The pan-genome of Emiliania huxleyi

28 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by sedeer in Genetics, Microbiology

Tags

algae, biology, bloom, Ehux, Emiliania huxleyi, Genome, Popular science, science, Species, White Cliffs of Dover

Emiliania huxleyi has more going for it than just a beautiful name. Despite being only a few millionths of a millimeter in size — about a tenth of the thickness of a human hair — this unicellular alga has a major impact on our planet. Blooms of E. huxleyi, which can cover more than 100,000 square kilometres of ocean, are visible from space and affect the global climate; the concerted impact of all the cells in the bloom influences carbon and sulphur cycles and even changes how much light the Earth reflects. Under an electron microscope, E. huxleyi cells reveal their striking, alien beauty; encased in tiny plates called coccoliths, they look like strange spaceships or escape pods. E. huxleyi lives throughout the world’s oceans, from the warm tropics to the subarctic seas, and these plates underlie its remarkable impact on the planet’s climate and geology.
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I’ve been interviewed!

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by sedeer in Blog, Science communication

≈ 2 Comments

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I’m thrilled to let you know that I’ve been interviewed on the Scientific American blog network! The SA Incubator posts interviews of “young and up-and-coming science, health and environmental writers and reporters”. I’ve read a couple of the interviews over the last year and was hoping to get interviewed one day, so I was very excited when I got an email last week from Khalil Cassimally inviting me for an interview. I really enjoyed answering the questions and I hope you’ll enjoy what I had to say. It’s also a great chance for me to get more exposure, so I’m very grateful for the opportunity.

On another subject, I tried something different in my most recent post on Accumulating Glitches and I’d love to hear what you think — what works for you, what doesn’t, how I could do better. The post is about ants which practice agriculture and what they might think of the way we farm…

Hauskaa Juhannusta to those of you in Finland! If anyone will be at the WCSJ 2013 meeting in Helsinki next week, let me know and we can try to meet up!

Three things to look for in science reporting

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by sedeer in Science communication

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

science, science and society, Science communication, Science in Society

Some time ago I shared some of my thoughts on science communication, including the importance of learning “to approach issues critically, to question and to reason, [so they would] have the wherewithal to challenge fixed beliefs and undermine authority”. I’ve also written about things like cognitive dissonance and how our social environment can shape the way we conduct research or interpret the results. In this post, I’d like to highlight a few of the flaws you might come across in scientific research and what you should look out for when you hear about a new study. I’ve picked out just three things you can check to help reassure yourself that a science story is on sound footing, but I hope people will chime in with more suggestions in the comments!
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What lies behind illusions?

13 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by sedeer in Humans

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

biology, brain, Cognition, illusions, Optical illusion, perception, Popular science, science, vision, Visual system, Waterfall

Humans have an exquisite sense of vision. It’s the primary sense for most of us and our making way of interacting with the world around us. We process the massive amount of visual data generated by sight using trillions of interconnections between billions of neurons spread across half our cerebral cortex. Despite this, our visual system falls prey to illusions, constructing ambiguous interpretations and objects that can’t or don’t exist. How do these illusions work and why do they succeed in fooling us even when we know about them? Continue reading →

Words of science: science

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by sedeer in Language, Words of Science

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

etymology, humanities, knowledge, language, science, vocabulary, words, Words of Science

Like many other fields, science has its own style of communication full of specific jargon and guided by unwritten rules. Most of the posts on this blog focus on breaching this barrier to the public’s understanding and appreciation of science. In this series, I’d like to take another approach by highlighting scientific words which have escaped the confines of jargon to reach a broader appeal because of their sound or their evocative power as metaphors. Today’s word is a bit different from the earlier words; this time I’d like to talk about the word science itself. [Previous words of science were petrichor, alluvium, nychthemeron, crepuscular, and interstitial.]
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