So I’m on the front page of the Austin paper today …

… and you’d think I’d be a little more excited. I wasn’t on the front page because of this blog, or as part of a feature about my YouTube channel, or to celebrate getting a AAAS Fellowship to work at Wired Magazine in San Francisco this summer, or to talk about my generally unquenchable thirst to share awesome science with people. This article was about the uncomfortable intersection of science and politics. Yuck!

I’m glad I got a chance to talk about this issue, but I think the (not totally accurate) story of “me” takes away from the message. (click through to read my full response)

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The Twisted Cultural Conflict of Duck Genitalia Research

What happens when a conservative website “discovers” a study that studies the explosive corkscrew nature of duck genitalia and how it relates to sexual evolution? Their commenters completely lose their minds at the idea that the government would fund such basic science research (srsly, read the comments … or actually maybe don’t).

Except that basic science research like this is the cornerstone of innovation and discovery. Carl Zimmer stands up for this kind of science in this must-read article, and I stand behind him. Besides, xkcd’s money chart reminds us that this isn’t why the budget is in trouble, maybe?

Science is a journey of unknowns, a slow and careful march into uncharted territories of human knowledge. We can not predict how research will benefit humanity, because those benefits might be years, or even decades down the road. Or they might not materialize at all.

You can’t fund the invention of an MRI machine, instead you fund basic research in the physics of magnetic resonance on living tissues. Likewise, studies of sexual conflict in ducks can unlock the secrets of our own evolution, and might even help us understand mysterious conditions like preeclampsia (which killed Sybil on Downton Abbey, an event I have not fully recovered from).

This is why it is so important to share science with your friends, and to make sure that scientists and science folks everywhere are connecting with the public. Because if you don’t communicate your science, then someone else will do it for you, and nefariously. 

By this point, you probably want to see the slo-mo videos of those explosive corkscrew genitalia, right? Here ya go. 

Perhaps most tragically, the critics seem to be missing the easy opportunity to make “stimulus package” jokes … which is funny, I don’t care who ya are.

I hate waking up to bad news. Thanks to Congress and the White House failing to agree on budget cuts, and the subsequent “sequestration” (across-the-board, slash-and-burn, top-to-bottom money-trimming), NASA has announced that they are suspending all education and public outreach activities. It’s a suspension, not a cancellation … but uggghhhh. NASA knows this sucks. But they’ve been put in a place where they have to choose whether they can support their actual missions with the money they have been given, and no matter how much they value the extras (and they do), it’s rock-and-a-hard-place time for space folks. It’s hard to put presents under the tree if you’re struggling to keep the lights on. Projects like the Mars Curiosity Twitter account and NASA’s Twitter socials will continue. So what could we be saying goodbye to? These are the outreach programs that put Mars science in underprivileged classrooms, turning science into smiles. The programs that publish free ebooks of our Earth as art, erasing borders and instilling wonder in one fell swoop. Programs that allow us to travel beyond our planet in a single click. These are programs that plop down space telescope mock-ups in the middle of downtown Austin so the kid in me can do cartwheels with sciencey glee. Today, online, there are so many wonderful places that can take up the slack (blogs and websites like this). But will we be able to do this effectively if NASA can’t even do it themselves? I don’t know. But we will try. Because if we do try, then we can remind people who vote and people who make budgets of what NASA already knows: Whenever we look up, we are inspired to make new things possible, in sciences terrestrial and astronomical. And when we look back down at Earth, and those borders disappear, doesn’t it make you want to make this chart a little more even? More coverage at Universe Today. 
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I hate waking up to bad news. Thanks to Congress and the White House failing to agree on budget cuts, and the subsequent “sequestration” (across-the-board, slash-and-burn, top-to-bottom money-trimming), NASA has announced that they are suspending all education and public outreach activities. It’s a suspension, not a cancellation … but uggghhhh. NASA knows this sucks. But they’ve been put in a place where they have to choose whether they can support their actual missions with the money they have been given, and no matter how much they value the extras (and they do), it’s rock-and-a-hard-place time for space folks. It’s hard to put presents under the tree if you’re struggling to keep the lights on. Projects like the Mars Curiosity Twitter account and NASA’s Twitter socials will continue. So what could we be saying goodbye to? These are the outreach programs that put Mars science in underprivileged classrooms, turning science into smiles. The programs that publish free ebooks of our Earth as art, erasing borders and instilling wonder in one fell swoop. Programs that allow us to travel beyond our planet in a single click. These are programs that plop down space telescope mock-ups in the middle of downtown Austin so the kid in me can do cartwheels with sciencey glee. Today, online, there are so many wonderful places that can take up the slack (blogs and websites like this). But will we be able to do this effectively if NASA can’t even do it themselves? I don’t know. But we will try. Because if we do try, then we can remind people who vote and people who make budgets of what NASA already knows: Whenever we look up, we are inspired to make new things possible, in sciences terrestrial and astronomical. And when we look back down at Earth, and those borders disappear, doesn’t it make you want to make this chart a little more even? More coverage at Universe Today. 
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I hate waking up to bad news.

Thanks to Congress and the White House failing to agree on budget cuts, and the subsequent “sequestration” (across-the-board, slash-and-burn, top-to-bottom money-trimming), NASA has announced that they are suspending all education and public outreach activities. It’s a suspension, not a cancellation … but uggghhhh.

NASA knows this sucks. But they’ve been put in a place where they have to choose whether they can support their actual missions with the money they have been given, and no matter how much they value the extras (and they do), it’s rock-and-a-hard-place time for space folks. It’s hard to put presents under the tree if you’re struggling to keep the lights on.

Projects like the Mars Curiosity Twitter account and NASA’s Twitter socials will continue. So what could we be saying goodbye to? These are the outreach programs that put Mars science in underprivileged classrooms, turning science into smiles. The programs that publish free ebooks of our Earth as art, erasing borders and instilling wonder in one fell swoop. Programs that allow us to travel beyond our planet in a single click. These are programs that plop down space telescope mock-ups in the middle of downtown Austin so the kid in me can do cartwheels with sciencey glee.

Today, online, there are so many wonderful places that can take up the slack (blogs and websites like this). But will we be able to do this effectively if NASA can’t even do it themselves? I don’t know. But we will try.

Because if we do try, then we can remind people who vote and people who make budgets of what NASA already knows: Whenever we look up, we are inspired to make new things possible, in sciences terrestrial and astronomical. And when we look back down at Earth, and those borders disappear, doesn’t it make you want to make this chart a little more even?

More coverage at Universe Today. 

The Anti-Science Left: Equal Opportunity Science Denial

We know that far-right Republicans have a long-running reputation for, well … not exactly embracing good science when it comes to things like climate or evolution. This doesn’t mean that all Republicans deny science, or that any of them are “dumb” or “stupid” (because very intelligent Republicans deny very good science).

But just as no one has a monopoly on truth, no one has a monopoly on untruth. The far left can be just as unscientific in their own ways. There is equal opportunity science denial out there, whether it’s vaccines causing autism or wind farms causing cancer or the blanket dismissal of GMO foods.

If you’re looking for something that might challenge your preconceived notions of what it means to be a science denier, take some time and watch this hour of great conversation.

Those of us trying to fight for science shouldn’t succumb to the labels and polarization that create an “us vs. them” tribal battle. We should remember that one of humanity’s great talents is being wrong. But that talent is only exceeded by our ability to learn why we are wrong, and figure out what’s right.

Source: youtube.com

The reason we have smartphones, the reason we have television, we’re able to talk on opposite sides of the continent, the reason we have smoke detectors… the reason we have these things is because we understand the reactions - the nuclear reactions - that take place in elements, in protons and neutrons and so on. Without that deep understanding, we wouldn’t have everything you can touch and see in our environment. So this claim that [the age of the Earth] has nothing to do with the economy is just wrong.

- Bill Nye, talking about Sen. Marco Rubio’s claim that he wasn’t qualified to answer a question on the age of the Earth, and that it didn’t matter to the economy anyway. 

Watch Bill Nye’s whole interview with CNN over on Boing Boing.

Of course, you might be surprised to hear that President Obama’s answer to the same question hasn’t been much different in the past.

Barack O-Bobblehead Flies To Edge Of Space!

He won, now he’s just rubbing it in.  :)

(Depending on your politics, you’ll either love the part where he’s next to space or plummets in a spin down to Earth. Also, depending on you musical politics, the Coheed & Cambria soundtrack to this will either make you very glad or very mad.)

Source: youtube.com

A note about the elections…

When it comes down to the choice between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, we are a nation divided, and many people will go to bed disappointed tomorrow night.

But no matter who wins on Election Day, we should remember this:

  • If Mitt Romney or Barack Obama win, the increasing luminosity from our Sun will ensure that our oceans boil away and life as we know it will likely cease to exist on Earth within about 1.5 billion years from November 6th, 2012.
  • If Mitt Romney or Barack Obama win, the expansion of the Sun into a red giant will engulf the Earth in a fiery planetary death within about 7.9 billion years.
  • If Mitt Romney or Barack Obama win, within about 120 trillion years all of the consumable hydrogen in the universe will be gone and the stars will all be extinguished.

I’m just saying … we know who would be better for science. But if your guy doesn’t win?

Life will go on.

For a little while, at least.

If only scientists had warned people of how vulnerable NYC is to hurricane-related storm surge in a warming climate with predicted sea-level rise…

Oh wait, they did! Here’s part of an abstract from Nature Climate Change, from February of this year (emphasis mine):

Struck by many intense hurricanes in recorded history and prehistory, NYC is highly vulnerable to storm surges. We show that the change of storm climatology will probably increase the surge risk for NYC; results based on two GCMs show the distribution of surge levels shifting to higher values by a magnitude comparable to the projected sea-level rise (SLR). The combined effects of storm climatology change and a 1 m SLR may cause the present NYC 100-yr surge flooding to occur every 3–20 yr and the present 500-yr flooding to occur every 25–240 yr by the end of the century.

If you listened carefully in the calm, as the eye of Sandy passed overhead, I’m told you could hear the faint sound of a fiddle being played while a flooded, darkened city burned.

Mentions of climate change in this year’s presidential debates: 0

If you were teaching a graduate seminar in public policy and challenged your students to come up with the most difficult possible problem to solve, they’d come up with something very much like climate change. It’s slow-acting. It’s essentially invisible. It’s expensive to address. It has a huge number of very rich special interests arrayed against doing anything about it. It requires international action that pits rich countries against poor ones. And it has a lot of momentum: you have to take action now, before its effects are serious, because today’s greenhouse gases will cause climate change tomorrow no matter what we do in thirty years.
Kevin Drum, with the sad truth. (via motherjones)

No candy for you, Kevin Drum. Your completely logical point and 110% truthy take on the political difficulties of dealing with climate change is like the worst trick when I asked for a treat.

But it’s something we need to hear.

(via motherjones)