Tag Archives: inquiring

Gore: Fracking Won’t Solve Our Climate Crisis

by Rosa54Nxuhep Posted on September 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Few figures in the climate change debate are as polarizing as former Vice President Al Gore. His fans and his enemies are equally rabid, and his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth is still probably the most-referenced document on climate change in history. In the last few years, Gore’s global warming work has mostly been channeled into a nonprofit he oversees called the Climate Reality Project, which organizes rallies and educational events.

This week, that group held its annual “24 Hours of Reality” marathon of live-streamed videos and appearances by Gore and other celebrities to raise funds for climate action. The event took place in New York City, which is gearing up for a series of meetings and protests in advance of the biggest climate summit of the last five years, to take place Tuesday at the United Nations. Gore took a break from the broadcast to chat with Climate Desk’s Inquiring Minds podcast, offering his views on everything from President Obama’s climate polices and the role of the tea party in US politics to his hopes for a strong international climate treaty.

Gore said that Obama hasn’t yet gone far enough in his efforts against climate change, but that he nonetheless admires “what the president has done.”

“In his first term I expressed some considerable concern about what I thought he was failing to do,” Gore said, adding that after the demise of cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate, “there was not the kind of energy and activity that I felt was appropriate.” But Gore credited Obama for shifting course dramatically in his second term, and for going around the “logjam” in Congress by instructing the EPA to issue “historic regulations” on carbon emissions from power plants.

Gore did criticize some of Obama’s policies, including the president’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, which Gore described as the “prevailing code for ‘let’s keep burning fossil fuels.'”

“But it’s not fair to just take those things out of context without looking at the totality of his policies,” he added. “And the totality of what he’s doing now in his second term is really historic.”

Gore expressed skepticism about the fracking boom. He said he opposed the use of natural gas as a bridge fuel—something the Obama administration has supported—”until and unless they demonstrate the ability to stop the methane leaks at every stage of the process, particularly during fracking.” (Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that some scientists argue can negate the climate benefits of burning natural gas instead of coal.) And he added that the increasing cost-effectiveness of solar and wind power was already posing a “threat to the viability of natural gas as a source of energy in the marketplace.”

You can hear Gore’s comments in full on this week’s episode of our Inquiring Minds podcast, below, and see the highlights of his comments in our exclusive video above.

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Gore: Fracking Won’t Solve Our Climate Crisis

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Science Says You Should Leave Work at 2 p.m. and Go for a Walk

by CarltonCoy Posted on August 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Charles Dickens, perhaps the greatest of the Victorian novelists, was a man of strict routine. Every day, Dickens would write from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. After that, he would put his work away and go out for a long walk. Sometimes he walked as far as 30 miles; sometimes, he walked into the night. “If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish,” Dickens wrote.

According to engineering professor Barbara Oakley, author of the new book A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra), Dickens wasn’t just a guy who knew how to keep himself healthy. Rather, his habits are indicative of a person who has figured out how to make his brain function at a very high level. And for this, Dickens’ walks were just as important as his writing sessions. “That sort of downtime, when you’re not thinking directly about what you’re trying to learn, or figure out, or write about—that downtime is a time of subconscious processing that allows you to learn better,” explains Oakley on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast.

And structured downtime doesn’t just help the world’s greatest writers and thinkers do their best work; it helps all of us while we’re learning and striving to achieve tasks. Or at least it would, if someone told us how important it actually is. “We spend from 12 to 16 years of our lives in formal education institutions. And yet, we’re never given any kind of real formal instruction on how to learn effectively,” says Oakley. “It’s mindboggling, isn’t it?”

Barbara Oakley. John Meiu.

In fact, suggests Oakley, there are some very simple techniques and insights that can make you way better at learning—insights based on modern cognitive neuroscience. The most central is indeed this idea that while you obviously have to focus your cognitive energies in order to learn something (or write something, or read something, or to memorize something), that’s only part of what counts. In addition to this “focused mode”—which relies on your brain’s prefrontal cortex—we also learn through a “diffuse mode,” rooted in the operations of a variety of different brain regions. In fact, the brain switches back and forth between these modes regularly. (For those familiar with Daniel Kahneman’s famous book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the diffuse mode would be analogous to Kahneman’s “System 1,” and the focused mode to “System 2.”)

What’s crucial about the diffuse mode, writes Oakley in A Mind For Numbers, is that the relaxation associated with it “can allow the brain to hook up and return valuable insights.” “When you’re focusing, you’re actually blocking your access to the diffuse mode,” adds Oakley on Inquiring Minds. “And the diffuse mode, it turns out, is what you often need to be able to solve a very difficult, new problem.”

Oakley is not a neuroscientist. However, as someone who initially hated math, but then later decided to “retrain my brain” and become an engineer, she grew fascinated by the process of learning itself. “Now, as a professor, I have become interested in the inner workings of the brain,” she writes in A Mind for Numbers.

Oakley’s findings are bad news for those of us at two extremes of the learning and working spectrum. First, there are the extremely driven (and control-obsessed) hard-workers, who never let themselves rest, who sleep only five hours per night, and who fuel their unending labors with yet another coffee or yet another burst of chemical energy in the form of a cookie or a candy bar. In effect, these behaviors thwart the diffuse state. “Some very persistent and focused people can manage to hold that off some, because they’re really focusing,” says Oakley. These people are missing out on a key part of the brain’s abilities.

Tarcher

And then, there are the procrastinators. You know who you are: You wait until the last minute to do your work, or to study for that test, or to write that paper. Then you put on a burst of conscious attention, including maybe pulling an all-nighter, but because you’re so close to your deadline, there’s never any downtime at all. That’s a surefire way not to produce your best work—or, not to learn. “When you procrastinate, you are leaving yourself only enough time to do superfical focused-mode learning,” writes Oakley. And no diffuse mode at all.

This helps to explain why if you memorize a lot of stuff the night before a test, even if you do well on the test, you’ll find that in a few weeks, you don’t remember much of anything that you memorized.

The best approach, then, would seem to be to pace yourself. To work, and then to take a break, and to repeat that process steadily over days and weeks.

You can also train your mind to more profitably use both states. Here’s one recommendation from Oakley:

One thing that I talk about in the book, and it’s so simple that it seems almost absurd, is that simple technique known as the Pomodoro technique. And in that technique you just set a timer for 25 minutes, and focus, and then when it’s done, you relax. So during that 25-minute time period, you really get rid of other extraneous, possible bothersome kinds of things like email sounds, or anything like that. But what this seems to do is it allows you to practice your ability to focus intently, and to practice your ability to let go and relax.

Unfortunately, we’re not yet at the point where the insights of modern neuroscience are being applied systematically in education, or in workplaces, to help us all achieve a higher potential. In the meantime, though, you can certainly practice them on your own.

“I think the real key that eludes people a lot of time,” says Oakley, “is the idea that it’s the removing of attention that actually allows that ‘ah-ha’ insight to take place.”

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a short conversation with neuroscientist Lucina Uddin, author of a recent paper finding that autistic kids have less brain flexibility, as well as a discussion of recent research suggesting that musical ability is innate and that fist-bumps are far superior to handshakes as a greeting, assuming you don’t want to spread germs.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. 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 You Should Leave Work at 2 p.m. and Go for a Walk

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The Science Behind the World’s Greatest Athletes

by MervinValenti Posted on July 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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At the 1964 Winter Olympics, Eero Mäntyranta won the 15 kilometer cross-country skiing competition by a whopping 40 seconds—a margin of victory that has never been equaled. That same year, he won the 30 kilometer race by a full minute. So what made this legendary Finnish skier such a success?

According to sports journalist David Epstein, Mäntyranta became the “greatest endurance athlete” of his generation in part because of a single mutation to his erythropoietin receptor (EPOR) gene, which helps regulate the production of red blood cells. Remember Lance Armstrong’s blood doping scandal? It turns out that because of his DNA, Mäntyranta had a similar advantage over his competition—but without ingesting or injecting a single cell. Mäntyranta “produced about 50 percent more oxygen-carrying red blood cells than a normal person,” explains Epstein on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “So he essentially was naturally what…Lance Armstrong was through doping technology.”

Epstein says Mäntyranta’s EPOR mutation is the clearest example of a “sports gene”—a single genetic variant that has the ability to turn someone into a superior athlete. But these genes are rare. More often, says Epstein (whose recent book is also called The Sports Gene), “we’re talking about networks of genes and suites of traits that make people better suited to some sports than others.”

Saying that some people are “better suited” than others sounds a lot like the idea that some of us are born more talented. But in recent years, much of the sports community has embraced the notion that achievement in athletics is attributable largely to logging 10,000 hours (or so) of dedicated training. The “10,000 hour” rule also permeates education in other domains, such as music and chess, where complex skills need to be developed. But with athletes like Mäntyranta in the competition, can this status quo idea possibly still hold true? And what, exactly, is the scientific recipe for building an elite athlete?

Here are a few of the key factors that Epstein lays out:

Start with the right genes. Mäntyranta’s EPOR mutation isn’t the only gene variant that can make or break an athletic career. On chromosome two of the human genome, there is a gene that codes for a protein called myostatin. (Myo meaning “muscle,” and statin meaning “to halt.”) For most people, this gene does exactly what its name suggests—it stops the production of muscles. But in rare cases, says Epstein, “someone has a mutant version, and it basically doesn’t tell their muscles to stop growing on time, and they end up being really, really muscle-bound.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, explains Epstein, the first adult determined to have this mutation was a professional sprinter. But it’s been detected in young children, as well. In 1999, for instance, a bouncing baby boy with seemingly superhuman strength was born in Germany. Unlike his roly-poly peers, this baby was ripped. The muscle mass in his lower limbs was off one end of the charts, while his limited body fat was off the other end.

When this “Superbaby” was tested for the presence of myostatin, none was detected in his blood. And other babies with similar mutations have begun to pop up, including Liam Hoekstra, who apparently could do a difficult gymnast move called the iron cross by the time he was 5 months old and could do a pull-up at eight months.

But if one gene can have such a significant effect, what other gene variants might be combined in a person to optimize athletic performance?

In his book, Epstein cites Alun G. Williams and Jonathan P. Folland, scientists in England who are studying 23 gene variants strongly linked to athletic endurance. The chance that any single individual currently on the planet has all 23 variants is incredibly small—less than one in a quadrillion (one thousand million million). The most any one of us can hope for is about 16 of these 23. The chance of having none of these variants, or very few of them, is also extremely small. Most of us have some but not too many. The end result? We need to train to build up endurance.

But genetics can also make a big difference when it comes to that training. “No two people respond to the medicine of training the same way because of differences in their genes,” says Epstein. “And so it’s turning out that the talent of trainability—the ability to get more biological adaptation out of your one hour of training than the next guy or the next girl—is really the most important kind of talent.”

But if we can’t change our genes, what can we do to become better athletes?

Learn to to predict the future. When it comes to professional baseball, says Epstein, “keep your eye on the ball” is useless advice. That’s because Major League pitches take far less than half a second to reach the plate—they’re simply moving faster than the eye can track. What batters are actually keeping track of is a specific pattern of movements that the pitcher is making.

Ted Williams in 1957, on his way to the Major League batting title. AP

The ability to predict where the ball will go based on how the pitcher releases it is the real talent of an all-star hitter. That’s why Mariano Rivera could strike out batter after batter with one pitch: a 90+ mile-per-hour cut fastball whose final destination was very difficult to predict. With just a subtle difference in how much pressure he put on the ball with two of his fingers, he could alter its course dramatically.

That’s also why no amount of trips to the batting cage will turn you into a slugger like Albert Pujols or Ted Williams. “We’ve only just realized that pitching machines are totally worthless for baseball practice,” explains Epstein, “because they don’t teach you to read body movements the way that you need to.”

Putting this idea to the test, softball pitcher Jennie Finch struck out Pujols and other Major League batters during the 2004 Pepsi All-Star Softball Game—her windup and delivery confounded their ability to predict where the pitch will go, despite the fact that she threw a bigger ball.

To understand how complex skills like hitting a small projectile traveling at speeds of over 90 miles per hour are performed, consider a famous study in which chess players of different levels were given a few seconds to study a chess board. What separated the experts from the amateurs was the fact that grand masters could memorize the location of pieces on the board after looking at it for just three seconds. At first, it seemed as though they had superhuman memory skills. But when the scientists asked them to memorize the placement of pieces on a board that didn’t conform to the rules of the game, they were no better than novices. In other words, what grand masters have actually developed is the ability to organize the board into meaningful units in their mind’s eye—what psychologists call “chunks”—that they can then easily recall.

Major League Baseball players can’t hit Jennie Finch’s pitches. C5813/Wikimedia Commons

We all use chunking to remember complex things: “If I gave you 20 random words right now, you’d have a lot of trouble repeating them back to me,” explains Epstein. “But, if I gave you a 20-word meaningful sentence, you might be able to repeat it back to me or very closely.” Why? Because “you’ve learned a system of grammar and groups of words and phrases that you can break down into meaningful chunks. So, you don’t have to…rely on your working memory.” And, adds Epstein, “it turns out sports works in a very similar way.”

So it’s not that MLB players have superhuman reflexes; instead, over the course of many years of training, they learn to “read” a pitcher’s upper body movements and predict where the ball will end up. “It’s really this kind of cognitive expertise that they’ve learned that allows them to look as if they’re reacting faster than is humanly possible,” says Epstein. “They are judging the field—their version of the chess board—and seeing what’s going to come in the future.”

Sample many sports in childhood—don’t specialize too early. As every parent knows, elite athleticism comes at a high price in the US, with many coaches pressuring talented children to start specialized practice immediately—often to the exclusion of other sports and activities. “AAU basketball has a second graders’ national championships now,” notes Epstein. “This is like kids who are over-hand heaving a ball at a 10-foot rim. They’ve convinced parents it’s like an important part of the scouting pipeline and their kids will get behind if they don’t go.”

Epstein argues that this push towards specialization—which he attributes to the popularization of the 10,000 hours rule—has been a “disaster.”

“There’s now a pretty strong body of evidence that we’ve over-specialized kids too early, and it actually makes them worse athletes,” he says. What Epstein is getting at is that there seems to be a critical “sampling period” before puberty, during which many eventual professional athletes play a variety of sports. Hyper-specialization makes it harder for kids to find the sport that is best suited to their biology. As an example for parents to follow, Epstein points to two-time NBA most valuable player Steve Nash, who didn’t start playing basketball until he was 12 or 13.

Grow up in a small town. The trend towards hyper-specialization might even explain why professional athletes come disproportionately from small towns, far away from elite training programs, instead of from major metropolises. If you’re from a city with a population of more than 5 million people, you’re actually less likely than the average Joe to make it to the NBA. If you come from a town of 50,000 to 99,000 people, your chances are 11 times greater than average of making it to the NFL or the NBA. These towns “are vastly over-represented for producing elite athletes,” says Epstein, “because they’re big enough to have a team, and small enough to avoid all of the hyper-specialization that the 10,000 hours has caused.”

Take a scientist’s approach to your own training. Ultimately, as scientists learn more about the biology of athletic prowess and the skills we need to excel at specific activities, what’s becoming clear is that training needs to be more individualized. Given the highly variable nature of our genes, what can you do to make sure that you’re using those training hours most effectively? Think like a scientist: test and retest your assumptions constantly.

“In studies of kids who go on to become elite, whether it’s in chess, sports or music,” says Epstein, “they tend to more often exhibit that self-regulatory behavior where they’re almost taking a scientist’s view of themselves…and continually evaluating and evaluating. And they better figure out what works for them.”

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion with skeptical pediatrician Clay Jones.

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 Science Behind the World’s Greatest Athletes

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Science Deniers Are Freaking Out About "Cosmos"

by LauriBuzacott Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you think the first episode of the new Fox Cosmos series was controversial (with its relatively minor mentions of climate change, evolution, and the Big Bang), Sunday night’s show threw down the gauntlet. Pretty much the entire episode was devoted to the topic of evolution, and the vast profusion of evidence (especially genetic evidence) showing that it is indeed the explanation behind all life on Earth. At one point, host Neil deGrasse Tyson stated it as plainly as you possibly can: “The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.” (You can watch the full episode here.)

Not surprisingly, those who deny the theory of evolution were not happy with this. Indeed, the science denial crowd hasn’t been happy with Cosmos in general. Here are some principal lines of attack:

Denying the Big Bang: In the first episode of Cosmos, titled, “Standing Up in the Milky Way,” Tyson dons shades just before witnessing the Big Bang. You know, the start of everything. Some creationists, though, don’t like the Big Bang; at Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis, a critique of Cosmos asserts that “the big bang model is unable to explain many scientific observations, but this is of course not mentioned.”

Fox

Alas, this creationist critique seems very poorly timed: A major new scientific discovery, just described in detail in The New York Times, has now provided “smoking gun” evidence for “inflation,” a crucial component of our understanding of the stunning happenings just after the Big Bang. Using a special telescope to examine the cosmic microwave background radiation (which has been dubbed the “afterglow” of the Big Bang), researchers at the South Pole detected “direct evidence” of the previously theoretical gravitational waves that are believed to have originated in the Big Bang and caused an incredibly sudden and dramatic inflation of the universe. (For an easy to digest discussion, Phil Plait has more.)

Denying evolution: Sunday’s episode of Cosmos was all about evolution. It closely followed the rhetorical strategy of Charles Darwin’s world-changing 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, beginning with an example of “artificial selection” by breeders (Darwin used pigeons, Cosmos used domestic dogs) to get us ready to appreciate the far vaster power of natural selection. It employed Darwin’s favorite metaphor: The “tree of life,” an analogy that helps us see how all organisms are living on different branches of the same hereditary tree. In the episode, Tyson also refuted one of the creationist’s favorite canards: The idea that complex organs, like the eye, could not have been produced through evolution.

The “tree of life” on Cosmos. Fox

Over at the pro-“intelligent design” Discovery Institute, they’re not happy. Senior Fellow David Klinghoffer writes that the latest Cosmos episode “extrapolated shamelessly, promiscuously from artificial selection (dogs from wolves) to minor stuff like the color of a polar bear’s fur to the development of the human eye.” In a much more elaborate attempted takedown, meanwhile, the Institute’s Casey Luskin accuses Tyson and Cosmos of engaging in “attempts to persuade people of both evolutionary scientific views and larger materialistic evolutionary beliefs, not just by the force of the evidence, but by rhetoric and emotion, and especially by leaving out important contrary arguments and evidence.” Luskin goes on to contend that there is something wrong with the idea of the “tree of life.” Tell that to the scientists involved in the Open Tree of Life project, which plans to produce “the first online, comprehensive first-draft tree of all 1.8 million named species, accessible to both the public and scientific communities.” Precisely how to reconstruct every last evolutionary relationship may still be an open scientific question, but the idea of common ancestry, the core of evolution (represented conceptually by a “tree of life”), is not.

Denying climate change: Thus far, Cosmos has referred to climate change in each of its two opening episodes, but has not gone into any depth on the matter. Perhaps that’s for a later episode. But in the meantime, it seems some conservatives are already bashing Tyson as a global warming proponent. Writing at the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters blog, Jeffrey Meyer critiques a recent Tyson appearance on “Late Night with Seth Myers.” “Meyers and deGrasse Tyson chose to take a cheap shot at religious people and claim they don’t believe in science i.e. liberal causes like global warming,” writes Meyer.

Actually, as Tyson explained on our Inquiring Minds podcast, Cosmos is certainly not anti-religion. As for characterizing global warming as simply a “liberal cause”: In a now famous study finding that 97 percent of scientific studies (that bother to take a position on the matter) agree with the idea of human-caused global warming, researchers reviewed 12,000 scientific abstracts published between the years 1991 and 2011. In other words, this is a field in which a very large volume of science is being published. That hardly sounds like an advocacy endeavor.

On our most recent episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Tyson explains why he doesn’t debate science deniers; you can listen here:

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Science Deniers Are Freaking Out About "Cosmos"

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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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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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Meet the Computer Geek Who Took on Ken Cuccinelli—and Won

by Mstyslava7ju Posted on November 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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For climate researcher Michael Mann, the last few weeks have hardly been average ones in the life of a scientist and university professor.

On October 30, Mann introduced Bill Clinton at a campaign rally for Terry McAuliffe in Charlottesville, Virginia. A few days later, he listened as President Obama, also campaigning for McAuliffe in Virginia, brought up Mann’s high-profile struggles with McAuliffe’s gubernatorial opponent, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

Not exactly average—but then, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes put it when interviewing Mann back in August, “You didn’t come to politics, politics came to you.” The story of how Mann, a self-described math and computer nerd working in an esoteric field known as paleoclimatology, wound up front and center in a nationally watched political campaign is told on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast:

As Mann explains on the show, “The last thing I ever wanted to do was to get involved in politics, to me that was anathema.” But “because of the situation I found myself in,” Mann continues, “I ultimately did grow to embrace the role that I can have in informing this debate that we’re having about potentially the most significant challenge that human civilization has faced.”

The “hockey stick” as depicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001. IPCC Third Assessment Report

Mann’s situation traces back to the world famous “hockey stick” graph, originally published by Mann and his colleagues in a 1998 scientific paper, and then prominently displayed by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2001 Third Assessment Report. Because of its stark depiction of just how dramatically humans have altered the climate in a relatively short time period, the figure may well be the most controversial chart in history. Not scientifically controversial, mind you: politically controversial.

“This curve became an icon in the climate change debate because it told a simple story,” says Mann of the hockey stick. “You didn’t need to understand a lot of physics and math to see what that curve was telling you: That there were unprecedented changes taking place in our climate today, and by inference, they probably have something to do with us.”

Columbia University Press

The saga of politicized attacks on the hockey stick is captured in Mann’s book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines, which is just out in paperback. Suffice it to say that it’s a long and sometimes enraging tale of congressional hearings, prying data requests, dubious scientific critiques, and personal attacks that stretches back to the early 2000s, and forward through the 2009 “Climategate” controversy and all the way up to the recently concluded Cuccinelli battle. Mann had to update the paperback edition of his book extensively just to capture the latest twists and turns.

Climategate, for example, centered in part on a leaked email that referred to “Mike’s Nature trick…to hide the decline.” This was erroneously taken to mean that Mann had been involved in trying to falsely show that temperatures are rising. (If you want to know what was really being discussed in this infamous email, read here.)

Multiple investigations have cleared Mann and the other scientists involved in Climategate. In 2010, however, Cuccinelli issued a “Civil Investigative Demand” to the University of Virginia, where Mann used to work, seeking Mann’s emails and other documents related to a number of his research grants. The demand cited the “hide the decline” email as well as other leaked emails from Climategate. The university resisted and, in a case that drew dramatic media attention and widespread denunciations of Cuccinelli’s “witch hunt,” was ultimately victorious at the Virginia Supreme Court.

Emerging from this broad story, in retrospect, are at least two large ironies:

(1) There are lots of hockey stick studies, not just Mann’s. So even as the issue was personalized and made all about Mann’s research and its validity, other scientists just kept on producing hockey sticks. Mann likes to joke that there is now a veritable “hockey team.” For other hockey stick studies see here and here.

(2) By attacking Mann in such a prominent way, climate skeptics have made him vastly more influential, politically and otherwise, than he might otherwise have been. For instance, Mann was just named one of the “50 Most Influential” people by Bloomberg Markets. Cuccinelli’s demands of the University of Virginia gave Mann a new stature that, in turn, empowered Mann to directly campaign against him.

To see how prominent Mann and his story ultimately became in the Virginia gubernatorial election, just watch this ad from the McAuliffe campaign:

Granted, the climate issue, and the issue of Cuccinelli’s pursuit of Mann’s files, did not tip the Virginia gubernatorial race all on their own. Overall, the most powerful electoral strike against Cuccinelli seems to have been his association with the government shutdown brought on by House Republicans. Still, Mann says, “the issue of ideologically driven anti-science, which was symbolized by Ken Cuccinelli, I think that did fit into a larger narrative of a dangerous candidate who was driven by ideology over logic and science, and substance. And I think in the end, that was the difference.”

Mann is well aware of how much of a departure campaigning against a Republican candidate is for a scientist. In the science community, there has long been discomfort with “advocacy” in its many forms, with the overtly political perhaps topping the list of scientific no-nos. Mann counters, though, that he’s no political operative: It’s just that this particular race, and this particular candidate, affected him so directly that he got involved.

“I felt like I had to fight back not just for myself, but to make it clear to other scientists that we do need to defend our science, not just because it’s the right thing to do scientifically, but because the implications are so profound in this case,” he says. How profound? “We are engaged in an unprecedented and uncontrolled experiment with the one planet that we have,” says Mann. Politicians who seek to undermine this reality now have something new to worry about: That scientists, inspired by Mann, may not simply sit by and watch it happen any longer.

To listen to the full interview with Michael Mann, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by best-selling author Chris Mooney and neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas, also features a discussion of the myth that left-brained people are logical and right brained people are creative, and the legacy of Carl Sagan and its lessons for today’s science wars.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes. You can also follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Meet the Computer Geek Who Took on Ken Cuccinelli—and Won

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Podcast: What It’s Like To Spend 55 Days in Space

by Myrna Posted on September 20, 2013

On our new show, Inquiring Minds, astronaut Marsha Ivins talks about her 5 shuttle missions, NASA’s budget, and why the Borg cube makes a good space ship. Marsha Ivins on Space Shuttle Columbia, 1997. NASA Climate Desk has launched a new science podcast, Inquiring Minds, co-hosted by contributing writer Chris Mooney and neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To subscribe via iTunes, click here. You can also follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow, and like us on Facebook. There aren’t many people on Earth who have spent more of their life in space than Marsha Ivins. A veteran of five Space Shuttle missions—in 1990, 1992, 1994, 1997, and 2001—Ivins has spent a total of 55 days in orbit, on missions devoted to such diverse tasks as deploying satellites, conducting scientific research, and docking with Mir and the International Space Station. Her jobs? Flight engineer, load master, robot arm operator, and photography manager, among other things. In this interview (click above to stream audio or watch the video below) with Inquiring Minds co-host Indre Viskontas, Ivins relates what it’s like to live in orbit—for instance, how your body and brain slowly adapt to the fact that no single direction is up or down. She also discusses some things you might not have known about space: why astronauts tend to be type-A personalities, for instance, and why Canada is so proud of the International Space Station’s robotic arm. Plus, for the benefit of geeks across the universe, Ivins explains why the Borg cube from Star Trek can maneuver just as well as any starfighter that Hollywood has ever dreamed up. “In space, they’re one and the same,” says Ivins. Marsha Ivins aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis, 2001. NASA In the interview, Ivins reflects broadly on where human space endeavors now stand. She discusses why publicly supported space missions are still vital, what it will take to get us to Mars and beyond, and why solving advanced space travel problems (problems involving energy and propulsion) might simultaneously help us solve many of our problems on Earth—perhaps including global warming. The interview comes at a dismaying time for the US space program. Compared with the space race heyday of the 1960s, the percentage of the federal budget devoted to NASA has steadily dwindled. “We spent 4-and-a-half percent of the fiscal budget, and we went to the moon, from having never been to space, in nine years,” says Ivins on the show. “That’s astounding. And we did that, and the United States was the technological leader of the globe from that point on. Not so much any more.” Today the NASA budget is about half a percentof total federal expenditures. As Neil deGrasse Tyson has noted, that means that if you held up a US taxpayer’s dollar, and cut into it that much, “it doesn’t even get you into the ink.” Moreover, it’s not clear that private space initiatives are the answer to the problem. “Space exploration is not an immediate payback, fiscally or otherwise,” Ivins says. “It is a generational kind of investment. And the only group that can afford to make that kind of an investment is a government.” Aurora Australis, from the International Space Station. NASA Ivins believes there would be dramatic payoffs from large scale space exploration investments, of the sort that the US made in the 1960s. That might include developing new sources of renewable energy that would not only be vital for long-range space travel, but could also help solve problems, like global warming, here at home. “When you develop something, in order to enable something like a space mission to Mars, it’s got enormous payback on the Earth,” says Ivins. Marsha Ivins, smiling in space. NASA More generally, Ivins thinks our culture simply needs to fall back in love with space, and what it means that humanity can, if it chooses, go there. “You are off the planet. Think about those words. ‘I am off the planet.’ You don’t get to say that [much]. “And I think fifty years from now, I would hope 20 years from now, it’s not a big deal to be off the planet, any more than it is to be at 30,000 feet in an airplane.” The podcast interview with Marsha Ivins is available for audio livestream and also as video. The video is also embedded below. This episode of Inquiring Minds also features a discussion about new developments in science, including research suggesting that political biases are so pervasive that they can interfere with your ability to do math, and mounting evidence of the dangers of head injuries received from playing football. To subscribe to the Inquiring Minds podcast via iTunes, click here. You can also follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. From –  Podcast: What It’s Like To Spend 55 Days in Space ; ;Related ArticlesWatch: Congressman Makes “Completely Wrong” Claim About TemperatureChart: Virgin America falls below the industry average on fuel performance standardsAdministration to Press Ahead With Carbon Limits ;

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Podcast: What It’s Like To Spend 55 Days in Space

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