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August 2010 archive

Do artefacts belong in museums?


Collecting tribal artefacts in the late 19th century, Harvard University's Peabody Museum sought to preserve a span of American history that 18th-century frontiersmen had tried to obliterate. By the end of the 20th century, the tribes wanted their things back. Thousands of ceremonial objects were returned before curators realised that earlier conservators had doused them with arsenic to repel insects. Saving the artefacts had rendered them deadly.


The UK's Royal Society announces its shortlist for the best science books of 2009, but it misses out on some great reads

Amanda Gefter, CultureLab editor

Every year the Royal Society Prize for Science Books celebrates the best in popular science writing. The six shortlisted books announced this week represent a diverse array of subjects and styles, ranging from history to philosophy, from evolutionary biology to cosmology. With some, I believe the judges got it right, but others struck me as odd choices.

The two physics books to make the list are both fantastic. In We Need to Talk About Kelvin, Marcus Chown (a consultant for New Scientist) shows us how things we experience every day can reveal profound truths about the nature of reality. Did you know, for instance, that a small percentage of the static on a badly tuned television is radiation from the afterglow of the big bang, or that your reflection in a window results from the uncertainty of our quantum world? Chown's book is a lively read which serves not only to make strange physics appear more familiar but, even better, to make the familiar appear wonderfully strange.


The man behind the installation (Image: Chris Watson)

Catherine de Lange, video intern

Close your eyes. Listen. What can you hear?




Jo Marchant, consultant

For women of childbearing age, rubella is now most recognisable as the "R" in the MMR vaccine. In Dangerous Pregnancies, Leslie Reagan highlights a time when we weren't so lucky.

Focusing on the rubella epidemic that hit the US in the 1960s, during which tens of thousands of babies were miscarried or born with birth defects, Reagan tells intimate and heart-rending stories of affected women fighting anti-abortion laws and mothers being forced to place their disabled children into state care. Although the epidemic is now largely forgotten, Reagan shows how it played a key role in efforts to legalise abortion, fed the foundations of the disability rights movement, and drove scientists to create a vaccine. The result is a traumatic but ultimately inspiring story that should be required reading for anyone who doubts the benefits of vaccines.

Book Information
Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, disabilities, and abortion in modern America
by Leslie Reagan
University of California Press

books_amend.jpgAmanda Gefter, CultureLab editor

The Royal Society has just announced their shortlist for the 2010 Prize for Science Books, which celebrates the best popular science books of the previous year. You can read our analysis of the shortlist here and find out which books we thought deserved to make the cut and which great reads were absent from the list.

All of this left us thinking about all the fantastic books that don't get the credit they deserve. So we want to hear from you: what do you think is the most underrated science book (written for a general audience) published in the last 50 years?


Amanda Gefter, Books & Arts editor

In cosmology, it is often lamented that theorists get all the glory while the hard-working experimentalists get the shaft. Ann Finkbeiner is out to right this wrong in A Grand and Bold Thing, an inside look at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which has created the most comprehensive 3D map of the universe ever made.

Finkbeiner's story centres on Jim Gunn, the Princeton University astronomer who was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2008. In the late 1980s, when Gunn began thinking about creating a massive digital survey of the sky, only around 10,000 galaxies had been catalogued. Fast-forward more than a decade, and the SDSS has mapped more than 230 million celestial objects, including more than 930,000 galaxies.

Bacteria on the catwalk


Kat Austen, Letters and Comments editor

You rarely see "couture" and "bacteria" in the same sentence - but fashion designer Suzanne Lee is changing all that. Lee is the creator of BioCouture: fabric grown by bacteria. Harnessing the power of biology, Lee has a radical vision for sustainable, green clothing made in labs rather than factories. I had a chance to chat with her to find out why the future of fashion may lurk in her sugar vat.


Fred Pearce, contributor

Fixing the weather is an old science fiction standby. Today, some believe we can fix our atmosphere's ills by geoengineering the climate. Science historian James Rodger Fleming is having none of it. For him, the story is full of charlatans, fantasists and climate fascists. Even bona fide scientists don't win his respect. He happily fingers "pathological" Nobel laureates and "disingenuous" Royal Society reports. Whether the would-be weather-makers are covering ice caps with soot or adding sulphur to the stratosphere, he views them with the "deepest suspicion".

But does any of it work? Is China really chasing rainbows when it forks out tens of millions of dollars every year on cloud seeding? Could we successfully shade the planet with magic dust? I loved the stories of hokum and hubris, but I would like to have had a few more answers.

Book Information
Fixing the Sky: The checkered history of weather and climate control
by James Rodger Fleming
Columbia University Press



Amanda Gefter, CultureLab editor




Fish: between seafood and wildlife

Four Fish_175.jpg

Hugh Warwick, contributor

THIS fascinating and disturbing book is as much about our attitudes towards fish as it is about the fish themselves. Paul Greenberg brilliantly captures the contradictory nature of our relationship with fish, asking whether we are "at root rational creatures". The fact that people manage to argue that "there are still some fish left" would suggest we might not be as rational as we wish we were.

Greenberg is unapologetically passionate, and as the plight of the salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna becomes progressively worse, you feel his anger rise. Should we embrace increased farming? Can we manage wild populations? Can we carry on eating so much fish?

Fish have yet to break through the double standard that protects mammals and birds as "wildlife" yet relegates fish to mere "seafood". Unless this attitude is challenged, the future for some species of fish will be very short.

Book information
Four Fish: A journey from the ocean to your plate by Paul Greenberg
Allen Lane

Fred Pearce, consultant

WITH their emails all over the internet, we cannot escape the foibles of climate scientists. Their motivations and moral compasses are, for many of us, as important as their climate models.

Heidi Cullen's beautifully crafted study provides the human detail that has been missing from most reports on climate science. Her seven journeys to explore climatic "Achilles' heels", from the African Sahel to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, from New York to Bangladesh, are full of vivid pen portraits of key researchers and stories that reveal their passions, insights and blind spots. Far from detracting from the science, these stories underpin its credibility. Cullen's sense of place is also exceptional; her climate scenarios are rooted in local landscapes and societies as much as in global models. This book sets a new benchmark for accessible writing on the likely weather of the future.

Book Information
The Weather of the Future: Heat waves, extreme storms, and other scenes from a climate-changed planet
by Heidi Cullen

The risky business of human trials


Clint Witchalls, books and arts editor

FIRST there was the agrarian economy, then the industrial economy. Now we have the service economy.

This is progress, economists and politicians tell us. But in this brave new world not everyone can be a lawyer, a stockbroker or a film star. In The Professional Guinea Pig, Roberto Abadie gives voice to a new economic underclass, a class of people that makes a living from renting their bodies to contract research organisations (CROs) for medical experiments.

"Pharmaceutical research feeds on a mass of destitute citizens who realised that clinical trials offered a better opportunity than jobs in McDonald's and similar dead-end options at the bottom of the new, service-oriented economy," writes Abadie.

Learning from the wisdom of herds


Samantha Murphy, contributor

If you have ever bought something because it had the most positive reviews, or joined in with a standing ovation simply because you didn't want to be the only one left sitting, then you are at least as smart as a honeybee and as steadfast as a bird in a flock. Reassuring news, as it turns out.

Peter Miller, an editor at National Geographic, argues that there is a lot we can learn from group behaviour in other animals. In The Smart Swarm he has extracted a few vital rules from research on the decision-making skills of birds, insects and fish, that can improve the way we approach even the most complex of our problems. How is it that honeybees can employ debate and democracy to decide where to relocate, when across the world boardroom meetings adjourn, week after week, without agreement? How do schools of fish change direction in the blink of an eye without a single signal or fearless leader to guide them? Do animals know something that we have either forgotten along the way or have yet to learn?

The descent of man

descentofman.jpgDeborah Blum, contributor

LET me start by revealing a prejudice: I don't like book titles that end with a question mark. They make me worry that the author doesn't know the answer, that he or she is looking to the reader for homework help.

And if the question posed is Is There Anything Good About Men?, I want some clear conclusions, a nice strong sense of what social psychologist Roy Baumeister thinks is "good" about the Y-chromosome community. A summary of key points might be handy in case there turns out to be a quiz.

Unfortunately, that is not what we get in this book. At times Baumeister seems dubious about men's good points. "To be blunt and undiplomatic, I like women better than men," he says. He cites studies showing that people who chat with women for 10 minutes a day are happier than people who don't get that lucky chance. By contrast, conversations with men appear to be downers. "This is not to say that talking to men is bad," Baumeister adds encouragingly.

Biofuel – capitalism's swansong?


Fred Pearce, consultant

The title suggests a hatchet job; the text is a bit more nuanced. Sometimes, and in some places, Agrofuels argues, we may be able to grow crops to use as biofuels without them becoming tyrannical neighbours.

François Houtart, a Belgian sociologist and Catholic priest, is less interested in the crops than the political landscape in which they grow. A couple of chapters on the biofuels such as palm oil that are farmed in developing countries are squashed by seven more on topics such as "the neoliberal discourse on climate change" and "post-capitalist logic". There is a brief and interesting interlude when he visits Colombian palm-oil growers. But for Houtart, turning nature into fuel represents capitalism's last stand against its own contradictions. Since capitalism destroys all it touches, he says, the outcome is inevitable. Houtart has little time to coax you to his viewpoint, though, so if you don't agree with him at the start you are unlikely to at the end.

Book Information
Agrofuels: Big profits, ruined lives and ecological destruction
by François Houtart
Pluto Press

Concrete: saviour or tombstone?


Jonathon Keats, contributor

Early in the 20th century, people with avant-garde taste could fill their homes with music played on concrete gramophones. Designed by Thomas Edison, this was one of many concrete furnishings the inventor intended for the futuristic concrete houses he built in Union, New Jersey.

Beginning in the neolithic period, Reese Palley delightfully traces the mix of innovation and impudence that make up the 7000-year history of artificial stone. While he is attentive to the environmental impact of massive concrete structures such as the Three Gorges dam in China, he ultimately sees concrete as "our ecological lifeboat", noting new formulations that take toxic chemicals from water and air. His narrative, however, suggests a less felicitous future in which the hubris that has grown with our ability to hijack geology gives new meaning to another Edison invention: the concrete tombstone.

Book Information
Concrete: A seven-thousand year history
by Reese Palley
W.W. Norton

Druin Burch, contributor

EXPERIMENTAL psychology is able to say many interesting things about the human mind. Approaching the discipline in a light-hearted way, as this book does, can be no bad thing, but that is no excuse for being thoughtless about it.

One of the chief concerns of this survey is to banish any notion that Freud might be worthwhile. He has been discredited by "scientific scrutiny", we are told, and in his stead we are offered a banquet of psychological schools, often several to a page, along with a great many statistics and descriptions of disorders: 19.4 per cent of us worry once every two to three days; there are more synapses inside our brains than there are atoms in the universe; arachibutyrophobia is the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of one's mouth.

Psychology is presented as a series of -isms, schools of thought that rush past the reader like plates of sushi on an accelerated restaurant conveyor belt. Up floats an aroma of each school's terminology and then it is off before you can taste its meat.

Follow the white rabbit

Amanda Gefter, Books & Arts editor

mad world2.jpg
"If a person says they see a white rabbit in a snowstorm and another does not, does the rabbit exist?"

That question has been the impetus for much of the work of Boston-based conceptual artist, Joe Kitsch, whose work plays with the often-subtle discrepancies between perception and reality. On Friday, I had the chance to attend the opening of Kitsch's new show at the Brookline Arts Center, just outside Boston, featuring his brand new, site-specific installation entitled Mad, Mad World. (Full disclosure: Joe is a good friend - you may remember some of the illustrations he's done for CultureLab.)

The faith that underpins science

MoonFaith.jpgAlbert Einstein once asked, does the moon exist when no one is looking at it? Such questions had been the preserve of philosophers, but with the discovery of quantum mechanics in the 1920s they became legitimate queries for physicists, too.

Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, did not believe that science grants us access to an objective reality and insisted that the task of physics was not to find out "how nature is" but only "what we can say about nature". Einstein, on the other hand, maintained an unshakeable belief in a reality that exists out there. Otherwise, he said, "I simply cannot see what it is that physics is meant to describe".

Einstein based his view of quantum mechanics on his belief in an independent reality - the moon does exist when no one is looking at it. In contrast, Bohr used the theory to construct and underpin his belief that the atomic realm has no independent reality. The two agreed on the equations but disagreed on what they meant.

Songs in the key of DNA

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video editor

Most pop songs are made up of four chords - so perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that sequences of the four base pairs that comprise our DNA could be the ideal blueprint for a musical score. Earlier this month at Diamond Synchotron in Didcot, UK, I attended the premiere of Allele, a piece of music composed from DNA. I was sceptical about how it would sound, but the result was an enchanting classical piece, performed by the New London Chamber Choir, that didn't leave any trace of its not-so-musical beginnings.


Saswato Das, contributor

If you want a crash course in cosmology, Stuart Clark's The Universe is an excellent place to start. It seeks to answer 20 frequently asked questions, ranging from what are black holes to how big is the universe, all in 3000-word essays. There are also clear answers to two questions that every astronomer faces at least once: "Do other intelligent beings exist?" and "Is there evidence for God?"

The essay format works surprisingly well. Clark is an engaging writer who manages to convey of lot of information in each answer. Accompanying quotes, such as Galileo talking about the Milky Way and Arthur Eddington's humorous ditty about light rays being bent by the sun, also serve to elucidate the subject matter at hand. When I reached the end of the book, however, I was left with a somewhat disjointed notion of the universe, with answers to some big questions but not enough context.

Book Information
Big Questions: The Universe
by Stuart Clark


Kate McAlpine, reporter and LHC rapper AlpineKat

Mixing science with hip-hop music isn't merely a hobby of scientists and science writers with  time on their hands. In an interview with VIBE magazine, hip-hop legend Dr Dre mentioned that he was thinking of an instrumental album called The Planets.

"It's just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like. I'm gonna go off on that. Just all instrumental. I've been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet," he told interviewer Jerry Barrow. "I've been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. I wanna do it in surround sound. It'll have to be in surround sound for Saturn to work."

Of course, if Dre undertakes this project, he'll be stepping up on the turf of some serious players.

Mathematical mystery tour


Lewis Dartnell, contributor

In the past few years Marcus du Sautoy has often appeared in the media, popularising mathematics and explaining its wonders and relevancies to everyday life. The Number Mysteries is a delightful expansion of this, particularly of his material from the UK's Royal Institution Christmas lectures in 2006. It is packed with puzzles and anecdotes.

Du Sautoy shows how mathematical canniness can help in everything from calculating the best properties on the Monopoly board to pursuing fame and fortune, and even how to break the world record for visiting all London Underground stations as quickly as possible. But alongside the breezier aspects of recreational mathematics, he describes the greatest unsolved mathematical challenges and doesn't shy away from the odd equation or challenging proof. Du Sautoy has established himself as a most worthy successor to the late author Martin Gardner, who did much to popularise mathematics.

Book Information
The Number Mysteries: A mathematical odyssey through everyday life
by Marcus du Sautoy
Fourth Estate

David Shiga, physical sciences reporter





Jo Marchant, consultant

It's Sunday evening in Mountain View, California. Theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde, from the University of Amsterdam, is munching sushi and telling me about a holiday he took in France last year. The day before he was due to return home, the house where he was staying was burgled. Stuck for several days without money or passport, Verlinde decided to relieve the stress by working, and came up with an idea about the nature of gravity that he believes could revolutionise physics.

Earlier in the day, we had attended the closing session of Science Foo camp, an "unconference" being held at Google headquarters, at which more than three hundred people from all fields of science were thrown together and asked to talk to people we didn't know, and attend sessions we knew nothing about.

Brightly-coloured chairs that had started off in neat rows were now scattered, and a small tent with several low camping seats was sitting incongruously in the middle of the floor. As we milled around, conference organiser Tim O'Reilly called a selection of people to give 45-second summaries of their time at SciFoo.


Jonathon Keats, contributor

Early on in the space race, when the US was lagging behind the Soviet Union, D. L. Worf, a scientist with the aerospace company Martin Marietta, recommended that the windows of the lunar landing module be coated with transparent sugar. The crew could then eat their way through it on the way back to Earth, lightening the load of food they would need to carry on the way up.

Though, sadly, never put into practice, the concept of edible spacecraft typifies the unconventional thinking underlying the past half-century of space flight. As Mary Roach observes in Packing for Mars, manned space exploration "forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn't acceptable. And possible."

Alzheimer's goes to the opera

Kat Austen, Letters & Comments editor

Image: Alastair Muir

Writing an opera about such a devastating, degenerative disease is no mean feat. To execute it as sensitively as writer Glyn Maxwell and composer Elena Langer have done in The Lion's Face is admirable - even if absolute scientific rigour was compromised by their sympathy to the indisputably challenging subject matter.

Samantha Murphy, contributor


Nick Rosen explains why living off-grid in the US has never been so comfortable

What does it mean to live off-grid?

The literal meaning is that you are not dependent upon utility companies for your power, water, phone, internet or sewage and waste disposal. The metaphorical meaning is to be set out of the system, semi-independent of all the normal support structures.

Jo Marchant, consultant

Does music need a composer? Or a performer? As this is Science Foo camp, an unconventional "unconference" being held at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, you can be pretty sure the answer is going to be no.

It's mid-morning on the final day of the meeting, and Imperial College evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi is describing a project that aims to create music using nothing more than a computer and the rules of natural selection.

In collaboration with Bob MacCallum, also at Imperial College, Leroi starts with 8-second sequences of randomly-generated notes, and asks volunteers to rate how much they like them. The highest ranked sequences are then allowed to "multiply" - copied and subjected to random changes. The volunteers rate the new generation of sequences and the cycle repeats.

Jo Marchant, consultant

In the 1970s, Karl Popper came up with a philosophical theory of reality that involved three interacting worlds: the physical world, the mental world, and "world 3", which comprises all products of the human mind - from ideas, pictures and music to every word ever written.

Something very similar to world 3 is now real and increasingly influencing how we live, says George Djorgovski, co-director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech. It's called the internet.

It's the first morning of Science Foo camp, and I've chosen a session called "virtualisation of science and virtualisation of the world". In fact - fittingly for a meeting being held at Google headquarters - how we deal with life increasingly lived online turns out to be one of the main themes of the day.
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