............In the 1920s and 1930s, as drawing was eradicated from public school programs, people cheered. No more long, drawn-out (sorry for the pun) lessons on form, accuracy and detail. The product could be prepared in advance, and students would not waste class time practicing outdated drawing techniques. What a mistake. The powers-that-be failed to examine the value of the drawing process. This was my realization as I created a new kind of biology class, one that incorporated illustration...........Venus & Aesculapius: The Gloves of Love by Rebecca Kreston at Body Horrors:
Advancements in the medical sciences follow a well-trod path: observation of a problem, reasoned hypothesis and experimentation, and implementation of a solution. This course is governed by logic and, occasionally, reinforced by unorthodox thinking with the ultimate goal of improving the viability of man. An exception to this rule is the invention of the rubber glove. One of the most important breakthroughs in the practice of medicine was born not of careful problem-solving and the scientific process, but of a romantic gesture, a clinical schoolboy’s crush, an event which one observer described as “Venus [coming] to the aid of Aesculapius.”........Why are freedom and technological progress considered mutually exclusive? by Jessica Bodford at Let's talk about cyberpsychology:
.........The world is now more connected than ever before. Just two weeks ago, more than 1 billion people logged onto Facebook in a single day. Almost a quarter of the world is now on a single social media site that traverses cultural and geographic boundaries. The widening reach of global cell and Internet service is roping into “the grid” new populations from previously unconnected countries. Yes, technological progress is advancing at a near exponential rate, and is paving the way for widespread connection to a degree that not even Marshall McLuhan could have foreseen.......It’s true that this ever-widening connection across people, industries, and societies has made the spread of information easier — and cheaper — than ever before. Not only has storage cost followed an exponential decline since the 1980s — indeed, dropping from approximately $1 million per GB in 1980 to less than $0.10 in 2010 — but the kinds of data being stored have grown more plentiful, more colorful, and more personal..........When Learning is Infectious – A Placebo Effect Beyond Belief by Christina Lebonville at Scilogs Guest Blog:
Many things you might encounter can alter how your immune system works: alcohol, stress, opiates, allergy medicine and even hormones. The list may be astronomically greater than previously thought due to a very strange phenomenon. In the 1970’s, researchers Robert Ader and Nicholas Cohen were studying rats’ preferences for sweetened water at the University of Rochester. Like humans, rats like sugary drinks. Also like humans, if you change the drinking experience, rats quickly learn to dislike sweet drinks (think back to a rough night with a margarita or five). Researchers simulated a “bad time” by giving rats injections of a nauseating drug after they drank. Little did they know that they were about to demonstrate how our immune system monitors our experiences..........I thought all anti-vaxxers were idiots. Then I married one. by Adam Mongrain at Vox:
.............During my early 20s, I lived in the skeptic blogosphere, a mid-2000s constellation of internet communities theoretically organized around highly charismatic bloggers, vloggers, and other intellectuals. In practice, however, these groups were centered on a more basic principle: hostility toward anyone and anything it deemed "irrational." It was then and is still now a very white, male, and defensive place. It was there that I developed a deep antipathy toward the anti-vaccination movement. It wasn't that I knew they were wrong about vaccines. It was more than that. I believed myself intellectually and morally superior to those people, and I reinforced that belief each time I left a comment or watched a vlog or republished a snarky article on the subject. I mastered a face, a kind of appalled, disapproving look for any time anybody even broached the subject of vaccine skepticism. Then I married an anti-vaxxer..........
Mitochondria are invading your genome! by Larry Moran at Sandwalk:
Eukaryotes are the descendants of a fusion event where a primitive archaebacterium fused with a primitive alphaproteobacterium. Over time, the genome of the alphaproteobacterium became reduced as many of its genes were transferred to the genome of the other partner. Today, the remnant of the alphaproteobacterium is the mitochondrion and the remnant of the archaebacterium has become the nucleus.......
At the time of the American Revolution, British military power surpassed that of any western nation. Yet, the son of a Connecticut farmer, David Bushnell, hoped to prove that creativity and inventiveness might win the day for the colonies. Born in 1740 in a section of Saybrook that is now Westbrook, David Bushnell was the eldest of five children. Still at home and unmarried at age 26, he lost his father and two sisters in a span of three years. His mother quickly remarried, by custom and necessity, and left the farm to David and his younger brother, Ezra. David sold his half of the farm to Ezra and studied to enter Yale College. Although 31-year-old David was much older than other applicants, he was accepted and entered Yale in 1771.........Attention lizards of the future: lay your eggs in shade by Jason G. Goldman at Conservation:
What’s the difference between a lizard and a lizard egg? This isn’t the start to a joke, and the answer could have dire implications for the future of lizards on our planet. The main difference between the two—the difference that will become increasingly important in a warmer (or colder) world—is that lizards can move while their eggs are stuck right where they are until the little lizard babies hatch. Lizards, like other “cold-blooded” ectotherms, do not regulate their own body temperature. They rely instead on their environment to either warm them up or cool them down. Too hot? Find some shade, or nestle down under a few centimeters of dirt. Too cold? Find a nice sunny spot on a warm log or rock and let the sun do all the work for you. Seems simple enough, but lizard embryos can’t do that. Instead, they have to be able to withstand whatever changes in temperature come their way if they’re to survive long enough to become a baby lizard........Your World, Rocked: A good introduction to geology course is actually a course in time. by Julia Turner at Slate:
..............Taking geology actually had a funny side effect for me. I came into the class an avid environmentalist. I was a child of the ’90s. I cared about whales. I recycled. I spent a semester on a farm. I wanted to keep humans from changing and destroying the planet. But geology complicated my understanding of this desire. The planet has been changing for millennia. It’s been destroyed and remade again and again. The temperature used to be different. The continents were in different places. Different creatures roamed the land. The environmentalist instinct to preserve the planet exactly as it is began to seem not altruistic, but selfish. The planet is a tough cookie. This pile of rocks doesn’t need saving. What we were trying to save, it seemed, was the version of the planet that works best for ourselves. And, sure, future generations and all the other species that currently live here. Still a worthy goal, of course. Perhaps an even worthier one, when you consider how unusual and unlikely Earth’s menagerie is. But geology made me think about it in a new way.............Lyme Deaths From Heart Inflammation Likely Worse Than We Thought by Judy Stone at Forbes:
Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections are skyrocketing. In western Pennsylvania, where I work, Lyme increased 25% just between 2013 and 2014, with Butler County having 412 cases and Allegheny County chalking up a record 822 cases last year. And where I vacation, in Maine, the rate of Lyme in 2014 was 240 cases per 100,000, which is more than 20 times the national average, and twice the rate of Butler. Across the country, the CDC now estimates there are ~329,000 cases of Lyme disease each year, tenfold higher than previously thought. Vermont and New Hampshire have the highest incidence.......Life May Have Spread Through the Galaxy Like a Plague by Jesse Emspak at Smithsonian:
.......Panspermia is the theory that the seeds of life somehow came to our planet from another world. The idea is controversial at best—most biologists would tell you that it just pushes the problem back a step, because we still wouldn't know what sparked life in the first place. And so far, there’s little reason to think life on other planets should be anything like what we see on Earth. Now Henry Lin and Abraham Loeb of Harvard University say that if we do see evidence of alien life, the distribution of inhabited planets would be a “smoking gun” for panspermia. According to their model, if life arises on a few planets and spreads through space to others, inhabited planets ought to form a clumpy pattern around the galaxy, with voids between roughly spherical regions. This bubble pattern appears no matter how the distribution happens, whether its aliens traveling by spaceship or comets carrying life’s building blocks. “It’s not that different from an epidemic,” says Lin, an undergraduate with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the study, which was accepted by the Astrophysical Journal. “If there’s a virus, you have a good idea that one of your neighbors will have a virus too. If the Earth is seeding life, or vice versa, there’s a good chance immediate neighbors will also have signs of life.”........
And if that is not enough, more readings for later this weekend:
PHOTO ESSAY: Storefront Displays by Jai Virdi-Dhesi at From the Hands of Quacks
Does Having Kids Age Parents? by Julie Anne Exter at Slate
Constructive Neutral Evolution (CNE) by Larry Moran at Sandwalk
A Life Well Lived by Kausik Datta at In Scientio Veritas
Adult, Autistic and Ignored by ELI GOTTLIEB at NYTimes
Weekend Diversion: Obsession, for cats? by Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang!
Ten Boneheaded Interpretations Of Ancient Skeletons by Kristina Killgrove at Forbes
Interconnected Worldview Traced to Source in The Invention of Nature by Nathan Gelgud at Biographile
What the Evolution of Fire Can Teach Us About Climate Change by Victoria Jaggard at Smithsonian
How Do You Build a Genius? by Melissa Pandika at Ozy
A Weapon from the Soil by Rebecca Kreston at Body Horrors
Can the Chinese Government Get Its People to Like G.M.O.s? by Christina Larson at Elements
Losing our Plants by Jennifer Landin at RedNewtGallery
How a Town in California Is Trying to Survive Without Water by Adam Perez at TIME
New Study: Testosterone Changes the Brain by Rachel E. Gross at Slate
Plodding With My Father by Helen Fields at The Last Word On Nothing
Mammoths in the News by John J. McKay at Mammoth Tales
Arizona’s virgin ant queens could shed light on the predictability of evolution by Viviane Callier at Science
The Extinct Eight: Fossil Versions Of Favorite NCAA Mascots by Shaena Montanari at Forbes
Revisiting Vernor Vinge’s “predictions” for 2025 by Daniel Lemire at Daniel Lemire's blog
1928-1981: Dawn of the robots by Alex Q. Arbuckle at Mashable
You’re Not Actually Bad at Math by Chase Felker at Slate
Don’t Worry, Smart Machines Will Take Us With Them by Stephen Hsu at Nautilus
Jim Lake and the Eocyte tree by Larry Moran at Sandwalk
Mummies know best: the pharaohs giving up their secrets about heart disease by David Kohn at Guardian
Endangered Porpoise Caught in the Web of Illegal Fishing by PRI's Environmental News Magazine
Paul Bloom on "The case against empathy" by Julia Galef at Rationally Speaking Podcast
The truth about genetically modified food by EMMA REYNOLDS at News.com.au
Why Replication Matters by Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed
Birding in a Mexican Nature Reserve by Steven Butler at Ozy
The Guardian view on human genome editing: find, replace – and cure , an Editorial at Comment is free
Woman incapable of feeling pain now feels pain all the time, thanks to childbirth by Olivia Campbell at Speaking of Science
Why ‘GMO-free’ is a marketing ploy you shouldn’t fall for by Rachel Feltman at Speaking of Science
Pig in us: Xenotransplantation and new age of chimeric organs by David Warmflash at Genetic Literacy Project
When Robots Hallucinate: What do Google's trippy neural network-generated images tell us about the human mind? by Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic
In the future, the best chemistry practices will be green by Bruce Watson at Green chemistry
Mammals' nocturnal past shapes sun sensitivity by Christopher A. Emerling at Understanding Evolution
Great PR, Bad Science: Soda Industry Gives Money to U.S. Mayors to Fight Obesity by Patrick Mustain at Food Matters
The Invention of Nature finds science's lost hero by Stephanie Pain at New Scientist
Three trillion trees live on Earth, but there would be twice as many without humans by James Dyke at The Conversation
Dirty farm air may ward off asthma in children by Jocelyn Kaiser at Science
New Paper Supports Proposal to Split Anoles into Eight Genera by Jonathan Losos at Anole Annals
Unhappy thoughts on student projects at SVPCA 2015 by Mike Taylor at Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
How Economists Can Be Just as Irrational as the Rest of Us by NEIL IRWIN at The Upshot
Your Awesome Neighbourhood Herring Gull (And Its Many Cousins) by Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology
High enthusiasm and low r-squared. by Andrew Hendry at Eco-evolutionary dynamics
Where have the big ideas gone? by Joern Fischer at Ideas for Sustainability
Computer science: Enchantress of abstraction by Richard Holmes at Nature
Schools should hand out diplomas, not disorders by ALAN SHUSTERMAN at Newsday
'NeuroTribes' Examines The History — And Myths — Of The Autism Spectrum by NPR Health at Shots - Health News
5 Reasons to Read the Autism Book Everyone’s Talking About by Jamie Pacton at Parents
Health effects of poor sleep can spread through body by Guy Dixon at The Globe and Mail
Previously in this series:
FieldNotes: a view to spotted horses in the morning
FieldNotes: The Word For World is Blue (or is it Gold?)
FieldNotes: Golden Mean, polite middle-ground, and optimal numbers of legs.
FieldNotes: speeding up and slowing down time
FieldNotes: from Captain Ahab to Jeff Goldblum, chasing the giants
FieldNotes: this is not your grandparents' neuroscience!
FieldNotes: Brontosaurus in, Food Babe out.
FieldNotes: Rogue Microwave Ovens Call Home
FieldNotes: Let the sleeping apes lie
FieldNotes: one thing leads to another leads to another
FieldNotes: Seductive Allure of Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations
FieldNotes: do African horses do flehmen at the sight of Derby hats?
FieldNotes: How The Bird Got Its Beak
FieldNotes: When Snakes Had Legs...
FieldNotes: Only before the bicameral mind evolved could people fall for Bohannon's cheap stunts
FieldNotes: Water, fire, origin of life, origin of cooking.
FieldNotes: Jurassic World, and other strange animals...
FieldNotes: Honey Badger Don’t Care!
FieldNotes: Hallucigenia is back on its head again.
FieldNotes: Poisonous and grieving quail, reclusive rail, and giants!
FieldNotes: When Snark was a Boojum
FieldNotes: In a grip of the legs of a snake
FieldNotes: Cecil and grief
FieldNotes: Science Notes and high school start times
FieldNotes: Earthly Octopus Genome, and Elephant Tracking
FieldNotes: Amplituhedron and the dissection of cats
FieldNotes: Oliver Sacks, and irreproducible psychology
Images:
Turtle Skeleton by Anna Dulaney, NCSU.
Bushnell’s American turtle – Library of Congress