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Jakob

The death of the death of megafauna

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Being a fan of science fact is a lot like being a fan of science fiction: every once in a while, a team of writers decides to obliterate your personal canon, seemingly because they hate you and want you to suffer. Actually that’s mostly just Steven Moffat; in the case of scientists it’s usually because new data has come to light or existing data has been reassessed. This time around, it’s old data that’s been reviewed.

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Making the myth of patient zero

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Don Sapatkin has a really interesting piece up at philly.com right now. It chronicles the origin of the “patient zero” narrative. If you’re not familiar, the story is that all known cases of HIV in the United States can be traced back to a single, unusually promiscuous individual, a flight attendant from Canada named Gaetan Dugas. While a lot of people have known this to be bunk basically since it was published, many others seem to believe it. I first encountered it on a message board where it was posted as an interesting factoid.

HIV-budding-Color

What Sapatkin’s article reveals is that the entire “Patient Zero” story was a calculated PR strategy by HIV researchers and public health officials who had become desperate to bring the disease into the public eye. According to the people quoted in the article, it worked. According to others, the effect on Dugas was ruinous, and his treatment utterly inhumane. Read More »Making the myth of patient zero

The Finkbeiner test

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The description for this picture is careful to mention that Mary Alice McWhinnie was the first woman to serve as chief scientist at an Arctic research station. Retrieved from Wikimedia commons, presumed to be public domain. Originally uploaded by the Smithsonian Institution.Christie Aschwanden has an excellent piece up at XX Science, with a simple experiment you can do at home to identify sexism in science journalism! As a long-time fan of the Bechdel Test, I’m easily convinced that science journalism warrants a similar instrument. Finkbeiner’s test is interesting because, unlike the Bechdel Test (which primarily reveals a lack of individuality and agency in fictional women), it has components specifically designed to call attention to “benevolent” sexism. Having applied the test, I believe that science journalism has made great strides forward, and finally achieved routine tokenism. Baby steps.

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Tea to fight malaria? Yes, but also no.

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Brendan Borell has written a scathing attack on the WHO, published in Slate last week. Because of the basics of the story, I thought I knew what I was in for: someone is advocating the use of a cheap “natural” remedy instead of a well-understood synthetic drug. They’re anecdotally reporting extreme efficacy and no drawbacks. Meanwhile, medical authorities are tearing out their hair and imploring people to stick to the stuff that works.

That’s how stories about herbal medicine typically go in my world. But this isn’t quite one of them.

“Although the tea itself has traditionally been used in treatment, not prevention, in China, a randomized controlled trial on this farm showed that workers who drank it regularly reduced their risk of suffering from multiple episodes of malaria by one-third.”

Randomized controlled trial you say?

“Soon afterward, a researcher named Patrick Ogwang with the Ugandan Ministry of Health documented a decline of malaria incidence among almost 300 workers drinking the tea, and followed up with the randomized controlled trial demonstrating

the tea’s effectiveness.”

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Image of crowd at Death of Evidence rally.

Science [REDACTED]

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As of this moment, across Canada, there are government appointees who have veto power over new scientific data. This sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. An adjustment to intellectual property law has made it possible for Canadian officials to block new studies from being published. They have stated no intent to use their new power this way, but nor is there any published set of standards on which they’re meant to base their decisions. People at the Science Uncensored project are understandably upset.

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The uBiome controversy

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uBiome is a cool project serving a widely recognized need: the mapping of the human microbiome. We’ve posted about uBiome on Twitter and Facebook, and have generally been pretty jazzed about the enterprise. Our enthusiasm took a major hit, however, when Melissa Bates and other bloggers began to voice serious concerns about the ethical oversight of the project, or rather the apparent lack thereof.

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Muses: DIY spectroscopy

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The Public Lab is, I think, a generally stellar example of how to go about citizen science: they identify genuine, pressing scientific needs that are underserved by existing institutions, develop effective and practical ways of addressing them, and then deftly articulate both to the public. Those steps are difficult enough to get right individually, let alone all at once—and repeatedly. Their ingenuity, insight and deep understanding of practical citizen science makes them not just role models, but inspirations. And that makes them an excellent subject for our first “Muses” post—a category for people and projects we find inspiring.

A whole lot of science fan culture tends to focus on heavy machinery: think the Large Hadron Collider or the Curiosity rover. These things are important for physicists and astronomers (and fans like me), but if you’re in a wetland, a factory, residential area, or salmon farm and you encounter an unknown substance, particle collision is not going to tell you what’s in your water. For that, you need spectrometry. And for that, it turns out, you do not need a PhD. Read More »Muses: DIY spectroscopy

A Habronattus coecatus jumping spider facing down and to the right.

Jumping spiders: Communication and miniaturization

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This should be evident from the title, but in case it’s not: If the combination of the words “jumping” and “spider” disturbs you, this is not the post for you. But if spiders only make you a little uncomfortable, I suggest sticking this one out, because from the perspective of animal behaviour and physiology, these things are cool. They’re also really small, so if for example you had a traumatic experience once involving a very large spider crawling onto your hand without you noticing (hypothetically of course) the miniature marvels that I talk about in this post should seem friendly enough.

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