PLoS founders Brown, Eisen, and Varmus. CREDIT: MARTY KATZ/WASHINGTONPHOTOGRAPHER.COM
From Jocelyn Kaiser in Science:
A decade ago, three U.S. biomedical scientists vowed to start a revolution in science publishing. They wanted to persuade publishers to share research papers normally available only to paying customers in a free online library. The trio threw their weight behind a radical idea: charge authors a fee, give them copyright, and post their peer-reviewed papers on the Internet immediately for anyone to read.
The scientists called their venture the Public Library of Science (PLoS), echoing a frustration among librarians over the escalating cost of journals. They argued that taxpayers shouldn’t have to buy subscriptions to see the results of research they had already paid for. Making the world’s research papers freely available would “vastly increase the accessibility and utility of the scientific literature, enhance scientific productivity,” and bring together disparate communities in biomedicine, wrote PLoS’s founders, including Harold Varmus, the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who now heads the National Cancer Institute.
Today, the so-called open-access movement is claiming success. Publishers big and small are producing hundreds of free-to-read, peer-reviewed online journals that charge authors fees ranging from about $500 to $3000 per paper. (By various measures, between 7% and 11% of the world’s peer-reviewed scientific journals are now open access.) The most prominent publisher, the nonprofit organization PLoS, launched its first journal in 2003. This year, PLoS is on track to make a small profit—a “landmark for PLoS, but also for open-access publishing as a whole,” testified Catherine Nancarrow, a managing editor of PLoS, at a U.S. congressional hearing last month.
For more… (subscription required)
From Vlatko Verdal, Five Books
The quantum information theory professor says there is nothing distinctly novel that was brought to philosophy by quantum mechanics. The key tenet is this randomness that is at the core of our interaction with the world: there is an element that you can never make more deterministic. And, of course, randomness as a way of looking at the world has existed for a long time. He chooses books on quantifying the universe.
Your first book is Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality? by Alastair Rae. This is a completely popular book about quantum physics: there is not a single equation in there, I think. What he does is to go through all the major ways in which we try to understand quantum physics, all the major interpretations. It’s extremely good in that he writes in a very objective way and it’s very difficult to tell which one he supports. It’s very passionately argued as well, and it’s a beautiful exposition, very philosophical. I think it’s the best, probably my favourite, popular account of all the things we argue about on the fundamental side of quantum physics.
To Read More…
As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of Science in Society all submissions are sent for peer refereeing, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.
In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have reviewed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.
If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of Science in Society, please email journals@science-society.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.
We are accepting book proposals for the imprint Science in Society.
Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.
Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.
If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.
From Lucas Laursen, Science
Climbing one of the world’s biggest granite walls is different from climbing trees, as National Park Service botanist Martin Hutten discovered while dangling from a cliff in the spray of Vernal Falls high above the Yosemite Valley. Hutten apprenticed in the logging industry before he started graduate school, so he new how to climb trees. “I could trust myself to a rope,” he recalls, “but I’d definitely never hung off a cliff or collected [samples] from a cliff.”
So when Hutten — who is seeking a Ph.D. in forest ecology at Oregon State University, Corvallis — and his fellow park rangers needed help surveying the park’s lichen, they enlisted experienced rock climbers. Over 2 weeks in 2007 and 2008, those volunteer climbers helped collect 394 lichen specimens. This year, the researchers are asking volunteers to help with other parts of their biodiversity survey, such as counting birds from the valley floor.
Hutten’s project is one of many worldwide in which volunteers help scientists collect data in ways that range from mundane to vital. Such help, although voluntary, is not free. Recruiting volunteers, finding appropriate ways for them to contribute, training them, keeping them motivated, and ensuring the quality of the data they collect requires time, money, and management expertise.
To Read More…
Want to get your publications underway now?
We are now accepting submissions for the next volume of The International Journal of Science in Society. The next submission deadline is Monday 16 August 2010.
Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.
Paper submission guidelines are available online.
Congratulations to David Wood and Laura Stocker the winners of the International Award for Excellence in the area of science in society with their paper Coastal Adaptation to Climate Change: Towards Reflexive Governance.
Abstract: We describe an action-research methodology designed to generate a model for reflexive coastal zone governance in Australia that is collaborative, capable of responding to new information, capable of higher order learning, adaptive, anticipatory, and able to innovate trials. In Australia, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has been responsible for interpreting and generating science about climate change impacts and the coastal zone, with a view to enabling coastal adaptation. However, while some progress has been made, our policy-makers, planners and stakeholders have been slow to develop and implement effective strategies for the coastal zone. In order to investigate the implementation gaps between science, policy and practice, the CSIRO commissioned an Australia-wide project, an aspect of which we frame in this paper. First, we examine the broad biophysical and socio-cultural context for coastal governance in Australia, then proceed to frame a novel methodology designed to enhance the knowledge-policy dialogue about coastal adaptation to climate change in Australia’s Southwest. Our action-research methodology derives from the Dutch transition management approach. It features: deliberative workshops using Google Earth as a stakeholder engagement platform; visualisation exercises using Google Earth; the development of scenarios for trials in coastal governance; and the prioritisation of these by the stakeholder groups.
From Colin Macilwain, Nature News
Spending on science is one of the best ways to generate jobs and economic growth, say research advocates. But as Colin Macilwain reports, the evidence behind such claims is patchy.
President Barack Obama says it. Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), says it. University and research leaders elsewhere are saying it, too. The number one current rationale for extra research investment is that it will generate badly needed economic growth.
“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” said Obama, addressing the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC last year. Getting down to the details, Collins has recently cited a report by Families USA, a Washington DC-based health-advocacy group, which found that every US$1 spent by the NIH typically generates $2.21 in additional economic output within 12 months.
“Biomedical research has generally been looked at for its health benefits, but the case for it generating economic growth is pretty compelling,” says Collins. In Britain, senior scientists have called on the government to support science as a means of helping the economy out of recession. Heeding such arguments, governments in Germany, Sweden, Canada and Australia, as well as the United States, have increased research spending as part of stimulus packages designed to aid their struggling economies.
To Read More…
From Stefany Anne Golberg, The Smart Set
The final episode of The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey begins not in the sea but in the sky. Sideways, we soar though the clouds, glimpsing a solitary island below, far into the Pacific. As always, we hold our breath in anticipation. A couple of years before “Clipperton: The Island Time Forgot” first aired, Jacques Cousteau gave his son and trusty costar Philippe a PBY seaplane named Flying Calypso, after Cousteau’s famous boat, Calypso. It was a fatherly gesture to a son who lived in his father’s shadow. The plane was meant to distinguish Philippe, whose true love was flight.
Eventually, we land. A menacing army of poisonous crabs mans the shoreline. The camera pans to a couple of rusted shipwrecks and some abandoned shacks, which are now perches for some booby birds. “Human beings have come and gone, leaving mute evidence of their troubled presence,” the narrator intones. This is what the remote island has to offer: some intimidating crabs, a flock of booby birds, the wreckage of failed attempts at civilization. In the final episode of The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey, the story of man and the story of nature will intertwine; melancholy, futile, but beautiful all the same.
Then, music! That triumphant theme song that trumpets, WE ARE ALL GOING ON AN ADVENTURE AND IT’S GOING TO RULE! Dah dah dah dah daaah! That music represents everything the whole world loves about Jacques Cousteau. It’s what we will blast on June 10, when we all grab a bottle of champagne and toast Jacques Cousteau on what would have been his 100th birthday.
To Read More…
From Edward A. Wasserman and Mark S. Blumberg, American Scientist
The basic argument of intelligent design was famously set forth in the watchmaker analogy of William Paley in 1802: The complexity and functionality of a watch imply a watchmaker; analogously, the complexity and functionality of living things also imply a designer, albeit one vastly more potent than a mere watchmaker. This argument rests on a simple analogy between the design of human artifacts and the design of natural forms. For the analogy to work, we must first accept that we design our inventions with purpose and foresight. On this point, most evolutionists and creationists agree. What distinguishes these two camps is that, when accounting for the origin of living things, proponents of intelligent design summon a divine creator, whereas evolutionists credit natural selection. Thus, evolutionists share with creationists the same understanding of design; they differ only in how they invoke it.
To Read More…
From John Tierny, The New York Times
The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard.
This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments at universities, participants would be given before-and-after “attitudinal surveys” and would take part in “interactive discussions or other activities that increase the awareness of the existence of gender bias.”
I’m all in favor of women fulfilling their potential in science, but I feel compelled, at the risk of being shipped off to one of these workshops, to ask a couple of questions:
To Read More…
From John Horgan, Scientific American
Scientists are on the verge of building an artificial brain! How do I know? Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute said so right here on ScientificAmerican.com. He wrote that the goal of reverse-engineering the brain—which the National Academy of Engineering recently posed as one of its “grand challenges”—is “becoming increasingly plausible.” Scientists are learning more and more about the brain, and computers are becoming more and more powerful. So naturally computers will soon be able to mimic the brain’s workings. So says Sejnowski.
Sejnowski is a very smart guy, whom I’ve interviewed several times over the years about the mysteries of the brain. But I respectfully—hell, disrespectfully, Terry can take it—disagree with his prediction that artificial brains are imminent. Sejnowski’s own article shows how implausible his prediction is. He describes two projects—both software programs running on powerful supercomputers—that represent the state of the art in brain simulation. On the one hand, you have the “cat brain” constructed by IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha; his simulation contains about as many neurons as a cat’s brain does organized into roughly the same architecture. On the other hand, you have the Blue Brain Project of Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
To Read More….
Image from Popular Science
From Jordan Manalatas, Daily Bruin
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, what then are we to make of Dr. Craig Venter’s recent stab at God? La Jolla’s own mad scientist and crew might just give the Big Guy a run for his money, raising all sorts of moral crises, ethical dilemmas and plumbings of faith.
Team Venter shook the scientific world last week with its announcement of the first successfully synthesized self-replicating bacterium. The bacterium in question – a chimeric copy of Mycoplasma mycoides, genomically synthesized and injected into a recipient cell – has a new nickname (Synthia) and an even louder reputation (the first synthetic life form).
Like Mary Shelley’s pithy Prometheus, our Dr. Venterstein has done what was once the sole domain of the gods – that is, creating new life. A product of synthetic genomic engineering, Synthia is perhaps the first creature since Jesus to lack proper earthly parents.
The DNA she bears was not written by God or nature, but by our Craig and his cronies at the J. Craig Venter Institute, on a computer. Somewhere in her genome lie some James Joyce quotes and an e-mail address, coded in the language of life itself.
To Read More…
From Victoria Gill, BBC News
Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA.
The researchers constructed a bacterium’s “genetic software” and transplanted it into a host cell.
The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species “dictated” by the synthetic DNA.
The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms.
Some also suggest that the potential benefits of the technology have been over-stated.
But the researchers hope eventually to design bacterial cells that will produce medicines and fuels and even absorb greenhouse gases.
The team was led by Dr Craig Venter of the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Maryland and California.
To Read More…
From Siri Carpenter, Science
What makes it possible for people to love, hate, help, or betray one another? How do we decode facial expressions? How do we understand and regulate our own emotional experiences? How do we separate the self from the other, make moral judgments, or decide how much money to save for retirement? What causes some people to turn to religious extremism, heroin, or politics? How does the brain fail those with social deficits such as autism?
Questions like these sit at the junction of our social, emotional, and biological realities, and they drive the young but rapidly growing field of social neuroscience.
Until a few years ago, the idea that science could elucidate the neural foundations of social phenomena as complex as love, friendship, and trust “just basically seemed ludicrous,” says Janine Simmons, chief of the National Institute of Mental Health’s (NIMH’s) program for affect, social behavior, and social cognition. Such “big questions” motivate many scientists to study neuroscience or psychology, she says — but soon they realize that the ability to address such questions is limited by technology. “It’s just recently that people have not been laughed at for taking on these more complex questions,” she says.
To Read More…
From John Tierney, The New York Times
Long before “sustainable” became a buzzword, intellectuals wondered how long industrial society could survive. In “The Idea of Decline in Western History,” after surveying predictions from the mid-19th century until today, the historian Arthur Herman identifies two consistently dominant schools of thought.
The first school despairs because it foresees inevitable ruin. The second school is hopeful — but only because these intellectuals foresee ruin, too, and can hardly wait for the decadent modern world to be replaced by one more to their liking. Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. Have you read Julian Simon’s “The State of Humanity”? Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World”? Gregg Easterbrook’s “Sonic Boom”?
To Read More…
From Terry Newell, The Huffington Post
The difficulty during last year’s Copenhagen Climate Summit in reaching agreement on how to address global warming reflects the contentious political environment on even scientific issues. While worrisome to many, there is an even more troubling lack of agreement right here in America on the core scientific question: is global warming real? While 72% of Americans still think global warming is taking place (Washington Post-ABC News Poll, November 2009), that’s down from 80% a year earlier. Among Republicans, only 54% believe global warming is happening, down from 76% in 2008. Last year’s revelation that some British scientists “massaged” their data for a published paper on the topic has been used by some (who have labeled it “Climategate”) to cast doubt on the entire record of scientific research on global climate change.
Can we no longer trust science and scientists? In a December ABC News -Washington Post poll, 40% of respondents said that they could “trust the things that scientists say about the environment” only “a little or not at all.” Sixty-two percent said that there is “a lot of disagreement” among scientists “about whether or not global warming is happening,” a figure far in excess of the disagreement that actually exists.
To Read More…
On the Philosophy of Open Science by Michael A. Peters.
This paper arises out of a keynote presentation given at the inaugural Science in Society conference at the University of Cambridge, 5-7 August, 2009. It emerges from some thinking about the nature of openness as a philosophical concept that I develop in a book called The Virtues of Openness: Education, Science and Scholarship in the Digital Age co-authored with Peter Roberts (Paradigm Press, 2009). In terms of my current thinking philosophy of open science rests on seven propositions. I state them baldly here without justification or argument. They are, if you will, ‘observations’ or working hypotheses to be confirmed (or falsified). Each of these propositions has a complex and contested history in philosophy and science and the aim of this paper is to scope the philosophy of open science rather than to defend seven these propositions.
The first part of the paper discusses narratives of openness, focusing on the major philosophical conceptions as they have been developed by Bergson, Popper (Hayek, Soros), Wittgenstein and Eco, teasing out the significance of a Wittgensteinian view of open science. The next section foregrounds ‘technologies of openness’ and their relations to scientific communication before highlighting ‘open science’ as an aspect of an emergent global science system.
From Ewa Hess and Hennric Jokeit, Eurozine
Today, the neurosciences enjoy a similar prestige as psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, write Hennric Jokeit and Ewa Hess. Despite the immense costs for healthcare systems, the fear of depression, dementia and attention deficit disorder legitimises the boom in neuro-psychotropic drugs. In a performance-driven society that confronts the self with its own shortcomings, neuroscience serves an expanding market.
Today, the phenomenology of the mind is stepping indignantly aside for a host of hyphenated disciplines such as neuro-anthropology, neuro-pedagogy, neuro-theology, neuro-aesthetics and neuro-economics. Their self-assurance reveals the neurosciences’ usurpatory tendency to become not only the humanities of science, but the leading science of the twenty-first century. The legitimacy, impetus and promise of this claim derive from the maxim that all human behaviour is determined by the laws governing neuronal activity and the way it is organised in the brain.
To Read More…
From John Richard Schrock, University World News
The number of women taking courses in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the STEM subjects, has been increasing since 1966 according to a new report. But another study, on boys’ academic responses to new video games, establishes a cause-and-effect relationship that could partly explain the decline in male academic achievement.
Women students in higher education now outnumber men in most countries, except Japan and Turkey. In the US, this has skewed the ratio among the sexes in terms of those who graduate: the proportion of males earning degrees has dropped to 43% while that for women has increased to 57%.
Women students have long dominated the humanities, with men still the majority in STEM. But while women have traditionally prevailed in professions such as nursing and teaching, veterinary and medical schools are now experiencing a flood of women students.
To Read More…
Today the Science Newsletter will be re-launched – marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Science Community. The newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.
It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Science Community.
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The Second International Conference on Science in Society
The 2010 Science in Society will be held at the Carlos III University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain from 11-13 November.
Plenary Speakers
- Dr. Matthew Stanley, New York University, New York, USA
- Dr. Fernando Broncano, Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain
- Dr. Javier Echeverria, Instituto de Filosofía of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain
- Jesus Zamora-Bonilla, UNED, Madrid, Spain
- Javier Moscoso, CSIC, Madrid, Spain
- Jimena Canales, Harvard University, Boston, USA
- Javier Ordonez, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://science-society.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. To submit a proposal, see: http://science-society.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. Please note that if your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options or to register for the 2010 Science in Society Conference, see: http://science-society.com/conference-2010/register/.
Themes
Accommodation
http://science-society.com/conference-2010/accommodation/
Activities and Extras
http://science-society.com/conference-2010/activities-and-extras/
Accommodations are now available for the 2010 Science in Society Conference. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information. 
From Daniel Rourke, 3 Quarks Daily
A face to face encounter, devoid of the warm appeal of flesh. The eyes are glass, a cold blue crystal reflects the light in a way real eyes never would. A muzzle of hair, perhaps taken from a barbershop floor or the hind quarters of an animal. The painted scalp 
peeks through the sparse strands: there is nothing here one might caress with fumbling fingers, or, a millennia ago, pick between to lovingly tease out a louse or mite. The figure balances uneasily on stumps for legs. Its waxen surface bears no resemblance to skin. It is a shade saturated of living colour. In another shortened limb the figure holds a wooden spear, with a plastic point designed to take the place of the authentic stone tip. Under its beaten brow this creature forever stands. He is a spectacle, a museum attraction. He is not human, he is ‘other’. He is not man, he is Neanderthal.
To Read More…
From Peter Forbes, The Guardian
Francis Collins was appointed director of the National Institutes of Health (equivalent of the Medical Research Council) by President Obama in August 2009. He is the Pete Seeger of molecular biology. When he has made a great discovery he writes a song about it. And the connection is not just a matter of uplifting songs: Collins is a geneticist, but his spiritual, emotional and political inheritance comes from Roosevelt’s New Deal (his parents worked with Eleanor Roosevelt), folk music and God, just as much as from Darwin, Mendel and Crick.
The cover of The Language of Life carries Obama’s endorsement: “His groundbreaking work has changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease.” His is a brilliant appointment, albeit controversial among some scientists: Collins is the highest-profile scientist and public administrator who is also a proselytising Christian. His previous book, The Language of God, contains both the most concise exposition I have read on why evolution is demonstrable fact and a moving account of his religious conversion from early atheism to strong belief. This stance has brought him into conflict both with Richard Dawkins and with Christian groups in the US. But, as right-wing attacks on evolution and global warming science broaden into a generalised anti-science movement, Collins is an important figure – someone who can wrong-foot people who have polarised attitudes.
To Read More…
From Tom Siegfried, Science News
For better or for worse, science has long been married to mathematics. Generally it has been for the better. Especially since the days of Galileo and Newton, math has nurtured science. Rigorous mathematical methods have secured science’s fidelity to fact and conferred a timeless reliability to its findings.
During the past century, though, a mutant form of math has deflected science’s heart from the modes of calculation that had long served so faithfully. Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos. Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot.
It’s science’s dirtiest secret: The “scientific method” of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing.
To Read More…
From Juli Weiner, Vanity Fair
Today, Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia, respectively. According to the Huffington Post, “the agreement would require both sides to reduce their arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons by about a third, from 2,200 now to 1,550 each.” The deal was a bona-fide diplomatic victory: “The presidents agreed that the new treaty marks a higher level of cooperation between Russia and the United States in the development of new strategic relations,” said a statement issued by the Kremlin, as reported in The New York Times.
But are 1,500 nuclear weapons any less capable of completely destroying the world than 2,200 nuclear weapons are? VF Daily checked with two Columbia University nuclear physicists to see what difference, if any, 700 nuclear weapons makes.
Gustaaf Brooijmans, experimental high-energy particle physicist, thinks 1,500 nuclear weapons are more than enough to devastate the planet, although annihilation isn’t a sure bet:
To Read More…
From Hartosh Singh Bal, Open Lounge
From Newton to Einstein, understanding gravity has been the holy grail of physics. Professor T Padmanabhan of the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, spoke to Open of the work for which he was awarded the 2009 Infosys Prize for the Physical Sciences.
Q Gravity is the force we are most familiar with, yet it remains the most mysterious. What makes it so?
A We are familiar with two force fields in day-to-day life: electromagnetism and gravity. The first deals with charged bodies and unlike gravity it can be both attractive and repulsive; so it doesn’t increase just because you add more and more material, because matter on the whole is electrically neutral. Gravity, on the other hand, is always attractive, which means that its effect is accumulative. As a result, gravitational systems have a tendency to collapse as they get more and more massive, and there is an inherent instability to gravitational systems. Moreover, if you consider the implications of Einstein’s formula E=Mc2, energy and mass are interrelated, so even energy exerts gravity, and in turn the gravitational field of matter also exerts gravity. As a result, gravity is the only non-linear classical force and is very difficult to work with.
To Read More…
From Zach Zorich, Archaeology,
If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative. 
The first studies of Neanderthal DNA focused on the genetic sequences of mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that convert food to energy within cells. In 2005, however, 454 began a collaborative project with the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, to sequence the full genetic code of a Neanderthal woman who died in Croatia’s Vindija cave 30,000 years ago. As the Neanderthal genome is painstakingly sequenced, the archaeologists and biologists who study it will be faced with an opportunity that seemed like science fiction just 10 years ago. They will be able to look at the genetic blueprint of humankind’s nearest relative and understand its biology as intimately as our own.
In addition to giving scientists the ability to answer questions about Neanderthals’ relationship to our own species–did we interbreed, are we separate species, who was smarter–the Neanderthal genome may be useful in researching medical treatments. Newly developed techniques could make cloning Neanderthal cells or body parts a reality within a few years. The ability to use the genes of extinct hominins is going to force the field of paleoanthropology into some unfamiliar ethical territory. There are still technical obstacles, but soon it could be possible to use that long-extinct genome to safely create a healthy, living Neanderthal clone. Should it be done?
To Read More…
From Veronique Greenwood, Seed Magazine
Long after Steven Strogatz had become a professor at MIT and Cornell, he was still writing letters to his high school calculus teacher, Don Joffray. The two started swapping word problems and logic puzzles when Strogatz, who studies chaotic systems, was in college. Their jovial mini-treatises form the body of Strogatz’s most recent book, The Calculus of Friendship.
But they always managed to keep a certain distance from each other, demonstrating, perhaps, the natural reserve for which mathematicians are known. Mr. Joffray, as Strogatz still refers to him, sent his congratulations on Strogatz’s engagement in a brief preface to a calculus problem, but Strogatz’s reply makes no acknowledgement. When he heard from secondhand sources that Joffray’s son had died, Strogatz wondered why Joffray never mentioned it, but never brought it up. After thirty years of omissions, it took a string of tragic events to bring their friendship into three dimensions.
Seed editor Veronique Greenwood spoke with Strogatz about the nature of friendship, why math isn’t about right and wrong, and how an elliptical swimming pool helped launch his teaching career.
To Read More…
From Samuel Arbesman, Boston.com
When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.
But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.
Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.
To Read More…
From Samuel Arbesman at Boston.com
When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.
But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.
Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.
These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.
To Read More…
From John M. Broder in the New York Times:
For months, climate scientists have taken a vicious beating in the media and on the Internet, accused of hiding data, covering up errors and suppressing alternate views. Their response until now has been largely to assert the legitimacy of the vast body of climate science and to mock their critics as cranks and know-nothings.
But the volume of criticism and the depth of doubt have only grown, and many scientists now realize they are facing a crisis of public confidence and have to fight back. Tentatively and grudgingly, they are beginning to engage their critics, admit mistakes, open up their data and reshape the way they conduct their work.
…
“We have to do a better job of explaining that there is always more to learn, always uncertainties to be addressed,” said John P. Holdren, an environmental scientist and the White House science adviser. “But we also need to remind people that the occasions where a large consensus is overturned by a scientific heretic are very, very rare.”
For the article…
From Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books:
It has been history’s biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events in at least 45 countries, and, on or around 24 November, there was another spate of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In Mysore, Darwin Day was observed by an exhibition ‘proclaiming the importance of the day and the greatness of the scientist’. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there were performances of a one-man musical, Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert (‘Twas adaptive radiation that produced the mighty whale;/His hands have grown to flippers/And he has a fishy tail’). At Harvard, the celebrations included ‘free drinks, science-themed rock bands, cake, decor and a dancing gorilla’ (stuffed with a relay of biology students). Circulating around the university, student and faculty volunteers declaimed the entire text of the Origin.
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The very idea of paying homage to the great scientists of the past is problematic. Scientists are not widely supposed either to be heroes or to have heroes. Modern sensibilities insist on scientists’ moral equivalence to anyone else, and notions of an impersonal Scientific Method, which have gained official dominance over older ideas of scientific genius, make the personalities of scientists irrelevant in principle. Honouring past scientists is therefore a different sort of thing from, say, paying homage to history’s generals, politicians or, indeed, imaginative artists. You don’t need to subscribe to a strict form of Pascal’s theory of history (had Cleopatra’s nose …) to accept, in one way or another, that individuals and circumstances can make a difference to the course of events. Had Lincoln not been president, the Civil War would quite probably have had a different trajectory and outcome; had Bush and Cheney not run the show, it’s plausible that Iraq would have not been invaded as a response to 9/11 or that an invasion would have turned out differently; and had Mozart not lived there would have been no Figaro. But it’s hard to accept that if Watson and Crick – clever and ambitious though they were – had not found the double helical structure of DNA, no one else would have done so.
For the full article…
www.ScienceinSocietyConference.com
Matthew Stanley teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He holds degrees in astronomy, religion, physics, and the history
of science, and is interested in the connections between science and the wider culture. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A.S. Eddington, which examines how scientists reconcile their religious beliefs and professional lives. Currently, he is writing a book that explores how science changed from its historical theistic foundations to its modern naturalistic ones. Professor Stanley is also developing a project on science in war, and he is part of a nationwide effort to use the humanities to improve science education in the college classroom. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, the British Academy, and the Max Planck Institute.
From Paul Walman, The American Prospect
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama warmed the hearts of progressives when he promised to change “the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.” And when he got into office, he took a number of steps that demonstrated his sincerity. 
He abolished George W. Bush’s restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research and announced that he was “directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making.” His Department of Energy — run by Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu — is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on exploring innovative new energy sources under its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), modeled on the Defense Department’s DARPA. Obama also increased spending for the National Science Foundation. And he just announced a $250 million public-private partnership to improve math and science teaching.
To Read More…
From Eric Benson and Justin Nobel in Guernica / a magazine of art and politics:
While the aerospace community waits for February when President Obama will announce the 2011 budget, effectively setting NASA’s direction for the near future, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin agitates for a manned mission to Mars.
On a Saturday last August just outside the nation’s capital, Dr. Robert Zubrin saw his ambitions come crashing back to Earth—or, more accurately, back to the moon. Chris McKay, a NASA astrobiologist, had just delivered a speech to the Mars Society in which he proposed a human space exploration program based around a permanent lunar base. A trip to Mars, he said, should be delayed for several decades as humanity learns to live on our closest celestial body. “I grew up with Star Trek—the original series,” McKay said, “and the slogan was ‘to boldly go.’ Going is easy… we need to boldly stay.”
For more…
John Markoff reviews W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology in the New York Times,
The popular view is that technology is the handmaiden of science — less pure, more commercial. But in “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves,” W. Brian Arthur, an economist, reframes the relationship between science and technology as part of an effort to come up with a comprehensive theory of innovation. In Dr. Arthur’s view, the relationship between science and technology is more symbiotic than is generally conceded. Science and technology move forward together in a kind of co-evolution. And science does not lead.
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Dr. Arthur tries to explain the emergence of radical new technologies from jet engines to GPS. He correctly points out that the jet engine did not arise from the steady accretion of small improvements in piston engines nor did the modern computer burst forth as the next generation of mechanical calculator.
He points to the human propensity to solve problems as the force that leads to new generations of technology through recombination of existing technologies. Technology is “alive” in the sense that a coral reef is alive. The reef is an ecological system with many species, and technology in the broadest sense is an elaborate and constantly changing structure made up of thousands of discrete technologies, themselves composed of separate technologies.
For the complete review…
From Janet Maslin, The New York Times.
“I always say that electricity is a fantastic invention,” the British economist Michael Lipton once told Michael Specter, whose bristling new book, “Denialism,” explores the dangerous ways in which scientific progress can be misunderstood. “But if the first two products had been the electric chair and the cattle prod,” Mr. Lipton continued, “I doubt that most consumers would have seen the point.”
Here is what they would have done instead, if Mr. Specter, a staff writer for The New Yorker and former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, correctly captures the motifs that shape the stubbornly anti-scientific thinking for which his book is named: they would have denounced electricity as a force for evil, blamed its prevalence on venal utility companies, universalized the relatively rare horrific experiences of people who have been injured by electrical currents and called for a ban on electricity use.
To Read More…
From Kurt Andersen, Vanity Fair.
Among the defining attributes of now are ever tinier gadgets, ever shorter attention spans, and the privileging of marketplace values above all. Life is manically parceled into financial quarters, three-minute YouTube videos, 140-character tweets. In my pocket is a phone/computer/camera/video recorder/TV/stereo system half the size of a pack of Marlboros. And what about pursuing knowledge purely for its own sake, without any real thought of, um, monetizing it? Cute.
And so in our hyper-capitalist flibbertigibbet day and age, the new Large Hadron Collider, buried about 330 feet beneath the Swiss-French border, near Geneva, is a bizarre outlier.
The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, cern, is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours. It’s also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, punctuated by shopping-mall-size subterranean caverns and fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs.
To Read More…
From Natalie Angier, New York Times.
Circling my way not long ago through the Vasily Kandinsky show now on display in the suitably spiral setting of the Guggenheim Museum, I came to one of the Russian master’s most illustrious, if misleadingly named, paintings: “Several Circles.” 
Those “several” circles, I saw, were more like three dozen, and every one of them seemed to be rising from the canvas, buoyed by the shrewdly exuberant juxtapositioning of their different colors, sizes and apparent translucencies. I learned that, at around the time Kandinsky painted the work, in 1926, he had begun collecting scientific encyclopedias and journals; and as I stared at the canvas, a big, stupid smile plastered on my face, I thought of yeast cells budding, or a haloed blue sun and its candied satellite crew, or life itself escaping the careless primordial stew.
To Read More…
A news report in Science magazine for 13 November 2009 describes the US State Department’s goal of “bolster[ing] the department’s science capacity across the board.” The event that brought this goal to public notice was the appointment of three leading scientists to be special envoys with an assignment to foster scientific relationships with Muslim-majority nations.
Speaking in Morocco on 3 November, Clinton said the new envoys will help “to fulfill President Obama’s mandate to foster scientific and technological collaboration” and to “develop the capacity to meet economic, social, and ecological challenges.” She announced the selection of Egyptian-born Ahmed H. Zewail, a chemistry Nobelist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena; Algerian-born Elias Zerhouni, a radiologist who stepped down last fall as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and biochemist Bruce Alberts, former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and current editor-in-chief of Science. Clinton said that the State Department is also bolstering its scientific and environmental expertise at embassies around the world.
Science Magazine Cover, 6 November 2009
The 6 November 2009 issue of Science announced the theme for the February 2010 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
This issue of Science includes the program of the 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting. The theme of the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego, 18 to 22 February 2010, is “Bridging Science and Society,” and calls on all scientists and engineers to make their work both beneficial and understandable.
A PDF of the program as it appears in this issue is available here; for more information on the meeting (including registration forms and information on accommodations), please visit www.aaas.org/meetings/.
Science for 23 October 2009 prints an editorial entitled Europe Rethinks Education by Pierre Léna discussing the importance of strengthening science education. Among the topics discussed is the Rocard Report on Science Education and efforts now underway to respond to it.
For societies to understand the consequences of vital issues such as climate change, education—especially science education—will play a critical role. Improving the quality of science education in primary and secondary schools is a challenge faced by nearly all countries. Europe has finally recongnized for a trans-European effort to rejuvenate the scientific education of all students, promising efforts are now under way.
From Toby Lester Boston.com
NEARLY FIVE CENTURIES ago, the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus went public with one of the most important arguments ever made in the history of ideas. The earth did not sit immobile at the center of the universe, he wrote. It revolved around the sun.
It was the mother of all paradigm shifts, dismantling a model of the universe that had been dogma since antiquity. When he published his theory, in “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” (1543), Copernicus provided a wealth of data on the movements of celestial bodies in support of his case. But what’s often overlooked is that he began his argument from the ground up, by focusing not on the heavens but the earth. In particular, he began with a geographical revelation, prompted by something he had recently come across on a new map.
More….
From William Waldegrave TimesOnline
Fifty years ago C. P. Snow described the gulf between the two cultures. Today we can be more optimistic about bridging it
Leavis was right: C. P. Snow was not a great intellect, or a great novelist. But you do not have to be either to say something that is true: and Snow did say something which was true, in his Rede lecture of 50 years ago, entitled The Two Cultures. There is something wrong with a civilisation, he said, where knowledge is so compartmentalised that people can count as highly educated and yet be wholly ignorant of huge swaths of what other highly educated people know. How could scientists not read Shakespeare? How could literary people never have heard of the second law of thermodynamics?
Obviously, there has always been specialised knowledge: Cicero would doubtless have been out of his depth in the further reaches of Archimedean mathematics; Richard Bentley would probably have found Newtonian calculus as obscure as did some of the classicists of my day who could read his Horace easily enough a century and a half later but not get the hang of dy by dx. Carlyle it was who talked about political economy as the dismal science. There is little new under the sun.
More…
From Nicholas Wade The New York Times
The theory of evolution really does explain everything in biology. The phenomena that Darwin understood in broad brush strokes can now be accounted for in the precise language of DNA. And though biological systems have attained extraordinary levels of complexity over the passage of time, no serious biologist doubts that evolutionary explanations exist or will be found for every jot and tittle in the grand script.
To biologists and others, it is a source of amazement and embarrassment that many Americans repudiate Darwin’s theory and that some even espouse countertheories like creationism or intelligent design. How can such willful ignorance thrive in today’s seas of knowledge? In the hope of diminishing such obscurantism, the prolific English biology writer Richard Dawkins has devoted his latest book to demonstrating the explanatory power of evolutionary ideas while hammering the creationists at every turn.
More…
Bridgette Meinhold of Inhabitat.com writes…
Researchers are developing ways to mass-produce tiny robots the size of a fly that operate like swarms of insects to collect data to aid in surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, and more. Measuring in at under 4 mm square, the microbots have all the equipment necessary to move, communicate, and collect data, plus they generate all of their own power via solar panels.
These mini-robots are quite revolutionary, considering that they contain all that’s necessary to collect data and relay it back using one single circuit board. In the past single-chip robots have presented significant design and manufacturing challenges due in part to the use of solder as an adhesive. More…
Common Ground Publishing has now launched the new imprint Science in Society with Quantum Mechanics in Chemical Physics: An Exploration by Ray M. Golding and W. C. Tennant.
You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:
Books should be between 30,000 words and 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.
Walking Tour of Cambridge on Wednesday, 05 August 2009 or Friday, 07 August 2009
Join us at 6:00 pm for a 1.5 hour walking tour of Cambridge. Some of the options will include King’s College, the stately University buildings of the Old Schools and Senate House, the University Church of Great St. Mary’s and the wonderful gatehouses of Trinity College, the home of Sir Isaac Newton and St. John’s College - with Cambrdige’s very own Bridge of Sighs. For more information please see the Conference website.
Michael A. Peters, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
Michael A Peters is Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in English Literature, and an honors degree in Geography, before attaining his teaching diploma and teaching in New Zealand high schools for seven years, the last two as head of department. While teaching he completed a major for a Bachelor of Science in Philosophy and returned full time to complete his Master in Philosophy, with first class honors, and PhD in Philosophy of Education with a thesis on the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. He has just completed a second book on the subject entitled Wittgenstein as Pedagogical Philosopher (Paradigm Press, 2008) with Nick Burbules and Paul Smeyers. He held a personal chair at the University of Auckland, NZ (2000-03) and Research Professor at the University of Glasgow, UK (2000-05), as well as numerous posts as adjunct and visiting professor throughout the world. More…
Join us on the Beves Terrace (weather permitting) for cocktails before moving into the historic Saltmarsh rooms for a Gala Dinner. Please see the Conference website for more details.
Accommodation for the 2009 Science in Society Conference in Cambridge, UK may now be booked. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information.
Yolanda Moses, Professor of Anthropoloy/Associate Vice Chancellor-Diversity, Division Of The College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, University of California-Riverside, California, USA
Dr. Yolanda Moses served as President of the American Anthropological Association, Chair of the Board of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Past President of City University of New York/ The City College, and President of the American Association for Higher Education. She currently serves as Professor of Anthropology, Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Excellence, and Executive Director for Conflict Resolution at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Moses’ research focuses on the broad question of the origins of social inequality in complex societies through the use of comparative ethnographic and survey methods. She has explored gender and class disparities in the Caribbean, East Africa and in the United States. More recently, her research has focused on issues of diversity and change in universities and colleges in the United States, India, and South Africa.She is currently involved with several national higher education projects with the National Council for Research on Women, Campus Women Lead and The Women of Color Research Collective. In addition, she is Chair of the National Advisory Board of a multi-year national public education project sponsored by the American Anthropological Association and funded by NSF and the Ford Foundation on Race and Human Variation. See: www.understandingrace.org. More…
5-7 August 2009
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
www.ScienceinSocietyConference.com
The New York Review of Books (Volume 56, Number 5 · March 26, 2009) has published a review of by H. Allen Orr of Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (University of Chicago Press, 468 pp., $29.00). The full review is not available online, but the magazine provides the following excerpt:
Since science is the defining intellectual enterprise of our age, it would seem worth understanding who the scientist is. This is the task Steven Shapin takes on in his latest book, The Scientific Life. Shapin’s book represents something of a departure from his previous efforts. The Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, Shapin is perhaps best known for two works on seventeenth-century science, A Social History of Truth (1994) and The Scientific Revolution (1996). He is also coauthor, with Simon Schaffer, of Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), a fascinating account of debates between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over the legitimacy and proper interpretation of experimental manipulation in science. In his new book, Shapin ventures beyond the strict boundaries of the history of science. While he spends some time on the evolution of the scientific vocation, he’s also concerned with how scientists live and work now.
We cannot live by scepticism alone* is the title of a Nature essay by Harry Collins calling for a “third wave” in science studies. the editors introduce it thusly:
Scientists have been too dogmatic about scientific truth and sociologists have fostered too much scepticism — social scientists must now elect to put science back at the core of society….
*Nature 458, 30 (5 March 2009) | doi:10.1038/458030a; Published online 4 March 2009
The International Journal of Science in Society provide an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of the past, present and future of the sciences. Conference presentations and Journal articles range from broad theoretical, philosophical and policy explorations, to detailed case studies of particular intellectual and practical activities at the intersection of science and society.
Paper submissions are now open for the first volume of The International Journal of Science in Society.
You will first need to submit a presentation proposal for the conference as either an attending or virtual participant. If accepted you will be able to submit your full paper for refereeing and possible publication in the Journal.
Please check the submission guidelines prior to submitting your paper.
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