Author: Discover Main Feed

“Computer mediated communication (CMC) plays a rapidly growing role in our social lives. Within this domain, e-mail addresses represent the thinnest slice of information that people receive from one another. Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extraversion. Level of accuracy was explained using lens model analyses: Lay observers made broad use of perceivable e-mail address features in their personality judgments, features were slightly valid and observers were sensitive to subtle differences in validity between cues. Altogether, even the thinnest slice of CMC—the mere e-mail address—contains valid information about the personality of its owner.”

Thanks to Robert for today’s ROFL!
Photo: flickr/Perfecto Insecto

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The 145thhththth Carnival of Space is up now at Crowlspace! Lots of fun space and astronomy blog posts, and, for a first, it may be slightly NSFW (thanks to Amanda, who is saucier than I knew!).

You never know who is checking out your Facebook profile, reading your tweets, or looking at your MySpace messages. But if you broke the law or are under scrutiny from the feds, then the FBI may already be “following” your online activities on different social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

A new internal Justice Department document obtained by San Francisco-based civil liberties group, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), details how federal agencies like the IRS and the FBI are now using social media to monitor suspects’ online activities and also track down their whereabouts. The document, obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, makes clear that U.S. agents are already logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips [AP].

The investigators are also using the sites to check suspects’ alibis with details of their whereabouts posted on Facebook and Twitter. And online photos from a suspicious spending spree — people posing with jewelry, guns or fancy cars — can link suspects or their friends to robberies or burglaries [AP].

The document also describes a bank fraud case, wherein federal authorities were able to nab a suspect who had fled to Mexico based on his Facebook updates about all the fun he was having in that country. The suspect’s page was private but some of his friends’ pages weren’t–allowing easy access to information related to the man on the run.

Using online sources to catch suspects isn’t really new: In the early days of the Internet, investigating authorities used text-heavy AOL and chat rooms to gather evidence and arrest wrongdoers. But enormously popular sites like Facebook can serve as a clearinghouse for information. While the changing nature of online activities has served the feds well, the Justice Department document (which was part of a presentation given in August by top cybercrime officials) doesn’t detail how to prevent abuse of available content. While most social networking sites expressly prohibit people from creating profiles under false identities the feds have ignored that rule and created profiles to monitor suspects. “This new situation presents a need for careful oversight so that law enforcement does not use social networking to intrude on some of our most personal relationships,” said [Marc] Zwillinger, whose firm does legal work for Yahoo and MySpace [AP].

While the document portrayed Facebook primarily as a useful tool, the government did note a few ways in which social media could interfere with legal proceedings. The Justice Department document warned prosecutors to advise their witness not to reveal details of their ongoing cases on their public posts. It also cautioned federal law enforcement officials to think prudently before adding judges or defense counsel as “friends” on these services. “Social networking and the courtroom can be a dangerous combination,” the government said [AP].

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Image: iStockphoto

This is very cool: a guy got a grant to comb through satellite imagery to look for terrestrial craters, and found one hidden in plain sight! The Planetary Society has all the details. The man who found it studied geology in college, but is now a systems analyst!

This is a perfect example of citizen science. There’s too much real estate — on Earth and in the sky — for what we normally think of as geologists and astronomers to examine carefully. And this shows there’s plenty of room for “amateurs” to help out… and that word always makes me laugh. I know a lot of amateur astronomers who know far more than I do about pointing a telescope. You’ll almost always find that at their borders, most definitions are pretty fuzzy.

Tip o’ the Whipple shield to David Kessler.

The other Zimmer at the Times: On On Point.

This one, talking about the secret life of plants, carnivorous and otherwise on WNPR’s Colin McEnroe Show.

Of all the planet hacking possibilities floated as last-minute ways to stave off a climate catastrophe (building a solar shade for the Earth, injecting the atmosphere with sunlight-reflecting aerosols, etc.), iron seeding seems one of the more practical and feasible ideas. The scheme calls for the fertilization of patches of ocean with iron to spur blooms of plankton, which eventually die, sink, and sequester carbon at the seafloor.

However, worries over the consequences of tinkering with the ocean ecosystem have held up plans to attempt this. And now, in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers claim that such a plan could risk putting a neurotoxin into the food chain.

Iron seeders have targeted the large swaths of ocean surface with high levels of nitrate and low chlorophyll, where an injection of iron could potentially turn a dearth of plankton into a bloom. But too many phytoplankton can be a bad thing, especially when it comes to members of the genus Pseudonitzschia. This alga produces domoic acid, which it spews into the surrounding seawater to help it ingest iron [ScienceNOW]. Sea lions off California have gotten sick from the toxin. In Canada, three people died in the 1980s from eating shellfish that themselves had eaten Pseudonitzschia.

Seeding experiments—about a dozen have taken place so far—had not shown the production of domoic acid. But oceanographer Charles Trick was not convinced, because those previous tests had harvested the plankton in the ocean but not tested them until the researchers returned to shore. So, for their study, the researchers examined water samples taken from open-ocean tracts in the sub-Arctic North Pacific Ocean where iron-fertilization experiments were conducted [AFP]. The results were not encouraging.

Pseudonitzschia collected in midocean and subjected to shipboard experiments produced plenty of domoic acid. “We found there is a lot of toxin out there,” he said. “If we were to seed with iron, the amount of toxin would go up” [The New York Times]. In fact, Trick says, the concentration of Pseudonitzschia doubled, which increased how much domoic acid was in the water. In turn, the preponderance of the acid allows more Pseudonitzschia to grow, in a sort of feedback circle.

Trick says he doesn’t think the acid would make it all the way up the food chain to people, though birds might ingest it. But, he says, this is another sign that tinkering on the planetary scale can be fraught with unintended consequences.

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Image: NASA SeaWiFS Project (the 12 seeding experiments thus far)

Research published yesterday in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests babies are born to boogie.

Researchers exposed 120 infants to a variety of music and recorded their reactions on video, using 3D motion capture technology. The parents holding their infants were given headphones to wear so they wouldn’t influence the babies’ behaviors by, say, tapping toes or bopping to the beat.

The results showed that infants react with rhythmic movement to music more than they do to speech, and that infants do indeed have rhythm (as the tempo was accelerated, the babies’ movements quickened). Finally, the researchers found that the better the rhythm, the happier the jammin’ baby; the better the babies were able to synch their movements with the music, the more they smiled.

Wrote the researchers:

The findings are suggestive of a predisposition for rhythmic movement in response to music and other metrically regular sounds.

Something this baby’s been trying to tell us for more than a year now:

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Video: CGElliott09

When organizers at the American Museum of Natural History in New York decided to set up a debate on the future of manned space exploration, President Obama had not yet announced plans to cancel the NASA program designed to carry astronauts to the moon by 2020 and Mars by 2030. That recent development only served to spice up the proceedings at last night’s Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The main theme guiding the night’s proceedings was supposed to be “Where next?” But based on NASA’s recent change of course, much of the night focused on how to kick the human exploration into gear.

Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, was the idealist and dominant personality on the panel, claiming “we’re much closer sending men to Mars now than we were sending someone to the moon in 1961.” He noted that when factoring in inflation, NASA has about the same budget for manned spaceflight as it did during the Apollo years. He encouraged a bold deadline for reaching Mars to motivate current scientists and inspire future ones.

Yet the Apollo comparisons can only go so far. “We don’t have the Cold War infrastructure that helped build Apollo,” said Paul Spudis, the panel’s moon expert. And during the Q&A session, audience member Miles O’Brien (a space blogger and formerly CNN’s science correspondent) plainly stated, “The nostalgia of the Space Race is not coming back. You can’t just recreate that.”

Most of the panel did agree, however, that NASA needs well-defined incremental goals and deadlines. “It’s a fundamental mistake to give NASA $20 billion and no destination,” Spudis said. “If you’re not working toward something, you’ll get nothing.”

Perhaps the necessary motivation can only come from a modern equivalent of the USSR: Would a Chinese mission to set up colonies on Mars, Tyson hypothetically proposed, act as a modern-day Sputnik? Lester Lyles, a retired Air Force general who served on the Augustine commission, downplayed that threat but admitted that militarily, space “is the ultimate high ground.”

The night also featured lively debate over the most logical destination for future astronauts. Spudis touted that recent research has revealed that humans could use materials readily available on the moon’s surface to produce potable water and rocket fuel. Zubrin cited the carbon and nitrogen on Mars, as well as the clear evidence of past liquid water. Cornell astronomer Steven Squyres favors the asteroids because of their low gravity and abundant metallic reserves, although he says we should make the moon our first stop “before going on to more interesting places,” drawing a glare from Spudis.

Noticeably absent from the discussion was a voice opposing manned exploration, which historically has taken up two-thirds of NASA’s budget despite getting overshadowed by robotic missions such as Voyager and Cassini. Squyres, who is in charge of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars, would have seemed to have been the logical person to make that argument, but he said we can’t send out humans into space soon enough. “Humans could do in one week what the rovers have done in six years,” he said.

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Image: NASA / JPL

Very lovely time lapse video from Mauna Kea, home to many of the world’s best optical telescopes:

The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.

For me, it really captures the best parts of how observing feels.

It misses the not-so-good parts, where the instrument breaks, or you’re shut down for wind in perfectly clear weather, or you’re trying desperately to stay awake on a diet of nothing but reheated bagel dogs.

I suppose I’m feeling rather maudlin about it, because its now been years and years since I’ve set foot at an observatory. During the past decade, almost all of my data has been ordered up from satellites or the observing queue, in contrast to my years at Carnegie, where I was observing for more than a month each year. My scientific life is much more “family friendly” as a result, but I still do miss the cold nights and big skies.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan)

Simon Singh is one of my (very few) heroes. He is a journalist who has been fighting not just the British Chiropractic Association (who is suing Simon for libel) but also the awful UK libel laws themselves. You can catch up with all this here.

The fight is actually going well on both fronts, but, sadly, it’s claimed Simon as a victim: it’s eating up so much of his time that he can no longer write his monthly column for The Guardian. This is a shame. He’s a great writer and a voice that definitely needs to be heard. He fights the quacks, the antireality brigade, the poor thinkers, and the out-and-out frauds that occupy every crevice of medical altmeddery.

Still, he is pushing for libel reform, and I know his voice overall will not be silenced. Nor will ours. Give your support for libel reform, and make sure the forces of darkness don’t win.

Tip o’ the subluxation to Tony Piro.

At the AAAS meeting in San Diego last month, I spoke with EarthSky’s Lindsay Patterson, and the resultant podcast just went up. You can listen here, or by playing the embedded audio below, and I’ve also pasted some transcribed sections below:

And now, the write-up:

Chris Mooney: The science has been coming in saying that global warming is real, human-caused, and it keeps getting stronger scientifically.

Chris Mooney is a journalist and the author of the 2009 book, Unscientific America. Mooney spoke about the reasons behind what he calls American inaction on climate change.

Chris Mooney: It’s a problem of politics plus media leading to inability to function on this issue. We’re a divided country and we handle science issues according to politicization and divisiveness, rather than according to what the science actually says.

Mooney pointed to the decline of print media, and the rise of political blogs. He believes good communication of science may now rest with scientists, themselves.

Chris Mooney: The scientific community is going to have to find new ways of getting that information out. Or else it may be the case that we can’t get society to act on the best scientific knowledge that we have. And that may be catastrophic.

He said that scientists have learned a powerful lesson about the need to communicate what they know with the public.

Chris Mooney: I think the scientific community is ready to change -in fundamental ways – how it engages with the public. That means one key part of the equation is going to be functioning better. Hopefully that will create a more scientific America, slowly.

In addition to his concern about the declining quality and quantity of vetted science news, Mooney talked about his belief that science media has suffered at the hands of a number of popular conservative blogs that he termed, ‘anti-science.’

Chris Mooney: It’s the kind of tactics being brought against science I haven’t seen before. It’s staggeringly frightening to watch how much of a revolt against science you can have in this country on an issue that’s politicized like that.

He said that at the same time, scientists have not reacted properly to the attacks against them.

Chris Mooney: Scientists are so worried about the fact that climate research and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are coming under brutal attack. There have been some mistakes made but nothing justifying the kinds of attacks that have come. My point is okay, the situation’s bad. What are you going to do about it? Because this is a new media world. You need to adapt to it.

Mooney spoke about “ClimateGate,” in which emails between climate scientists were hacked and made public.

Chris Mooney: Scientists needed to realize that capacity was there to create a semblance of scandal. They needed to respond immediately, loudly, and with one voice, saying, ‘Okay, we’re looking into these things, but these things are not fundamental to what we know. The science rests on many foundations.’
Written by Lindsay Patterson

Once again, the original podcast is here.

If you thought that fingerprints or DNA fragments were the only bits of forensic evidence that could pin you to a scene of a crime, then think again. Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder have found preliminary evidence suggesting that you can be identified from the unique mix of bacteria that lives on you.

Each person, they say, is a teeming petri dish of bacteria, but the composition varies from person to person. Every place a person goes and each thing he touches is smudged with his unique “microbial fingerprint.” The bacterial mixes are so specific to individuals that researchers found that they could pair up individual computer keyboards with their owners–just by matching the bacteria found on the keyboard to the bacteria found on the person’s fingertips. Describing their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists write that that if this bacterial fingerprint technique is refined, it could one day help in forensic investigations.

The Human Microbiome Project has already found that different body parts harbor different kinds of microbes. Study coauthors Noah Fierer and Rob Knight note that these colonies don’t change much over time. No amount of hand-washing will change a person’s microbial make-up, they say.

For their experiment with computer keyboards, scientists extracted bacterial DNA from three different keyboards and sequenced more than 1,400 copies of bacterial ribosomal gene from each sample to identify the individual species of bacteria each sample contained [Technology Review]. With this information in hand, the scientists were able to pair each keyboard with its user.

In another test, scientists took samples from nine computer mice and were also able to determine their users based on the similarities between hand bacteria and the colonies on each mouse. The scientists also found that there was a very clear difference between bacterial samples taken from the mouse users and 270 samples from a database. Hand bacteria, they found, can survive at room temperatures for up to two weeks and the bugs could be identified even when fingerprints were smudged, or there was not enough DNA to obtain a profile [BBC]. The researchers also note that identical twins, who share the same DNA, have different bacterial compositions living and growing on their hands.

However, scientists warn that while the “microbial fingerprinting” technique seems largely accurate so far, it’s too early to say if it will ever be used in courtrooms. Forensics expert David Foran argues that it’s “utility in a forensic context is doubtful”. It’s unlikely to ever meet the high standards of certainty needed for a criminal investigation, although that probably won’t stop it from appearing in a future episode of CSI [Not Exactly Rocket Science].

Other experts, like microbiologist David Relman, says the idea of this “signature” is not entirely new. For decades, researchers have wondered whether it may be possible to identify individuals based on, say, the unique strains of Escherichia coli harbored in their gut. Until recently, though, “all the ideas that were floating around couldn’t really be explored in a really detailed and methodical way,” Relman says [Technology Review].

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Image: flickr / Andrew*

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. This is a fun but crucial part of the book: Chapter Ten, “Recurrent Nightmares.”

Excerpt:

Fortunately, we (and Boltzmann) only need a judicious medium-strength version of the anthropic principle. Namely, imagine that the real universe is much bigger (in space, or in time, or both) than the part we directly observe. And imagine further that different parts of this bigger universe exist in very different conditions. Perhaps the density of matter is different, or even something as dramatic as different local laws of physics. We can label each distinct region a “universe,” and the whole collection is the “multiverse.” The different universes within the multiverse may or may not be physically connected; for our present purposes it doesn’t matter. Finally, imagine that some of these different regions are hospitable to the existence of life, and some are not. (That part is inevitably a bit fuzzy, given how little we know about “life” in a wider context.) Then—and this part is pretty much unimpeachable—we will always find ourselves existing in one of the parts of the universe where life is allowed to exist, and not in the other parts. That sounds completely empty, but it’s not. It represents a selection effect that distorts our view of the universe as a whole—we don’t see the entire thing, we only see one of the parts, and that part might not be representative. Boltzmann appeals to exactly this logic.

After the amusing diversions of the last chapter, here we resume again the main thread of argument. In Chapter Eight we talked a bit about the “reversibility objection” of Lohschmidt to Boltzmann’s attempts to derive the Second Law from kinetic theory in the 1870’s; now we pick up the historical thread in the 1890’s, when a similar controversy broke out over Zermelo’s “recurrence objection.” The underlying ideas are similar, but people have become a bit more sophisticated over the ensuing 20 years, and the arguments have become a bit more pointed. More importantly, they are still haunting us today.

One of the fun things about this chapter is the extent to which it is driven by direct quotations from great thinkers — Boltzmann, of course, but also Poincare, Nietzsche, Lucretius, Eddington, Feynman. That’s because the arguments they were making seem perfectly relevant to our present concerns, which isn’t always the case. Boltzmann tried very hard to defend his derivation of the Second Law, but by now it had sunk in that some additional ingredient was going to be needed — here we’re calling it the Past Hypothesis, but certainly you need something. He was driven to float the idea that the universe we see around us (which, to him, would have been our galaxy) was not representative of the wider whole, but was simply a local fluctuation away from equilibrium. It’s very educational to learn that ideas like “the multiverse” and “the anthropic principle” aren’t recent inventions of a new generation of postmodern physicists, but in fact have been part of respectable scientific discourse for over a century.

It’s in this chapter that we get to bring up the haunting idea of Boltzmann Brains — observers that fluctuate randomly out of thermal equilibrium, rather than arising naturally in the course of a gradual increase of entropy over billions of years. I tried my best to explain how such monstrosities would be the correct prediction of a model of an eternal universe with thermal fluctuations, but certainly are not observers like ourselves, which lets us conclude that that’s not the kind of world we live in. Hopefully the arguments made sense. One question people often ask is “how do we know we’re not Boltzmann Brains?” The realistic answer is that we can never prove that we’re not; but there is no reliable chain of argument that could ever convince us that we are, so the only sensible way to act is as if we are not. That’s the kind of radical foundational uncertainty that has been with us since Descartes, but most of us manage to get through the day without being overwhelmed by existential anxiety.

For those people seeking some long-term postmortem respect, you could always go the route of the Royal Tenenbaum epitaph and have your hyperbolic greatness engraved upon a headstone. But we all know weather eventually gets the better of those words, and besides: Why settle for one measly sentence when you could speak directly to your descendants from beyond the grave?

The Objecs company has the answer: RosettaStone “technology enhanced memorial products,” which, preloaded with your autobiographical information, will attach to your grave. From Discovery News:

When your great-great-great granddaughter stops by sometime in the next century and wants to know who you were, she’ll touch her NFC-RFID enabled cellphone (or whatever device we’re using by then) to one of those symbols on the granite iPod-looking device on your headstone and she’ll get your note.

NFC stands for “near-field communication” which is a subset of RFID – “radio frequency identification.” You’re probably using this technology already. RFID is what allows you to pay a toll while driving 30 mph by way of the little box stuck to your rearview mirror.

As the above passage notes, the practicality of RosettaStone depends on it working with the cellphone technology of the future that will probably be directly implanted in your head, or perhaps that someone will care enough after you’re gone to drop by the cemetery and upgrade your headstone.

Still, it could work. So please, no stupid text abbreviations in your autobiography. This is for posterity.

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Image: Objecs LLC

A few months ago, I wrote about an art exhibit in NYC based on my book Death from the Skies! Brian George, one of the artists who put this exhibit together, just posted a very cool blog entry about it too.

He posted some great picture on Picasa, which you can see in the slideshow below or on Picasa directly.

I am totally blown away by the sculpture Solar Flares and CMEs. In the book, I describe how the tangling of the Sun’s magnetic field lines is like a bag full of springs under tension. How I pictured that in my head is almost exactly duplicated by that piece.

I could not get to NYC for the exhibit, but I really wish I had. The artwork is amazing, almost as amazing as the feeling I get thinking that a book I wrote for my own nefarious purposes actually inspired a group of artists to create such wonderful and astonishing pieces. My thanks to all of them for swelling my head just a little bit more.

There’s a lot more going on beneath those huge sheets of Antarctic ice than you might think. NASA researchers say they uncovered a major surprise in December: The team drilled an eight-inch hole and stuck a video camera 600 feet down, hoping to observe the underbelly of the thick ice sheet. To their amazement, a curious critter swam into view and clung to the video camera’s cable [Washington Post]. The three-inch crustacean in their video (and pictured in the image here) is a Lyssianasid amphipod, a relative of a shrimp. The team also retrieved what they believe to be a tentacle from a jellyfish.

“We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. “It was a shrimp you’d enjoy having on your plate” [AP]. Indeed, researchers previously believed that nothing more complex than microbes could live in such a hostile place, beneath an ice sheet in total darkness. While complex organisms have shown up before in retreating glaciers, this seems to be the first time any have been found 600 feet down below an intact sheet of ice.

The sheer unlikeliness of the find (what would these creatures eat, after all?) cast doubt in the minds of some scientists that this is the organisms’ true habitat. The site is connected to the open sea, says Cynan Ellis-Evans of the British Antarctic Survey. But given the distance to that open sea—12 miles–study coauthor Stacy Kim says it’s highly unlikely such small creatures made such a journey under an ice sheet. In addition, the hole NASA drilled measured only eight inches across. That means it’s unlikely that that two critters swam from great distances and were captured randomly in that small of an area, she said [AP].

If crustaceans really can tough it out buried beneath the ice, perhaps complex organisms can live in more places than we give them credit for. Astrobiology enthusiasts are probably already thinking of the ice-covered moons in our solar system, like the Jovian moon Europa and the Saturnian moon Enceladus, and wondering whether extraterrestrial critters could be lurking beneath those frozen surfaces. First, though, there’s a lot left to sort out about this intriguing puzzle.

Become a fan of Discover Magazine on Facebook

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Image: NASA

I had fun sampling Rush Limbaugh in the latest Point of Inquiry (around minute 3:30), as he stunningly suggests to Andy Revkin: “Why don’t you just go kill yourself, and help the planet by dying?”

First, for the original clip of Rush’s extremism in all its glory, listen here:

I couldn’t resist asking for Revkin’s response to Limbaugh, which came at around minute 13:00 of the show. Revkin first set the stage for Rush’s performance as follows:

I was speaking about three very tricky things: population growth, United States consumer habits, and climate–in one riff. I was participating via video hookup with a Wilson Center event, and basically I said, “Look, if you’re going to go with the whole carbon-centric meme, and we’ll have carbon credits for this, that, and the other, and you live in America, where we’re heading from 300 million to 400 million people in the next 30 or 40 years, why shouldn’t a family get carbon credits for having fewer kids?”

It was what I would call a thought experiment. And that got picked up by some right wing blog, and that got picked up by Rush Limbaugh, who I’m sure never saw the original video thing….Just hearing the audio [of Limbaugh] is amazing. And of course I wrote a thorough critique of what he had said on DotEarth, and then he spent the next week nibbling, almost apologizing. Suicide is a realm you don’t go into, without having to draw a lot of ire from a lot of people who have actually experienced the loss of family members. So he almost apologized, but not quite.

Hey, why apologize when you’re Rush Limbaugh?

[For more Point of Inquiry, listen here, or subscribe here via iTunes.]

Today I’m off to Portland, OR for the 2010 American Physical Society’s March meeting to participate in this panel:

Science Literacy, the Nature of Science and Religion

Jon Miller: The Development of Civic Scientific Literacy in the United States

Sheril Kirshenbaum: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future

Murray Peshkin: Addressing the Public About Science and Religion

Judith Scotchmoor: Increasing our understanding of how science really works

Art Hobson: Physics Literacy for All Students

Our session will be moderated by Lawrence Woolf and you can read the abstracts online. I’m really looking forward to what I’m certain will be a very interesting discussion.

Please be sure to fill out my quick survey on how you get your science fix! Thanks.

Two-alarm Zimmer family radio alert!

My brother Ben will be on On Point today (Tuesday) at 11 am, talking about taking over as the language maven at the Times. Then, at 1 pm, I’ll be talking on the Colin McEnroe show on WNPR about my article on carnivorous plants in National Geographic. You can listen live or get a podcast after the show on the show page.