Author: Josh Witten

http://www.thefinchandpea.com

Who ya gonna call?

MV5BMTkxMjYyNzgwMl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMTE3MjYyMTE@._V1_SX214_AL_We typically do our #SCInema sciencing of movie quotes on Friday. This past friday happened to be Halloween. So, we took a whack at the classic film Ghostbusters, which turned 30 this year*. If you have not watched Ghostbusters recently, you are cheating yourself. It holds up.

Bill Murray. Dan Aykroyd. Harold Ramis. Sigourney Weaver. Rick Moranis. Directed by Ivan Reitman. You owe it to yourself.

Frankly, I had been looking forward to sciencing Ghostbusters all October (yes, I once went as a Ghostbuster for Halloween). It was not, however, until a few tweets into the sciencing that we settled on a hashtag. We tried #GibbsBusters, #IdealGasBusters, even #FadeevPopovGhostBusters, before settling on the relatively pedestrian, but descriptive #GhostBusterSci.

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The first act of the film centers on a trio of disgraced, academic parapsychologists losing their faculty positions and starting a company to catch ghosts. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that many lines need no alteration to be applicable to today’s scientific world.

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This also suggests that a plausible backstory for an all-female Ghostbusters 3 team would be composed of graduate students/post-doctoral fellows who are unable to find faculty positions due to the oversupply of PhDs, undersupply of faculty spots, and disparity between the gender equality in some graduate school fields with the gender inequality among faculty.

Like usual, I have Storified our results.

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*File under things that make me feel old.

Trick or Treat! – Mullerian Mimicry Edition

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Photo Credit: Jennifer Taylor (All Rights Reserved; Used with Permission)

You are never to young for a meta-costume*.

To the untrained eye, it may look like my daughter is dressed as a monarch butterfly for Halloween. To the trained eye, you will recognize that half of her parental set is extremely dorky.

She is actually going as the concept of Müllerian Mimicry instantiated in the form of a viceroy butterfly. This costume is occassionally mistaken for Batesian Mimicry by novices.

Butterfly (monarch) on a Penta by Arturo Yee (CC BY 2.0)
Butterfly (monarch) on a Penta by Arturo Yee (CC BY 2.0)
Viceroy by Rodney Campbell (CC BY 2.0)
Viceroy by Rodney Campbell (CC BY 2.0)

Continue reading “Trick or Treat! – Mullerian Mimicry Edition”

Science for the People: Bodies Everywhere

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This week, Science for the People is looking at the morbid and fascinating history of our attempts to grapple with disease and death. We’re joined by medical historian Richard Barnett to talk about his book The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration.

And we’ll speak to mortician and blogger Caitlin Doughty about her new book Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, and her ongoing YouTube series “Ask a Mortician“, about the history, science and cultural attitudes attached to dealing with the deceased.

*Josh provides research help to Science for the People and is, therefore, completely biased.

Dr. Twitter

EvaCameraOur travel guru, Eva Amsen, was recently interviewed by Times Higher Education about using Twitter and other social media productively as an academic in her role as outreach coordinator for F1000. The article includes a handy list of reasons you should be on social media in case your superiors question the number of tweets you posted last month.

Congratulations to Emily Willingham & David Grimes

It makes me very happy to share the announcement that our friend Dr. Emily Willingham is joint winner of the 2014 John Maddox Prize for Standing Up for Science. Emily is brave. That isn’t an adjective that one gets to use for many science writers; but Emily is brave. She has continued to bring clarity of scientific evidence to controversial issues such as autism, vaccines, school shootings, and parenting despite continuous abuse, legal threats, and other challeges.

The judges awarded the prize to freelance journalist Dr Emily Willingham and early career scientist Dr David Robert Grimes for courage in promoting science and evidence on a matter of public interest, despite facing difficulty and hostility in doing so…Emily Willingham, a US writer, has brought discussion about evidence, from school shootings to home birth, to large audiences through her writing. She has continued to reach across conflict and disputes about evidence to the people trying to make sense of them. She is facing a lawsuit for an article about the purported link between vaccines and autism. – Sense About Science

Although we do not know Dr. David Grimes, he also deserves our congratulations, thanks, and deep respect for his work:

David Grimes writes bravely on challenging and controversial issues, including nuclear power and climate change. He has persevered despite hostility and threats, such as on his writing about the evidence in the debate on abortion in Ireland. He does so while sustaining his career as a scientist at the University of Oxford. – Sense About Science

I have received phone calls from a very distressed David Grimes late at night over death threats, looking for a second opinion about how to cope with threats to his livelihood and threats of physical harm against him. While David is no push over, the constant barrage of abuse does take its toll and it’s very brave of him to continue to speak out against scientific falsehoods in the media when he’s under no obligation to as a researcher. – Daniel Murray

Congratulations to Dr. Emily Willingham and Dr. David Grimes.