Many people, including perhaps some Two-Penny readers, know very little about what scientists do. Frankly, I’m not sure I can claim to know, and I used to be one. (Well, I was a science student and lab assistant. That counts, right?) Well, now there’s a website called LabLit.com that helps illuminate the mysterious lives of scientists. In addition to essays by and profiles of numerous working scientists, they also highlight realistic portrayals of scientists in the arts (novels, film, etc.).

I haven’t had a chance to explore much of this site yet, but I’ve liked what bits I’ve read so far. I’d particularly like to point out this profile/interview of a mathematician who offered some advice to the creators of Numb3rs, which is currently my favorite show on television. (I wish I’d watched the first half of the season, but I’m sure I can find a way to remedy that.)

I suspect, and this interview seems to confirm, that the math on Numb3rs is real math. It certainly helps that I’ve heard of at least a few of the types of analyses they talk about. Now if only I could figure out what they mean. The show definitely makes me wish I’d done more math (although perhaps at a slower pace than my college math classes).

Numb3rs airs Fridays at 10 pm Eastern on CBS. I encountered LabLit.com via Science Magazine‘s NetWatch.

Over the past week, I’ve found a fair number of resources on evolution that I want to look more closely at. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to evaluate them right now. I’m posting this partly so that I’ll be able to go back and find these things again, and partly because I know that some of you will be interested. These resources are:

• The Darwin Digital Library of Evolution, which contains all of Darwin’s writings as well as several works by his predecessors, those building upon his work, and people reacting to evolution. The library is hosted by the American Museum of Natural History, which also has an exhibit on Darwin’s work and Life. I got to see the exhibit in late November, and it’s really amazing. The admission is a little expensive, but I think it’s worth it.

• A New York Times article on research about recent (within the last 10,000) human evolution:

  Wade, Nicholas. “Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story.” New York Times. March 7, 2006.

• An article in Science about a computer generated model for evolutionary trees.

  Francesca D. Ciccarelli, Tobias Doerks, Christian von Mering, Christopher J. Creevey, Berend Snel, and Peer Bork. Toward Automatic Reconstruction of a Highly Resolved Tree of Life. Science 3 March 2006: 1283-1287.

According to this short blurb in Science, a bunch of musicians led by Tim Westergreen are trying to figure out what the ‘genes’ are in music. In this case, the ‘genes’ are basic features of music. They’ve identified 400 so far. You can check out their work at www.pandora.com.

Two-Penny Words would like to say happy birthday to Charles Darwin.

Those of you in Philly who are not completely snowed in may want to head to Penn’s Archeology and Anthropology museum, where they are having a party for Darwin—assuming they aren’t snowed in, too.

It seems we really don’t know very much about nutrition. For one thing, it appears that limiting the fat in one’s diet doesn’t really have many benefits. It doesn’t appear to prevent breast cancer, colon cancer, or heart disease. In addition, trying to make school food more nutritious doesn’t appear to reduce their levels of obesity.

The good news is that you can probably eat what you want. Unfortunately, I can’t say whether that decision will have long term consequences or not.

This post refers to:

Kolata, Gina. Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds. New York Times. February 8, 2006.

Kolata, Gina. Thinning the Milk Does Not Mean Thinning the Child. New York Times. February 12, 2006.

If you’ve ever listened to (or participated in) a political discussion, you know that it often isn’t rational. Brain scans have now confirmed this, at least as far as partisanship goes. Researchers have found that people with strong partisan feelings reacted to political statements with the parts of the brain that deal with emotions, and even feel relief and other positive emotions if statements that go against these partisan inclinations are refuted. The research involved only those with strong partisan feelings. It would be interesting to see if there was a difference in the way moderates reacted to such statements. In the meantime, it seems that those with strong political feelings would be wise to carefully consider whether they’re thinking rationally or emotionally.

Speaking of emotions, what about that good feeling you get when someone nasty gets what they deserve? Well, apparently, men feel this stronger than women. I’m curious, though, how the results would have been if they had conducted the experiment with a crime other than cheating or a punishment other than pain. What would happen if they told some American subjects that French women do get fat?

Yes, the French are getting fatter. As you might expect, the French health authorities are getting upset. I’m sure the fact that they’ll have to foot the bill for the impending health utilization contributes to that. Based on the end of this article, however, the French people seem to be okay with their expansion. Perhaps that’s the new French paradox.

This post refers to:

Carey, Benedict. “A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious.” New York Times. January 24, 2006

Miller, Greg. “No Sympathy for the Devil.” ScienceNOW Daily News. January 18, 2006

Sciolino, Elaine. “France Battles a Problem That Grows and Grows: Fat.” New York Times. January 25, 2006.

No, this post is not about a new fantasy novel. It’s about physics and archeology.

If you follow physics at all, you’ve probably heard of dark matter. It’s stuff that has mass (hence the “matter”) but physicists can’t see it because it doesn’t emit electromagnetic radiation like stars do (hence the “dark”). Dark matter is detected by its gravitational effects. Most of the matter in the universe seems to be dark matter, and apparently physicists at Johns Hopkins University may now know how it’s organized. (Okay, they actually announced this in early December.) It turns out that dark matter forms a sort of “cosmic web.” At the nodes the web, the mass of the dark matter becomes great enough that it can pull light matter towards it.

As for ancient cities, it turns out that the computer game Luxor is named after a real Egyptian city. An archeology professor at Johns Hopkins has set up a website where you can see photographs of her dig at the site.

This post refers to:

Johns Hopkins University Office of News and Information JHU-STScI Team Maps Dark Matter in Startling Detail. December 9, 2005.

Bryan, Betsy and VanRensselaer, Jay. Hopkins in Egypt Today. Johns Hopkins University. January 2006.

In my last post, I mentioned RNAi in passing. As it happens, I recently wrote a piece on RNAi for an online magazine called Eclectica. It’s fairly short, so I hope that you’ll take a few minutes to read it. In addition to my piece, there are a number of other non-fiction, fiction, and poetry pieces, as well as some reviews.

This post refers to:

Kanumalla, Anju. DNA, RNA, and Alphabet Soup. Eclectica. January 2006.

The new year has begun. It’s a time to look back and to look forward. If you’ve managed to recover from your New Year’s revelry, I invite you to look at a few places that review the best science of 2005 and try to anticipate what 2006 may bring.

Science decided that “Evolution in Action” was the biggest breakthrough of 2005. They’ve made their Breakthrough of the Year section available to everyone who their website, not just subscribers. They make special note of four developments in evolution: the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome, recent discoveries in human evolution, speciation, and avian influenza.

The Breakthrough of the Year runners-up are also discussed in a separate article. In addition to reviewing the achievements of 2005, the Science staff made predictions on which scientific areas to watch in 2006, as well as evaluating the predictions they made at the end of 2004. For 2006, I’m particularly interested in RNAi and the avian flu.

When I get articles from Science, I usually prefer to look at PDFs, which look nicer when printed. However, some of the full text HTML versions on the Science website include reference lists, however, which you might find useful if you want to read further. The links provided above go to full text HTML pages rather than PDFs.

In addition to Science’s end of the year special, Scientific American has also named their top 50 leaders in science for 2005. Unfortunately, it was recently revealed their choice for research leader of the year, Dr. Hwang, fabricated many of his stem cell and cloning findings. Scientific American also compiled a list of the top 25 news stories of 2005.

This post refers to:

Breakthrough of the Year Section. Science Magazine. December 23, 2005. (See orange box in the Table of Contents for links to PDF files.)

Scientific American 50. Scientific American. November 21, 2005.

Top Science Stories of 2005. Scientific American. December 26, 2005.

The New York Times just finished a five part series called Preventing Cancer. In it, they review some common assumptions that people have about the causes of cancer and means of preventing it. Each of the five articles deals with a different potential cause. I’ve summarized the articles here, but I encourage you to read the articles. They help illustrate why epidemiology research can be so difficult, and why it’s necessary to look at medical discoveries carefully.

Part 1: Diet
The article focuses on the effects of fiber and reports that there is little—almost no—evidence to support the idea that a proper diet can help prevent cancer. A good diet won’t hurt, however, and does help prevent conditions like heart disease.

Part 2: Exercise
Again, there is little evidence that exercise can help prevent cancer. There is some evidence, however, suggesting it might be beneficial in colon and breast cancer. As with following a healthful diet, exercise has other benefits that make it worth doing anyway.

Part 3: Stress
Stress doesn’t appear to influence the development of cancer either. This article does talk about some new research suggesting that cancer tricks the immune system into leaving it alone.

Part 4: Toxins in the Environment
Once more, a connection that seem like common sense is difficult to find.

Part 5: Genes
The study of cancer genetics actually has led to advances in the treatment of cancer, if not its prevention. The result is that cancer may become a disease that a person lives with (and for which a person consumes pills) for years. The situation is likened to that of AIDS nowadays.

I wish they could have expanded on the cancer genetics, but given space constraints and the interests of most readers, I understand why they didn’t. I suspect that I’ll make that a topic of personal study later on.

This post refers to:

Kolata, Gina. “Which of These Foods Will Stop Cancer? (Not So Fast).” New York Times. September 27, 2005.

Kolata, Gina. “But Will It Stop Cancer?” New York Times. November 1, 2005.

Kolata, Gina. “Is There a Link Between Stress and Cancer?” New York Times. November 29, 2005.

Kolata, Gina. “Environment and Cancer: The Links Are Elusive.” New York Times. December 13, 2005.

Kolata, Gina. “Slowly, Cancer Genes Tender Their Secrets.” New York Times. December 27, 2005.