Letters Remain

Tag: science

  • What’s Wrong With ‘Neurobabble’?

    We know that irrelevant neuroscience jargon increases the persuasiveness of arguments, but why is the current trend of finding a neural explanation for much of human behaviour a dangerous thing? In his warning against reductionism and trusting in neural explanations for largely psychological phenomena, Tyler Burge, Professor of Philosophy at UCLA, describes the three things wrong…

  • In Evolution, Adaptability Beats Fitness

    The longest continuous evolution experiment was started in 1988 and is still ongoing. The study, examining the “evolvability” of Escherichia coli (E. coli), has recently surpassed 52,000 generations and has had a sample of the population frozen and saved every 75 days (every 500 generations). The wealth of data obtained is fantastic and these frozen ancestors have been the…

  • The Scientific Journalism Formula

    In a near-perfect parody of science reporting in the popular press, Martin Robbins, The Lay Scientist, created “a news website article about a scientific paper“. In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding? […] This…

  • Science Journalism’s Manifesto for the Simple Scribe

    “To make somebody read it”. That is the only reason for writing, according to the renowned Guardian editor Tim Radford, author of the “manifesto for the simple scribe”. This manifesto, previously distributed to editors at Elsevier and Nature, consists of twenty-five writing tips that collectively tell a science writer all they need to know to write…

  • Avoid Boring Writing: Tips (to Avoid) from Scientific Articles

    Most scientific papers consist of “predictable, stilted structure and language”, leading to consistently boring journal articles. Kaj Sand-Jensen, writing in the ecology journal Oikos, decided to investigate this problem and concluded his research by providing a set of recommendations for how to write consistently boring scientific articles (pdf): Avoid focus Avoid originality and personality Write…

  • Cosmic View to The Know Universe

    In 1957, the Dutch educator Kees Boeke wrote Cosmic View, a essay exploring “many levels of size and structure, from the astronomically vast to the atomically tiny”. Boeke’s essay went on to inspire the 1968 animated short, Cosmic Zoom. Cosmic View and Zoom then inspired the more famous Charles and Ray Eames documentary, Powers of Ten,…

  • An Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs

    Parts of Abraham Maslow‘s famous 1940s hierarchy of needs are outdated and thought of as quaint by the scientific community, according to a team who have revised the hierarchy to take into consideration scientific findings from the last 60+ years. Maslow’s pyramid is used to represent the hierarchy of basic human motivations, from basic physical…

  • Irrelevant Neuroscience Jargon Increases Persuasiveness

    The addition of “irrelevant talk about neuroscience” makes a previously bad psychological explanation much more persuasive and acceptable. Luckily experts are not fooled by this addition of spurious neuroscience, but as an in-depth look at the study shows, almost all non-experts (including neuroscience students) are fooled and persuaded by the addition of logically irrelevant neuroscience…

  • Statistical Significance Explained

    If you didn’t read the House of Commons Library’s statistical literacy guides recently (or you need a refresher on what, exactly, statistical significance means), then you can do much worse than student Warren Davies’ short rundown on the meaning of statistical significance: In science we’re always testing hypotheses. We never conduct a study to ‘see…

  • Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure

    After discovering that he held the LRRK2 mutation on his twelfth chromosome (indicating that his lifetime risk of developing Parkinson’s disease is 30-75% rather than the typical 1%), Google co-founder Sergey Brin became one of the first philanthropists to fund research into a disease based on the results of a genetic test. In Thomas Goetz’s…