FieldNotes: Brontosaurus in, Food Babe out.

The biggest news this week is the 300-page PeerJ paper reanalyzing a bunch of sauropods and concluding that Brontosaurus is, after all, its own genus. I have not seen much dissent on paleo-blogs, and most people are quite enthusiastic about this development. Lots of ink has been spilled, but you should start with Brian Switek and Andy Farke for details:

Back to Brontosaurus? The Dinosaur Might Deserve Its Own Genus After All by Brian Switek at Smithsonian:

It may be one of the most famous dinosaurs of all time. The trouble is that shortly after being discovered, the Jurassic creature fell into an identity crisis. The name for the long-necked, heavy-bodied herbivore Brontosaurus excelsus—the great “thunder lizard”—was tossed into the scientific wastebasket when it was discovered that the dinosaur wasn't different enough from other specimens to deserve its own distinct genus. But now, in a paleontological twist, Brontosaurus just might be back. A new analysis of dinosaur skeletons across multiple related species suggests that the original thunder lizard is actually unique enough to resurrect the beloved moniker, according to researchers in the U.K. and Portugal.....

Brontosaurus thunders back! by Andrew Farke at The Integrative Paleontologists:

Pretty much every person who ever read a dinosaur book or went to a natural history museum learned that Brontosaurus is just an outdated name for a big long-necked dinosaur that should be called Apatosaurus. Two different names were applied to the same type of animal, but Apatosaurus wins out because it was named first. But…it’s just not that simple. It’s never that simple! In a move that is sure to generate considerable discussion by scientists and non-scientists alike, Brontosaurus is back. This topic is being covered in immense detail by many other writers, so I’m going to give just a quick tutorial here. In the interests of full disclosure, I should also note that I was the volunteer editor who handled this paper for the open access journal PeerJ. The opinions expressed here are solely my own.....

You should also see additional coverage if you want more details and different perspectives:
 Welcome back, Brontosaurus! And other first thoughts on Tschopp et al. (2015) by Matt Wedel at Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
The thunder lizard returns - Brontosaurus resurrected by Dr Dave Hone at Lost Worlds (The Guardian)
Brontosaurus is Back! New Study Finds They Aren’t Apatosaurs After All by Jon Tennant at D-brief
The Brontosaurus is Back – Author Interview by PeerJ at PeerJ Blog
The Brontosaurus Is Back by Charles Choi at Scientific American
Bully for Brontosaurus by Greg Laden at Greg Laden's Blog
Brontosaurus Rising by Elif Batuman at The New Yorker
Why Brontosaurus is no longer a dirty word for dinosaur hunters by Stephen Brusatte at The Conversation
Brontosaurus deserves its name, after all by Kate Baggaley at ScienceNews
Brontosaurus dino name is revived by Paul Rincon at BBC News
Brontosaurus Finally Gets Its Name Back by Jennifer Viegas at Discovery News
Brontosaurus Should Be Reinstated As A Distinct Dinosaur, Say Scientists by George Dvorsky at io9

The second big story of the past week is a brilliant smackdown of Food Babe by Science Babe, worth your time and effort to read in its entirety: The 'Food Babe' Blogger Is Full of Shit by Yvette d'Entremont at Gawker:

Vani Hari, AKA the Food Babe, has amassed a loyal following in her Food Babe Army. The recent subject of profiles and interviews in the New York Times, the New York Post and New York Magazine, Hari implores her soldiers to petition food companies to change their formulas. She's also written a bestselling book telling you that you can change your life in 21 days by "breaking free of the hidden toxins in your life." She and her army are out to change the world. She's also utterly full of shit. I am an analytical chemist with a background in forensics and toxicology. Before working full-time as a science writer and public speaker, I worked as a chemistry professor, a toxicology chemist, and in research analyzing pesticides for safety. I now run my own blog, Science Babe, dedicated to debunking pseudoscience that tends to proliferate in the blogosphere. Reading Hari's site, it's rare to come across a single scientific fact. Between her egregious abuse of the word "toxin" anytime there's a chemical she can't pronounce and asserting that everyone who disagrees with her is a paid shill, it's hard to pinpoint her biggest sin. ......

See also additional commentary:  
Food Babe versus the Science Babe: Of Beaver Butts and Bullshit by Michelle Francl-Donnay at The Culture of Chemistry
Get out the popcorn: Science Babe vs. The Food Babe by Orac at Respectful Insolence
Watch scientist challenge the scare-promoting Food Babe by Alison Bernstein & Kavin Senapathy at Genetic Literacy Project 
Why the "Food Babe" enrages scientists by Julia Belluz at Vox
My Problem With Food Babe's Message by Cheryl Wischhover at Elle
Evolution of Food Babe: From misguided consumer advocate to crude bully by Kavin Senapathy at Genetic Literacy Project
Countering the assault on science by Editorial Board at Montreal Gazette

  

'Natural' Doesn't Always Mean Good, Part One and 'Natural' Doesn't Always Mean Good, Part Two and 'Natural' Doesn't Always Mean Good, Epilog by David Ropeik at :

.....This anthropocentric arrogance, and hypocrisy, that we are part of Nature, but that we are separate from Nature, is necessary for the central conceit of classical environmentalism; that humans and our special powers and our modern technologies and products and progress have despoiled Nature, ruined Nature, and the solution is, as Joni Mitchell wrote, to “turn the bombers into butterflies” and “get ourselves back to The Garden” — the idealized Garden of Eden — the pre-human ideal of Nature, the way IT was meant to be until WE came along and mucked things up. To believe that requires you to separate humans from nature. You have to believe that we are behaving unnaturally. You have to reject the obvious truth that humans are just one species, doing only what every other species naturally does, using every available tool and skill and instinct to survive, the most universal natural imperative of all. Only by denying this inescapable biological truth and separating humans from Nature can classical environmentalism set up the hero — Nature — and the villain — Us, a threat so powerful that the fate of all things is in our hands......

Defending Darwin by James Krupa at Orion Magazine:

I’M OFTEN ASKED what I do for a living. My answer, that I am a professor at the University of Kentucky, inevitably prompts a second question: “What do you teach?” Responding to such a question should be easy and invite polite conversation, but I usually brace for a negative reaction. At least half the time the person flinches with disapproval when I answer “evolution,” and often the conversation simply terminates once the “e-word” has been spoken. Occasionally, someone will retort: “But there is no evidence for evolution.” Or insist: “It’s just a theory, so why teach it?”......

NYC Has So Many Coyotes Living There, They've Started Going to Bars by Samantha Larson at Smithsonian:

So a coyote walks onto a bar … This is not the start of a joke. A coyote was actually found on top of a Long Island bar on Tuesday. And it turns out this is not as unexpected of an occurrence as one might think. In recent years, the eastern coyotes have started roaming outside their historical habitat and into a new one—the urban jungle....

Bombing Range Is National Example for Wildlife Conservation by Carlton Ward at Florida Wildlife Corridor:

.......Nationwide, more than 300 federally listed threatened or endangered species inhabit military lands and waters—more than are found throughout the entire national park system, which has nearly three times more land. In Kansas, the U.S. Army’s Fort Riley shelters the nation’s largest remaining native tallgrass prairie, habitat for imperiled grassland birds such as the dickcissel and Henslow’s and grasshopper sparrows. In the southeast, more than a third of all remaining pairs of the critically endangered red-cockaded woodpecker are found on four military installations: Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Stewart and Fort Benning in Georgia, and Eglin Air Force Base in Florida........

Your baby is doing little physics experiments all the time, according to a new study by Rachel Feltman at Speaking of Science:

When an infant sees an object behave in a surprising way, she does everything she can to learn more about its mysteries, and the initial surprise ends up helping her learn. A new study suggests that a baby can identify an unusual object as being more worthwhile than a typical one, and she can run simple "experiments" on it to help her understand it. So your baby is basically a tiny scientific genius, which is worth remembering the next time she coats the walls in spaghetti. She's probably just doing science, dad.....

Aliens Are Enormous, Science Suggests by Douglas Main at Newsweek:

Aliens, if they exist, are likely huge. At least that’s the conclusion of a new paper by cosmologist Fergus Simpson, who has estimated that the average weight of intelligent extraterrestrials would be 650 pounds (300 kilograms) or more. ET would have paled in comparison to these interstellar behemoths. The argument relies on a mathematical model that assumes organisms on other planets obey the same laws of conservation of energy that we see here on Earth—namely, that larger animals need more resources and expend more energy, and thus are less abundant. There are many small ants, for example, but far fewer whales or elephants.....

The science of why you really should listen to science and experts by Chris Mooney at WaPo:

It’s no secret that Americans have trouble with scientific authority. We are, after all, a country nearly half composed of creationists who think humans have been around for only 10,000 years or less. And experts don’t just suffer at the hands of religious and political ideologues — they also get flak from their own presumed academic allies. A group of scholars sometimes dubbed “postmodernists” — no longer trendy, but they were in the 1990s — has delighted in pointing out that scientific experts themselves nourish all kinds of biases, and can be quite closed-minded in their own way. But just as it was once academically fashionable to dis experts, the worm is now turning, and many are now standing up for them again. And to that trend, we can now add empirical evidence in experts’ favor, thanks to a fascinating new study out by Yale law professor and science communication researcher Dan Kahan and a team of researchers and legal scholars (including one judge).....

Fields of Toxic Pesticides Surround the Schools of Ventura County—Are They Poisoning the Students? by Liza Gross at The Nation:

........If the concentrated use of pesticides near predominantly Latino communities seems unfair, some have argued that it’s also illegal. Parents of students at Rio Mesa High School first raised that question sixteen years ago, after the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization, reported in 1998 that thousands of pounds of the fumigant methyl bromide were routinely applied within close range of California schools. Methyl bromide, a potent neurotoxic agent that can cause involuntary twitching, neurodegeneration and even death, is applied to fields before planting to wipe out pests and soil diseases and for decades was strawberry growers’ preferred fumigant. In the EWG study, Rio Mesa, with 2,169 students at the time, ranked second statewide when it came to methyl bromide use within a mile and a half of a school. The top-ranked position was held by an elementary school in Oxnard.......

Giant pandas meet in the forest for secret panda parties by Jason G. Goldman at Earth Touch:

The giant panda has always been an elusive creature. Even the handful of pandas that live in zoos and sanctuaries lead quite mysterious lives … so mysterious, in fact, that panda caretakers have quite a difficult time even coaxing them to mate. What we do know about wild pandas is that they spend most of their days alone slowly munching on bamboo. Because there's so little nutrition in the bamboo plant compared with what's in fruit or meat, they need to eat a lot of it. Males eat as much as seven to nine kilograms of the stuff, chewing and chewing and chewing for up to 14 hours each day.....

The next three posts go together:
Top 10 popular chemistry books for the general reader by Ashutosh Jogalekar at The Curious Wavefunction:

........But as usual, the other big limitation of the list is that it contains no chemistry books. This wouldn't be the first time a popular science list has excluded chemistry - chemistry is the black sheep of the sciences when it comes to popular writing, even though modern life would be unimaginable without it, as would the puzzle of the origin of life. Given Weinberg's physics background this is somewhat understandable and it's his personal list after all. However I thought I would add my two cents to the discussion by offering my own modest list of chemical titles which I think would delight and inform the general reader, along with some biomedical research sprinkled in. Feel free to add your own in the comments........

Recommended Science Books For Non-Scientists by Chad Orzel at Forbes:

Steven Weinberg is hawking a book about the history of science these days, and as part of the publicity effort for that, has produced a list of 13 books for non-scientists, with an accompanying essay on the history of science writing. I haven’t read Weinberg’s book, but my impression from the various excerpts and editorials I’ve read is that as a dabbler in history of science, he’s very much in the Whig history mode, and I take kind of a dim view of that. It’s a variant of the same argument I railed against last week– that science is an unnatural and recent development– and I don’t like it any better from a Nobel-winning physicist.....

We need new models of popular physics communication by Ashutosh Jogalekar at The Curious Wavefunction:

.........This little tour of the myriad faces of popular physics - physics as poetry, physics as drama, physics as fiction, physics as comic characters - brings out the sheer diversity of incarnations that the story of physics and its practitioners can adopt when being narrated to a wide audience. Together they speak to the nature of physics as something real done by real human beings. The image of popular physics as a set of explanations of the wonders of the cosmos communicated through explanatory writing is a valid one, but there is so much to be gained by embedding this image amidst a kaleidoscopic variety of other forms of science communication. It's something we can all look forward to.......

Believe it or not, "learning styles" don't exist by Simon Oxenham at Neurobonkers:

Earlier this week on this blog we looked at Chris Jarrett's lecture on neuromyths. One of those myths was the belief held by a shocking 93% of British teachers that we learn better if taught through the medium we personally prefer. As this false belief is so pervasive that it seems nearly everyone wrongly believes it, I thought I'd go a little further and post professor Daniel Willingham's excellent explanation of why learning styles don't exist....

 

The Myth of the Demon Drug by Bruce Alexander at :

.....Rat Park closed forever more than 30 years ago. In its heyday, it was a big plywood box that was furnished to serve as a happy home for rats in my laboratory at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. My research associates and I used Rat Park to demonstrate that rats living in reasonably normal social housing had much less appetite for morphine than rats living in solitary confinement in tiny wire cages, which most laboratory rats then occupied. In short, we demonstrated that an individual’s life and circumstances have a huge impact on their tendency to develop addiction......

Leaving the academic canyon by John Stanton-Geddes at John Stanton-Geddes blog:

.....Looking back on how I got to where I am, I feel the best analogy is going for a hike in a box canyon. At the start, the canyon is wide, beautiful and seemingly endless. About half-way down it starts to get narrower, but you don’t worry because it’s still beautiful and you’re enjoying yourself. But then, you get to the end, and the only way out is a steep climb to the top.I got to the end of the canyon, and I could see the path out. I even think I could have climbed there. But I’d had a good long hike, and surprisingly, I found a side canyon. Climbing out was no longer the only, or even the best, way to continue.....

The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things by Jay Cassano at Fast Company Exist:

Most people are in the pursuit of happiness. There are economists who think happiness is the best indicator of the health of a society. We know that money can make you happier, though after your basic needs are met, it doesn't make you that much happier. But one of the biggest questions is how to allocate our money, which is (for most of us) a limited resource.......

Your Pet Rabbit Hates You by Esther Inglis-Arkell at io9:

........Certain animals are prone go into a trance. They lie on their back, they curl up their limbs, and they go still. It's called many things: tonic immobility, feigned death, hypnosis, playing possum, or trance. Some pet owners call it adorable. They notice that, when they come home they can pick up their rabbit, put it on its back, hold it for a little while, and it will go still while they pet it. This doesn't happen for all rabbits. Some just scramble off people's laps and run away. So if a rabbit stays to be petted, it must love getting cuddled like that!......

Are poor countries destined to struggle with conservation? by Jason G. Goldman at Conservation:

Conservation is a human endeavor. It seems like an obvious statement, but too often it seems we forget that scientific pursuits are inextricably linked to the nuances of human behavior and cognition, whether conspicuous or veiled. Humans are biased creatures, and if we don’t pay attention to those biases we risk losing out on possible conservation gains.....

 

3-D Scans Reveal Caterpillars Turning Into Butterflies by Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science:

The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly is one of the most exquisite in the natural world. Within the chrysalis, an inching, cylindrical eating machine remakes itself into a beautiful flying creature that drinks through a straw.....

Study Report, Study Reality, and the Gap Between by Hilda Bastian at Absolutely Maybe:

We take mental shortcuts about research reports. “I read a study,” we say. We don’t only talk about them as though they are the study – we tend to think of them that way, too. And that’s risky. Even the simplest study is a complex collection of thinking and activities. You can’t capture it all, even when the methodology is documenting your thinking.....

Read these two together:

Carbon Capture by Jonathan Franzen at The New Yorker and We Are Still Arguing About Jonathan Franzen by Michelle Nijhuis and Judith Lewis Mernit at The Last Word On Nothing:

Since Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Carbon Capture” went live on the New Yorker’s website last week, environmentalists and the journalists who write about them haven’t been able to stop bickering about it. Whether Franzen was wrong-headed or visionary, dumb or prophetic, he clearly touched a nerve when he asked, “Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?” Here, Michelle and guest poster Judith Lewis Mernit, who typically agree about everything from Shakespeare to the unifying power of Benedict Cumberbatch, dive into the fray—on opposite sides. Pray their friendship endures.....

When Photographers Are Neuroscientists by Jonathon Keats at Nautilus:

in the summer of 1867 American photographer Carleton Watkins hauled a mammoth wooden camera through the wilderness of Oregon, taking pictures of the mountains. To prepare each negative, he poured noxious chemicals onto a glass plate the size of a windowpane and exposed it while still wet, developing it on the spot. Even then, his work was not complete. Because wet-plate emulsions are disproportionately sensitive to blue light, his skies were overexposed, utterly devoid of clouds. Back in his San Francisco studio, Watkins manipulated his photos to resemble the landscapes he’d witnessed. His finished prints were composites, embellished with a separate set of cloud-filled negatives.....

The Scientific Problem That Must Be Experienced by Philip Ball at Nautilus:

........You get the point: turbulence, a ubiquitous and eminently practical problem in the real world, is frighteningly hard to understand. Nearly a century after Heisenberg, scientists are still trying to figure it out. And it’s still a cutting-edge problem: Russian mathematician Yakov Sinai won the 2014 Abel Prize for mathematics—often seen as the Nobel of math—partly for his work on turbulence and chaotic flow. Yet I propose that to fully articulate and understand turbulence we need to add the intuitive, contemplative perspective of art to the detailed analysis of science. There is a long-standing dialogue between art and science on this elusive problem. It is no coincidence the science of turbulence has often been forced to fall back on qualitative, descriptive accounts, while art that celebrates turbulence sometimes resembles a quasi-scientific gathering of data and idealization of form: a search for underlying patterns and regularities......

Groups and Gossip Drove the Evolution of Human Nature by Eric Michael Johnson at Slate:

Black-and-white colobus monkeys scrambled through the branches of Congo’s Ituri Forest in 1957 as a small band of Mbuti hunters wound cautiously through the undergrowth, joined by anthropologist Colin Turnbull. The Mbuti are pygmies, about 4 feet tall, but they are powerful and tough. Any one of them could take down an elephant with only a short-handled spear. Recent genetic evidence suggests that pygmies have lived in this region for about 60,000 years. But this particular hunt reflected a timeless ethical conflict for our species, and one that has special relevance for contemporary American society.....

Decoding Plato: I met with the world’s leading Atlantologist to separate fact from myth. by Mark Adams at Slate:

Stavros Papamarinopoulos could’ve been a character in a John le Carré novel. He had arranged for us to meet at an empty suite of offices belonging to his economist friend in the unfashionable port city of Patras. This had required me to ride a bus for four hours from Athens. Papamarinopoulos is a professor of geophysics at the University of Patras. He is also the world’s most respected Atlantis expert......

How Articles Get Noticed and Advance the Scientific Conversation by Victoria Costello at The Official PLOS Blog:

The good news is you’ve published your manuscript! The bad news? With two million other new research articles likely to be published this year, you face steep competition for readers, downloads, citations and media attention — even if only 10% of those two million papers are in your discipline. So, how can you get your paper noticed and advance the scientific conversation? ...

Are Adolescents Really Risk-Takers? Most Adults Say Yes, But the Science is Starting to Say No by Agnieszka Tymula and Paul Glimcher at Frontiers for Young Minds:

Most adults firmly believe that as kids reach their teens, they start to take crazy risks that get them in trouble. Motivated to protect teenagers, adults impose age limits on what they consider to be really dangerous activities. But do teenagers simply love taking all risks much more than adults? Our research suggests otherwise. When the risks are vague, adolescents indeed are very optimistic about their odds and much more likely to take risks than adults. However, teenagers who understand the risks associated with a decision are way more conservative in their behavior than people of their parent’s or even grandparent’s age. Our research suggests that adults should probably focus more energy on trying to educate adolescents about risks than on limiting them....

 

Blue Zones: What the Longest-Lived People Eat (Hint: It’s Not Steak Dinners) by Patrick Mustain at Food Matters:

......Most people living in the Blue Zones enjoy physical activity incorporated naturally into their daily lives (like gardening or walking); a sense of purpose (like caring for grandchildren or civic volunteering); low stress levels and a slower pace of life; strong family and community connections; and a diet characterized by moderate caloric intake, mostly from plant sources.......

Better Call Science: Can People Be Allergic to Electricity? by Kyle Hill at Nerdist:

Before Jimmy McGill can enter his brother Chuck’s house, he has to leave his phone, his car keys, and any other electronic devices in Chuck’s mailbox. The dark, lifeless property has been stripped of anything that can produce electromagnetic (EM) radiation – light bulbs, appliances, and whatever Jimmy could plug a dying phone into. The once robust lawyer of HHM needs this blackout because of his “condition.” But like any lawyer would respect, a look at the evidence changes his case.....

Evolving Alaskan habitats: how global warming may disrupt the prey-predator balance by Jonathan Trinastic at Goodnight Earth:

The polar bear scrambling onto a small piece of floating ice is the emotional icon of global warming. We know that dramatic loss of sea ice is threatening their habitat and will likely reduce their population and change their distribution. But what about other species in the northern climates and Arctic? Is global warming dangerous for all animals or will some see a survival advantage?....

It’s all hype: Few commercial weight-loss programs are effective by Dr. Jekyll at Lunatic Laboratories:

In a bid to help physicians guide obese and overweight patients who want to try a commercial weight-loss program, a team of Johns Hopkins researchers reviewed 4,200 studies for solid evidence of their effectiveness but concluded only a few dozen of the studies met the scientific gold standard of reliability.....

Humans Have Previously Undiscovered ‘Beige Fat' by Alexandra Ossola at Popular Science:

Having the right amount of body fat can be healthy, but most Americans have too much of it. A team of researchers led by a biologist at the University of California San Francisco has been investigating the cellular composition of this fat in order to engineer fat-burning drugs in the future that might help curb the obesity epidemic. The study was published recently in Nature Medicine....

Why do we have allergies? by Carl Zimmer at Ars Technica:

........One summer afternoon when I was 12, I ran into an overgrown field near a friend’s house and kicked a hornet nest the size of a football. An angry squadron of insects clamped on to my leg; their stings felt like scorching needles. I swatted the hornets away and ran for help, but within minutes I realized something else was happening. A constellation of pink stars appeared around the stings. The hives swelled, and new ones began appearing farther up my legs. I was having an allergic reaction.......

A Feathery Hedgehog by Thayer Walker at Bird Watch:

To those who would contend evolution a humorless process, see Exhibit A: the kiwi. Round and squat, flightless and half-blind, this strange bird has become a cultural icon despite—or perhaps due to—its lack of physical elegance....

Humans have innate ability to assess probability, but odds are we’re a bit off by Diana Gitig at Genetic Literacy Project:

Do you know someone who plays the lottery religiously? I knew a woman who would carefully track the local news–when a lottery win was announced nearby, she’d perk up immediately. She had to buy a ticket from the winning store, convinced that one win made another more likely. Of course, she’s wrong, the odds of winning the lottery are catastrophically low and they don’t change based on who wins where. But her behavior, and her flawed perception of statistical reality, belies a deeply rooted ability to intuitively asses probability.....

Fluorescent proteins light up science by making the invisible visible by Marc Zimmer at The Conversation:

When you look up at the blue sky, where are the stars that you see at night? They’re there but we can’t see them. A firefly flitting across a field is invisible to us during the day, but at night we can easily spot its flashes. Similarly, proteins, viruses, parasites and bacteria inside living cells can’t be seen by the naked eye under normal conditions. But a technique using a fluorescent protein can light up cells' molecular machinations like a microscopic flashlight.....

Earth's 'Alien' Creatures May Reveal Clues About Extraterrestrial Life by Calla Cofield at Space.com:

Animals that survive in some of the most extreme environments on Earth — places once thought to be totally inhospitable — have made scientists think more broadly about where life could exist elsewhere in the universe. How can these tenacious, Earth-bound creatures help space scientists look for life elsewhere in the universe?...

What will happen after people stop ignoring the evidence on climate change by Chris Mooney at WaPo:

On Sunday, Post reporters Tom Hamburger, Joby Warrick and I reported that the conservative-leaning American Legislative Exchange Council is stressing that (in our words) it “does not deny climate change” and has been “overhauling their organization to be more transparent and more welcoming to divergent views.” The story also reports that the Southern Company, a major utility, will cease funding the climate “skeptic” scientist Willie Soon later this year....

How much harm is done by predatory journals? by Zen Faulkes at NeuroDojo:

There is a cottage industry of people who feel the need to show, “There are journals that will publish crap!” And it’s getting tiring. The Scholarly Kitchen did this to Bentham Journals a few years ago, we had the Bohannon “sting” in Science, the angry “Get me off your fucking mailing list” paper. A recent entry into this pageant is a cocoa puffs paper. A new editorial calls predatory journals “publication pollution.” To listen to some of these, you could be forgiven for thinking that publishing a paper in one of these journals is practically academic miscondusct: a career-ending, unrecoverable event.....

Our literature isn’t a big pile of facts by Stephen Heard at Scientist Sees Squirrel:

I wrote recently about the reproducibility “crisis” and its connection to the history of our Methods, and some discussion of that post prompted me to think about another angle on reproducibility. That angle: is our literature a big pile of facts? And why might we think so, and why does it matter?....

The obnoxiously loud sounds of glaciers melting by Kim Martini at Deep Sea News:

No matter where you go in the ocean, there will always be noise. Rain, waves, wind, ice, whales, boats, kraken screams, etc. All these processes have specific noises associated with them, creating an ever present background rumbling in the ocean. But it’s the constant snap, crackle and pop of melting glaciers that turns fjords from the sound equivalent of your local library into happy hour at the bar on Friday night.....

Why Don't Animals Get Schizophrenia (and How Come We Do)? by Bret Stetka at Mind Matters:

Many of us have known a dog on Prozac. We've also witnessed the eye rolls that come with canine psychiatry. Doting pet owners—myself included—ascribe all sorts of questionable psychological ills to our pawed companions. But the science does suggest that numerous non-human species suffer from psychiatric symptoms. Birds obsess; horses on occasion get pathologically compulsive; dolphins and whales—especially those in captivity—self-mutilate. And that thing when your dog woefully watches you pull out of the driveway from the window—that might be DSM-certified separation anxiety. "Every animal with a mind has the capacity to lose hold of it from time to time" wrote science historian and author Dr. Laurel Braitman in "Animal Madness."....

BOLD Assumptions: Why Brain Scans Are Not Always What They Seem by Moheb Costandi at Braindecoder:

In 2009, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara performed a curious experiment. In many ways, it was routine — they placed a subject in the brain scanner, displayed some images, and monitored how the subject's brain responded. The measured brain activity showed up on the scans as red hot spots, like many other neuroimaging studies. Except that this time, the subject was an Atlantic salmon, and it was dead. ....

The Monty Hall Evolver by Bjørn Østman at Pleiotropy:

........Recently I have introduced several people to the Monty Hall problem - always a great party trick. And again, almost everyone instantly arrives at 50/50, and are as adamant that this is the correct solution as the next guy. So I decided to finally write the code to do it, but made two stipulations: 1) the code must mirror the way the problem is told as closely as possible. This will not be the most efficient code to write or the fastest to execute, but will hopefully be easy for readers to see through, so to speak. And 2) rather than just playing the game many times, I will let a population of individuals play it and compete with each other for a chance to reproduce (aka evolution).......

Scientist gains humility from chimpanzee research by hannahobrown at The Renaissance Woman:

.......While I was doing field research for my PhD thesis, I wrote a blog series for the Expeditions Blog section of Scientific American. My mission was two-fold: First, I wanted to convey to readers what it’s like to do a field study of chimpanzees, especially those living in such a compromised habitat. Second, I wanted to use my experiences as a gateway to discuss chimpanzees in the contexts of science and conservation. With that in mind, I typically used a personal experience as a gateway for writing about a particular topic I felt readers might be interested in. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback on the blog series. I have enjoyed the opportunity to introduce other scientists and members of the general public to my chimpanzee study population. I’ve also discovered the joy of blogging and hope to do more of it in the future......

Amy Robinson Is Her Own Best Laboratory by Charlotte Wilder at Boston.com:

.....The handwriting on the left side looked a little shaky, but it was still small and neat, a slightly juvenile version of the right side’s ordered and measured letters. She’s in the middle of a project to map out her notebooks and visualize the data of her own thoughts and discoveries......

The proper terminology to use when writing about illness by Merrill Perlman at Columbia Journalism Review:

Common phrases often become so, um, common that we repeat them even when they are not accurate or have the potential to offend. We’ve discussed why “gyp,” “Indian giver,” “schmuck,” and the like can be considered offensive, and Native Americans continue to battle to have the offensive word “squaw” removed from place names. Even the government had “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s, seeking to deport Mexicans who came into the United States illegally. That would not pass muster today. ....

How scientists are annotating climate reporting by Laura Dattaro at Columbia Journalism Review:

When melting ice disappears from the arctic, it exposes more of the ocean’s dark surface, which absorbs the sun’s warming rays. The water heats up and more ice melts, the cause and effect feeding each other in a example of a phenomenon known as climate feedback. It’s an appropriate name for a group that’s attempting to slow some of the runaway misinformation about climate change, by doing what scientists do with their published work: review it. To achieve this, Climate Feedback—less an organization at this point than an amorphous gathering of climate scientists, oceanographers, and atmosperic physicists—is making use of a browser plugin from the nonprofit Hypothes.is to annotate climate journalism on the Web. Readers with the plugin, or with a link created through it, can read an article while simultaneously reading comments and citations from a cadre of experts. Click on the headline, and you’ll see an overall rating, based on the article’s accuracy, fairness, and adherence to evidence.....

How a Snowflake Turns Into an Avalanche by Yvonne Bang at Nautilus:

It was just a regular day at the Yellowstone Club in Montana, as far as the weather was concerned. No heavy snowfall or vicious winds were preventing snow mechanics engineer David Walters and five of his colleagues from doing their field work. Walters’ academic advisor had even chosen to do some skiing nearby. But just as the team were about to leave, Walters heard a cry. An avalanche had begun to tumble down around his advisor, Daniel Miller....

A Grand Theory of Wrinkles by Sarah Lewin at Quanta magazine:

Pedro Reis, an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had long been interested in how things wrinkle. For example, a dimpled surface like that of a golf ball offers less air resistance than a smooth sphere. If a flying object could dimple or wrinkle on command, Reis thought, it could alter its own aerodynamics midflight......

Naked Sleep Is Better Sleep by Allison Brager at Fitness Cult Chronicles:

You wouldn't believe the questions I get when people find out that I study sleep for a living. There is one sleep related question in particular that has popped up numerous times over the past six months - "Is it better to sleep naked?". Some people ask because they want affirmation that their sleeping habits are socially (and biologically) acceptable while others have heard anecdotal evidence that it helps performance . While I don't have any answers regarding the social implications for ditching your pajamas, I can address the biological argument for sleeping naked. Yes, it is true. Sleeping naked is better, especially for an athlete in training.....

Every year this tiny bird migrates across the Atlantic for 3 days without stopping by Jason Goldman at Earth Touch:

Move over monarch butterfly, humpback whale and Serengeti wildebeest. The new most epic of migratory animals is the humble blackpoll warbler (Setophaga striata). The blackpoll is a very small songbird, weighing just a scant 12 grams. That's only slightly more than the mass of a new pencil (10 grams) and slightly less than the weight of an empty soda can (15 grams). The point is it's a tiny, tiny bird. You could probably knock it over just by blowing on it. This bird impresses nobody. ...

16 types of useful predictions by Julia Galef at Less Wrong:

How often do you make predictions (either about future events, or about information that you don't yet have)? If you're a regular Less Wrong reader you're probably familiar with the idea that you should make your beliefs pay rent by saying, "Here's what I expect to see if my belief is correct, and here's how confident I am," and that you should then update your beliefs accordingly, depending on how your predictions turn out.....

Change Your Stories, Change Your Reality by Paula Wood at This View of Life:

I am a User Experience Designer. My job is to understand the goals of the users of a system (in my case software), the elements of what might contribute to those users’ satisfaction, and then to suggest design solutions which enhance the usability and enjoyment of said system. All systems have design problems and design solutions, not just software, and all systems have design patterns that can be optimized. This being my profession, I started looking at our culture from a similar perspective. I found it to be permeated with negative stories, with zero-sum game thinking in which one person’s gain means another person’s loss. There are lots of stories of winners and losers, us versus them, of this group taking that group’s resources. So much polarization exists in our political system and in our culture. Issues of civil and women’s rights seem to be moving backwards. How did this come to be? How can we change it, when it all seems so entrenched?....

Chimps and Humans are Less Similar than We Thought by Rob Dunn at Your Wild Life:

Mary Claire King, as much as any individual scholar, has changed how we think about what it means to be human. She did so using genetics as a lens through which to see what was otherwise invisible. In her hands this lens offered many insights. It was King who first identified a key gene in breast cancer. It was King who helped to identity the missing dead in Argentina in the 1980s. It would also be King who, in 1975, first compare the genetic similarity of humans and chimpanzees. It was known chimpanzees and humans were similar, kin, but just how similar? One could only really guess. And to compare a chimpanzee and a human, one hunched, one upright, one furry, one relatively bald, one able to build cities, write, read and make music, one not, it seemed clear that a fair number of differences needed to be accounted for.....

In Brief and Images:

Interactive video graphic: Cool tool to understand the Periodic Table by Periodic Videos at Genetic Literacy Project:

The periodic table is the most important reference document in chemistry. It arranges all the known elements from left to right and top to bottom in order of increasing atomic number (number of protons in the nucleus), electron configurations and recurring chemical properties. Elements are presented in order of increasing atomic number, which is typically listed with the chemical symbol in each box......

'Carolina butcher' walked on hind legs, terrorized early mammals in Late Triassic by Michael Tenneson at ScienceShot:

When North Carolina was a wet, tropical swamp some 231 million years ago, the top of the food chain was occupied by a nearly 3-meter-tall crocodilian ancestor that walked on its hind legs and ate the relatives of early mammals, say paleontologists writing on 19 March in Scientific Reports. The researchers, from North Carolina State (NC State) University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, both in Raleigh, say the newly analyzed fossil—parts of a skull, spine, and upper forelimb found in central North Carolina—represents one of the earliest examples of crocodylomorphs, a group of crocodilelike animals who ruled Earth in the Late Triassic.......

Spider speed increases as temperature rises by David Shultz at ScienceShot:

As unnerving as it may be for some, the scuttling movement of tarantulas is a rather impressive feat. All eight of the animal’s hairy appendages are controlled not by muscles, but by a hydraulic fluid called hemolymph, which flows through the legs and causes them to flex and extend. While this system is simpler and lighter than muscled movement, it is also more sensitive to temperature changes. This could have direct implications for the speed of the skittering critters and for robots designed to mimic their movement, researchers write in The Journal of Experimental Biology. In the new study, they tested Texas brown tarantulas' (Aphonopelma hentzi) speeds across a variety of temperatures. The hotter the temperature, the faster the spiders sprinted. Speeds at the highest end of the tested range—40°C—were 2.5 times faster than speeds at the lowest end of the range—15°C. The researchers found that the difference was caused simply by faster stride frequency. .....

Sloths' fur provides a feast for hungry birds by Emily Conover at ScienceShot:

While the three-toed sloth dines on leaves, other animals dine on the sloth. The sloth's fur is chock-full of moths (as well as other insects, algae, and fungi), which spend much of their lives on its back—using it like a matchmaking service to help them find mates, and laying their eggs in the sloth's poop, which nourishes their larvae. Now scientists report this month in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment that hungry brown jays feast on this moving buffet of insects (as seen in this video). But is the brown jay friend or foe of the sloth?....

Edwardsiella andrillae: The Icy Anemone by at Strange Animals:

Meet Edwardsiella andrillae, a recently discovered species of sea anemone that lives anchored to the underside of sea ice offshore of Antarctica. The species was discovered in December 2010 during a test run of an undersea robot by a research team working for the Antarctic Geological Drilling (ANDRILL) Program*.....

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