Tag Archives: science

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The perils of science hyperbole

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The fallout from the NASA paper on arsenic-eating critters has taught us a lot more about the life-cycle of exciting science stories than it has about the life-cycle of the critters themselves. Molecular biologist and super-sharp sf commentator Athena Andreadis does a post-mortem:

This is not the first or only time NASA administrators have been callously cavalier.  Yet even though the latest debacle didn’t claim lives like the Challenger incident did, it was just as damaging in every other way.  And whereas the Challenger disaster was partly instigated by pressure from the White House (Reagan needed an exclamation point for his State of the Union address), this time the hole in NASA’s credibility is entirely self-inflicted.  Something went wrong in the process, and all the gatekeeping functions failed disastrously.

[…]

NASA spokespeople, as well as Wolfe-Simon and Oremland, have stated that the only legitimate and acceptable critiques are those that will appear in peer-reviewed venues – and that others are welcome to do experiments to confirm or disprove their findings.

The former statement is remarkably arrogant and hypocritical, given the NASA publicity hyperdrive around the paper: embargoes, synchronized watches, melodramatic hints of “new life”, of a discovery with “major impact on astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life”.  This is called leading with your chin.  And if you live by PR, you cannot act shocked and dismayed when you die by PR.

As for duplicating the group’s experiments, the burden of proof lies with the original researchers. This burden increases if their claims are extraordinary.  The team that published the paper was being paid to do the work by a grant (or, possibly, by earmarked NASA money, which implies much less competition). For anyone else to confirm or disprove their findings, they will have to carve effort, time and money out of already committed funds — or apply for a grant specifically geared to this, and wait for at least a year (usually more) for the money to be awarded.  It’s essentially having to clean up someone else’s mess on your own time and dime.

Hyperbolic science PR is nothing new, of course, but it’s damaging and counter-productive in these politically-charged times:

By disbursing hype, NASA administrators handed ready-made ammunition to the already strong and growing anti-intellectual, anti-scientific groups in US society: to creationists and proponents of (un)intelligent design; to climate change denialists and young-earth biblical fundamentalists; to politicians who have been slashing everything “non-essential” (except, of course, war spending and capital gains income).  It jeopardized the still-struggling discipline of astrobiology.  And it jeopardized the future of a young scientist who is at least enthusiastic about her research even if her critical thinking needs a booster shot – or a more rigorous mentor.

There’s some sort of deep sad irony in here: our hunger for exciting new truths can jeopardise our chances of discovering them.

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Genesis reloaded: are there forms of life on Earth we’ve missed?

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It’s a well-used riff, but it seems to be making a comeback in recent months: is there a “shadow biosphere” of lifeforms on Earth that don’t obey the known rules of biochemistry? And if so, how might we find it – let alone recognise it when if do? A nice long article; you should go read the whole thing, but here’s a few snippets:

To investigate a species of microbe fully, you first need to culture it in the laboratory and then study its biochemistry by sequencing its genome to position it on the tree of life. This technique, while undoubtedly important, has its problems.

Many microbes don’t like being plucked out of their natural habitat and cannot be cultured easily. Some resist gene sequencing.

And, because the chemical techniques used to analyse microbes are customised and targeted to life as we know it, they wouldn’t work on an alternative form of biology. Should there be a different type of microbial life out there, it is very likely to be overlooked, simply because it would be unresponsive to the biochemists’ probes used so far. In a laboratory sample it might well get thrown out with the garbage.

If you set out to study life as we know it, then what you find will inevitably be life as we know it. It’s therefore an open question whether some microbes might actually be the descendants of a different genesis.

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Notwithstanding their exotic nature, to date all extremophiles that have been analysed are standard life: they belong to the same tree of life as you and me. Their existence proves that the range of conditions under which standard life can survive is much broader than previously suspected. Nevertheless there are limits.

If there is a shadow biosphere, it might be occupied by weird ‘hyper-extremophiles’ inhabiting environments beyond the reach of even the hardiest form of standard life, and have so far escaped detection because nobody thought to look for any form of life under such extreme conditions. A good example is temperature: standard hyperthermophiles seem to have an upper limit of about 130˚C – and for good reason. The intense heat disrupts vital molecules, and even with a host of repair and protection mechanisms, DNA and proteins start to unravel and disintegrate if they are subjected to temperatures much in excess of 120˚C.

Suppose we find nothing living between 130˚C and 170˚C in a deep-ocean volcanic-vent system, but then discover microbes thriving there between 170˚C and 200˚C? The discontinuity in temperature range would be a strong indicator that we were dealing with weird life as opposed to standard life that had simply pushed the temperature envelope higher.

[…]

There are plenty of other places that could be home for isolated weird extremophiles. The inner core of Chile’s Atacama Desert is one place – it is so dry and oxidising that bacteria can’t metabolise. The U.S. space agency NASA has a field station there, but so far there is no evidence for any carbon chemistry that could be attributed to weird life.

Other possible locations include the upper atmosphere, cold dry plateaus and mountain tops (where high-ultraviolet flux is a problem for standard life), ice deposits at temperatures below -40˚C, and lakes heavily contaminated with metals toxic to known life. We don’t need to confine our search to a single parameter such as temperature; it’s possible that some combination such as temperature and acidity together is more relevant.

Very speculative stuff, as science goes: it’s basically hinging on the old “white crow” aphorism, which says that the fact that you’ve never seen something doesn’t prove that the thing doesn’t exist. But we’re friends of informed speculative science around these parts, so… 🙂

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Quantum computing for dummies

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Heard people talking about quantum computing, but not really sure you understand what they mean? Well, you’re far from alone (as the late great Richard Feynman once said, “anyone who claims to understand quantum physics doesn’t understand quantum physics”), but why let that stop you from trying to get a layman’s grasp of the basic ideas?

That, one assumes, is the spirit in which this brief introduction to quantum computing at Silicon.com has been written [via SlashDot]… though I’m in no position to comment on how accurate or useful it is. Input from passing physicists is, as always, more than welcome. 🙂

Hang on, what’s quantum entanglement when it’s at home?

I was afraid you were going to ask. Quantum entanglement is the point where scientists typically abandon all hope of being understood because the thing being described really does defy the classical logic we’re used to.

An object is said to become quantumly entangled when its state cannot be described without also referring to the state of another object or objects, because they have become intrinsically linked, or correlated.

No physical link is required however – entanglement can occur between objects that are separated in space, even miles apart – prompting Albert Einstein to famously dub it “spooky action at a distance”.

The correlation between entangled objects might mean that if the spin state of two electrons is entangled, their spin states will be opposites – one will be up, one down. Entangled photons could also share opposing polarisation of their waveforms – one being horizontal, the other vertical, say. This shared state means that a change applied to one entangled object is instantly reflected by its correlated fellows – hence the massive parallel potential of a quantum computer.

Accuracy aside, what’s interesting to me is seeing this sort of bluffer’s guide in a venue like Silicon.com, which is more of a business organ than a tech one. Prepping the Valley VCs for upcoming investment decisions, perhaps?

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Garage ribofunk going mainstream

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Interesting to see it’s taken less than a year for coverage of DIY molecular biology to graduate from the comparative fringedom of H+ Magazine to a mainstream science publication like Nature [via SlashDot]. Notable lack of scare-stories and hand-wringing involved, too… though I suspect we’ll have this meme picked up by the tabloids before the end of the year; that’s a nice juicy OMG-terror-security-panic!!1 story just waiting to shift units to the easily frightened, right there.

What’s impressive is the level of sophistication involved, which (as others have pointed out) mimics the enthusiastic adoption of home computing by the cutting edge of geek enthusiasts back in the day:

Many traditional scientists are circumspect. “I think there’s been a lot of overhyped and enthusiastic writing about this,” says Christopher Kelty, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has followed the field. “Things are very much at the beginning stages.” Critics of DIY biology are also dubious about whether there is an extensive market for garage molecular biology. No one needs a PCR machine at home, and the accoutrements to biological research are expensive, even if their prices fall daily. Then again, the same was said about personal computers, says George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. As a schoolboy, he says, he saw his first computer and fell in love. “Everybody looked at me like, ‘Why on earth would you even want to have one of those?'”

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No one knows how many of those 2,000 are serious practitioners — Bobe jokes that 30% are spammers and the other 70% are law-enforcement officials keeping tabs on the community. But many DIY communities are coalescing: not only in Cambridge, but also in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris and the Netherlands. Some of these aim to develop community lab spaces with equipment that users could share for a monthly fee. And several are already affiliated with local ‘hacker spaces’, which provide such services to electronics enthusiasts. For example, the New York DIYbio group meets every week at the work-space of an electronics-hacker collective called NYC Resistor, which now has a few pieces of basic molecular biology equipment, including a PCR machine.

Of course, there are real risks that come with the growth of a movement like this, but there’s also a whole lot of potential, which I think outweighs the risks if they’re managed sensibly (i.e. by oversight, transparency and strong networked communities, rather than by blanket bans and heavy-handed restrictions that would drive the movement underground, as well as potentially into a position of political radicalism). Viewed in parallel with the surge of interest in 3d printing and electromechanical hacktivism (which really is spreading very fast, alongside the hacker spaces that house them), things don’t look entirely unlike some unpublished proto-prequel to Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix. Who will you be: Mechanist or Shaper?

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What’s wrong with science journalism (and how, perhaps, to fix it)

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You went and read this satirical skewering of science journalism clichés when I flagged it up, didn’t you? If not, go read it now… and then read this follow-up by Martin Robbins, the chap who wrote it, who makes a good stab at analysing the root causes of bad science journalism (somewhat biased for the UK market, but I expect the issues are similar elsewhere) and attempts to present some solutions.

My point was really about predictability and stagnation. The formula I outlined – using a few randomly picked BBC science articles as a guide – isn’t necessarily an example of bad journalism; but science reporting is predictable enough that you can write a formula for it that everyone recognises, and once the formula has been seen it’s very hard to un-see, like a faint watermark at the edge of your vision.

[It’s like the fnords, man! Just like the fnords!]

… you can see ‘the pattern’. They’re called ‘Scare quotes’ and they are used by writers to distance themselves from the words inside, or to indicate paraphrasing – unless you’re a cynic, in which case scare quotes are a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows journalists to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the words mentioned.

This habit is so deeply ingrained at the BBC that even the question of whether ‘effects’ are ‘interesting’ is deemed too thorny an issue for the headline writer to give an opinion on. God forbid that in calling a piece of research ‘interesting’ the BBC should sully its reputation for robotic impartiality.

Lots more interesting analysis and commentary, well worth a read. Go look.