Love at first sight is a myth, you see, and it all comes down to biology and narcissism.

... if you want any further evidence of how science kills music, listen to Simon Singh's excruciating rewrite of Katie Melua's already nauseating Nine Million Bicycles. You have been warned.

The passion killers

In the 1960s Marshall W. Nirenberg deciphered the genetic code, the combination of the A, T, G and C nucleotides that specify amino acids. So why do people think that Francis Crick did it?

The Forgotten Code Cracker

It hasn't been all play.

Be sure to watch the video. (Photography by Frans Lanting, music by Philip Glass, video by Alexander V. Nichols.)

Celebrating Food, Feces, and 3 Billion Years of Evolution

It's not often that research results look this good. An elegant new way to visualize individual brain cells not only provides a major boost to scientists trying to understand how the brain works, but has also won one of its developers a major prize in science photography.

The brain is a beautiful thing.

Colours light up brain structure

... visiting delegations from faraway planets are likely to be very small in size. The only resource of interest … will be knowledge. These purposes can be realized with relatively small observation, computation, and communication devices. Such spaceships are thus likely to be smaller than a grain of sand, possibly of microscopic size. Perhaps that is one reason why we have not noticed them.

This is a really cool study.

In one experiment, Kassin asked volunteers to perform a challenging task on a computer but warned them not to touch the "Alt" key or risk damaging a computer. Volunteers were told that the computer had been damaged and were asked whether they hit the banned key. In reality, the volunteer did nothing wrong. Most volunteers denied it, but as the initial task they were given was made difficult, they became less sure because they were distracted. When researchers had confederates lie about having seen the volunteers hit the Alt key, the number of people who confessed went up to 100 percent. Every stage of increased pressure led ever larger numbers of volunteers to believe they were really guilty.

Don't think of cheney's law, or of this:

And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me — drawn from the hour-long meeting we’d had a week earlier — and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general. ... There is the attorney general, and he pointed to me, and I was just to his left.

Remember:

"It's very important that the American people understand this. After 9/11 the gloves came off."

Those gloves have since gone missing ...

Ms. Gustitus said: “He [the Attorney General nominee] said he didn’t know if waterboarding is torture.”

Mr. Giuliani said: “Well, I’m not sure it is either. I’m not sure it is either. It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.

Confessions Not Always Clad in Iron

Some ideas are reeled into our mind wrapped up in facts; and some ideas burst upon us naked without the slightest evidence they could be true but with all the conviction they are.

The ideas of the latter sort are the more difficult to displace.

Wrapped Up In Facts

I can't wait to see Cramer get worked up over this. ("I'm too old ... I know too many almond growers, too many pumpkin growers, ...")

Not long ago, I found myself sitting at the edge of a field with a bear and thirty or forty thousand very angry bees. The bear was there because of the bees. The bees were there because of me, and why I was there was a question I found myself unable to answer precisely.

"One bear will teach another bear, and then that bear will do it," he said.

When he called for questions, the discussion quickly turned to bears. Practically everyone had a story to tell. Ordinary fences, it was agreed, were useless, and even electric ones could be breached [*]. One man said that he draped his electric fence with bacon; this enticed the bear to stick his nose against the wires and get zapped. Another recommended driving nails through plywood, then laying the plywood around the hive, nail-side up.

“It definitely keeps the bears out,” he said of the arrangement.

“It’s not too good for the inspector who steps on a nail,” the inspector said.

“Get a tetanus shot,” a second man suggested.

Think of the watermelons:

The honeybees seemed to be suffering not so much from any particular ailment as from just about every ailment.

It was as if an insect version of AIDS were sweeping through the hives.

Decius is vindicated! Rattle is wrong again! :)

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" is working like a charm!
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: [uncomprehendingly] Thanks, honey.

From the NRC report mentioned in the article:

“Pollinator decline is one form of global change that actually does have credible potential to alter the shape and structure of the terrestrial world.”

See recent coverage in Science News.

Also: the magic method of Dr. Lipkin's team is metagenomics ("the greatest [scientific] opportunity since the invention of the microscope"), which has been recommended previously.

Stung: Bees, Bears, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, and Economic Collapse -- Oh My!

From Chapter 2, "Beginner's Traps":

In summary, there are no small problems. Problems that appear small are large problems that are not understood. Instead of tiny details unworthy of the intellectual, we have men whose tiny intellects cannot rise to penetrate the infinitesimal. Nature is a harmonious mechanism where all parts, including those appearing to play a secondary role, cooperate in the functional whole. In contemplating this mechanism, shallow men arbitrarily divide its parts into essential and secondary, whereas the insightful thinker is content with classifying them as understood and poorly understood, ignoring for the moment their size and immediately useful properties. No one can predict their importance in the future.

I recommend this book. Amazon writes:

Although the wisdom contained in this slim, elegant volume is almost a century old, it is as fresh and useful today as it no doubt was then.

See also: Google Books; MIT Press offers some samples, or full text for CogNet subscribers.

Advice for a Young Investigator

Jared Diamond is wrong. Human civilization and the world’s ecosystems will not collapse in this century. This presentation looks at the emerging positive ecological trends that will dominate the next hundred years. It features scientific and economic analyses showing how humanity will increasingly withdraw its productive activities from wild nature enabling ecosystems to heal themselves and to thrive. Trends that will be highlighted include: human population growth, urbanization, dematerialization, agricultural and energy efficiency, forest growth, global temperature, and overall economic growth. More than 80% of the world’s wealth is intangible and that percentage will increase throughout the 21st century.

Attendees will realize that global ecological trends are not nearly as dire as they are often portrayed. Of course, there are still major ecological problems -- declining fisheries, shrinking tropical forests, growing scarcity of fresh water -- but these problems are transitory. Come learn what policies and institutions are necessary to hasten the Great Restoration!

This presentation is not available online, but you can check out the author's book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific And Moral Case For The Biotech Revolution:

A positive, optimistic, and convincing case that the biotechnology revolution will improve our lives and the future of our children The 21st century will undoubtedly witness unprecedented advances in understanding the mechanisms of the human body and in developing biotechnology. With the mapping of the human genome, the pace of discovery is now on the fast track. By the middle of the century we can expect that the rapid progress in biology and biotechnology will utterly transform human life. What was once the stuff of science fiction may now be within reach in the not-too-distant future: 20-to-40-year leaps in average life spans, enhanced human bodies, drugs and therapies to boost memory and speed up mental processing, and a genetic science that allows parents to ensure that their children will have stronger immune systems, more athletic bodies, and cleverer brains. Even the prospect of human immortality beckons.

Such scenarios excite many people and frighten or appall many others. Already biotechnology opponents are organizing political movements aimed at restricting scientific research, banning the development and commercialization of various products and technologies, and limiting citizens’ access to the fruits of the biotech revolution.

In this forward-looking book Ronald Bailey, science writer for Reason magazine, argues that the coming biotechnology revolution, far from endangering human dignity, will liberate human beings to achieve their full potentials by enabling more of us to live flourishing lives free of disease, disability, and the threat of early death. Bailey covers the full range of the coming biotechnology breakthroughs, from stem-cell research to third-world farming, from brain-enhancing neuropharmaceuticals to designer babies. Against critics of these trends, who forecast the nightmare society of Huxley’s Brave New World, Bailey persuasively shows in lucid and well-argued prose that the health, safety, and ethical concerns raised by worried citizens and policymakers are misplaced.

Liberation Biology makes a positive, optimistic, and convincing case that the biotechnology revolution will improve our lives and the future of our children, while preserving and enhancing the natural environment.

The Great Ecological Restoration Begins