In 1995, Steve Sillett received a Ph.D. in botany from Oregon State University, in Corvallis. Soon afterward, he took his present job, at Humboldt, and began to explore the old-growth redwood canopy.

No scientist had been there before.

The tallest redwoods were regarded as inaccessible towers, shrouded in foliage and almost impossible to climb, since the lowest branches on a redwood can be twenty-five stories above the ground. From the moment he entered redwood space, Steve Sillett began to see things that no one had imagined. The general opinion among biologists at the time -- this was just eight years ago -- was that the redwood canopy was a so-called "redwood desert" that contained not much more than the branches of redwood trees.

Instead, Sillett discovered a lost world above Northern California.

Gold Star.

Update: If you enjoyed this article and are looking for further reading, you may consider Forest Canopies: Second Edition.

Cimbing the Redwoods, by Richard Preston | The New Yorker

Steven Pinker on selfish genes:

To mark the 30th anniversary of Richard Dawkins’s book, OUP is to issue a collection of essays about his work. Here, professor of psychology at Harvard University, wonders if Dawkins’s big idea has not gone far enough.

Wow, it's really been 30 years since the publication of The Selfish Gene.

Yes, genes can be selfish

Darwin didn't gather a thousand and one facts and then invent a theory to explain them -- which was the scientific style that had been urged on the world by the prophet of science Francis Bacon. Instead, the young Darwin made a leap of imagination and then worked for decades to find out if his idea really held up.

From Surmise to Sunrise

Quorum sensing provides a mechanism for bacteria to monitor one another's presence and to modulate gene expression in response to changes in population density. Camilli and Bassler (p. 1113) review how the synchronous response of bacterial populations to small molecule autoinducers that is involved in quorum sensing confers social behavior to bacteria. Autoinducers are packaged in a variety of ways and have varying half-lives, depending on their roles. Autoinducer signals are integrated within each cell by second-messenger systems, probably by cdiGMP signaling.

Bacteria Have Social Lives Too

If MemeStreams had higher visibility, it might have been mentioned in this article.

It has been weeks since President Bush's State of the Union speech, and I have not heard any outcry over his policy statement on cloning: "Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms." I can only guess that this means the public doesn't care, or doesn't understand what Mr. Bush means by this, or agrees with his nonsensical concept of what "human" means, or that somehow the stem cell scandal in South Korea has led to widespread agreement that we should just give up on such research. Any of these possibilities would be a mistake, not just for American science, but for the very human life the president seeks to protect.

It's a theoretical ban in the first place, like banning marriage between robots.

Perhaps it was President Bush who first said, "If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace."

Little did we know then that the menace is marriage.

But really, who are we to stand between two robots and their happiness?

All Clones Are Not the Same

"The more fundamental issue is that journals do not and cannot guarantee the truth of what they publish," said Nicholas Wade, a science reporter for The New York Times. "Publication of a paper only means that, in the view of the referees who green-light it, it is interesting and not obviously false. In other words, all of the results in these journals are tentative."

Reporters Find Science Journals Harder to Trust, but Not Easy to Verify

Fans of Drew Westen's recent fMRI work will want to see this.

This year, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Marco Iacoboni and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in a group of subjects while they were watching the Super Bowl ads.

The main idea behind this project is that there is often a disconnect between what people say about what they like — and the real, underlying deeper motives that make us want and like some things and some people, but not others. With fMRI, it is possible to look at unfiltered brain responses, to measure how the ads shown today elicit emotions, induce empathy, and inspire liking and wanting.

In retrospect, there's not a lot to look at here. You basically just have to take the guy's word for it.

WHO REALLY WON THE SUPER BOWL? By Marco Iacoboni

Neoteric wrote:

Emory University psychologist Drew Westen ...

I want the paper.

A recent article by NYT columnist John Tierney, Smells Like Team Spirit, refers to Westen's latest work in the context of sports fans. The researcher, Drew Westen, is at Emory University in Atlanta.

At the site for the Laboratory of Personality and Psychopathology, you can find the paper, which is entitled, "The neural basis of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on political judgment during the U.S. Presidential election of 2004." This manuscript is currently in press. The site states:

If you would like to view one of the manuscripts currently in press, please email us for a password to download it, at psychlab@emory.edu.

It's not clear from other web discussions whether the authors are providing access to this paper just yet; it is still under revision.

Emory issued a press release about the work.

RE: Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases

Districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.

I find this conclusion overreaching, because it ignores the opposing candidate. For some of these highly biased voters, Bush may simply be the lesser of two evils. The voters may have been turned off by a common liberal or democratic policy that Al Gore or John Kerry or John Edwards said. It could be about anything -- affirmative action, gun control, school prayer, or gay rights, for example.

My criticism here falls under "correlation does not imply causation."

On this topic, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Wikipedia article on the "correlation implies causation" fallacy uses one of my favorite Simpsons scenes as an example:

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" is working like a charm!
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: [uncomprehendingly] Thanks, honey.
Lisa: By your logic, I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Hmm. How does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work; it's just a stupid rock!
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: (pause) Lisa, I want to buy your rock.

These days, everyone has a rock for sale. What's yours?

RE: Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases

From the State of the Union:

"A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners, and that recognize the matchless value of every life. Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator -- and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale." (Applause.)

The Whole Truth? Why bother if you're not under oath? It's always so boring and complicated. You aren't a wonk, are you?

So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development. As I reported before, there have been partial insertions, but now a team of researchers has inserted a complete human chromosome 21 into mouse embryonic stem cells, and from those generated a line of aneuploid mice that have many of the symptoms of Down syndrome, including the heart defects. They also have problems in spatial learning and memory that have been traced back to defects in long-term potentiation in the central nervous system.

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.

George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.

This may be true, but don't call him "anti-hybrid":

"We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen."

A mouse is a mouse. Who are we to tweak it? Let's focus on nanobots instead. Those are safe -- and ethical, too!

Here's a thought. If sending iPods to Congressmen can change their thinking on intellectual property, maybe someone could send 535 of those green fluorescent mice to the Capitol. That would be sweet.

Human-Animal Hybrids