And…I’m moving again. I’ve joined Field of Science!

Switching from WordPress to Blogger to become a part of the Field of Science blog network. I’m excited to be in a science community again, writing science, reading science, commenting on science. My first post in my new home addresses the recent piece discussing women on the tenure track in the NYT, or, as I like to call it: To mate and reproduce or to stay single. If you have a mo’, please stop by and give it a read, comment, or just wave hello.


When worlds collide: Wakefield, ethics, & where I live

The News of the Day is that the British Medical Journal has called Andrew Wakefield’s notorious and notoriously retracted vaccine-MMR study “fraud.” That’s something a lot of people had already figured out, but with the imprimatur of BMJ, I guess this makes it official.

Ah, it takes me back, though. To the time I dined with Andrew Wakefield. To that day that the Lancet issued its full retraction of that horrific, fraudulent trash heap of a paper.  To that satisfying few hours of schadenfreude when the GMC handed down its decision to strip him of his license. To my various other Andy sightings about town. To the real horrors of what he wrought when he did what he did to those children in that study.

I’ve posted a lot about Wakefield on my personal blog, and some of the posts have focused on my anger at his bastardization of science and my musings on how people might feel when they falsify data. They’ve included mapping what the enormity of the alleged conspiracy against him would have to be and breaking down with tongue firmly in cheek his plea to make his book of apologia a bestseller. There was the post that I swore would be My Last Word on Wakefield (it wasn’t).

Finally, there is what I taught my son today. We’re studying science–Science–and we were discussing the qualities that make one a good scientist. Sure, there’s curiosity. Creativity. And…there’s honesty. For that and that alone, I close with my defense of ethics in science, why ethics matter, and why I think someone who perpetrates this level of harm to public health ought to be somewhere away from his comfortable, ultra-expensive home just a stone’s throw from where I live. Preferably a quiet place, perhaps with four bare walls, a place where he can ponder the damages he’s wrought.

NPR’s Asperger’s FAIL













Did Jesus walk on water?

Is Jesus standing on ice in this image? Source: Trimmer, Sarah. A Series of Prints of the New Testament. London, 1790. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Wikimedia Commons.

A miracle subjected to science…for the holidays…

Timeline, 2007:  A New Testament story has become so symbolic the ability of Jesus Christ to transcend the natural world that its single catchphrase—walking on water—encapsulates the idea of one who can perform miracles. There is even a lizard, the basilisk lizard, that is sometimes called the “Jesus Christ lizard” because it can sprint across the surface of a pond. Of course, the lizard relies on the laws of physics and the surface tension of the water to accomplish this feat.

Now, according to researchers at Florida State University, it’s possible that a person stepping off the shore of the Sea of Galilee 2000 years ago might well have stepped onto a layer of ice thick enough to bear a man’s weight. The researchers stop short, however, of designating theirs as the true explanation for the presumed miracle of Christ’s walk on water.

How a mere mortal might walk on water

To tackle a natural explanation of walking on the surface of the Sea of Galilee—which is Israel’s largest freshwater lake and known to Israelis as Lake Kinneret—Nof’s team turned to the Mediterranean. They took core samples from the bottom of the sea and used the layers to infer weather patterns from 2500 to 2000 years ago. The cores contain layers of shells, and the animals these shells represent give clues about prevailing temperatures over time. The team found that at the time of Jesus, the Mediterranean was about 4 degrees cooler. Because water heats or cools slowly relative to air, the air temperature must have been even colder.

Based on this and other inferences, they determined that temperatures around the time Jesus and his disciples lived may well have fallen into the 20-F range during cold periods. Today, Lake Kinneret does not see such low temperatures, and the chances of ice forming on its surface are about once every 10,000 years…in other words, never. But 2000 years ago, the chances might have been as high as once every 30 to 60 years, according to the researchers.

Spring ice is no miracle

One factor influencing their conclusion is the saltwater spring in the area, which could produce a plume of saltwater underlying the freshwater. Thus, when the air temperature dropped below freezing, only the top part of the lake responded to the temperature and only the top part of the lake froze. A lake that seemed liquid could, as a result, have had a sheet of ice, possibly 4 to 6 inches thick, lying unseen near its surface. The researchers call this phenomenon “spring ice.”

In the story of the New Testament, which is repeated in three of the four gospel accounts, Jesus is on the shore of the lake as a fishing boat with some of his disciples approaches, tossed and battered in a raging storm. To the disciples’ amazement, Jesus steps from the shore and walks to them, across the surface of the water. The disciple Peter, who is on the boat, also tries to step into the water and walk on its surface, but he sinks. Jesus calms the storm and saves them.

Theology aside…

Nof’s idea not surprisingly elicited a lot of controversy, and at least a few people have taken non-theological issue with the conclusions. For example, relatively quiet, calm conditions would be required for spring ice to form, yet the fishermen were described as being caught in a storm with high winds and huge waves that threatened their craft. In addition, the New Testament accounts make reference to their using oars, and being on a ship and using oars over a layer of ice would have been difficult, at least. Jesus himself might have had to wear crampons to avoid falling on the divine rear-end when stepping onto the ice. And there is also the issue of what happened with poor Peter, who either could not walk on water because his faith faltered or found no ice on which to walk.

Autism, SHANK, and busy highways



The dumbest science question ever?

From NASA/Wikimedia commons: The Hubble image shows the paired galaxies very close together with streams of stars being pulled out of the galaxies. The colliding "parent" galaxies lose their shape and smoother galaxies are formed. The whole merging process can take less than a billion years.

I don’t know if this qualifies as the dumbest science-related question ever, but it’s one that’s been bothering me for, oh, years. If you google it, the hits that turn up are, ironically, all religion related, and no help at all.

The question: Why was life such a hit? Rephrased: Why did life, once it got going, persist?

Maybe you know what I mean. Everywhere we look on Earth (almost), we find life. In places where you’d think nothing could evolve, much less survive. There are the bacteria living two miles deep in the Earth, the life flourishing in lava tubes, the organisms that surprised us in such inhospitable places as geothermal vents, Antarctic lakes, and yes, Mono Lake in California.

Why was life such a big hit once Nature got things going? In a more evolutionary context, what benefit do natural processes derive from life? Even after cataclysmic losses in mass extinctions, life bounces back.

Yes, of course, after those extinctions, niches were more readily available than a cheap foreclosure in Las Vegas. And of course, when life first arose, the world was one big niche just waiting to be partitioned. But why are there no boundaries on the blue planet? Hardly anywhere to go where life isn’t?

Like I said, this could be the dumbest science-based question ever asked. I’m assuming some kind of evolutionary context for life itself in the larger backdrop of the physical world, a world that evolves ever so inexorably to a universal heat death that our little minds (or maybe it’s my little mind) can scarcely encompass. Do life and its many processes get us there faster, urge entropy’s expansion? That, of course, assumes some ultimate, seemingly predetermined goal of transformation into heat and an ultimately messy demise.

That assumption may be and probably is a huge misstep. After all, the universe has got some pretty big transformation engines without turning to a teensy little mechanism like life. In other news, it would actually link the second law of thermodynamics and evolution directly, instead of leaving them as fodder for arguing creationist worldviews.

But it feels like a big question. The related question is, Is it a big, stupid question?



Evil alien stalkers bent on tissue samples


Emotionless. Not even human!



Scientist as savior…or stupid bumbling fool


The scientist is ready for her close-up





Regroup and try again



Speaking of NASA



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