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Baby Catapulting and Other Batshit Hypotheses That Teach You How Science Works

by VioletFarthing Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a really good joke. Someone has made a clever new connection between two mundane things that we’ve all encountered—and suddenly we have a lovely “aha” moment. We find it funny.

That sense of revelation accompanying a good joke or comic is very similar to what many scientists experience when they finally figure out a great explanation for some kind of previously unknown phenomenon. But don’t take it from us. Take it from the scientifically-trained author and illustrator Zach Weinersmith (née Weiner), creator of the popular web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC), known for its science-themed humor.

“I suspect what’s actually going on with people who are thought of as very creative is they’re good at two skills, one of which is generating connections rapidly, and two, editing out the garbage quickly,” explains Weinersmith on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast.

Zach Weinersmith in 2011. Christina Xu/Wikimedia Commons

In Weinersmith’s case, some of funniest jokes are actually about just plain bad scientific thinking—and they teach a lesson about what science is, and what it isn’t. The comic artist is now one of the main forces behind an event series, entitled the “Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses,” that specializes in “celebrations of well-argued and thoroughly-researched but completely incorrect evolutionary theory.” The winner takes home a sculpture of Charles Darwin, “shrugging skeptically.” The first festival took place at MIT in late 2013.

The idea for the festival originated in a popular cartoon that Weinersmith drew, depicting a scientist presenting the argument that babies are shaped like footballs so that they can be punted over mountains and thereby share hereditary material with more genetically-distinct populations living in nearby villages. (see below; click to enlarge/go to original). On a whim, he polled his Facebook fans to see if anyone might be interested in attending an event in which he turned this comic into a pseudo-serious academic talk.

“To my amazement, a thousand people came to this really dorky show,” says Weinersmith.

The cartoon that started it all. Zach Weinersmith/Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

And so BAHFest was born; the first winner gave a talk attempting to explain baby crying (“infant distress vocalization”) as advantageous because it gave supremely frustrated adults a “natural adrenaline boost” that, in turn, made them more effective in battle with rival tribes. Especially when they brought the infants into battle with them. (You might be noticing a theme here.)

Why did Weinersmith and the other organizers choose to highlight fake science talks about topics related to adaptation and human evolution in particular? “Biology is something everybody gets on some level,” says Weinersmith, who confesses he has a much harder time imagining a fake chemistry talk that would actually be funny. But he stresses that he is not “actively trying to make fun of” evolutionary psychology, or the idea that we can explain how humans behave and think today based on the evolutionary quandaries and stresses present during the species’ development. It’s just that the just-so stories characteristic of this field are quite seductive when couched in evolutionary terms.

As for Weinersmith’s own wacko-funny idea that babies are meant to be aerodynamic: He notes, babies are “largely hairless,” an attribute that would reduce friction, or drag, when flying through the air. Plus, when you blow air on babies’ faces, meanwhile, he notes they close their mouths, preventing air from entering their bodies and creating an eddy current. (Weinersmith’s science background is in physics.) “It doesn’t make sense that the baby should have this reflex unless it is designed to fly through the air, via a catapult,” says Weinersmith.

Nazca “Astronaut,” Peru. Raymond Ostertag/Wikimedia Commons

Furthermore, babies enjoy being lifted and spun in the air. And there’s even some historical evidence, Weinersmith says:

If you consider the Nazca lines, these are enormous macrostructures of these simplistic iconic drawings. So why would you ever make a drawing that people on the ground can’t even see, which is also at the same time iconic and cute-looking. There’s only one reasonable explanation which is that it’s designed for a baby to be flying over it and remain calm in flight.

Below is the full video of Weinersmith giving his “Infantapulting Hypothesis” talk at the first BAHFest. You’ll notice one slight alteration in the “theory” from cartoon to lecture: The babies are not being punted any more, but rather, catapulted. “In the original version, the baby was being drop kicked,” says Weinersmith. “And I thought for an audience of semi-normal people, that might be a little upsetting. Or at least, it would be hard to make slides.”

So how do we distinguish fact from fiction when it comes to science? When Weinersmith asked one of the previous BAHFest participants about a certain graph, one that showed a direct correlation between obesity and the length of a country’s roads, he got the following answer: “Nothing that I left in is not true.” And herein lies a major pitfall in science: cherry picking or data mining. Because we humans are highly susceptible to the confirmation bias—that is, we tend to look for evidence that supports what we already think is going on, rather than data that might call our own hypotheses into question—we need to be very careful not to focus on only a small subset of information available to us.

Otherwise, what we think is a good idea might actually be, well, just a joke.

Another serious lesson from the supremely unserious BAHFest is that there is a huge amount of interpretation of data involved in science. “I feel like there’s this unfortunate notion among most people that what a scientist does is get data, and then the data tells them what the conclusion is and that’s how science gets done,” says Weinersmith. “And of course the actual process is quite a bit messier, which probably makes it more fun. But I think the public often get misled by the idea that getting science is kind of like digging up gold nuggets or something.”

When Weinersmith isn’t creating comics and curating events to roast bad science, he’s tending to his 3-month old baby girl. Infantpulting is out, of course, but he says he was thinking about a safe way that he could, er, involve his daughter in a real wind tunnel demonstration to elaborate on the theory.

“I suppose I could 3D print a model of exactly my kid for the experiment,” he says.

To listen to the full Inquiring Minds interview with Zach Weinersmith, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a short discussion with Cynthia Graber, author of the new PBS/NOVANext article “The Next Green Revolution May Rely on Microbes,” and a discussion of the science of why human biting is so dangerous, and of how our hormones influence political choices.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds viaiTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Baby Catapulting and Other Batshit Hypotheses That Teach You How Science Works

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Luis Suárez’s World Cup Bite Was Really Dangerous. Here’s Why.

by John Graham Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, has officially banned Uruguay striker Luis Suárez from the remainder of the World Cup for his alleged bite of Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini this week. And for good reason: Not only is biting another player incredibly unsportsmanlike and just plain dirty; it’s also extremely dangerous.

Of all the bites you can get—nearly 1 percent of emergency room visits are due to mammalian bites of various kinds—the human one is “particularly notorious,” as one study puts it, due to the risk of subsequent infection. Ten percent of human bites that break the skin become infected, quite a high number in comparison with infection rates generally. For example, in a recent study of 297 emergency room patients with lacerations, the infection rate was only 3.4%.

That’s because, to put it bluntly, we have pretty dirty mouths. Human saliva contains some 50 species of bacteria—and 100 million microbes of them per milliliter. There are even reports in the scientific literature of serious diseases resulting from human bites and their subsequent infections, including hepatitis, herpes, and tetanus. (There is even one report of a patient contracting HIV from a bite to the lip.)

The placement of Luis Suárez’s bite was relatively rare: the shoulder. More than half of human bites are on the hands and fingers; only about 18 percent are to the head and neck. One of the most common bite scenarios: One person punches another in the mouth, connects with his teeth, and ends up with a hand wound. One 2003 study found that of emergency room patients arriving with infected human bites, 70 percent were young men, and fifty-six percent of the bites were “clenched fist injuries.”

These so-called “fight bites,” says another 2002 study, are “notorious for being the worst of human bites.” That’s because they can infect certain hand tendons and joints that have “a very limited ability to fight infection.” The authors warn that “significant morbidity can result from late presentation or inadequate initial management” and that “the emergency physician needs to remain vigilant for complications associated with the closed fist injury.”

The research literature also notes that “patients with bite injuries are often intoxicated, making the process of obtaining a reliable history and conducting a thorough examination difficult.” Luis Suárez does not appear to have been drunk, though; and FIFA has a lot of videotape. It does not look like his bite broke Chiellini’s skin, but if it did, let’s hope he gets some very careful medical care.

We discussed the science of the human bite in more detail on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast:

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Luis Suárez’s World Cup Bite Was Really Dangerous. Here’s Why.

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The Woman Who Forgot the Names of Animals

by RicardoEGAG Posted on June 13, 2014

Mother Jones

We’ve all been mesmerized by them—those beautiful brain scan images that make us feel like we’re on the cutting edge of scientifically decoding how we think. But as soon as one neuroscience study purports to show which brain region lights up when we are enjoying Coca-Cola, or looking at cute puppies, or thinking we have souls, some other expert claims that “it’s just a correlation,” and you wonder whether researchers will ever get it right.

Sam Kean

But there’s another approach to understanding how our minds work. In his new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, Sam Kean tells the story of a handful of patients whose unique brains—rendered that way by surgical procedures, rare diseases and unfortunate, freak accidents—taught us much more than any set of colorful scans. Kean recounts some of their unforgettable stories on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast.

“As I was reading these case studies I said, ‘That’s baloney! There’s no way that can possibly be true,'” Kean remembers, referring to one particularly surprising case in which a woman’s brain injury left her unable to recognize and distinguish between different kinds of animals. “But then I looked into it, and I realized that, not only is it true, it actually reveals some important things about how the brain works.”

Here are five patients, from Kean’s book, whose stories transformed neuroscience:

1. The man who could not imagine the future. Kent Cochrane (KC), pictured below, was a 70s wild child, playing in a rock band, getting into bar fights and zooming around Toronto on his motorcycle. But in 1981, a motorcycle accident left him without two critical brain structures. Both of his hippocampi, the parts of the brain that allow us to form new long-term memories for facts and events in our lives, were lost. That’s quite different from other amnesiacs, whose damage is either restricted to only one brain hemisphere, or includes large portions of regions outside of the hippocampus.

KC’s case was similar to that of Henry Molaison, another famous amnesiac known as HM. HM taught us that conscious memories of things like which street you grew up on (personal semantic information or facts about yourself) and what happened on your prom night (episodic memories for events in your past) are stored independently from other types of non-conscious memories, of things like how to ride a bike or play the guitar. You can lose one type of memory without losing the other. But KC taught us still more: That our ability to imagine the future is tied to our ability to use our memories to re-experience the past.

KC (“Kent Cochrane”), right, with his family. After losing his long-term memory, KC became one of the most famous patients in neuroscience. Cochrane family.

“When he lost his past self,” says Kean of KC, “he lost all sense of what he was going to do over the next hour, or over the next day, or over the next year. He couldn’t project himself forward at all, and kind of realize that he would want to be doing something in a month or a year. He was kind of eternally trapped in the present tense.”

Although it might sound obvious now, before KC came along, neuroscientists hadn’t realized how closely tied, on a cognitive level, our future is to our past. “But if you think about it, it does make sense,” explains Kean, “because the ultimate biological purpose of having a memory isn’t just…to make you happy or something like that. The point of a memory is so that you can kind of keep track of what happened in your past, and then apply that to the future.”

2. The man whose vocabulary was reduced to one word. In the late 18th century, the idea that different functions of the mind might be tied to specific parts of the brain first gained a foothold. Phrenology, as it came to be called, was based on the notion that bumps in the skull were markers of larger bits of brain, and that these bumps were clues as to what mental talents, or lack thereof, a person might possess. By the 1840s, however, many scientists dismissed phrenology (and rightly so) as rank pseudoscience.

Paul Broca. Wikimedia Commons.

So when Paul Broca, a French neuroanatomist, first proposed that there was a specific “language area” in the brain—and did so based on evidence from the brain of a patient nicknamed “Tan”—he was laughed out of a scientific meeting.

Tan—whose story is related in Kean’s new book—suffered from epilepsy throughout his childhood. By age 31, he could only respond to questions by repeating the word “tan.” Unless, that is, he was enraged. Then, he’d let out a cry of “Sacre nom de Dieu!,” a French insult. Yet Tan still seemed to be able to understand spoken language, even if he could not to speak himself. Because his vocabulary was so impoverished, he became an expert at gesturing, expressing himself through mime.

So how was it possible that a man lost his ability to speak words, but not to understand them?

In 1861, gangrene took Tan’s life—and Broca got his brain, which he proceeded to study. Broca found a lesion on the left side of the brain, near the front. This turned out to be the “language production” node; it is now known as Broca’s area. From Tan and patients like him, neuroscientists thus learned that the speech production and speech comprehension regions of the brain are quite separable—and we need both, functioning properly, to communicate using language.

3. The man whose brain was split in two. In the 1940s, neurosurgeons developed a new procedure to treat patients with severe epilepsy. As a last resort when other less invasive treatments were ineffective, they would sever the major fiber tract, known as the corpus callosum, that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. That way, when the sparks of over-excited neurons started in one part of the brain, the seizure was at least confined to that hemisphere, limiting the damage of the electrical storm.

The corpus callosum (in red). Anatomography/Life Science Databases/Wikimedia Commons

But as it happened, the patients involved didn’t just have their epilepsy reduced: They also became marvels of science. Because these “split-brain” patients cannot send information from one hemisphere to the other, neuroscientists can learn from them which functions are limited to one side of the brain or the other.

One such patient, with the initials PS, was studied by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. In experiments on PS and other split-brain patients, Gazzaniga devised a clever way of talking to each hemisphere independently. He would flash pictures on different sides of a screen, knowing that the visual system divides the world into two halves, and each hemisphere only sees one of them.

Thus in one experiment, Gazzaniga flashed an image of a snowy scene so that only PS’s right hemisphere would perceive it, and an image of a chicken claw so that only his left hemisphere would pick it up. Then, Gazzaniga asked PS to choose, from an array of objects, those relevant to what he had seen. PS’s left hand (governed by the right hemisphere) picked up a snow shovel, and his right hand (governed by the left hemisphere) chose a rubber chicken. So far, so good: That makes sense.

But when Gazzaniga asked him why he chose those objects, PS responded, “The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed,” reports Kean. But of course, the shovel actually went with the snow scene. What was happening was that when it came to language, the left hemisphere is dominant. The right hemisphere, by contrast, has a barely functioning language capacity, but can express itself in other ways—by pointing with the left hand, for example, or by drawing or choosing objects with it.

You can watch a video featuring Gazzaniga’s work with another split-brain patient here.

Split-brain patients like PS thus unlocked another mystery of the mind; or rather, the two minds. They showed that the two hemispheres store and process different types of information, and that when the connections between the two hemispheres are broken, each one can act independently of the other. For those of us with an intact corpus callosum, however, the hemispheres share information to such a large extent that calling someone ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ just doesn’t make sense. “The idea that the left-brain is logical and controls all language, and the right brain is completely arty and just wants to do those kind of creative things—that’s way, way overblown,” says Kean.

4. The woman whose brain forgot animals. This is the story that, when Kean first read about it, he “did not believe it at first.”

“It was a case of someone who had an injury to the part of their temporal lobe,” remembers Kean, “so, on the side of the brain…the temples. And this person lost the ability to recognize all animals.” And yet, stunningly, pretty much everything else was fine.

Hachette.

How could that happen? In his book, Kean explains that the woman in question suffered from complications of a herpes virus infection, which in rare cases can spread to the brain’s temporal lobes, where we store general information about the world, like our knowledge of the capitals of states and countries. When herpes invades the brain, it can induce a coma and even death. But patients who do recover are sometimes left with very bizarre problems: they can lose the ability to recognize a particular category of things.

That’s what happened with the woman who couldn’t recognize animals: She could not tell them apart either by sight or sound, even though she could name and recognize other things just fine—the sound of a doorbell versus that of a phone, for instance. “She knew tomatoes are bigger than peas,” Kean writes, “but couldn’t remember whether goats are taller than raccoons. Along those lines, when scientists sketched out objects that looked like patent-office rejects (e.g., water pitchers with frying-pan handles), she spotted them as fakes. But when they drew polar bears with horse heads and other chimeras, she had no idea whether such things existed.”

These patients have what are called category-specific agnosias, or losses of knowledge. And they have taught neuroscientists something critical concerning how we store information about the world: Namely, our brain divides objects into categories, and organizes those categories hierarchically. Thus, in the patient that Kean describes, the “animal” category had been knocked out, but nothing else had been.

That’s just the beginning of what can happen to the brain, however. There are other patients who suffer from a disease called semantic dementia. First, they can’t tell a robin from a sparrow. Then all birds seem the same. Then, as their brain damage progresses, they can’t tell an animal from an inanimate object—until eventually, their speech contains no specific nouns.

5. The king who kept his skull but lost his mind. If you’re still not convinced that blows to the head can devastate the brain—even if there are no symptoms of concussion, or exterior damage to the skull—this last case just might make you a serious NFL critic. In 1559, King Henry II of France lost a jousting match after taking a blow to the head. In doing so, he proved unequivocally that an intact skull does not mean that an intact brain resides inside it.

Henry II. Wikimedia Commons.

At first, the doctors examining the king were not concerned. “They thought Henry was actually going to be just fine because when they looked at his skull, there was no…big crack on the outside; there wasn’t a gory, obvious wound,” says Kean. But it took the dueling neurosurgeons in the title of Kean’s book to realize the extent of the damage to the king’s brain.

“Twisting injuries, where you get hit on the side of your head, and your head kind of jerks one way,” explains Kean, “those are especially bad because they end up tearing the seams between neurons—sometimes even tearing neurons themselves—open. And your brain—because of the flood of chemicals that come out of these torn neurons—your brain often has a big, electrical discharge at the same time.”

“If the brain starts to swell or blood pools up inside the brain, it’s very, very deadly. It will start to crush cells,” says Kean. In such a case, a skull fracture might actually help matters by releasing some of the pressure and limiting the damage.

Henry II was not so lucky: the blow to his head caused his brain to swell and eventually hemorrhage, leading to his death—even though not a single shard of the jousting rod that hit him actually penetrated his brain. Henry’s doctors could not save him, but future researchers learned from his case just how bad brain injuries can be.

Such, then, are some of the fascinating things we can learn from patients whose brains have been altered, or damaged, in unique ways. But as Kean relates, these patients don’t just teach us by virtue of what they have lost. We also have much to learn from what they keep, from the brain functions that still work for them, even after all of their injuries.

Notably, they all seem to keep, at least in some form, their core identities.

“The more cases I looked, the more I saw evidence that you really do retain the sense of self,” says Kean. “And in some ways…I thought that was kind of comforting, too, because when you’re talking about these stories, you have to put yourself in the mind of these people, and think, you know, ‘What would I be like if I lost this function of my brain, or, you know, if I turn into a pathological liar or I couldn’t recognize my loved ones anymore?’ But there are some things you do retain, that you won’t lose about yourself.”

To listen to the full interview with Sam Kean, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features an exclusive brief interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson about the meaning of the just-completed Cosmos series; a discussion of whether the famed and controversial hormone oxytocin might be capable of extending the span of human life; and a breakdown of the physics of how soccer balls travel through the air (just in time for the World Cup).

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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The Woman Who Forgot the Names of Animals

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This Ice Sheet Will Unleash A Global Superstorm Sandy That Never Ends

by MilagroPCJA Posted on May 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you want to truly grasp the scale of the Earth’s polar ice sheets, you need some help from Isaac Newton. Newton taught us the universal law of gravitation, which states that all objects are attracted to one another in relation to their masses (and the distance between them). The ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland are incredibly massive—Antarctica’s ice is more than two miles thick in places and 5.4 million square miles in extent. These ice sheets are so large, in fact, that gravitational attraction pulls the surrounding ocean towards them. The sea level therefore rises upward at an angle as you approach an ice sheet, and slopes downward and away as you leave its presence.

This is not good news for humanity. As the ice sheets melt due to global warming, not only do they raise the sea level directly; they also exert a weaker gravitational pull on the surrounding ocean. So water sloshes back towards the continents, where we all live. “If Antarctica shrinks and puts that water in the ocean, the ocean raises around the world, but then Antarctica is pulling the ocean towards it less strongly,” explains the celebrated Penn State glaciologist Richard Alley on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “And as that extra water around Antarctica spreads around the world, we will get a little more sea level rise in the US than the global average.”

Alley, a self-described “registered Republican” and host of the PBS program Earth: The Operators’ Manual, spoke on the occasion of truly dire news, of the sort that ice sheet experts like him have been dreading for some time. Last week, we learned from two separate research teams that the ice sheet of West Antarctica, which comprises just one relatively small part of Antarctic ice overall but contains enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by some 10 or 11 feet, has been irrevocably destabilized. Scientists have long feared that of all the planet’s great ice sheets, West Antarctica would be the first to go, because much of it is marine-based—the front edge of the ice sheet is bathing in increasingly warm water, which is melting it from beneath. Here’s a helpful visualization of how this process works:

AntarcticGlaciers.org (Bethan Davies) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

The great ice sheet naturally wants to push outwards and spread into the sea, Alley explains, much like water spreads out when poured onto a flat surface. But the advance is held up by the “grounding line”—the ice sheet’s mooring at a particular point on the sea floor.

And here’s where the problem arises: The latest research suggests that the ice is melting from below, and thus, losing its moorings. The oceanfront glaciers of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are experiencing “rapid grounding line retreat,” in scientific parlance, and this is happening “sooner than we initially expected, scientifically,” says Alley. The cause seems to be a change in winds driven by global warming, which in turn, is sending more warm water towards Antarctica’s glaciers. And as the glaciers lose ice from below, there is less friction with the ground, and thus, faster ice flow into the sea, where it can contribute to sea level rise.

“What they found,” Alley continues, “is that it’s likely that the fuse has already been lit.”

You need to really pause, and take a deep breath, to take in what that means: A little over three meters of sea level rise is already on its way into the ocean, with nothing to stop it. Granted, the process still takes a long time—likely hundreds of years—because as Alley explains, melting an ice sheet is a lot like unsnarling a traffic jam. “There’s this huge merge, that you take something that is a couple of miles thick, and a hundred miles wide, and you squeeze it way down,” says Alley. “And it’s coming out through a place that’s well less than a mile thick, and not nearly that wide.”

Richard Alley. Geoff Haines-Stiles for Earth: The Operators’ Manual.

Last year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a high-end estimate for global sea level rise of about three feet by the year 2100. Is that still valid? Given how long it takes to drain West Antarctica, maybe so. But maybe not. The latest research, Alley points out, “did not run the worst case scenario.”

Either way, three feet by 2100 is hardly any consolation to those humans, our grandchildren or great-grandchildren, who will be living in the 22nd century. If it hasn’t already collapsed by then, West Antarctica will be coming for them. And what does that mean?

As of now, coastal counties are home to 39 percent of the US’s population and generate nearly half of its GDP, according to the National Academy of Sciences. In other words, they are absolutely fundamental to our country and economy. But the collapse of West Antarctica basically means that in the future, all of these coastal regions—and all of the coastal regions everywhere else in the world—will be subjected to ocean conditions similar to a permanent Superstorm Sandy.

“The highest storm surge from Hurricane Sandy, or Superstorm Sandy, was just under 13 feet, and a whole lot of places it was 10 feet or less,” explains Alley. “And we’re looking at 11 feet, or something like that, from West Antarctica. Plus a little thermal expansion water expanding as it gets warmer and some mountain glacier melting that are already on the table. And so you can sort of think of the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy, something vaguely in that neighborhood for most of the coastline of the world.”

We remember what that looked like:

Queens, N.Y., during Superstorm Sandy. Wang Chengyun/Xinhua/ZUMA

The chief difference (besides the lack of hurricane-like wind and rain) would be that the water wouldn’t retreat any more. It wouldn’t just be a storm surge, it would be the new state of the ocean.

And it gets even worse: West Antarctica isn’t the only worry. To hear Alley tell it, it’s just that West Antarctica is pretty much lost to us already. Next up is a place that we might still be able to save, but that we’re currently playing an insane game of roulette with: Greenland.

It contains much more water than West Antarctica: About 23 feet of global sea level rise. That’s equivalent, on a worldwide scale, to the storm surge caused by Supertyphoon Haiyan when it struck the Philippines last year.

Satellite images show Greenland’s ice sheet before and after a stunning melting event in July 2012. NASA.

And here again, the news isn’t good. Recently published research finds that much more of the Greenland Ice Sheet than previously believed is exposed, from beneath, to the ocean. Basically, the new science amounts to a topographical re-mapping exercise—for terrain that is as much as three miles below a vast sheet of ice. And it turns out that the canyons beneath Greenland’s glaciers are deeper than scientists previously thought, and in some cases, well below sea level. This means, in turn, that more of the ice sheet is potentially exposed to warming seas—similar to the ice sheet of West Antarctica.

“It doesn’t yet say, ‘Greenland is about to fall into the ocean, run for the hills,'” says Alley, “but it does make Greenland look a little bit more vulnerable than we thought.”

But not yet sacrificed. Not yet gone. For Alley, then, the true upshot of the West Antarctica news is this: It makes saving Greenland absolutely essential. Ten feet of sea level rise will be incredibly painful to adapt to already, but 33 feet from the combined loss of West Antarctica and Greenland? It’s simply inconceivable. There is no such thing as adapting to that.

Essentially, then, we need an all out global push to stop global warming and save Greenland—and thus, the places where we all live.

Alley puts it like this: “If we’ve committed to 3.3 meters from West Antarctica, we haven’t committed to losing Greenland, we haven’t committed to losing most of East Antarctica. Those are still out there for us. And if anything, this new news just makes our decisions more important, and more powerful.”

Or, we could continue to fiddle and do nothing. If that happens, then Greenland is still just the beginning. Next up: The rest of Antarctica, of which West Antarctica comprises only a small part. Melt the whole continent, the largest mass of ice on Earth by far, and someday, it would reward you with as much as 200 feet of sea level rise. That would take a very long time to happen, and there is still plenty of time to stop it…but, we know already that it is possible, given high enough temperatures. According to Alley, the Earth currently sports many so-called “raised beaches” at altitudes far above our current sea level—preserved shorelines from a time when the oceans were radically higher.

That’s why, as a human civilization on Earth, pretty much the dumbest thing you could possibly do is melt your planet’s ice sheets. And that’s why, if the news about West Antarctica isn’t enough to snap us into action on climate change, then we will only be able to thank ourselves for the disaster that is coming.

To listen to the full interview with Richard Alley, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of a controversial project to replicate some of the most famous studies in social science, and of new research on whether firstborn children are more politically conservative than their later-born siblings.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How To Convince Conservative Christians That Global Warming Is Real

by BettyWhitefoord Posted on May 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian, has had quite the run lately. A few weeks back, she was featured in the first episode of the Showtime series The Years of Living Dangerously, meeting with actor Don Cheadle in her home state of Texas to explain to him why faith and a warming planet aren’t in conflict. (You can watch that episode for free on YouTube; Hayhoe is a science adviser for the show.) Then, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2014; Cheadle wrote the entry. “There’s something fascinating about a smart person who defies stereotype,” Cheadle observed.

Why is Hayhoe in the spotlight? Simply put, millions of Americans are evangelical Christians, and their belief in the science of global warming is well below the national average. And if anyone has a chance of reaching this vast and important audience, Hayhoe does. “I feel like the conservative community, the evangelical community, and many other Christian communities, I feel like we have been lied to,” explains Hayhoe on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “We have been given information about climate change that is not true. We have been told that it is incompatible with our values, whereas in fact it’s entirely compatible with conservative and with Christian values.”

Hayhoe’s approach to science—and to religion—was heavily influenced by her father, a former Toronto science educator and also, at one time, a missionary. “For him, there was never any conflict between the idea that there is a God, and the idea that science explains the world that we see around us,” says Hayhoe. When she was 9, her family moved to Colombia, where her parents worked as missionaries and educators, and where Hayhoe saw what environmental vulnerability really looks like. “Some of my friends lived in houses that were made out of cardboard Tide boxes, or corrugated metal,” she says. “And realizing that you don’t really need that much to be happy, but at the same time, you’re very vulnerable to the environment around you, the less that you have.”

Her research today, on the impacts of climate change, flows from those early experiences. And of course, it is inspired by her faith, which for Hayhoe, puts a strong emphasis on caring for the weakest and most vulnerable among us. “That gives us even more reason to care about climate change,” says Hayhoe, “because it is affecting people, and is disproportionately affecting the poor, and the vulnerable, and those who cannot care for themselves.”

The fact remains, though, that most evangelical Christians in the United States do not think as Hayhoe does. Recent data from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication suggests that while 64 percent of Americans think global warming is real and caused by human beings, only 44 percent of evangelicals do. Evangelicals in general, explains Hayhoe, tend to be more politically conservative, and can be quite distrusting of scientists (believing, incorrectly, that they’re all a bunch of atheists). Plus, some evangelicals really do go in for that whole “the world is ending” thing—not an outlook likely to inspire much care for the environment. So how does Hayhoe reach them?

From our interview, here are five of Hayhoe’s top arguments, for evangelical Christians, on climate change:

1. Conservation is Conservative. The evangelical community isn’t just a religious community, it’s also a politically conservative one on average. So Hayhoe speaks directly to that value system. “What’s more conservative than conserving our natural resources, making sure we have enough for the future, and not wasting them like we are today?” she asks. “That’s a very conservative value.”

Indeed, many conservatives don’t buy into climate science because they don’t like the “Big Government” solutions they suspect the problem entails. But Hayhoe has an answer ready for that one too: Conservative-friendly, market-driven solutions to climate problems are actually all around us. “A couple of weeks ago, Texas…smashed the record for the most wind energy ever produced. It was 38 percent of our energy that week, came from wind,” she says. And Hayhoe thinks that’s just the beginning: “If you look at the map of where the greatest potential is for wind energy, it’s right up the red states. And I think that is going to make a big difference in the future.”

2. Yes, God Would Let This Happen. One conservative Christian argument is that God just wouldn’t let human activities ruin the creation. Or, as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma has put it, “God’s still up there, and the arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what he is doing in the climate, is to me, outrageous.” You can watch Inhofe and other religious right politicians dismissing climate change on biblical grounds in this video:

Hayhoe thinks the answer to Inhofe’s objection is simple: From a Christian perspective, we have free will to make decisions and must live with their consequences. This is, after all, a classic Christian solution to the theological problem of evil. “Are bad things happening? Yes, all the time,” says Hayhoe. “Someone gets drunk, they get behind the wheel of a car, they kill an innocent bystander, possibly even a child or a mother.”

Climate change is, to Hayhoe, just another wrong, another problem, brought on by flawed humans exercising their wills in a way that is less than fully advisable. “That’s really what climate change is,” she says. “It’s a casualty of the decisions that we have made.”

3. The Bible Does Not Approve of Letting the World Burn. Hayhoe agrees with the common liberal perception that the evangelical community contains a significant proportion of apocalyptic or end-times believers—and that this belief, literally that judgment is upon us, undermines their concern about preserving the planet. But she thinks there’s something very wrong with that outlook, and indeed, that the Bible itself refutes it.

“The message that, we don’t care about anybody else, screw everybody, and let the world burn, that message is not a consistent message in the Bible,” says Hayhoe. In particular, she thinks the apostle Paul has a pretty good answer to end-times believers in his second epistle to the Thessalonians. Hayhoe breaks Paul’s message down like this: “I’ve heard that you’ve been quitting your jobs, you have been laying around and doing nothing, because you think that Christ is returning and the world is ending.” But Paul serves up a rebuke. In Hayhoe’s words: “Get a job, support yourself and your family, care for others—again, the poor and the vulnerable who can’t care for themselves—and do what you can, essentially, to make the world a better place, because nobody knows when that’s going to happen.”

One reason some evangelicals dismiss climate worries is an apocalyptic worldview. Igor Zh./Shutterstock

4. Even If You Believe in a Young Earth, It’s Still Warming. One reason there’s such a tension between the evangelical community and science is, well, science. Many evangelicals are Young-Earth creationists, who believe that the Earth is 6,000 or so years old.

Hayhoe isn’t one of those. She studied astrophysics, and quasars that are quite ancient; and as she notes, believing the Earth and universe to be young creates a pretty problematic understanding of God: “Either you have to believe that God created everything looking as if it were billions of years old, or you have to believe it is billions of years old.” In the former case, God would, in effect, seem to be trying to trick us.

But when it comes to talking to evangelical audiences about climate change, Hayhoe doesn’t emphasize the age of the Earth, simply because, she says, there’s no need. “When I talk to Christian audiences, I only show ice core data and other proxy data going back 6,000 years,” says Hayhoe, “because I believe that you can make an even stronger case, for the massive way in which humans have interfered with the natural system, by only looking at a shorter period of time.”

6,000 years of temperatures records and a projection of the warming to come. Jos Hagelaars/My View on Climate Change

“In terms of addressing the climate issue,” says Hayhoe, “we don’t have time for everybody to get on the same page regarding the age of the universe.”

5. “Caring for our environment is caring for people.” Finally, Hayhoe thinks it is crucial to emphasize to evangelicals that saving the planet is about saving people…not just saving animals. “I think there’s this perception,” says Hayhoe, “that if an environmentalist were driving down the road…and they saw a baby seal on one side and they saw a human on the other side, they would veer out of the way to avoid the baby seal and run down the human.” That’s why it’s so important, in her mind, to emphasize how climate change affects people (a logic once again affirming the perception that the polar bear was a terrible symbol for global warming). And there’s bountiful evidence of this: The just-released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Working Group II” report on climate impacts emphasizes threats to our food supply, a risk of worsening violence in a warming world, and the potential displacement of vulnerable populations.

So is the message working? Hayhoe thinks so. After all, while only 44 percent of evangelicals may accept modern climate science today, she notes that that’s considerable progress from a 2008 Pew poll, which had that number at just 34 percent. Ultimately, for Hayhoe, it comes down to this: “If you believe that God created the world, and basically gave it to humans as this incredible gift to live on, then why would you treat it like garbage? Treating the world like garbage says a lot about how you think about the person who you believe created the Earth.”

To listen to the full interview with Katharine Hayhoe, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of recent findings that laboratory mice respond differently to male researchers, and new breakthroughs in “therapeutic cloning,” or the creation of embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embryos.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How To Convince Conservative Christians That Global Warming Is Real

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Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

by FelixHuddleston Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jared Diamond didn’t start out as the globe-romping author of massive, bestselling books about the precarious state of our civilization. Rather, after a Cambridge training in physiology, he at first embarked on a career in medical research. By the mid-1980s, he had become recognized as the world’s foremost expert on, of all things, the transport of sodium in the human gall bladder.

But then in 1987, something happened: his twin sons were born. “I concluded that gall bladders were not going to save the world,” remembers Diamond on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “I realized that the future of my sons was not going to depend upon the wills that my wife and I were drawing up for our sons, but on whether there was going to be a world worth living in in the year 2050.”

The result was Diamond’s first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. It’s the book that came before his mega-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, but it very much lays the groundwork for that work, as well as for Diamond’s 2005’s ecological jeremiad Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a sense, The Third Chimpanzee ties together Diamond’s thinking: It’s a sweeping survey of who we humans are—evolutionarily speaking, that is—and what that says about whether we can solve the “various messes that we’re making now,” in Diamond’s words. And this month, The Third Chimpanzee has been released in a new, shortened and illustrated edition for young adults, underscoring Diamond’s view that our entire future now depends on “enabling young people to make better decisions than their parents.”

In other words, if you want to boil down Diamond’s message these days to its essence, it would be something like this: Go forth, young chimpanzees, and clean up the mess we made. (Or else.) For Diamond, the story of who we are is also the story of what we must do. The younger among us, anyway.

Jared Diamond’s new edition of The Third Chimpanzee is directed at all the young chimpanzees out there, who had better be wiser than their parents. GlobalP/Thinkstock

So who are we? From the perspective of genetics, we are clearly the third species of chimpanzee. Our DNA is only 1.6 percent different from that of either chimps or pygmy chimpanzees (today more commonly called bonobos). “The reason why you and I are talking, and we’re not locked up in cages—whereas chimpanzees are not talking, and are locked up in cages—all that lies in 2 percent of our DNA,” explained Diamond on Inquiring Minds.

In fact, as Diamond emphasizes in his book, we are more genetically similar to chimps than many other closely related species are to one another. Gorillas and chimps, for instance, are 2.3 percent different, which means that chimps are considerably closer to us than to their other nearest primate relatives. Or, consider two very closely related songbird species: the red-eyed and white-eyed vireo. They are 2.9 percent different, notes Diamond.

So what makes humans so seemingly special? Until pretty recently, we weren’t. All the way up to 80,000 years ago, we were just “glorified chimpanzees,” in Diamond’s words. But then, something changed. Diamond calls it the “Great Leap Forward.” “The first art appears, necklaces, pierced ostrich shells,” says Diamond. “There’s rapid invention of tools, implying that even though our brains had been big for hundreds of thousands of years, we were not doing much interesting with these big brains—at least nothing that showed up preserved in the fossil record.”

We’re still not sure what brought on the Great Leap Forward. There wasn’t any big environmental change that drove us to adapt; all this happened in the middle of an Ice Age. Diamond’s hypothesis is that it was the development and perfection of spoken language that catapulted us forward, making possible teamwork, collaboration, planning, long-distance trade, and much more. Whether for lack of vocal capacity, brain development, or some other reason, chimps never made this leap. “A baby chimpanzee that was brought up in the home of a clinical psychologist couple, along with their baby, by age two, the chimpanzee could pronounce only four consonants and vowels, and it never got better,” says Diamond. “But if all you can say is, bi, ba, di, do, that doesn’t get you Shakespeare, and it also doesn’t let you discuss how to construct atomic bombs and bows and arrows.”

7 Stories.

In this view, the downstream consequences of language acquisition are, basically, everything that stands out about human civilization. That ranges from the highly beneficial—the dramatic growth in life expectancy—to the mixed: technologies that have significant benefits but also huge costs (like, say, devices to exploit fossil fuels for energy). And most of all, it includes environmental despoilment and resource depletion. “At present, we, humans, are operating worldwide on a non-sustainable economy,” says Diamond. “We’re exploiting resources, water, energy sources, fisheries, forests, at a rate such that most of these resources will get seriously depleted within a few decades.”

As a result, Diamond believes that our big brains are now setting us up for a major fall—a Great Leap Backward, if you will. “We are now reversing our progress much more rapidly than we created it,” writes Diamond in the new The Third Chimpanzee. “Our power threatens our own existence.”

In our interview, host Indre Viskontas asked Diamond where he thought humanity would be 100 years from now. What’s striking is that he wasn’t positive that the modern world, as we know it, would be around at all. It all depends, he says, on where we are at 2050:

DIAMOND: Either by the year 2050 we’ve succeeded in developing a sustainable economy, in which case we can then ask your question about 100 years from now, because there will be 100 years from now; or by 2050 we’ve failed to develop a sustainable economy, which means that there will no longer be first world living conditions, and there either won’t be humans 100 years from now, or those humans 100 years from now will have lifestyles similar of those of Cro-Magnons 40,000 years ago, because we’ve already stripped away the surface copper and the surface iron. If we knock ourselves out of the first world, we’re not going to be able to rebuild a first world.

In 2005’s Collapse, Diamond provided a great deal more detail on how ecological despoilment led to the collapse of other societies, such as the Easter Islanders, who cut down all their trees. The difference now, however, is that globalization causes our peril to be more widely distributed, kind of like a house of cards. “In this globalized world,” says Diamond, “it’s no longer possible for societies to collapse one by one. A collapse that we face, if there is going to be a collapse, it will be a global collapse.”

And yet despite all of this, Diamond says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about the future of humanity. What exactly does that mean? “My estimate for the chances that we will master our problems and have a happy future, I would say the chances are 51 percent,” explains Diamond. “And the chances of a bad ending are only 49 percent,” he adds.

Not everybody agrees with Diamond that we’re in such a perilous state, of course. But there is perhaps no more celebrated chronicler of why civilizations rise, and why they fall. That is, after all, why we read him. So when Diamond says we’ve got maybe 50 years to turn it around, we should at least consider the possibility that he might actually be right. For if he is, the consequences are so intolerable that anything possible should be done to avert them.

Which brings us back to his book for young people—or, perhaps more accurately, for young chimpanzees. “This is the spirit in which I dedicate this book to my young sons and their generation,” writes Diamond in the new edition. “If we learn from the past that I have traced, our future may be brighter than that of the other two chimpanzees.”

To listen to the full interview with Jared Diamond, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of the science (and superstition) behind this week’s “blood moon,” and the case of K.C., the late amnesiac patient who taught us so much about the nature of human memory.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Mindsvia iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cosmos, How Science Got Cool, and Why He Doesn’t Debate Deniers

by ShelaChoaiv Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last Sunday’s debut of Cosmos, the rebooted series from Fox and National Geographic, made television history. According to National Geographic, it was the largest global rollout of a TV series ever, appearing on 220 channels in 181 countries and 45 languages. And, yes, this is a science show we’re talking about. You will have to actively resist the force of gravity in order to lift up your dropped jaw and restore a sense of calm to your stunned face.

At the center of the show is the “heir apparent” to legendary science popularizer and original Cosmos host Carl Sagan: the impassioned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who appeared on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast to talk about what it’s like to fill Sagan’s shoes (stream below). On the podcast, Tyson discussed topics ranging from what we know now about the cosmos that Sagan didn’t (top three answers: dark matter and dark energy, the profusion of discovered exoplanets, and the concept of parallel universes, or the “multiverse”) to why science seems to have gotten so super-cool again. After all, not only has Cosmos garnered such a reach, but The Big Bang Theory is currently the number one comedy on TV.

“I wake up every morning saying, ‘How did I get 1.7 million Twitter followers?'” Tyson joked while discussing science’s newfound popularity. “Should I remind them that I’m an astrophysicist? Maybe I should tell them, ‘Folks, I’m an astrophysicist. Alright? Escape now.'”

Thanks in part to Cosmos, Tyson is arguably the single most visible public face of science in America today. And as such, he may have to walk a difficult line. Many science defenders want Cosmos to do nothing less than restore our national sanity by smiting all science denial, especially when it comes to the issues of evolution and global warming. It’s an impossible task, but the theme was nonetheless quite apparent at a November Library of Congress gala dedicating Carl Sagan’s papers, where Cosmos producer Seth MacFarlane denounced science’s “politicization on steroids,” and Cosmos writer Steven Soter remarked that Sagan would have been “appalled” by today’s attacks on climate scientists.

Carl Sagan himself often took strong stands on science-based political issues of the day. He clashed with the Reagan administration over arms control and the “Star Wars” program, and the debate over his ideas about “nuclear winter” served as a kind of preview of the current battle over global warming. Sagan also openly debated pseudoscientists like Immanuel Velikovsky, who posited that the planet Venus had started out as a comet ejected by Jupiter, and had caused various events described in the Bible on its way to its current position. Indeed, Sagan even took on Velikovsky in the fourth episode of the original Cosmos, explaining in depth why his ideas were wrong.

By contrast, Tyson made clear on Inquiring Minds that he does not plan to follow in Sagan’s footsteps in this respect (or for that matter, those of Bill Nye the Science Guy, who went straight into the creationists’ den to debate evolution last month, and was faulted by some for doing so). “Carl Sagan would debate people on all manner of issues,” said Tyson. “And I don’t have the time or the energy or the interest in doing so. As an educator, I’d rather just get people thinking straight in the first place, so I don’t have to then debate them later on.” (To be sure, Tyson has on occasion been drawn into such debates in the past.)

Neil Tyson and a universe. Fox

The deniers, of course, are already out in force over the new Cosmos, whose first episode brought up both evolution and global warming, and whose future episodes will tackle human evolution in greater depth. At the creationist website Answers in Genesis, one writer even goes so far as to dispute the show’s treatment of the Big Bang, writing, “The big bang model is unable to explain many scientific observations, but this is of course not mentioned.”

Tyson certainly has plenty of criticism for those who would deny science. “I claim that all those who think they can cherry pick science simply don’t understand how science works,” he explained on the podcast. “That’s what I claim. And if they did, they’d be less prone to just assert that somehow scientists are clueless.”

But at the same time, and unlike many science champions (such as the biologist Richard Dawkins), Tyson is quite careful not to pit science against religion. For instance, the first episode of the new Cosmos tells the story of Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk who was persecuted and ultimately burned at the stake by the Inquisition over his ideas about the universe, including the notion that there are an infinite number of suns and worlds beyond our own. Some have argued that to tell this story is in effect to pick a fight over science and religion, but Tyson counters that “Giordano Bruno himself was a deeply religious person. In fact, you could argue that he was more religious than the people prosecuting him.”

The stance of Cosmos, Tyson emphasizes, is not anti-religion but anti-dogma: “Any time you have a doctrine where that is the truth that you assert, and that what you call the truth is unassailable, you’ve got doctrine, you’ve got dogma on your hands. And so Cosmos is…an offering of science, and a reminder that dogma does not advance science; it actually regresses it.”

In other words, Tyson’s view appears to be that in an age rife with science denial, Cosmos rises above that fray by instilling in us wonder about the nature of the cosmos and our quest to understand it. And given the breathtaking quality and stunningly wide distribution of the show, there’s much to say for that approach. Every time you pick a fight, whether over climate change or over evolution or over religion, you lose some of the audience (even as you fire up another part of it).

The “ship of the imagination” sails through the cosmos, on Cosmos. Fox.

In the end, however, scientific knowledge, and wanting to do something about the problems that science reveals, are inseparable. And as soon as you want to change something in the world because of science, you inevitably run up against interests, emotions, and denial.

Global warming is the case in point: Just as Carl Sagan worried about nuclear holocaust because of science, so we today worry about the planet’s steady warming. Indeed, that kind of thinking is central to the Cosmos legacy. Asked on the podcast about the warming of the planet, Tyson explained the ultimate message of Cosmos: “You are equipped and empowered with this cosmic perspective, achieved by the methods and tools of science, applied to the universe. And are you going to be a good shepherd, or a bad shepherd? Are you going to use your wisdom to protect civilization, or will you go at it in a shortsighted enough way to either destroy it, or be complicit in its destruction? If you can’t bring your scientific knowledge to bear on those kinds of decisions, then why even waste your time?”

So in the end, we should all thank Tyson—as well as Fox, National Geographic, and the show’s many writers and producers—for making the new Cosmos happen. It will contribute immeasurably to the appreciation of science in America and beyond. It will make kids think harder about pursuing science careers by showing them that the cosmos is intensely awesome, and the act of understanding it is downright heroic. But, can it ultimately stay above the political fray?

Maybe in some universes.

To listen to the full podcast interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of whether bringing extinct species back to life is a good idea, and of new research suggesting that climate change contributed to the rise of Genghis Khan.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cosmos, How Science Got Cool, and Why He Doesn’t Debate Deniers

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Science Says Your Soul Is Like a Traffic Jam

by TGEGreggjbxsfx Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Who are you?

The question may seem simple to answer: You are the citizen of a country, the resident of a city, the child of particular parents, the sibling (or not) of brothers and sisters, the parent (or not) of children, and so on. And you might further answer the question by invoking a personality, an identity: You’re outgoing. You’re politically liberal. You’re Catholic. Going further still, you might bring up your history, your memories: You came from a place, where events happened to you. And those helped make you who you are.

Such are some of the off-the-cuff ways in which we explain ourselves. The scientific answer to the question above, however, is starting to look radically different. Last year, New Scientist magazine even ran a cover article titled, “The Great Illusion of the Self,” drawing on the findings of modern neuroscience to challenge the very idea that we have seamless, continuous, consistent identities. “Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel,” declared the magazine. “Some thinkers even go so far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self.”

What’s going on here? When it comes to understanding this new and very personal field of science, it’s hard to think of a more apt guide than Jennifer Ouellette, author of the new book Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. Not only is Ouellette a celebrated science writer; she also happens to have been adopted, a fact that makes her life a kind of natural experiment in the relative roles of genes and the environment in determining our identities. The self, explains Ouellette on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream above), is “a miracle of integration. And we haven’t figured it out, but the science that is trying to figure it out is absolutely fascinating.”

Jennifer Ouellette

The question of whether the self could be said to exist at all is just one of the major scientific questions that Ouellette takes on in her new book. Nearly as thorny is the question of what actually gives you your (apparent) identity in the first place. You might think of the two issues in this way: For modern science, the question is not just who we are, but also, if we are.

To determine who she is, Ouellette naturally started with her genes. Fortunately for the book (and perhaps for her), she was able to get her genome analyzed by the genetic testing company 23andMe before the Food and Drug Administration stepped in late last year to challenge its provision of health-related genetic analyses. In response, 23andMe stated in December that it would now only offer raw genetic data and ancestry information, while it awaits FDA approval for health-related products. In the meantime, Ouelette defends what she received from the company: “They’re very careful, I found, in their results, telling you that this basically just gives you a sense of what risk factors might be,” Ouellette says. “I never had a sense that it was an oracle in any way. They actually linked to relevant papers, they ranked how valid the studies were, if they were preliminary, if they were very robust with a high sample size.”

From this inquiry, Ouellette learned that she might have a somewhat elevated risk of Type 1 diabetes, but also a lower than average risk of Alzheimer’s. But it is crucial to bear in mind that all of these risks are relatively slight and merely statistical in nature. For instance, Ouellette’s chance of getting Alzheimer’s, based on this analysis, is only 4.9 percent, compared with a 7.1 percent chance for members of the general population. Which underscores one of the key through lines of the book: Your genes are very important, but they are far from everything.

In fact, although you wouldn’t know it from a conventional wisdom that endlessly pits “nature” and “nurture” against each other, the two aren’t actually opposed at all. Every expert Ouellette spoke with for the book agreed with this: Genes and environmental factors work together to make us who we are, meaning that setting them in opposition to one another is simply misinformed. “That’s kind of empowering,” Ouellette says, “because I think that sometimes we get caught up in things like genetic determinism. Genes are very, very important, and they certainly do impose constraints, but there’s also a very strong sense in which we have a lot of role in shaping how we are perceived and who we think we are.”

MRI modeling of the brain’s white matter connections Xavier Gigandet et al./Wikimedia Commons

To see this, consider the ultimate repository of everything that we are: the so-called “connectome,” which is defined as the sum total of all the connections between the hundreds of billions of nerve cells, or neurons, in our brains. Genes shape many aspects of how our brains form and develop—how the connectome gets wired—and, accordingly, research repeatedly shows that major behavioral traits like personality are partly inherited. But at the same time, your life experiences also change the connectome daily. “Everything that we do changes who we think we are,” says Ouellette. One scientist interviewed in Ouellette’s book calls the connectome “where nature meets nurture.”

Needless to say, the science of mapping the human connectome is currently in its infancy. There are an estimated 100 billion neurons in the human brain, and as for the connections between them? Sheesh. There may be as many as 100 trillion synapses, or spaces where these neurons exchange information. So far, only one connectome has been mapped, and that was for a much simpler organism—the microscopic roundworm, or nematode. “It took them 10 years just to get the nematode,” says Ouellette, “and the nematode only has 302 neurons.”

Out of this unimaginable complexity emerges the self as we think we know it—and scientists have identified many of the component parts. For instance, there are specific brain regions associated with recognizing yourself in the mirror, feeling that you’re in your own body, feeling that your body begins and ends somewhere, and recognizing where you are in space. So how then can anyone argue that there is not actually such a thing as a self?

Much depends on what you mean by the “self” in the first place. If you think of your self as an essence—something you’d describe with adjectives like “unified,” “continuous,” and “unchanging”—well, science has some bad news for you. New Scientist, for instance, cites an array of neuroscience experiments showing how easy it is to make us believe we are outside of our bodies, or that we’re in the body of a mannequin, or that a rubber hand on a table is our hand…and much else. The hand experiment is particularly disturbing. Watch it:

In other words, while you tend to think of your body as a self-contained entity, and to believe there are clear lines of demarcation between your body and other bodies, there are quirks in the brain that allow this sense to break down. And dropping acid—another self-experiment that Ouellette undertook for the book—further undermines this assumption. “I dropped acid, and you get disembodied,” Ouellette says. “The acid actually messes with those parts of the brain, the ability to distinguish between self and other.”

And then on top of that, there are all the problems associated with memory. We would all surely agree that our memories comprise a central part of who we are, yet an array of psychological interventions can cause us to think we made choices we didn’t make, remember things that didn’t actually happen to us, and so on. “Every time we remember something, we are rebuilding it,” Ouellette says. “We’re not actually remembering what happened, we’re remembering what happened the last time we remembered it. And as a result, we embellish; little bits and details get changed.” Memory is also culturally determined: Research has shown, for instance, that Americans tend to retain a particular type of memory, focusing on events that are more personal and individual. In China, by contrast, events of grand cultural or historical significance are more likely to be remembered.

Ouellette’s conclusion from all of this, therefore, is that while it would be going too far to say there is no such thing as the self at all, our understanding of what the self actually is must be dramatically revised. “It’s not right to say it’s an illusion,” she says, “but it is a construct. But it’s not what you think it is.” More specifically, Ouellette ultimately concludes that the self is an emergent property of the billions of neurons of our brain all interacting with one another. What’s emergence? “A system in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” writes Ouellette.

“A traffic jam is emergent,” she explains. “You have all these cars interacting. If it gets dense enough, enough interactions, you’re going to get a traffic jam. But that traffic jam is real.” It is more than the sum of all its cars. Something similar goes for the self.

This also means the self is very fragile. Damage the brain or cease its function, and the self may dissipate. Die, of course, and the story is the same. “I expected people to object more to my take on what happens to your conscious self after you die,” Ouellette confesses. “Because I basically say there is no soul. Or rather, your soul is this conscious thing that is emergent, and once all that activity that leads to the emergent phenomenon disappears, so does that, it’s gone.”

The good news, though, is that during the time we have, all the science that Ouellette relied upon to learn about her own self—genome and brain scans, personality tests, and even virtual identities—can only get better, and better, and better. The next few decades are going to be a great time to get to know yourself. You just have to be clear about what that actually means.

To listen to the full podcast interview with Jennifer Ouellette, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of the recent discovery of a 30,000-year-old “giant virus” frozen in Arctic ice, and about a case currently before the Supreme Court that turns on how we determine, scientifically, who is intellectually disabled.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Science Says Your Soul Is Like a Traffic Jam

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Matthew McConaughey Is Right: Science Does Prove the Value of Gratitude

by muistenam Posted on March 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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This morning, everybody is talking about Matthew McConaughey’s folksy, funny, and kinda preachy Oscar acceptance speech.

In it, McConaughey did something you rarely hear in one of these: He crossed the streams of science and religion. Specifically, after thanking God, McConaughey added that “He,” with the super big capital H, “has shown me that it’s a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates.”

What is McConaughey talking about?

Turns out he isn’t just winging it: A decade of research has defined gratitude as a social emotion that, while related to empathy, is nonetheless distinct from it. Feeling gratitude helps bind us to our groups and communities and enhances social relationships. And it isn’t just humans: Primatologist Frans de Waal has observed behaviors that look a heck of a lot like gratitude in chimpanzees, who are more likely to share food with other chimps who have recently groomed them.

What’s the payoff of feeling grateful, of “paying it forward,” and of helping out those who help you? The research suggests more hope and optimism, a better ability to manage stress, a tendency to exercise more and even sleeping better. And while not all of us are as naturally adept at feeling grateful, the research also suggests there are interventions you can do to turn your life on a more thankful path: Simply writing down the things you’re thankful for, on a regular basis, seems to bring on these benefits.

On the Thanksgiving episode of Inquiring Minds last year, we discussed this growing body of research suggesting that the emotion of gratitude has many beneficial effects, singling out one recent gratitude study in particular, which showed a link between feelings of gratitude and the avoidance of risky behaviors like using drugs and engaging in teenage sex in African American youth. (The study did not, however, establish causation.) The discussion starts roughly at minute 3:

For a much fuller explanation of the science of gratitude, here’s a piece I wrote last year for Nautilus, unpacking all of this a bit more.

Obviously, a lot of people, like McConaughey, want to hop on board this research and ride it to a religious destination. But you don’t have to, because thankfulness can certainly occur outside of a faith-based context.

In other words, there was a gem of wisdom in McConaughey’s speech that, religious or not, you can put to good use.

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Matthew McConaughey Is Right: Science Does Prove the Value of Gratitude

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Is the Arctic Really Drunk, Or Does It Just Act Like This Sometimes?

by NatishaFe Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Just when weather weary Americans thought they’d found a reprieve, the latest forecasts suggest that the polar vortex will, again, descend into the heart of the country next week, bringing with it staggering cold. If so, it will be just the latest weather extreme in a winter that has seen so many of them. California has been extremely dry, while the flood-soaked UK has been extremely wet. Alaska has been extremely hot (as has Sochi), while the snow-pummeled US East Coast has been extremely cold. They’re all different, and yet on a deeper level, perhaps, they’re all the same.

This weather now serves as the backdrop—and perhaps, as the inspiration—for an increasingly epic debate within the field of climate research. You see, one climate researcher, Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, has advanced an influential theory suggesting that winters like this one may be growing more likely to occur. The hypothesis is that by rapidly melting the Arctic, global warming is slowing down the fast-moving river of air far above us known as the jet stream—in turn causing weather patterns to get stuck in place for longer, and leading to more extremes of the sort that we’ve all been experiencing. “There is a lot of pretty tantalizing evidence that our hypothesis seems to be bearing some fruit,” Francis explained on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast. The current winter is a “perfect example” of the kind of jet stream pattern that her research predicts, Francis added (although she emphasized that no one atmospheric event can be directly blamed on climate change).

Francis’s idea has gained rapid celebrity, no doubt because it seems to make sense of our mindboggling weather. After all, it isn’t often that an idea first published less than two years is strongly embraced by the president’s science adviser in a widely watched YouTube video. And yet in a letter to the journal Science last week, five leading climate scientists—mainstream researchers who accept a number of other ideas about how global warming is changing the weather, from worsening heat waves to driving heavier rainfall—strongly contested Francis’s jet stream claim, calling it “interesting” but contending that “alternative observational analyses and simulations have not confirmed the hypothesis.” One of the authors was the highly influential climate researcher Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who also appeared on Inquiring Minds this week alongside Francis to debate the matter.

Jennifer Francis and Kevin Trenberth.

“I applaud Jennifer for raising the issue,” Trenberth said on the show, but he argued that much more research is needed, adding that “I’m suspicious that the outcome will not be quite the way in which Jennifer would like.” Trenberth just doesn’t buy the seemingly counterintuitive idea of global warming making winters seem worse, although he is more than willing to cite other recent events, such as dramatic heat in Australia, Alaska, and Brazil, as the kind of extreme weather that climate change should produce. “At least with regard to global warming, it’s on the right side of things,” said Trenberth of these heat waves. “It’s much harder to see how cold can be caused by global warming.”

What’s going on here? In climate science, too many of the “debates” that we hear about are fake, trumped up affairs generated by climate skeptics who aim to sow doubt. But that’s not the case here: The argument over Francis’s work is real, legitimate, and damn interesting to boot. There is, quite simply, a massive amount at stake. The weather touches all of us personally and immediately. Indeed, social scientists have shown that our recent weather experience is a powerful determinant of whether we believe in global warming in the first place. If Francis is right, the very way that we experience global warming will be vastly different than scientists had, until now, foreseen—and perhaps will stay that way for our entire lives.

What Happens in the Arctic…

To understand Jennifer Francis’ big idea, you first have to understand what’s happening with the Arctic. It’s the part of the climate system that Francis has spent her career studying, and it’s the part that has changed the most, and the most rapidly, over the past decade. The rate of warming in the Arctic has been twice that of the mid-latitudes, and that warming has been punctuated by some truly shocking moments, such as the year 2007 and its unprecedented sea ice decline (since surpassed by the year 2012). 2007 “literally smashed the all-time record low for the summer minimum extent,” says Francis. And as she watched it happen, she knew that “the system as we knew it had fundamentally changed.”

What happened next is that Francis in effect crossed the streams: She combined together her expertise on the Arctic with some new thinking about the dynamics of the atmosphere. “Those momentous changes that we started to see happening got me thinking, and this kind of got me going back to my roots in meteorology,” Francis says. “And I realized that this rapid warming happening up there, and the ice loss we were witnessing, must have an effect on the large-scale circulation system, or the atmospheric patterns, beyond the Arctic.”

The result was a now famous 2012 paper titled, “Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes,” co-authored with Stephen Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In it, the two researchers presented evidence that the Arctic’s rapid warming, which they termed “Arctic amplification,” was having a major atmospheric effect by reducing something called the “poleward thickness gradient.” That sounds pretty wonky, but it simply refers to the difference in the atmosphere’s thickness as one progresses from south to north. We all know that hot air rises, and thus, the atmosphere is thicker nearer to the equator than it is at the poles. But with a rapidly warming Arctic, the thickness difference between south and north should decline, because the Arctic atmosphere would increase in thickness more rapidly than the atmosphere to the south. And that, in turn, changes the jet stream, whose motion is driven by these thickness differences.

You can watch Francis give a more thorough scientific explanation of the idea here, complete with an impressive video animation of the jet stream:

“We know that as the Arctic warms much faster, it will weaken this temperature difference between the north and the south,” Francis explains. “And because that temperature difference is one of the drivers of the west to east winds of the jet stream, we expect to see the west to east winds get weaker, as that temperature difference gets smaller. And we know that when the jet stream gets weaker, it is more easily deflected.”

That, in turn, leads to extreme weather—or so the theory goes. As Francis and Vavrus put it in their 2012 paper, a slowing down of the jet stream “causes more persistent weather conditions that can increase the likelihood of certain types of extreme weather, such as drought, prolonged precipitation, cold spells, and heat waves.” That sounds an awful lot like a recipe for what we’ve recently seen in California, the UK, the East Coast, and Alaska/Sochi. So no wonder this idea has gotten so much attention lately. The jet stream this winter, says Francis, has been “pretty much locked in place since December, until very recently.”

The Case for Skepticism

Francis’s idea is surprisingly simple, once you get down to it, so much so that as the polar vortex descended upon the US in early January, pop culture references abounded. One particularly popular Internet meme declared, “Go home, Arctic, you’re drunk,” a line that even made its way onto to NPR’s popular program “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.” The meme isn’t just funny: It captures the basic idea that weather is staggering around in a way that it doesn’t normally do, a bit out of its wits of late due to the jet stream.

Greg Laden/ECMWF

No wonder, then, that Francis’ ideas have gotten so much media attention. At a time when all of us are searching for some explanation for mind-boggling winter weather, along comes a scientist who seems to explain it all to us clearly, and also to link it to climate change.

So why don’t scientists like Kevin Trenberth accept it?

On Inquiring Minds, Trenberth outlined a number of scientific criticisms. One of them is simply that there is a great deal of change in the jet stream anyway, and more wavy patterns just happen from time to time. “The main counterargument to Jennifer at the moment is that a lot of this can simply happen through natural variability,” Trenberth explained. As he noted, there have been winters in the past with wavy jet streams and very cold mid-latitude “polar vortex” excursions. “In some years, the Arctic air gets bottled up, and it doesn’t penetrate into middle latitudes much,” says Trenberth, “and in other years, it has more waviness, outbreaks of cold occur.”

And there’s an additional reason for skepticism. Trenberth thinks that if a process as important as the one described by Francis were occurring, then climate models—complex computer simulations of the atmosphere under climate change—would have picked it up. But when scientists run these models, he says, “it takes a really long time, 50 years or something like that, to see a big change in the atmospheric circulation in association with climate change.” Francis is thus postulating a change much more rapid than what the models show.

In response to such criticisms, Francis fully admits that her idea is new, not fully accepted by all scientists, and requires further testing. One problem, she notes, is that the Arctic change has been so fast that there aren’t many years of jet stream behavior that you can even study to prove or disprove her ideas. “The rapidly warming Arctic has really only been a detectable signal in the system really in the last decade, maybe decade and a half,” she says. “And so literally we only have maybe 15 years where we might be able to detect any response of the atmosphere to this rapidly warming Arctic.”

That’s How Science Works

Stepping back and surveying this exchange, what one sees is a model of how science works when it is working well, in the way that it is supposed to. It’s the utter opposite of politicized “debates” in which skeptics go to the media to raise issues that are red herrings or already resolved by researchers, and most scientists don’t even bother to respond.

By contrast, here we have a scientist (Francis) who has reason to believe she’s uncovered something new and unexpected in the climate system, who publishes that idea, and who cites a combination of physical reasoning and (admittedly limited) observations. But other scientists (like Trenberth) are, as yet, unconvinced that the new idea meets the burden placed upon ideas of its kind when they are first introduced. Nor are they able to fit the argument easily into the context of what they already know, as encoded in the climate models whose equations represent our state-of-the-art physical understanding of the climate system.

So what happens now? Well, every year is more data, which means that every year is an additional scientific test for Francis. Scientists simply have to watch the Arctic, and the atmosphere, and see how they match what Francis has postulated. And given the amount of attention the idea has received, there are a lot of them out there now, paying very close attention.

“I think in the next few years, we’re going to get a lot of answers,” says Francis. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may not have to wait for scientists to publish those answers: You’ll probably feel them first.

To listen to the full Inquiring Minds debate between Jennifer Francis and Kevin Trenberth, you can stream here:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion about Indre’s new 24-lecture course, “12 Essential Scientific Concepts,” which was just released by The Teaching Company as part of the “Great Courses” series.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Is the Arctic Really Drunk, Or Does It Just Act Like This Sometimes?

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