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Sparked by Richard Louv’s book on Nature-Deficit Disorder, many organizations, agencies, teachers and the White House have made the push to get people outside for the benefit of their mental and physical health. Now there is another reason: to benefit environmental health. In a new study my colleagues and I show that outdoor recreationists—in this case, birdwatchers and hunters—are more likely than non-recreationists to carry out conservation activities....The science of protecting people’s feelings: why we pretend all opinions are equal by Chris Mooney at his blog at Washington Post:
....The reason is that an important successor to the Dunning-Kruger paper has just been come out — and it, too, is pretty depressing (at least for those of us who believe that domain expertise is a thing to be respected and, indeed, treasured). This time around, psychologists have not uncovered an endless spiral of incompetence and the inability to perceive it. Rather, they’ve shown that people have an “equality bias” when it comes to competence or expertise, such that even when it’s very clear that one person in a group is more skilled, expert, or competent (and the other less), they are nonetheless inclined to seek out a middle ground in determining how correct different viewpoints are. Yes, that’s right — we’re all right, nobody’s wrong, and nobody gets hurt feelings.....Lots of Cases of Synesthesia Are Based on Alphabet Magnets by Carl Engelking at D-brief:
....They are a ubiquitous childhood toy: alphabet fridge magnets. You may remember some from your own childhood, though they probably weren’t your most beloved of games. But for some people, especially those growing up in the late 70s or 80s, one particular set left a deep impression — it forever changed the colors they associate with letters. That’s the conclusion of a new study on synesthesia, a condition where sensory stimuli overlap. The study finds that more than 6 percent of American synesthetes have color associations that match a particular Fisher-Price fridge magnet set. And that finding will force scientists to rethink how synesthesia works. ....YOU ARE NOT A TETRACHROMAT, AND THIS GRAPHIC IS BULLSHIT by DangerOnion at Unreasonably Dangerous Onion Rings:
....A Dutch researcher in the 1940s noticed that the mothers and daughters of deuteranomalous men like myself all had normal color vision. He knew that the genes responsible for cone cells came from sex chromosomes, which left two possible explanations. If the mutated M cells came exclusively from the father, all fathers and sons of deuteranomalous men would have the same condition, which wasn’t the case. If they came in equal part from the mother, then deuteranomaly would be similarly present in women, which wasn’t the case. He concluded, therefore, that the mothers and daughters of deuteranomalous men must have a fourth set of cells, giving them three functional ones and one mutant. He hypothesized that women with four functional sets of cells might exist, but it wasn’t the point of his research so he didn’t look into it.....Strange Stars Pulse to the Golden Mean by Natalie Wolchover at Quanta Magazine:
....Dynamical systems — such as pendulums, the weather and variable stars — tend to fall into circumscribed patterns of behavior that are a subset of all the ways they could possibly behave. A pendulum wants to swing from side to side, for example, and the weather stays within a general realm of possibility (it will never be zero degrees in summer). Plotting these patterns creates a shape called an “attractor.”....A Leg to Stand On by Jessa Gamble at The Last Word On Nothing:
....Animals don’t naturally have odd numbers of legs. They may have odd numbers of arms (see: radially-symmetric starfish) or a single “foot” (see: slugs). But for proper legs that are primarily used for getting around, it’s never been found.....The Power of Touch by Maria Konnikova at her blog at The New Yorker:
...Few people outside Romania initially knew about the leagăne. But when Ceaușescu was deposed, in 1989, images of the children reached television screens around the world. Mary Carlson’s first reaction, like most people’s, was shock. But then Carlson, a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School, noticed something. A former student of Harry Harlow, the psychologist best known for his studies of touch-deprived monkeys, she had been working with primates and rats to see how the presence or absence of touch affected levels of the stress hormone cortisol. (Cortisol affects physical and mental development: having too much—or too little when you should have more—has been linked to stunted cognitive growth, poor emotion regulation, and a failure to thrive.) “The muteness, blank facial expressions, social withdrawal, and bizarre stereotypic movements of these infants” all seemed painfully familiar, she and her husband, a Harvard psychiatrist and pediatrician named Felton Earls, later wrote. They were precisely the types of reactions that Carlson had seen in touch-deprived monkeys and chimpanzees. In animals, the effects of such deprivation could often be reversed through “grooming interventions”—a rat, for instance, might be paired with a caregiver who engaged in more licking and nuzzling. Could the same thing work in human infants who had been trapped in similarly extreme conditions? Carlson and Earls travelled to Romania to find out.....Computing the optimal road trip across the U.S. by Randy Olson at Randal S. Olson:
....The result was an epic itinerary with a mix of inner city exploration, must-see historical sites, and beautiful natural landscapes. All that was left was to figure out the path that would minimize our time spent driving and maximize our time spent enjoying the landmarks.....Evolution, Perfection and Life by Potnia Theron at Mistress of the Animals:
....The idea that there is junk, or waste, or nonsense in nature is tough for some people. They may or may not be overtly or classically religious, but slovenly nature, to use Zimmer's word, is an anathema to them. Many people who are in awe of nature, be it towering redwoods, or the intricate dance of genes, find stuff that doesn't serve a purpose, well, unsettling. The explanations of the accumulation of junk DNA, just like the accumulations of non-functional bits of anatomy, just happens. Zimmer, as Steve Gould famously did every year, goes back to Darwin for defense of both other forces of evolution beyond natural selection. What is tough is when the data, be it in the natural world, one's laboratory or genome, don't conform to one's preconceptions of the world....The Devastating Stereotype of the Artless Scientist by Dylan Nugent on Medium:
...Suggesting that contributing to scientific discovery requires savantism and a social disorder tells most people that their contributions are unwelcome and science isn’t for them. It also manages to marginalize the actual dedication and creativity that every scientist and artist has had to possess. Given that modern art is so often obsessed with the notions of humanism and abstraction, isn’t it time we recognize that the geniuses of our society are people just like any others?....Celebrating 150 years of Mendelian Genetics by Catherine Potenski at BMC Series blog:
On March 8, 1865, Gregor Mendel presented his findings "Experiments in Plant Hybridization" at the Natural History Society of Brno. His experiments in pea plants allowed him to elucidate the laws of genetic inheritance, which pre-dated the molecular era. We still celebrate his achievements, 150 years later...
Two interesting discussions (including in the comments): Blogs are dying; long live (science) blogs by Jeremy Fox at Dynamic Ecology; and Don’t Freak Out. Science Blogs are NOT Dying by Paige Brown Jarreau at From The Lab Bench.
And another interesting related pair of links: A Disease of Scienceyness: How misguided science fandom hurts actual scientists and You're not a nerd, geeks aren't sexy and you don't "fucking love" science.. Enjoy!
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