This Wired story from Jonah Lehrer examines something that too often goes unexamined: The monumental messiness of science. This merely puts science on a par with many other serious endeavors that people try to pursue with rigor and ambition — like, say, writing.
Continue reading →So where IS the ProPublica for science journalism? There are a lot of organizations spending money on promoting science and science communications, but so far, not much aimed at funding high-level science journalism, either of the day-to-day reporting sort of the more in-depth kind that examines not just the findings but the workings of science. Where is our ProScientifica?
Continue reading →“In one case, for instance, a revised manuscript arrived at his office with four named authors, but when he examined the metadata, he discovered an additional author was making substantial contributions.”
Continue reading →The coral reef argument was fascinating in its own right, both scientifically and dramatically — for here a very capable andn conscientious scientist, Alexander Agassiz, struggled to reconcile both two views of science and the legacies of the two scientific giants of the age, one of whom was his father.
Continue reading →The turf between science and religion is — well, it’s a gray area. And it seems perfectly fine to me to treat it the way Gray did: as a region not to tread in your day job. Science was empirical, and if it wasn’t empirical, it wasn’t science. Religion was belief — a domain beyond proof. That’s why they call it faith.
Continue reading →I think it helps to have a sense of the history of science, which embeds in a writer or observer a sense of critical distance and an eye for large forces at work beneath the surface. Machinations in government surprise no one who has studied the history of government and politics. Likewise with science.
Continue reading →What’s been distracting me lately from the big story I need to finish writing …
Continue reading →Among the many treats in Carl Zimmer’s piece on fireflies and sex, I particularly liked this quick peek at how a life and a career can take a sharp turn for the most unplanned of reasons.
Continue reading →Most of us recognize the power of the urge to conform , but you don’t often see it evoked and displayed so starkly as in this old Candid Camera segment.
Continue reading →William J. Broad’s Times piece on the new National Geographic “Ocean – An Illustrated Atlas gives a nice look at both the book — and gives long-overdue and well-deserved attention to oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who co-authored the Atlas.
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