Science Cafes

HOUSTON, TX-- On a recent flight, I was flipping through the in-flight magazine and came across an article that caught my attention. It was about a new phenomenon that began in Europe and has since started to catch on in the US. Unlike some recent Euro-trends, this one has nothing to do with capri pants or lattes.

The phenomenon is what is called a "Science Café" and the basic idea is to have regular, informal meetings between scientists and the general public. According to the website ScienceCafes.org:

"A science café's casual meeting place, plain language, and inclusive conversation create a welcoming and comfortable atmosphere for people with no science background. Each meeting is organized around an interesting topic of conversation. A scientist gives a brief presentation and sometimes shows a short video clip to kick off the discussion."

This struck me as a fantastic idea that could really help bridge the gap between what is often perceived as the mysterious world of research science and the folks out there who are interested in scientific topics but don't happen to have an affiliation with a university, museum, or research center.

What I especially like about this movement is the emphasis on keeping things very laid back, in part by meeting at a local pub. Not surprisingly, people are less intimidated about science, and more likely to ask questions, while sipping a beer or a glass of wine than they would be sitting in a lecture hall. And based on personal experience, its not too hard to convince scientists to come and give a talk if you offer to buy them a pint.

ScienceCafés.org provides information about existing Science Cafés (which often go by other names, such as "Science on Tap") as well as information about how to start a new one.

Apparently there is (or was?) a Science Café here in Houston, but I have so far not been able to get any information about it. If anyone out there knows anything about this organization, please let me know.

Otherwise, perhaps we should get one started...

Watch leafcutter ants live!

Click here to watch a live video feed from a laboratory colony of Atta cephalotes leafcutter ants at the Smithsonian's Ant Lab.

The worker ants in a leafcutter colony come in all different sizes, and each size (called a caste) has a different task to perform. You can watch the foraging workers carrying leaves into the nest where they are transferred to smaller workers who chew them into smaller fragments that can then be placed on the fungus garden. The fungus, which looks like a gray sponge, is the colony's primary food source, and the ants use the leaves to keep it alive. In a way, the fungus acts like the ants' digestive system, since they cannot digest the leaves themselves. The fungus-growing ants are one of the classic examples of a mutualism, whereby two species interact in a way that is beneficial to both.

Don't Know Much About History

WASHINGTON, D.C.-- Yesterday, while strolling through the exhibits in the Natural History Museum, I overheard the following conversation:

WOMAN: "What is that?" (pointing at a fossil skeleton of a saber-toothed cat)

MAN: "You mean that small dinosaur?" (indicating the same fossil)

How can someone possibly confuse a saber-toothed cat (a mammal that lived around 20 thousand years ago) with a dinosaur (reptiles that died out 65 million years ago)???? Sadly, I have heard this type of mistake, in which all extinct animals are lumped together in the same category, as if they all lived together at the same time, quite often.

It seems that many folks have difficulty distinguishing between the relatively recent past (i.e. thousands of years ago) with the distant past (millions to billions of years ago). Granted, from our perspective, in which a human lifetime lasts a hundred years at most, it all seems to have been distant past. A thousand years ago is a long time in human history, and ten thousand years goes back to the dawn of human agriculture and the very early shift towards civilization.

But there is a massive difference between these thousands of years ago and millions. We're talking orders of magnitude here.

Change years to dollars and it's a little easier to comprehend what I mean. The difference between 10,000 years ago (when saber-toothed cats lived) and 100 million years ago (when dinosaurs lived) is like the difference between making $10,000 (ten thousand dollars) a year versus $100,000,000 (one hundred million dollars) a year. See what I mean?

I can't help but feel that part of the blame lies with popular movies such as Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. I must admit that I have not yet seen this movie, so my commentary on it is probably somewhat unfair given that all I know about the movie is what I saw in the preview. But as far as I understand it, the movie involves animals from the Ice Age interacting with dinosaurs. This never happened in the history of the earth, because these time periods were separated by MILLIONS of years.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy movies like Ice Age and I loved Jurassic Park, in which dinosaurs were brought back to life through genetic engineering. In many ways, these types of movies bring to our attention the diverse life forms that once existed on our planet and have since gone extinct. How many people knew about ground sloths (that's the character Sid) before the Ice Age movies? Even if he's not exactly anatomically correct (see fossil reconstruction below), at least more people today are aware that there was such a thing as a ground sloth.

There have been plenty of movies, books, and TV shows where people are living with dinosaurs (think about the Flintstones). Since humans evolved no earlier than about 5 million years ago (at least that's when our lineage diverged from chimpanzees) and dinosaurs were gone by 65 milion years ago, there was obviously no way for this to have actually happened without the use of a time machine or some crafty cloning technology.

This doesn't mean that humans did not live at the same time and place as some pretty amazing animals that are now extinct. Woolly mammoths, cave bears, and an enormous komodo-dragon-like lizard in Australia were once either on the dinner menu for early humans or the other way around. Just not dinosaurs.

So remember: pre-historic mammals are not dinosaurs, even if all we see of them today is a reconstructed skeleton in a museum. I doubt you would make the same mistake if you were staring at the face a living saber-toothed cat and a living T-rex side-by-side.

But that, of course, would be impossible.

Are people sick of nature?

BALTIMORE, MD-- A recent study suggested that there has been a steady per capita decrease in visits to parks and other natural areas by Americans (as well as Japanese and Spaniards) over the last 20 years. In addition to being a generally sad phenomenon, some have speculated that this trend could have negative consequences for nature conservation, since, as the logic goes, people will be less interested in preserving nature if they have less experience with it.

Not to fear, say the authors of a paper published today by Andrew Balmford and colleagues in the online journal PLoS Biology. Although there has indeed been a decline in visits to protected areas in the USA and Japan, say the authors, visits to protected areas worldwide have actually been increasing.


These data suggest the trend in total visits to protected areas (A) and per-capita visits to protected areas (B) is negative in North America but positive everywhere else

It is unknown whether the visitors to protected areas outside of North America are from the country in which the park is located or from abroad, although two lines of evidence suggest that they are likely to be outsiders. First, the increase in visitation is correlated to an increase in foreign arrivals. Second, visitation to protected areas is negatively correlated with the wealth of the nation in which the park occurs. In other words, the poorer a country is, the more visits its parks receive. Although this may seem puzzling at first, I am not surprised by this finding given that many of the world's most spectacular natural areas--and certainly the regions with highest biodiversity--are located in developing countries. (For a possible explanation for why this is true, see Jared Diamond's eye-opening book, Guns, Germs, and Steel)

Refreshingly, this study suggests that people are not generally sick of nature. Instead, it seems to show that people are willing to travel overseas, often to developing countries, to see nature and wildlife. I would say that this bodes well for the importance that people place in nature and protected areas.

It will be interesting to see whether these trends continue given the current economic climate. There are still plenty of amazing natural areas out there, many of them just a short drive away...

Traffic Lessons from Ants and Physicists

BALTIMORE, MD-- A recent article in Seed suggests a few lessons about the flow of traffic that may be discerned from two seemingly unconnected branches of science: particle physics and myrmecology (the study of ants).

On the physics of traffic, Jonah Lehrer writes,

"Tom Vanderbilt, in his authoritative book Traffic, describes a simple experiment performed by the Washington Department of Transportation that involved a liter of rice, a plastic funnel, and a glass beaker. When the rice was poured into the beaker all at once, it took 40 seconds for the funnel to empty; the density of jostling grains impeded the flow. However, when the grains were poured in a gradual stream, it took only 27 seconds for the rice to pass through. What seemed slower actually turned out to be 30 percent faster."

...and the ant solution:

"Dirk Helbing, a “congestion expert” at the Dresden University of Technology, constructed a network of “carriageways” between an ant nest and a source of sugar. Within a few hours, the ants located the most direct route to the sugar, which became dense with hungry insects...Helbing discovered that just as the carriageway approached its breaking point, ant “traffic cops” physically blocked the road. This forced the ants to find another route to the sugar, and thus prevented a traffic jam."

Science blogging vs. Peer-review

BALTIMORE, MD-- Alex Wild over at Myrmecos has started a discussion about a very interesting topic for us blogging scientists: what impact can sharing one's scientific opinions on a blog affect their scientific career?

As Alex himself points out, and as several followers have subsequently commented, blogging is not a replacement for the peer-review process. I doubt that any scientists who are active bloggers think of their websites as substitutes for peer-reviewed journals.

Nevertheless, I agree that putting your ideas out on the web could have potentially negative consequences for one's reputation as a scientist. But the flip side to that point is that it could also improve your reputation as a scientist, writer, photographer, etc.

Plus, in my opinion, blogging is a far better way to get information about science out to non-scientists than perhaps any other media that I am aware of. And this point alone makes it worth while to keep writing about science, sharing your opinion, and getting folks excited about what we do as scientists.

On the radio

BALTIMORE, MD-- I'll be interviewed on the radio tonight, along with my labmate Natasha Mehdiabadi. If you happen to be near Fairfax, Virginia this evening, tune in to WEBR from 8-9 PM. Otherwise you can listen live via the internet at http://www.fcac.org/webr/ (click on "Listen Now").

Have a question or wanna give us a shout out? Call the station at (703) 560-TALK.