the hamburger incident, or how a tick bite made me allergic to meat

Finally I’ve had a chance to dig into the science of tick-induced meat allergy!  Go read about it on Discover’s website.

behind the scenes on a crazy first two days

Thursday was my first official day as an exhibit developer at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences.  I’m joining an amazing crew of 150+ folks who keep the place running, a rowdy group that includes old friends from the Morehead Planetarium and not a few Science Online tweeps.  All hands were on deck my first two days to open the brand spanking new Nature Research Center last night for a fancy black-tie gala (no, I didn’t get to go, but the reporter below did).

There are lots of sneak-peek videos inside the Nature Research Center on WRAL if you’re curious (click on the image to watch the video). I picked the one above because it aired on the 5:30 news last night, and my dad called to tell me I’m in it, sort of (thanks dad). I walk by at about 2:15, in a pink shirt and a huge hurry.

Had you seen the NRC on Thursday morning when I started, you would have laughed.  The construction folks were still tinkering in places; interactives cut off the ends of sentences; there were empty glass cases and empty metal stands in several exhibits; dust and fingerprints were everywhere.  It’s a testament to how incredible the staff is that it did open, and not only did it open, it opened looking absolutely fabulous and 98% complete. If it can go from where it was Thursday morning to where it was last night, it’s going to look amazing for its public opening next Friday.

You might could guess that a first day on the job the day before a black-tie gala in a brand new museum building would be a crazy one.  It’s certainly true — I barely sat down between 9 am and 6:15pm, and the second day was even busier — but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  Exhibit development is a bit of a new thing for me, and though I’ll be focusing on the writing side of development (the interactives with the cut-off sentences are part of my job), knowing how exhibits are built and installed is a valuable piece of the puzzle.

To give you an idea, the final pieces of installation are a bit like shop class, a bit like art class, and a bit like flower arranging.  Some things are heavy, some things are fragile, and nearly everything’s expensive, one of a kind, and must go up by tonight!  I did everything from printing and cutting heavy plastic sheets for signs to pinning dog pacemakers and horseshoe crabs to the side of a giant wood-and-fabric wedding cake inside a glass case.  I cleaned a lot of dust and fingerprints from incredibly awkward places, helped artfully hang glass spheres inside a display, and applied stickers smaller than my pinkie fingernail to plexiglass meteorite stands using a sewing pin to make them straight.  Oh, and I did do one thing in these two days that was actually my job: I edited fish descriptions in an interactive so that no sentences were cut off.

It’s been insane, but I can’t imagine a better first two days on the job.  Come see us at the grand opening next week!

on women in physics

An interesting little story from LiveScience caught my eye on Twitter this week, about what kinds of interventions actually succeed in keeping women in physics.  As a woman formerly in physics, I’m always interested in hearing what people think convinces us to stay or go.  This little piece, well-intended as it was, set off some burning hellfire rage.

In the study LiveScience is reporting on, a group at Clemson took a look at five different efforts (single-sex physics classes, female physics teachers, woman scientist guest speakers, discussions of woman scientists’ work, explicit discussions of underrepresentation) to see which worked best.  Excerpted from LiveScience:

“There are lots of causes and hypothesized solutions for these causes that are prevalent in our mythology,” Hazari said. “Basically our mythology around what helps girls is not necessarily true, and we have to be a little bit smarter finding evidence. The one factor we did find was that explicitly discussing underrepresentation had a significant positive effect on females’ choice of a physical science career.”

Hazai said it wasn’t clear why that one strategy proved to be effective, but she guessed that it might be because such a conversation made the issue personal for girls.

“Showing them a picture of somebody doesn’t make them want to do it themselves,” Hazari said. “But this process of discussing underrepresentation may prompt female students to reassess their own biases, thereby influencing a change. It’s really about having more meaningful discussions with them about these issues.”

Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t seem to be anywhere online, and the LiveScience article is irritatingly vague as to what constitutes a “meaningful discussion about these issues” and how large the effect was.  But that’s not why it makes me rage.

I deeply resent the idea of “making it personal” to keep women in physics (or science in general).  When you make it personal, you’re assigning responsibility for solving a broad problem — one that’s not her fault — to an individual woman.  This is not okay.

Why?  To explain, I’m going to have to make it personal.

i can haz computer literacy

I’m here for a hit-and-run style post tonight — mostly, I wanted to show off today’s big achievement.  No, it wasn’t anything cool I accomplished at my day job.  No, it wasn’t the fact that I dragged my rapidly-falling-ill self outside in the cold to help tire out the dog.  Instead, it was the bold feat illustrated below.

I typed things in a command line! And it made pages and pages of good things happen! We're ignoring the fact that I messed up my password first.

Yep, that’s right.  Look at me with my bad self.  Even though Ubuntu has gotten more and more idiot-friendly in the six years I’ve been using it — and like the friendly idiot I am, I’ve embraced its gradual idiot-friendliness — I can still use a command line.  And what’s more, I sudo apt-get installed that from memory. Booyeah.

Amusingly, the whole reason I had to do this is that Ubuntu’s idiot friendly software installer made me run around in very non-idiot-friendly circles trying to override its silly “this is not from a recognized source” complaint.  In the command line, I cut through all those circles with a “Do you want to continue [Y/n]?”  Y, dammit, y!  Why can’t I say that in the GUI?  Sigh.

Incidentally, Calibre is a very useful piece of software.  I use it to convert various sciencey documents into a Kindle-friendly format.  Ever tried to read a technical article in PDF format on a mobile device?  Yeah, that’s what Calibre’s for.  It does lots of other things, too.  Support open source software!

Also incidentally, I would be doing something terribly wrong if I didn’t include XKCD’s most famous Linux joke, so here you go.

from the archives: mitochondria and basketball

In honor of tonight’s UNC-Dook game, I’m sharing an article I wrote in August about the other ways the two schools interact.  That said, f*!k Dook and GO HEELS!

If you hear UNC and Duke mentioned in the same sentence, you might picture hordes of fans with faces painted blue, trading insults and cheering on basketball teams.

Instead, imagine researchers from both universities trading insights, looking past their schools’ rivalry to break new scientific ground.

One such collaboration between the two universities has led to a finding about how our cells stay healthy.  The discovery might help scientists understand diseases ranging from cancer to Alzheimer’s.

The group’s finding centers on tiny bean-shaped power generators in our cells called mitochondria. They produce the energy our cells need to do the work that keeps our bodies going, from pumping our hearts to transmitting signals in our brains.

But cells themselves need to stay healthy, too, and to do that, they need to keep their power generators in working order. The tiny generators constantly split apart to make new ones and fuse together to retire old ones, swapping parts between mitochondria just as you’d trade parts to rebuild a broken engine.

If a cell doesn’t balance this splitting and fusing, though, it will have too few generators or too many, meaning it will have too little power or too much. Scientists suspect that under- or overpowered cells play a role in diseases as diverse as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Read the rest (including the trash talk part) at the News & Observer.

P.S. It’s worth noting that most of the folks I spoke to for this story — despite their close scientific collaboration — were more than happy to own up to some serious (if good-natured) basketball trash talk come February and March each year.  This rivalry is something special indeed.

P.P.S. If my own stance on the rivalry isn’t clear enough (or you wish to revel in it a bit more), I recommend heartily the treatise from the Daily Tarheel titled “Why I Hate Duke.”

turns out that caribou DO matter

A few weeks back, I took apart a chain email about drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).  It was great fun, but this morning my spouse — an ecologist who studies agricultural impacts on soil carbon — made an offhand comment about climate change that made me rethink one of my claims.  Yes, we are big enough nerds to talk science over breakfast.

In my post, I tried to dismantle the idea that caribou are the only reason we should care about what happens to ANWR, saying things like:

Arctic tundra like the ANWR coastal plain is ecologically important on a global scale whether or not it has caribou running around on it.

True fact, but misleading.  I went on to mention the ways that Arctic tundra soils affect the global carbon cycle, and my implication was that that process is completely independent of caribou.  In fact, caribou are a really important piece of the puzzle.

Grazing animals like caribou control which plants grow, and which plants die.  Think about it — have you ever seen a cow pasture full of shrubs and trees?  Odds are low.  Grazers tend to munch fairly indiscriminately on anything small and leafy in their pasture, keeping everything except grass from taking hold.  Large grasslands foraged by caribou, reindeer, elk, deer, moose, etc. are the same way — shrubs and trees aren’t going to survive the critters’ foraging.  Grazers make sure that grasslands stay grasslands.

When you remove grazers, though, the vegetation changes.  Shrubs start to move in, and in some places, trees will take hold.  Over time, an ungrazed grassland can become a forest.  This won’t happen everywhere — not all climates and geologies will support a forest — but no matter what, grazers unwittingly decide which plants survive and thrive.

When new plants move into a grassland, all of its interactions with the atmosphere change.  Trees reflect sunlight differently, “breathe” carbon dioxide differently, spread across the land differently, and store carbon in their roots at different depths than grasses.  All of these things change the land’s relationship to the global carbon cycle and change the way it fits into the climate change picture.

Thinking again about ANWR, scientists have turned up mixed results about whether arctic tundra soils are better at taking carbon out of the atmosphere when grazers live there or not.  One recent paper found that keeping caribou and muskoxen off the land in west Greenland let it store three times as much carbon, because shrubby plants were better at sucking it out of the atmosphere than grass.  Other folks get different results in slightly different ecosystems, and the general conclusion most scientists agree on is that we don’t really know enough about how it all works.

What we do know, though, is that whether they make things better or make things worse, the caribou do matter.  Sorry, caribou.  Didn’t mean to diss you so badly.

overheard

“Some people think we don’t know anything!”

– local sustainability official who once explained to me that propane is not a fossil fuel, speaking about citizens’ distrust for government

Hmm … I wonder why!