the bottom of his skis with wax. The wax lessens the friction, or rubbing, between ski and snow. Reducing friction helps ski jumpers go faster.

When the time comes, Malysz will head downhill. Physical forces will both help and hinder him. Gravity will pull him toward the bottom of the slide, helping him move faster. But drag will slow him down. To fight drag, Malysz will crouch down. He'll bend low at the knees and waist, and he'll place his arms behind him.

This position will make Malysz's body seem smaller. That means he won't have to push as much air out of his way. Less drag means more speed. Malysz may go more than 60 miles an hour!

Read more.

Sex Cells and Socks

There are science bloggers and then there's Ed Young, a Brit who enjoys breaking it down, from the life sciences to bytes of information technology. Here's a re-print nicely written on what it means when a liver cell - as opposed to human sex cells - have an extra chromosome. When the former has more than necessary it's a Down syndrome scenario. Thankfully not so with the liver.

Young's opener? Quaint for the science-challenged comparing chromosomes to socks.

REPRINT FROM THE NOT EXACTLY ROCKET SCIENCE BLOG, Ed Young

Our chromosomes are like socks: you want to have a pair of them, nothing more and nothing less. We have 23 pairs of chromosomes per cell, and there are great costs to exceeding this ideal number. Having odd numbers of certain chromosomes leads to genetic disorders like Down syndrome, while babies with three of every chromosome – triploids – tend to be lost to miscarriage or die within months. But having extra chromosomes isn’t always bad. In our liver, it’s positively encouraged.

Cells with extra chromosomes are known as polyploids and they’re a common feature in all mammalian livers. Some have four copies of each chromosome; others have eight, even sixteen. Now, Andrew Duncan from the Oregon Health and Science University has found that liver cells can cycle through chromosome numbers with surprising ease, frequently increasing and reducing their counts.

This unique ability could explain why the liver is so good at re-growing itself in the face of injury (the entire organ can regenerate from just a quarter of its mass). By producing a mix of cells with different sets of chromosomes, the liver is a hotbed for genetic diversity. When it’s injured, the most resistant cells from the pool can start things anew.

Duncan injected mice with special liver cells that each carried eight full sets of chromosomes. These “octoploid” cells were engineered to produce a bright glow in the presence of certain chemicals. By tracking their shimmers, Duncan could spot the transplanted cells and any of their daughters.  He found that that these glows came from cells with eight sets of chromosomes, but also those with four or even two. Some of the daughters of the transplanted cells had clearly jettisoned some of their parents’ chromosomes.
To work out how, Duncan looked at how these cells divided under the microscope. As I’ve written about before, for such an ordinary process, cell division is an astonishingly beautiful dance:

It begins with cells creating the right number of partners, by duplicating all of their chromosomes. At first, the dancers haphazardly mingle with each other but as things get underway, they separate and line up in a neat row. Then, dramatically, they shimmy across to opposite ends of the room, following long spindles of protein. Once the partners split up, the cell pinches down its middle and separates them forevermore. Without this courtly dance, you would never have been anything more than a fertilised egg. Life simply wouldn’t work.

For one cell to split into two, it needs two sets of spindles, coming from two separate poles. But when Duncan looked at liver cells, he found that they would often have three or four sets of spindles. Some cells even had eight. It’s cellular chaos but somehow it works – a cell with many sets of chromosomes produces daughters with fewer sets. Duncan calculated that around 4 in every 100 divisions produced at least three or four daughter cells, each with different numbers of chromosomes.
This degree of chromosomal instability has been linked to cancer in the past. The fact that it’s so pervasive in the liver is very surprising, especially since liver cancer is very rare in mice. For now, it’s a mystery, but one that Duncan is keen to solve. His next step is to try and find other similar cases in both mice and humans, across a variety of different tissues.

Neurons Raise Your Hands in The Air ... Say Holla' Back Y'all

PR folks at the University of California, Berkeley sent out a press release on neuronal firing patterns and not too many of us in the blogosphere picked it up.

Maybe it's too elementary but I found the work interesting. Researchers there say neurons have to fire in sych and in rhythm, specifically, cortical rhythms, or oscillations. The latter 'rallies' groups of neurons in widely dispersed areas of the brain to engage in coordinated activity the way a conductor uses her baton to direct the many sections of a symphony orchestra.

They say the act of catching a ball necessitates the coordination of multiple groups of neurons to perceive the object, judge its speed and trajectory, decide when it's time to catch it and then direct the muscles in the body to grasp it before it whizzes by or drops to the ground.

I had thought that was well known but U. Cal says no, neuroscientists had not fully understood how neuron groups in widely dispersed regions of the brain first get linked together to be able to stage the concert , or act, of doing something.

The UC Berkeley findings are to be published the week of Sept. 20 in the online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more.

A Rose by Any Another Name ....

I've run for years and successfully convinced myself that I need sugar (candy bar, donut, brownie) for fuel. Now too many years past 30, it's caught up with me. I've anecdotally linked my sugar fetish to a number of minor health issues and like many have drawn a line on what and how much sugar I will eat. For example I put down any item in a store if it has the dreaded "high fructose corn syrup" on the label.

So I don't think many of us were too surprised when the Corn Refiners Association, the lobbying group and manufacturing association that represents makers of high-fructose corn syrup - - noting sales are at a 20 year low -- decided to fight back in an extraordinary way. If consumers like myself put back say ketchup if the item has HFCS then, don't list it. Fraud? No not really. Earlier this week the AP reported that the association has petitioned the FDA for permission to identify high-fructose corn syrup on food packaging as corn sugar.
 
One could say this is brilliant - - Business Insider says the re-branding is shear genius - - or that the corporate morals of the nation's major bankers have wafted over to the farmers and the food manufacturers. Never mind obese American kids, the billion dollar diet industry and a broken health care system over-burdened with chronic victims of diabetes, high blood pressure and coronary heart disease. The bottom line for a tiny minority is all that matters.

For anyone interested in the science, high fructose corn syrup is a blend of glucose and fructose. But for anyone who took a biology or O-chem course, you know sucrose "the good sugar" is also glucose and fructose. The thing is, in the latter. the mix is 50-50. Not so for HFCS ... it's usually 58-42 with additional additives.

Studies indicate the body metabolizes HFCS differently from table sugar in a way that increases the risk of diabetes, liver disease, and obesity. In an article on sixwise.com it was revealed that researchers from the University of California, Davis compared glucose and fructose consumption among 32 overweight or obese people and found they resulted in very different health changes.Read more. 



To read more about the debate and the bigger issue of agribusiness, and corn farm subsidies go to Care2's website and read a few articles then take their  High Fructose Corn Syrup Challenge.