Tag Archives: science

Scientists Looking at Liquid

This all started because I saw an ad on the back of a magazine. The ad was for a DNA assembling machine and featured a woman looking at a tiny vial of amber liquid, which seemed oddly specific. Where could a biotech company get such a picture? Vu was there and he said it was probably a stock photo. Pictures of scientists looking at liquid are everywhere.

So I checked.

Pictures of scientists looking at liquid are everywhere. These are some of my favorites from a Google image search for “scientist:”

The only thing we seem to like half as much as looking at liquid is looking at microscopes. But that’s a distant second. Looking at liquid is definitely the favorite. Especially if it’s green.

Do you guys have any favorite pictures of scientists looking at liquid? Could you please share them with me?

This is Neat: The Uncanny Valley

What is the uncanny valley? Suppose you win a sweepstakes and the prize is that you get to spend a day hanging out with a robot. You get to pick one of the following companions:

Robot1
.
An industrial robot.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
Aww!
.
.
.
.
.
.
Robot3
.
OH GOD WE HAVE TO TAKE OFF AND NUKE IT FROM ORBIT
.
.
.

.
.
.
Robot4
.
A mannequin that’s kind of creepy.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Robot5 copy
.
Are you sure that’s not just a photo of a woman?
.
.
.
.
.
.

The different reactions you just had to the different faces demonstrate the uncanny valley. We’re fine with completely human or completely nonhuman faces, but many people find faces that are somewhere in between creepy.

Though there’s some evidence that the uncanny valley is a real psychological phenomenon, so far it has been mostly speculative. In a recent paper published in the journal Cognition, a pair of scientists sought to reproduce the uncanny valley experimentally.

Theoretically, this is how we think people will react to faces depending on how human or nonhuman they look:

conjecture The researches collected eighty snapshots of real-life robots that people have actually built. (The five photos above are from their collection.) They asked research participants to rate each face for “mechanicalness” and “humanness” on a scale of 0 to 100. That way they could quantify how far to the left or right each robot belonged on the uncanny valley chart.

Then they recruited a fresh set of participants who wouldn’t be biased by having seen the faces before and asked the new set of people to rate each face on “friendliness.” This is what the researchers got:

This figure looks a lot like the uncanny valley chart we expected. There’s a peak in likability with the cute robots that look a little human, and another peak with the robots that look like regular humans. But note that the 100% industrial robots didn’t do too shabby.

How well people like or dislike a robot’s face is one thing, but does that affect what people actually do? This is a question engineers care about. If they want to build a robot that’s meant to socialize with people, they’d rather not have their human clients secretly trying to kill it. The researchers involved in this paper recruited another batch of participants to address this question.

They gave each participant some imaginary money. Participants got to decide how much money to give to one of the robots in the pictures. Here’s the important part: the researchers told the participants that the robot would decide how much money to give back. Participants who did especially well at maximizing their imaginary money in the game would win real money as a prize. So the participants had to make decisions about how much they trusted each robot with real money at stake.

These are the results:

trust The researchers found an uncanny-valley-like pattern again.

Based on this research, we have evidence that the uncanny valley really exists and that people make decisions with important consequences based on it. So if you’re a designer and you want to avoid get me a cross and some holy water moments, you should keep your robot out of the valley.

The article is open access, so you can read the whole thing here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027715300640

If Prometheus had been an actual scientific expedition

I just went and saw the movie Prometheus the other day, and all I have to say is, ouch. And not just because Noomi Rapace gives herself a C-section, either. The problem is that now that I work in a science field, all science fiction movies have been ruined for me.

The science of Prometheus isn’t even all that bad. It takes some stabs at plausibility, like when the exploration team can’t breathe the atmosphere because it contains 3% carbon dioxide. That’s actually pretty accurate. Suddenly breathing 3% carbon dioxide, when it’s not what you’re used to, would be bad for you.

The bigger problem is the scientists. They make so many poor professional decisions in this movie, that if this had been a real research expedition, they would all have lost their jobs and been so thoroughly discredited they could never find another academic job, anywhere, ever. Sure, the idea was to make the movie more exciting, but I think it gives people the wrong idea about what the job is actually like. So I thought I would write this post about how Prometheus would have gone if the expedition had been run by actual scientists.

A biologist being stupid.

Continue reading →

Art and Science

I found a thought-provoking article on the Science Careers magazine the other day.

Adding an Artistic Dimension to Science

The article profiles several practicing scientists who are also simultaneously pursuing a career in the arts. These two ways of looking at the world, art and science, may seem disparate, but they can exist in the same human mind. I am one of those human minds, or at least I hope to be.

By day, I’m a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I’m about halfway through a program to earn a Ph.D. in plant biology. I spend the days in a laboratory studying how rice plants transport nutrients over long distances – from the roots and the leaves to wherever they are needed. By night, I’m an aspiring spec fic and science writer. I have a short story and a couple of nonfiction pieces out in magazines, a couple of Smashwords novels, and even a few fans.

How long can one keep up doing both? The prospects of ever earning enough to survive from writing are dismal. Pursuing a career in research science requires ultimate commitment, one that might not leave much room for an artistic pursuit on the side. And yet art and science careers do positively reinforce each other. Writing helps me be more creative in the lab, and I might sneak a few references to antimatter into my writing. The Science Careers article describes people who have made it work, so I should feel hopeful.

Back from NASW Trip

Traveling home from the National Association of Science Writers meeting today felt strange. The airports were half-empty from all the cancelled flights into and out of New England. I’m fortunate that I didn’t have to go anywhere near Hurricane Sandy to get to Minneapolis, but still. Eugh.

As I’m sitting here fighting off sleep so I can get back onto Central time, I thought I’d share with you some pictures from the trip.

The first thing you see when you get out of the terminal at Raleigh-Durham Airport is a full-wall mosaic of various cereal crops. The Triangle Park region, where the meeting was held, is home to a cluster of important ag-biotech companies.

Sir Walter Scott in a labcoat. He’s standing outside the convention center where we held our meeting.

Continue reading →

National Association of Science Writers 2012

This week I’ll be traveling to the National Association of Science Writers’ annual conference in Research Triangle Park.

The National Association of Science Writers is a trade organization for science journalists, university public information officers, and scientists with an interest in communicating to the public. The conference is going to run from October 26th to the 30th and will include workshops on writing craft and the latest developments in science. Expect to see photos when I get back!

This is Neat: Caulerpa

Source: www.reefcorner.com

How many cells do you think this thing has?

a. 100,000

b. 1 million

c. 10 million

d. 1 billion

One. This is all one cell. What you’re looking at is a frond from a genus of seaweed called Caulerpa. Caulerpa grows in tropical waters and is considered an invasive species in the Mediterranean Ocean. Each individual of Caulerpa is one huge, enormous cell. The inside of the plant is a syncytium, which means that millions of cell nuclei are floating around with no cell membranes to separate them.

Two Books on Science Writing

You might know that I’ve been taking a class on science writing for popular audiences this semester. There are two required readings for the course, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011, ed. Mary Roach, and A Field Guide for Science Writers, ed. Deborah Blum, Mary Knudson, and Robin Marantz Henig, and I’ve been enjoying them so much that they’ve become oatmeal reading. Wait, didn’t you know that? I do all my reading for fun over oatmeal in the morning.

Source: Amazon

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 The book is pretty much what it sounds like: a collection of the best stuff published in popular science magazines in 2011. The articles range in subject from how you collect semen samples from chimpanzees* to shock reporting on the Gulf oil spill to a meditation on the limits of what physics might be able to discover. The book feels like reading many issues of Discover magazine and The New Yorker, because that’s where many of these articles come from. Except that this book is a highlights reel.

Source: Goodreads

A Field Guide for Science Writers This is pretty exciting stuff, because it gets into the nuts and bolts of how one goes about writing about science. The book is divided into sections, one of which is about actually writing well, one about the peculiarities of certain fields such as medicine, and one about working in all the various print markets. Print markets. The biggest problem with this book is that it was published in 2006, and the written word has been through an upheaval since then. I’d recommend this book for the section on craft alone, but the ten pages on writing for the Web left me wanting more.

I’m leaving this class with more conviction than ever that science writing is very cool stuff. What could be better than science and writing put together?

* A section of PVC pipe lined with K-Y Jelly, in case you were wondering.

Face Blind

It feels like this sometimes

I remember the first day of high school vividly. I was going to a school far away from my home district, so my family had arranged a carpool with three other girls from the area. Their names were Sarah, Amber, and Stacey. Early in the morning that September, I got dropped off at Sarah’s mom’s house, and the three of us hung around in the shade of the live oaks, bubbling with excitement.

Sarah’s mom drove us the 30 minutes to school, then we piled out of the car and went our separate ways to our lockers.

At homeroom, the teacher had us get into groups of 6 and introduce ourselves around in a circle. I noticed that a Latina girl was being awfully quiet – she hadn’t said her name. I asked her what it was.

She gave me a very strange look. “Sarah.”

I don’t usually make blunders as bad as that one, but for a long time I’ve suspected that I’m pretty stupid at recognizing people. I couldn’t tell Merry apart from Pippin to save my life. And I hate, hate romantic comedies. Most of the characters are wearing street clothes and they all tend to be the same ethnicity. What am I supposed to work with?

There’s a name for this problem. Prosopagnosia, or face blindness. It sound like a terrifying terminal condition, but it’s actually more common than you might think. For a class on science writing I’m taking this semester, we read an article by Oliver Sachs, who cites statistics that as much as 2.5% of the population have severe prosopagnosia – they have trouble recognizing even their friends and loved ones. For the rest of us, the ability to recognize faces is distributed on a bell curve, like IQ is. Which puts me somewhere in the range of Forrest Gump.

If you’re curious, the Prosopagnosia Research Center at Harvard University has an online test you can use to gauge your own ability to recognize famous faces. It’s real quick and dirty, but the results are interesting.*

*I thought Princess Diana was Tina Fey. Just sayin’.

10 Reasons Why Being a Grad Student is Awesome

10. The schedule is flexible. The graduate school cares more about whether you do a good job than what time of the day you do it. That is, unless you’re doing a time-course experiment – then you’re at the experiment’s mercy.

9. It’s a meritocracy. To do a good job, you need to do good science.

8. My boss is a scientist.

7. You’re surrounded by nerds. I can rhapsodize about how cool carbonic anhydrase is to my fellow grads, and they’ll know what the heck I’m talking about.* They probably feel the same way about carbonic anhydrase.

6. You can spend all day surrounded by your Eppendorf tubes if you want to.

The machine I work with doesn't look like this

5. You get to work on a Machine. Or at least I do. The Machine I work with weighs at least 50 pounds and is controlled by a computer that runs DOS.

4. Ph.D. Comics.

3. You get to learn new things every day – you’re supposed to learn new things every day. The other day I went to a seminar given by a guy who is comparing the geographic patterns of phylogenetic diversity in senita cactus and senita moths. The best part was that I was required to go to this seminar. Learning about the latest research on senita cactus is part of my job.

2. Your research might help people someday. Check out Norman Borlaug, one of the University of Minnesota’s most famous graduates. His research on dwarf varieties of wheat started off the Green Revolution.

1. If you work hard, and you do what you’re supposed to do, eventually you get to be called “Dr. Such-and-such.”

* Carbonic anhydrase is cool because it’s ridiculously fast. It’s an enzyme that turns carbon dioxide into bicarbonate and back again in your body, and it can do this about a million times per second.

Steam Trains and Ghosts

Margaret R. Taylor's Writing Blog