July 14, 2012

The Scienceblogging Weekly (July 13th, 2012)

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Blog of the Week:

Contagions is a blog written by Michelle Ziegler (Twitter, Facebook, the other two blogs by Michelle - Heavenfield and Selah - are focused entirely on history and not on medicine or science). In Contagions, Michelle explores infectious disease - there is a lot about the Plague - from history to epidemiology to most recent scientific papers. Sometimes gruesome, always fascinating.

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Top 10:

Is Autism an “Epidemic” or Are We Just Noticing More People Who Have It? by Emily Willingham:

In March the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the newly measured autism prevalences for 8-year-olds in the United States, and headlines roared about a “1 in 88 autism epidemic.” The fear-mongering has led some enterprising folk to latch onto our nation’s growing chemophobia and link the rise in autism to “toxins” or other alleged insults, and some to sell their research, books, and “cures.” On the other hand, some researchers say that what we’re really seeing is likely the upshot of more awareness about autism and ever-shifting diagnostic categories and criteria....

New technique identifies magnetic cells in animals by watching them spin by Ed Yong:

A migrating robin can keep a straight course even when it flies through a cloudy night sky, devoid of obvious landmarks. That’s because it can sense the Earth’s magnetic field. Something in its body acts as a living compass, giving it a sense of direction and position. This ability – known as magnetoreception – isn’t unique to robins. It’s been found in many other birds, sharks and rays, salmon and trout, turtles, bats, ants and bees, and possibly cows, deer and foxes. But despite more than 50 years of research, the details of the magnetic sense are still elusive....

The Sex Scholar by Kara Platoni:

Decades before Kinsey, Stanford professor Clelia Mosher polled Victorian-era women on their bedroom behavior—then kept the startling results under wraps....

Bloggers and Bowerbirds by Erin Kissane:

There are still a lot of elbows being thrown in the squabble about “creation” versus “curation,” and it seems to be getting worse. As humans tend to do, we’re talking past each other and pretending to simplicity in the face of the complex and the weird. Here’s what I think is going on. I think we’re getting tripped up by two things: clumsy language and a misapprehension about competition for limited resources....

Citations, Social Media & Science by Morgan D. Jackson:

This morning I was reading a newly published paper that I found intriguing, not only for its content1 but also for who it cited — sort of. Among the regular cadre of peer-reviewed journal articles supporting the author’s findings were two blog posts by University of Glasgow professor Roderic Page. Rod is a major proponent for digitizing and linking biodiversity literature with all aspects of a species’ pixel-trail across the internet, so I was excited to see his blog being “formally” recognized. As I finished reading the paper and reached the References section, I skimmed through to see how a blog citation might be formatted. Much to my dismay, after breezing through the L’s, M’s, and N’s I found myself within the R’s, with nary a Page in sight...

Investigation: Drug Resistance, Chicken And 8 Million UTIs by Maryn McKenna:

...I’ve been working with a great new group, the Food and Environment Reporting Network — one of the grant-funded journalism organizations that have arisen in the wake of the collapse of mainstream journalism — on an important, under-reported topic. Which is: Over the past decade, a group of researchers in several countries have been uncovering links between the use of antibiotics in chicken production and the rising occurrence of resistance in one of the most common bacterial infections in the world. The infection in question is UTI, which just about every woman I know will recognize: It stands for urinary tract infection, and on average one out of every 9 women in the United States suffers one at least once per year. There are 6 million to 8 million UTIs in the US each year, costing at least $1 billion in healthcare spending....

The hows and whys of human attraction by Barbara J. King:

Robin Dunbar may not be a household name, but some of his thinking has reached the status of household ideas. You’ve heard that 150 is an approximate upper limit on the number of our family-and-friend relationships because that’s how many connections we can track? That’s Dunbar. You’ve read the theory that language evolved as a sort of replacement for hands-on grooming among our primate relatives when group size got big? That’s Dunbar too. Now, in The Science of Love and Betrayal, Dunbar, who is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford, asks seductive questions about love and friendship. Why do men and women pair-bond when so many other animals don’t? How do biology and sociality intersect in explaining human attraction to others? ...

Crimes and Misdemeanors: Reforming Social Psychology by Dave Nussbaum:

The recent news of Dirk Smeesters’ resignation is certainly not good news for social psychology, particularly so soon after the Diedrik Stapel case, but I believe it can serve as an opportunity for the field to take important steps towards reform. The reforms that are needed the most, however, are not restricted to preventing or detecting the few instances of fraud by unscrupulous researchers who are intentionally falsifying data. What we should be more concerned about are the far less egregious, but much more common offenses that many of us commit, often unknowingly or unintentionally, and almost never with fraudulent intent....

The Vampire of Venice Returns, or What Is that Brick Doing in that Skull's Mouth? by Kristina Killgrove:

It seems like every spring there is renewed coverage of a partial skeleton that was found on the island of Lazaretto Nuovo (one of two 15th-16th century leper colonies near Venice) in 2009. I've never covered it here, but since I was alerted to an airing of a documentary about the skeleton on Italian TV this week, I thought it may be time to track the progress of the so-called Vampire of Venice ("il vampiro di Venezia" in Italian, and not to be confused with a similarly named Dr. Who episode)....

How the Deaf Brain Rewires Itself to 'Hear' Touch and Sight by Nadja Popovich:

Our experiences help shape our brains. So it might make sense that for a person born without hearing, the part of the brain that's meant to process audio would be underdeveloped. But according to a new study, those who have been deaf since birth actually use the sound-related part of the brain -- known as the primary auditory cortex -- to do even more heavy lifting than their hearing counterparts. ...

Special topic 1: #arseniclife:

The Case (Study) of Arsenic Life: How the Internet Can Make Science Better by Rebecca J. Rosen

Live-blogging Arsenic Life by Carl Zimmer

Discovery of an arsenic-friendly microbe refuted and Q and A: Critical 'Arseniclife' studies released by Dan Vergano

Pair Of Studies Rebuts Arsenic-Based Life by Carmen Drahl

Arsenic Death by ChemBark

"Arsenic bacteria": Coffin, meet nails by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Arsenic Life, Cold Fusion, and the Allure of Wishful Thinking by Matthew Francis

Another chink in the Ingelfinger armor? Arsenic life talk forces Science to release paper early, without embargo and Science has “not asked for a correction or retraction” of arsenic life paper, and why situation is unlike XMRV-CFS by Ivan Oransky

Arsenic-Life Discovery Debunked—But "Alien" Organism Still Odd by Richard A. Lovett

Consider the publication embargo... and NASA's cowardly responses to their #arseniclife FAIL by Rosie Redfield

New research points toward “no” on arsenic life by Phil Plait